No mockeries now for them; no prayers nor bells,
Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs,
The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells;
And bugles calling for them from sad shires.
What candles may be held to speed them all?
Not in the hands of the boys, but in their eyes
Shall shine the holy glimmers of good-byes.
The pallor of girls' brows shall be their pall;
Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds,
And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds.
Owen's poem appears to inspired by the many deaths of soldiers he saw each day in the trenches of war. He starts the poem off, describing innocent young men being sent to war like cattle are sent to slaughter. He abandons his original views of war as heroic and glorious, and describes it as one large funeral where young soldiers are not given a proper goodbye. Instead of the typical church bells that are sounded when someone dies under ordinary circumstances, there are only the sounds of gunshots when a soldier dies, he writes.
A powerful line in this poem reads, "No mockeries now for them; no prayers, nor bells (p. 43)." Owen seems to now believe that traditional rites for death are mockeries. This suggests that he has a new grasp of the meaning of life and death, and he no longer believes that traditional bells and ceremonies are what death it about. For him, these rites mocked a tragic ending.
The second stanza is very powerful as Owen writes how there will be no candles to mourn the dead soldiers, but only the candles of their blazed life seen in their eyes. These moments are their true good-byes, as the last light of consciousness dies. However, he observes that war does not...
His war poems express frustration about how innocent soldiers are hardened by war and eventually killed in many cases. They also express frustration about the attitudes of civilians back home and how many simply ignored the tragic nightmare of the war.
Brecht's perspective on war is similar to Owen's in that he is very anti-war. However, his perspective differs as he does not view civilians as ignorant, but rather as interested in prolonging the war for their profit.
According to Brecht, in the world of war, only the scavengers survive; by exploiting those who fight (and die) in the name of war. The point of the play is that war destroys everybody except those at the very top. Even Mother Courage, who tries to play by the rules of war, is ruined by it. Brecht very much believed that war was a business run like any other.
Both authors seem to absolutely despise war and what it does to the people around it. Both have similar yet different reasons for taking an anti-war perspective, yet both were writers far ahead of their time. The 1960's was the era of strong anti-war protests, yet both writers showed the same feelings as protesters of this era. For this reason, both are regarded as powerful anti-war artists.
Bibliography
Brecht, Bertolt. Mother Courage and Her Children. Tr. Eric Bentley in Representative Modern European Dramas. ed. Lee Gun-sam. Seoul: Pan Korea Book Corp., 1978.
Lewis, Day C. (1963 ed). The Collected Poems of Wilfred Owen. By Wilfred Owen. New York: New Directions, 1963.
Roberts, David. (1998). Short Biography of Wilfred Owen. Saxon Books.
