“war lasts, rain soaks, and clouds sag stormy.”
This quote is to reflect the men’s feelings. They feel that the war will never end, the weather is wearing them away and the future doesn’t look bright either. Many men don’t understand what they are fighting for and often ask themselves:
“What are we doing here?”
However many of the officers also don’t understand the reasons, so cant give the men any answers:
“We turn back to our dying.”
Another aspect of the war shown in the poem is that the war was slow, often there was very little action, most of the time when the men are expecting an attack, “nothing happens”, as he said four times - nothing except tiny changes in the time of day, the weather and the progress of war. The men appear trapped in a No Man’s Land between life and death. The poems movement is circular, when it ends, the men are exactly where they were in the first verse.
The men with “foreheads crisp”, which mean that they are young, have given up on their hopes and beliefs. Wilfred Owen calls it their “forgotten dreams”. The forgotten dreams could either be there hopes of returning home alive and well to their families, or it could mean that the men are thinking about why they were lied to about how they were going to return home, after a short war, a hero.
“Wearied we keep awake because the night is silent…”
The irony of this line is that the men can’t sleep because the night is too silent, the atmosphere is too tense, whereas most people can only fall asleep when it is quite. They are fearful of a German surprise attack:
“Worried by silence, sentries whisper, curious, nervous,”
A line from verse 2 continues the idea of those at the home front believing that the war is great is:
“like a dull rumour of some other war.”
The word rumour is to represent the idea of the war being horrifying to those back in Britain as ludicrous.
The weather is possibly the men’s main enemy according to Owen, so it is featured a lot in the poem using powerful imagery. The real cause of their suffering seems to be that they are lying out in the open under freezing conditions. An effective simile form verse 2 for describing how the weather can play tricks on the men is:
“mad gusts tugging on the wire, like twitching agonies of men among its brambles.”
It forms the idea of men caught in the barbed wire; the simile allows the readers to picture the movement of the wire in their heads. The use of the word “brambles”, as the spikes of the wire is an effective contrast, as brambles are prickly shrubs.
To show again the terrible conditions that the men have to live with, Owen used the oxymoron:
“black with snow,”
As snow is normally white, this is an oxymoron. The snow will be black because the trenches were extremely muddy and the snow will be restricting the men’s views. The oxymoron also creates the imagery of the sky being dark and gloomy. The poet will have used the snow to represent the men. White snow is associated with purity and innocence. The snow turns black, suggesting an atmosphere of evil with the men feeling scared, depressed and sorrowful. Continuing with the snow, Owen creates the idea that the snow is alive, as if the weather is a person and he or she is attacking the solders:
“Pale flakes with fingering stealth come feeling for our faces”
The weather doesn’t seem to care what it is doing to the men. Later in the poem the ground is “littered with blossoms”, showing the casual, unsympathetic attitude the weather has.
In verse 3 personifications is used to create a powerful image of the sun:
“Dawn massing in the east her melancholy army”
Wilfred Owen making the sun seem like an army which is gathering in the east, which of course is where the sun rises in the morning:
“Attacks once more in ranks on shivering ranks of grey,”
The sun is said to be attacking in ranks, which means that the sun is getting increasingly brighter and warmer. The shivering ranks of grey are the British army in their grey uniforms, who are cold and scared. This is a very effective device. Wilfred Owen chose his words carefully to arouse sympathy for the men. For example he used words like “misery”, “shivering”, “melancholy” and the sun “attacks” the men again.
The poet uses alliteration as an effective way of describing the sinister hissing sound of the wind:
“The merciless iced winds that knive us…”
The wind is cold and sharp and the incomplete lines allows the readers to imagine for themselves what the wind is like.
To represent the sounds of gunfire in verse 2:
“incessantly, the flickering gunnery rumbles,”
It an effective alliteration as it allows the reader to hear the rumbling of the soaring bullets in their head. The same is true for another alliteration:
“Sudden successive flights of bullets streak the silence.”
Many of the men, because of the horrific deaths and suffering that they have seen, believed that God was punishing them:
“For God’s invincible spring our love is made afraid”
On the other hand, for the same reasons, many men have lost all hope in faith they had in God:
“For love of God seems dying”
Wilfred Owen blamed him for the suffering due to the war and the weather:
“His frost will fasten on this mud and us”
In the quote he was referring to God. The simple Christianity, which he had once believed in, seems inappropriate.
When Owen dreams of home, he sees that the home fires or almost dead. In verse 6 there is an example of the care taken by Owen with small phrases is:
“crusted dark-red jewels”
The fires were like jewels in the sense that they were beautiful however they offered no comfort or warmth.
Owen believes that when the men return home, they would not be welcomed:
“Shutters and doors, all closed: on us the doors are closed,”
Nothing will every be the same again. He feels that only part of him will return home, he will only resemble the man he used to be:
“Slowly our ghosts drag home”
Their houses have be deserted, leaving only little animals:
“crickets jingle…innocent mice rejoice: The house is theirs.”
They seem expected to stay where they are, stuck in an unforgiving world. The end of the poem suggests that soon they are all going to die.
This is a very powerful, thought provoking poem, which shows the horrifying truth about the death and suffering of the war. We know it is authentic as the poet lived what he wrote about. Wilfred Owen was a talented poet who used a lot of powerful and effective imagery to convey the theme of the poem. Owen’s prominent style and technique helped to promote the purpose of this poem. He used a lot of figures of speech, contrasts and daring techniques, for example para-rhymes. The message, which he manages to get across clearly in this poem, is that, war is wrong, and the only real enemies we have are ourselves.
