A Critical Analysis of 'Anthem for doomed youth' by Wilfred Owen.

The poem asks and answers the following question, what funeral and ceremonies are there for the soldiers that die as cannon fodder? The answer the poem gives is none. The meaning it conveys is that the war must be wrong if the soldiers die so cheaply as to not receive a proper burial. The poem is about the First World War where over ten million people died and was written by Wilfred Owen who served as an officer. Owen wrote poetry through out his war years, using his experience of battle and its aftermath as his inspiration, having experienced many horrors on the front line.

‘Anthem for doomed youth’ is a Shakespearian sonnet, having the traditional 14 lines three quatrains and one couplet and has a rhyme scheme of abab cdcd effe gg. By using a sonnet Owen again uses a touch of irony. Traditionally the sonnet is the form used in love poems, but this poem has a kind of love that turns bad. The young male population have so much patriotic love for their country, and are so willing to fight for her, but this love results in horrifying mass death.

Anthem is a descriptive account of war and is philosophical with a look at the value and reality of war. In the octave the imagery is mainly auditory and in the sextet visual, but both techniques give a similar effect, creating a very real, vivid and dramatic atmosphere.

‘The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells;’(line7 in the octave)

‘The pallor of girls brows shall be their pall;’(line4 in the sextet)

The intention of the different styles of imagery is used in conjunction with other different techniques used throughout the poem. The purpose of which is to firstly shock, horrify and perhaps overwhelm in the first two quatrains and then to create great feelings of sorrow in the sextet. This is achieved, as visual imagery requires more time to summon in the mind then auditory imagery with the descriptions in the sextet being more about humans and feelings and so requires greater time, focus, being more personalised so producing more distress. This accomplishes the consequence of being more conspicuous as apposed to the octave, which principally uses comparisons of inanimate objects.