Benjamin Goldenstein
English 11 SL
Ms. Capur
The Send-Off
The Send-Off, by Wilfred Owen, is an ironic and dark humored description of how the soldiers we’re sent off to the battlefront, during World War I (keyword “The Send-Off”). In this poem, Owen conveys to us that the soldiers are being sent to their doom.
From the very start we sense the soldiers’ lost fate. The soldiers go to the train, they are singing joyfully, as if they are being sent to a country picnic, but of course the narration is omniscient, we know what lies ahead of them, and so simultaneously the lanes are darkening around them. Secondly, the soldiers are surrounded by wreath and spray, a wreath and a spray are decorative flower arrangements usually placed to honor the dead, like on a grave. The soldiers are said to be dead before they have even died, a “dead man walking” type of ironic proverb. Those same flowers are brought up again, in this case, as if the soldiers mock what the women meant by the offering of these flowers, the wreath and spray, almost as if the women know that the soldiers, their husbands and relatives: the men will die.