As these soldiers die all that surrounds them are the sounds of warfare, far from any semblance of an orderly funeral service with prayers, choirs and bugles announcing their deaths. He bemoans that the soldiers who die or are dying are senselessly slaughtered like ‘cattle’ and that, in the heat of battle, they are not given the kind of funeral and send off that they deserve.

Image: Wilfred Owen (author unknown: image taken from 1920 edition of Poems of Wilfred Owen), Wikimedia Commons.The poem has a very telling title, which reflects the speaker’s anger and mourning for the deaths of young soldiers sent to battle during the First World War. He is the author of, among others, The Secret Library: A Book-Lovers’ Journey Through Curiosities of History and The Great War, The Waste Land and the Modernist Long Poem. The author of this article, Dr Oliver Tearle, is a literary critic and lecturer in English at Loughborough University. If you found this commentary on ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’ useful, you can discover more classic war poetry here. The cleverness isn’t allowed to dominate, yet Owen’s use of mourning imagery and funeral conventions makes for a poem that not only makes us think, but moves us too. In the last analysis, ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’ is a clever sonnet but more than this, it’s an impassioned one: Wilfred Owen fills his poem with raw emotion which moves us in every line. The ‘tenderness of patient minds’ – ‘patient’ not only because those left at home had to wait patiently and agonisingly for news of their loved ones fighting at the front, but also in the sense of ‘suffering’ (the original meaning of ‘patient’) – will be more powerful a memorial for the dead men than the literal flowers placed on their graves.Įven the world itself, and the natural order, seems to mourn: every time the light fades from the land and dusk falls, it will be as though the world has gone into mourning every night for the dead men (the act of drawing down the blinds of a home was a common way of showing yours was a house in mourning). The ultimate funeral pall is no sheet placed over the tombs of dead soldiers but the pale brows of the young girls the men left behind (first for war and then, tragically and more permanently, in death), girls who have lost their sweethearts and are pale with grief.

How interesting, then, that the mechanical twisting of religious acts of devotion and respect which we are presented with in the octave should, in the sestet, be turned on its head: Owen tells us that the most sincere ‘holy glimmer’ of respect for the dead soldiers is not found in the glimmer of candles (lighted as an act of remembrance) but in the brightly shining eyes of young boys (suggestive not only of the children made fatherless orphans by the war but also of their slightly older brothers, young boys of sixteen or seventeen who had gone off to fight in the war).

Wilfred owen's anthem for doomed youth