Personification In Anthem For Doomed Youth

Wilfred Owen was a war poet who enlisted in the British army in 1915 and began writing poetry after meeting Sassoon at the ‘Craiglockhart War hospital in Edinburgh’ (1). Anthem for Doomed Youth was one of the poems which was written with Sassoon’s help; he helped Owen transform his poetry and encouraged him to publish his poetry. In Owens’s preface, he wrote his ‘subject is war, and the pity of war.’(2)Owen presents death in the poem Anthem for Doomed youth by using vivid, strong and bold language to show the readers the horrors of war and how ‘each one of the million soldiers is an individual’(2) who were slaughtered like ‘cattle’ and each death bought its own sadness and grief to many people back at home. Owen compared the killing of the …show more content…
(4) It’s also a ‘form of metonymy as the shires themselves aren’t sad, but the people in them are.’(4) The soldiers are called to war using an instrument and the soldiers going to war is seen as heroic and is a cause of celebration as seen in the poem The send-off as the soldiers ‘sang their way’ to the train station to be taken to the front line without knowing the reality of war. Yet in Anthem for doomed youth, even though they are called with a musical instrument (which makes it almost ceremonious), they die with the sound of guns and shells which mark their death with no proper funeral service so Owen paints a horrifying picture of the war as the innocent soldiers are dying mercilessly, without being …show more content…
Owen illustrates the families reactions to finding their loved ones had died ‘in their eyes shall shine the holy glimmers of goodbyes.’ This suggests that they cannot physically say goodbye and there is religious imagery ‘holy glimmers’ as there is no funeral service or ceremony for the dead soldiers so it reflects in the teary-eyes of the soldiers loved ones. There is also a full stop to emphasis and show the soldiers definite death and that they will not be coming back nor will they be able to say goodbye to their loved ones. Owen talks about who the soldiers left behind ‘pallor of girls’ brows shall be their pall’. The pallor means paleness of the girls which could either suggest their purity/innocence or the shock from hearing the dreadful news. ‘Pall is a heavy cloth draped over a coffin’ (5) so metaphorically, the paleness of the girls will be the drape of the coffin and this alludes to funerals and death. On the other hand, there is a contrasting view about death in The Dead-Beat where the doctor is happy that the soldier died ‘soon died. Hooray!’ An exclamation mark was used to emphasis the joy of the doctor that the soldier died. By doing this, Owen shows the different views people had about death of soldiers during the war in his poems.
Eventually, the poem finishes off by ‘drawing-down of blinds’ at ‘each slow dusk’. The drawing