Analysis Of Anthem For Doomed Youth By Wilfred Owen

Wilfred Owen who was born in 1893 is still named as one of the leading British poets of war poetry about World War I in the English literature. Throughout his poetries, he vividly captures the reality of war and chaos inside of the soldiers. Before the war, Owen was a language tutor in France, but he served in an army because he felt pressured because government’s propaganda pressured him. Nevertheless, when he actually got into the army, he disillusioned and realized both pity and horror of war. From his dreadful experience, the anti-war feeling strongly created in his mind. Therefore, there is a link to ideas about ‘anti-war feeling’ throughout his poems. Wilfred Owen expresses his anti-war feeling through the literary techniques; simile, personification, metaphor, and alliteration.

To fully express his anti-war feeling about the reality of war, Owen uses simile in his Famous poem, ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’. In the opening lines, we can realize how the dead soldiers have been treated, ‘What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?’ The ‘passing bell’ is tolling during the funeral to announce that a soul has left the dead body. In Wilfred Owen’s poem, ‘the passing-bells’ is a symbol of a death, but it can symbolize the lack of humanity. With the meaning of ‘death’, it suggests that although the soldiers die honorably on the battlefield, their deaths are meaningless with the winning the war. On the other hand, Owen explores the individuality and inhumanity of deaths