Compare two poems by Wilfred Owen, showing how Owen portrays the victims of war.

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James Spicer, 10w2. English coursework, Mr Sumner

Compare two poems by Wilfred Owen, showing how Owen portrays the victims of war.

Wilfred Owen was born in Plas Wilmot, near Oswestry, on 18th March, 1893. Educated at the Birkenhead Institute and at Shrewsbury Technical School, he worked as a pupil-teacher at Wyle Cop School while preparing for his matriculation exam for the University of London. After failing to win a scholarship he found work as a teacher of English in the Berlitz School in Bordeaux.

Although he had previously thought of himself as a pacifist, in October 1915 he enlisted in the Artists' Rifles. Commissioned as a 2nd Lieutenant, he joined the Manchester Regiment in France in January, 1917. While in France Wilfred Owen began writing poems about his war experiences.

In the summer of 1917 Owen was badly concussed at the  after a shell landed just two yards away. After several days in a bomb crater with the mangled corpse of a fellow officer, Owen was diagnosed as suffering from .

While recovering at Craiglockhart War Hospital he met the poet . Owen showed Sassoon his poetry, and he advised and encouraged him. So did another writer at the hospital, . Sassoon suggested that Owen should write in a more direct, conversational style. Over the next few months Owen wrote a series of poems, including Anthem for Doomed Youth, Disabled, Dulce et Decorum Est and Strange Meeting. These show how his views on the war changed from how it was good to fight to how horrible it really is on the battle field.

In August 1918 Owen was declared fit to return to the . He fought at Fonsomme, where he was awarded the . Wilfred Owen was killed by machine-gun fire while leading his men across the Sambre Canal on 4th November, 1918. A week later the Armistice was signed. Only five of Owen’s poems were published while he was alive. After Owen's death his friend, , arranged for the publication of his Collected Poems (1920).

The two poems by Owen I have chosen to compare are Anthem for Doomed Youth and Dulce et Decorum Est. Both poems are about life on the Western front in the First World War and are about the death and suffering of the soldiers.

Anthem for Doomed Youth is set in the form of a sonnet and is carefully constructed with a complex rhyming scheme. By using a sonnet for the structure of his poem, Wilfred Owen introduces a touch of irony. The usual function for the sonnet is love, but this poem has a sort of anti-love, or rather, a love that turns bad. The male population have so much patriotic love, and are so eager to serve, but this love turns sour. Instead they spend time rotting in the wastes of the trenches, only to be run down in the blink of an eye by a German machine-gun. Not only are their lives wasted, gone without the holy rite of funeral, but the lives of their loved ones at home are also ruined.

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The title starts with the word ‘Anthem’, which is a type of song, or more specifically a hymn. Hymns are traditionally sung at weddings, funerals or church services, which is ironic because the soldiers won’t get a proper funeral. It then goes on to say that they are ‘Doomed Youth’, emphasizing how young the soldiers are and how they have virtually no chance of surviving the war.

The first line is a rhetorical question shown by the ‘What’ at the start and the question mark (‘?’) at the end. It mentions the ‘passing bells’ as if they are funeral bells ...

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