Anthem For Doomed Youth.

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Sheera Suner

Anthem For Doomed Youth

        Throughout this poem there is a theme of mourning and funeral.  In the first stanza it is almost sarcastic with instruments of war conducting a service on the battlefield for their victims.  The guns become ‘passing-bells’ and shells become  ‘demented choirs’.  The second stanza takes us back home where the true mourners are.  The poet speaks of how ‘the holy glimmers of goodbyes’ will shine in the eyes of boys instead of their hands and how ‘the pallor of girls’ brows’ being the ‘pall’ of the dead. The last two lines, for me carry the greatest effect and meaning:

        ‘Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds,

         And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds’

The first is about the disappointment of people who have worried and waited for a long time and whose pain can only be expressed in small gestures or things such as flowers.  The second could be interpreted in many different ways.  It could be referring to the custom of drawing down of blinds but it could also be about the end of a life and hope leaving as reality settles.  These two lines also delineate the pointlessness of hoping as the dead were ‘doomed’ and predestined for slaughter in the way that ‘cattle’ are in the first place.

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        ‘Anthem For Doomed Youth’ is structured like a sonnet and has a very strong rhyme which never appears to be forced and does not interrupt the meaning of the poetry.  Indeed, most things about the structure and choice of language appear to be unforced as they are so well incorporated with one another and only after the second reading does one realise how carefully thought out they are.

        In the first stanza, there is a large use of onomatopoeia: ‘stuttering’, ‘rattle’, ‘patter’, ‘wailing’.  This has the effect of bringing the reader to the battlefield.  Wilfred Owen has personified ...

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