Wilfred Owens Speech On The Next War

Good Morning/Afternoon Mr Bain and fellow classmates, today I will be speaking about a man who wrote some of the most powerful British poetry during World War 1, Wilfred Owen. Significantly only five of Owens poems were published in his lifespan, from August 1917 to September 1918. In November 1918 he was killed in action at the age of twenty-five, one week before the Armistice. Through his poetry, he depicted the reality and horrors of the First World War. This era was the First World War, the Great War, or the War to End All Wars.

Wilfred Owen’s poem The Next War, was written from his own perspective. The imagery in the poem was actual circumstances he had to cope with when on the front in 1917, during World War One. The tone of the poem is reasonably miserable, but somehow Owen has captured one of the most sorrowful events of our lives, death, and turned it into a tolerable situation, where death is not the enemy; rather the companion. Throughout the poem, there are continuous references to “Death”. “Sat down and eaten with him, cool and bland”, it was conveying how death was always amongst the soldiers. Audaciously, death was personified as an “old chum”. “Oh, Death was never an enemy of ours!” Leading us to ask ourselves, who was the enemy? Death cannot be the enemy to the soldier. Death had become a constant companion with the soldier. However, the answer lies in the poems final lines, which warned the soldiers that they were duped into believing that they nobly fight