How does Wilfred Owen express his felling about the First World War in Anthem for doomed youth and Duke et decorum Est?

     Wilfred Owen was a poet in World War 1. He entered the war in January 1917 and fought as an officer in the Battle of the Somme but was hospitalized for shell shock. Owen began producing the best work of his short career; his poems are suffused with the horror of battle and they are finely structured. Owen thought, just like everyone else that it was honorable to die for your country. He thought that war was seen as old men sending young men to war. The title’ Anthem for doomed youth’ suggests this.

      Owens audience was the every body who did not fight in the war. His Purpose of writing these poems was to tell every body what it wads really like in the war he did this because he saw no point in telling lies to comfort the civilians at home and told them how the young youths were being needlessly butchered in battle and how no one will remember them or mark their death. Also Owen tells us about the torturous conditions that they had to live and battle in.

     Owens tone was a passionate expression of outrage at the horrors of war and pity for the youths who sacrificed in it. He wanted to tell every body how the youths were suffering and fighting to stay alive and that no one is going to take pity on them.

     The theme is in Anthem for Doomed Youth is that there are all these youths going out to war and being killed for no reason, no one is going to notice them and there is not going to be any funeral to mark their death. And in the last part of the poem the theme is in the homes of the families of the dead men. The theme in Duke et Decorum Est is actually describing how these youths are dying and how they are suffering and struggling to get back behind the trenches to their rest positions.

     Owens imagery in Anthem for Doomed Youth is all these dead men just lying on the floor un noticed like slaughtered cattle. I get this image because of the first sentence ‘What passing-bells for these who die as cattle’. In Duke et Decorum Est the imagery is of exhausted men limping and staggering along just like a drunk person with no shoes on and scruffy clothes. Line 5 suggests this ‘many had lost their boots But limped on, blood shod’ Then from line 9 to 16 ‘Gas! Gas! Quick boys!-an ecstasy of fumbling, Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time; But someone still was yelling out and stumbling and flound’ ring like a man in fire or lime… Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light, as under a green sea, I saw him drowning. I get the image of someone seeing someone else being gassed through their mask and it looks like they are drowning in the green sea but the green sea is actually the gas. Both of these poems have a very nasty view of war to the reader. It gives the image that it is like being tortured slowly and painfully.