He also describes the ‘anger of the guns’ as ‘monstrous’. This makes the line more vivid and enlarges the anger that the guns possess. Owen uses alliteration in ‘rifles’ rapid rattle’ to emphasise the firing of the guns. ‘Rapid’ and ‘rattle’ are also onomatopoeia as the machine guns make that noise when they are fired. ‘Stuttering’ is the sound the bullet makes as it hits the soldiers’ jackets or bodies. Owen in these few lines is describing the sounds of the war and trying to convey the brutal reality of the trenches, as he is appalled and angry at the carnage taking place. ‘Patter’, line 4, again resembles the sound of bullets hitting objects such as humans or sandbags. So, the rhetorical question is asking what prayers do the soldiers get and he answers – only the sound of guns and rifles can patter out their prayers.
The poem is very much concerned with the way the soldiers die without funerals as we saw in lines 1-4. He uses language that would be fit for the description of a funeral. For example: ‘passing bells’, ‘orisons’, ‘choirs’, ‘bugles’, ‘candles’, ‘good-byes’, ‘pall’, ‘flowers’, and the ‘drawing down of blinds’. All these words and phrases signify an ironic way that in the battlefield there is no funeral but just the ‘shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells.’ This line again refers back to a funeral. The choirs are likened to the shells because they come in numbers and shrill/wail.
The word ‘mockeries’ in line 5 shows us clearly that he is using it to emphasise the fact that he is mocking the idea of a glorious death and that people believed that they would feel pride dying for the country. Owen is trying to highlight that that is not the case; in fact they die en masse without a funeral or proper burial.
The tone of the first stanza is angry, loud, and captures the sounds of war. It puts across the devastation of the war and the brutal reality of the trenches. It uses lots of hard, jarring words like ‘rapid’, ‘rattle’, ‘stuttering’, and ‘shrill’.
Both of the stanzas start with a rhetorical question. The second stanza, however, is more concentrated on the home front. It has a more sombre tone and Owen uses language to soften words and to slow down the speed and inharmonious jarring of the language in the first stanza. In the first stanza Owen uses words like ‘patter’, ‘hasty’, and ‘stuttering’ resulting in the tempo being fast and upbeat. The second stanza on the other hand uses language like ‘eyes’, ‘byes’, and ‘minds’, which have long vowel sounds to slow down the pace.
In the rhetorical question at the beginning: ‘What candles may be held to speed them all?’, Owen is asking how can they be remembered or their deaths be justified by candles held in a church (‘speed them all’ means to help them to heaven). Owen answers this by saying that the soldiers can be only remembered in the eyes of their loved ones. This is because ‘glimmers’ signify tears of genuine sadness.
Owen uses the word ‘pallor’ in line 12 because it suggests that the girls look dead like the soldiers, and without their loved ones they might feel ‘dead’. It is a sheet-like paleness like the ‘pall’ (line 12), which goes over the coffin. Owen is not angry here as in the first stanza but is showing the sadness of war not just for the people who fight and are sent out to be slaughtered, but also their loved-ones at home who are numbed through the deaths of the soldiers- ‘their flowers the tenderness of silent minds’.
Owen is speaking out against the warmongers and trying to depict the cruelty of the war in the home front as well as the western front. The last line of the poem: And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds’ signifies the end of the poem with blinds being drawn at the end of the day but also when someone draws one’s blinds it denotes the death of a person in the family. And Owen writes this because at each dusk it is like a mourning at each person’s house as people constantly die in the war.
Siegfried Sassoon also conveys powerful feelings about the First World War in his poem ‘Attack’. The poem is also a sonnet but it has not got much of a rhythmic structure and it is all jumbled up. This could be interpreted as the soldiers in the poem who are confused and floundering in the mud during the attack: ‘clumsily’.
In the first four lines Sassoon uses no punctuation, which suggests and conveys a slow unfolding of visual images. The world ‘emerges’ emphasises the idea that the sun is revealing the smoking battlefield. Sassoon conveys the battlefield as dark, mysterious and almost shocking. He uses words such as ‘wild purple’, which gives it a surreal quality; it almost doesn’t seem right. And ‘glowering’, which suggests that the sun is not just shining but nearly frowning. This personification characterises the battlefield as being evil and dangerous.
An even better example of this would be line 4 – ‘the menacing scarred slope’. The personification of the scarred slope makes the phrase more vivid. We can compare this to Owen’s poem when he writes: ‘the monstrous anger of the guns’. These phrases personify objects, making them feel more monstrous/menacing, and enlarges the anger that the poets have for the war. They are nearly accusing the objects of war for the devastation they have caused.
Sassoon uses unusual language in line 5 of ‘Attack’. He describes the tanks movements as ‘creep’ and ‘topple’. These are words not normally associated with tanks but suggest the movement of men going over the top. He later describes the men to ‘jostle and climb to meet brisling fire’. It suggests that they have become like the tanks and that they are automatic and without any real human control. This can be compared to ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’. Like Sassoon, Owen dehumanises the soldiers and makes them look like animals: ‘What passing-bells for those who die as cattle?’ The poets are livid at the fact that the soldiers are not seen as people but are dying in thousands without recognition and proper burials. They are appalled and angry and try to emphasise this is their writing. Yet they admire the soldiers for being so courageous.
Alliteration is used to emphasise the points Sassoon is trying to convey. The two ‘t’s in ‘time ticks’ emphasise the ticking of their watches. The two ‘b’s of ‘blank and busy’ sounds short and punchy like the time ticking on. Time is personified in this line: The ‘blank’ implies the disinterest of the time. It has no role yet the ‘busy’ indicates that it does not stop. In these words Sassoon is conveying that even though time does not or cannot stop and had no role in the war, every time it ticks another soldier has been killed as if it is the fault of the ticking of their watches that the soldiers are dying. Sassoon is trying to get this point across more strongly by using the alliteration and it could be interpreted that Sassoon is asking for the time to stop hoping that this will stop the war: ‘O Jesu, make it stop!’
The idea of the second half of this poem is that it had become nearly impossible to stop these innocent solders from dying. He suggests this in line 9: ‘Lines of grey, muttering faces, masked with fear’. The ‘grey’ symbolises the colour of fear but also a ‘dead-like’ image. Grey is colour associated with ashes and dead-bodies. It gives a sense that they are as good as dead as they are about to be massacred after going over the top. We can compare this to Owen’s ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’: ‘pallor of girls’ brows’. The pallor indicates that the girls almost look dead. ‘Pallor’ is an unhealthy paleness of the skin much like the ‘grey, muttering faces’. Sassoon also describes their faces as ‘masked with fear’ but it is more than fear that we can see on their faces; it is death.
He strengthens this idea with the last 2 lines of the poem: ‘hope, with furtive eyes and grappling fists, | Flounders in mud.’ This implies that the hope that the soldiers have got of surviving is now failing and the soldiers have no hope in surviving. Hope is personified here as if hope itself is struggling to survive.
Sassoon uses words such as ‘grappling’ and ‘flounders’ to emphasise this point. These words give a sense of desperation and hopelessness. The last few lines of the poem give it a prayer like quality. Sassoon even adds ‘O Jesu, make it stop!’ The ‘O’ is a cry from the heart and again, gives a sense of desperation. Sassoon is really begging from the heart for peace and an end to the war. He is praying for the end to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of soldiers.
He also uses effective use of punctuation in this line. The caesura signifies the end of the floundering and also of the sentence. It emphasises the early end to the lives of the young soldiers like the early cut-off of the line. Sassoon is mourning over the deaths of many young soldiers but also is angry for the warmongers for telling the young lads that it is a noble thing to die for your country.
