This paper examines Wilfred Owen's "Anthem for a Doomed Youth," a seminal World War I poem that juxtaposes church liturgy with the brutal reality of trench warfare. The analysis explores how Owen, drawing from his own experiences as a lay reader and combat soldier, uses Anglican imagery, sound devices, and structural contrasts to expose the cruel irony of celebrating young soldiers destined to die. The paper traces Owen's biographical influences, interprets key literary techniques including personification and alliteration, and examines the poem's octave-sestet structure to demonstrate how Owen constructs two parallel realities: the false comfort of religious ceremony and the devastating truth of modern warfare.
Wilfred Owen is almost always classified as one of the great "War Poets" of World War I, along with Robert Graves and Siegfried Sassoon. The War Poets were a group of alienated British young men, usually from the aristocracy, who had grown disenchanted with their class, society, and the lies they had been taught about patriotism while growing up. Owen's seminal poem "Anthem for a Doomed Youth" fuses the High Church Anglican liturgy and sounds of a celebratory church service with the poet's bitter discontent about serving the military. Having seen men being mowed down in the trenches, he knew what they would face, and it was not something to be celebrated.
Owen was less aristocratic than many of his other War Poet counterparts, and he had a sharp eye for the suffering of men of all classes on the battlefield in his poetry. Because Owen's family could not afford to send him to public school, he lacked the ability to be academically competitive to pay for a college education. He worked as a lay reader, or "an assistant to a clergyman" until 1913. These experiences in church as well as his war experiences obviously inform the setting of "Anthem for a Doomed Youth." Owen might also have been in the same position as the men in the poem, being honored in church before being sent to the front lines of battle.
An "Anthem" is a song of praise, and the setting of the poem is a likely rural church where an anthem is being sung to praise and honor the young men about to head out to the front and fight for king and country. These innocent young men, as the title of the poem indicates, are "doomed" in Owen's eyes, and the choirs of praise and thanksgiving and the tolling of the bells are a cruel mockery of what they will face.
Because Owen himself may have endured such a scene as a young man going off to war, or had he witnessed such a "praise-giving" again, it may have moved him to write "Anthem for a Doomed Youth." The poem may also have been based upon his own memories. After being in combat, Owen wrote to his mother: "I have not been at the front. I have been in front of it," a sentiment reflected in "Anthem." Before going to war, Owen had attended classes part-time at university but again failed to win support for full-time study. He began to work as a private tutor in France after falling ill in 1913.
Before departing to the front lines, he wrote to his mother expressing his complex feelings about the war's impact on society: "While it is true that the guns will effect a little useful weeding [of the aristocracy], I am furious with chagrin to think that the Minds which were to have excelled the civilization of ten thousand years are being annihilated—and bodies, the product of aeons of Natural Selection, melted down to pay for political statues." However, this sentiment—the belief that war would cleanse and reinvigorate a society which had grown decadent, narcissistic, and wasteful by the early twentieth century—was soon replaced by an even more extreme sentiment after serving: "I have suffered seventh hell." Owen was hospitalized for being "shell shocked" and began to write in earnest during this period. On September 1918 he returned to the front line, where he won the Military Cross for bravery. He was preparing his first collection of poems when, on 4 November, he was killed. The telegram informing his parents of his death arrived on 11 November, the day the signing of the Armistice ended the war.
"Anthem for a Doomed Youth" was published in October of 1917, and a little more than a year later in November 1918, Owen would be dead. The poem's opening lines are harsh and bleak: "What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?" The tolling of the church bells is monstrous to the poem, signaling not religious devotion but sounding like the bells around a cow's neck before slaughter. Instead of solemn church bells, Owen writes: "Only the monstrous anger of the guns. / Only the stuttering rifles' rapid rattle / Can patter out their hasty orisons." Church bells, in short, are too "pretty" for the sounding of a tribute to the men who will serve, who are doomed to an early grave.
Instead, the soldiers about to serve should be "treated" to the mimicking of gunfire, so they will be prepared for the trenches. In foxholes, after all, the soldier's "hasty orisons" must keep time to the guns and the rifles. Owen uses personification to characterize the guns, which are angry—as his tone is angry. The guns do their work, and the alliteration of the "rifles" and "rapid rattle" and the consonance of the "ts" in "stuttering" and "rattle" give a sense of what a battlefield really sounds like: not a church service with slow bells, but with roaring guns and spattering bullets.
Owen makes frequent use of nihilistic language in "Anthem" to convey sadness and the future sense of deadness the soldiers may experience, or at very least feel. "No mockeries now for them; no prayers nor bells; / Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs," he writes. Prayers and bells and holy-sounding praise are a mockery, given what these men are being sent to do and what they will face. The poem is characterized by absence rather than presence; the only real sound is "The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells; / And bugles calling for them from sad shires."
The words "demented choirs" refer to the madness that many soldiers, including Owen, suffered as a result of their service, and also recall the fact that the poem is set in a church. But instead of human beings singing in harmony, the shells of guns make "shrill" and "wailing" sounds. Owen's compassion for all soldiers of all classes is evident in this stanza: those who go mad and also those called from rural places in the shires by the bugles of war.
The poem is broken into an octave and a sestet, and while the octave is more auditory in its images, the sestet contains the more striking images of the poem, although Owen's compassion is always evident. "What candles may be held to speed them all?" he muses about the candles lit in church, thinking the candles are more likely to speed the boys to the grave than home. "Not in the hands of boys but in their eyes / Shall shine the holy glimmers of goodbyes." The sacredness of the ceremony is not in votive candles, but in the holy hopes and glimmers of goodbyes of the youths, as they pray within to return to their loved ones, perhaps a mother or a wife.
But rather than warmth and the hope of a return, Owen offers a darker image: "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." The homey image of girls, flowers, and house blinds recall the drawing of blinds down upon the lives of men at the front, and the flowers will adorn the men's graves. Owen effectively creates two parallel universes, two parallel church services. In one service, the "Anthem" of praise is sung, the church bells toll, their glorious sacrifice is praised, and beautiful young girls from the village shire look on, happy and beautiful, while church candles glow. In the second, there is the sound of gunfire, the paleness of death, and quick prayers that keep time with the ammunition.
The soldiers need to be warned of the suffering that awaits them, Owen implies, but they are not; instead they are praised in the language of the church, even while they are going off to their deaths. There should not be a celebration; instead the men should listen to gunfire, and instead of the glowing lights of the church and the beauty of the young women in the church, the men should look upon pale-death images, as the girls should be pale as death in sorrow, as the men will be pale as death, under flowers in the ground after they serve.
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