Doomed Youth Essay Example

the first few weeks of 1913, Owen suffered a crisis of faith.

He realised that literature meant more to him than religion, and he left Dunsden on the verge of a nervous breakdown.During his period of recovery that summer, he became interested in the archaeological remains of the Roman city of Uriconium. In one of his early poems, Uriconium, an Ode, he displays his first awareness of the bodies of the victims of war. Having applied for a scholarship to university, and been turned down, Owen left England for France. War was declared while he was still teaching English there.

He visited a hospital for the wounded, and this presented him with an apocalyptic vision of the horrors of war. However, he returned to England in 1915 and enlisted in the army as a Private.After a period of training in Essex, Owen joined the 2nd Manchesters on the Somme in early January 1917. His letters to his mother are graphic descriptions of the conditions endured by him and his fellow soldiers at this time.

In March 1917, following a fall from which he sustained a concussion, Owen was involved in a period of fierce fighting at the front, near St. Quentin. He was invalided home, suffering from shell-shock. In Craiglochart War Hospital on the outskirts of Edinburgh, he met Siegfried Sassoon, whose first “war” poems had just been published.

Owen was inspired by this book, and greatly encouraged by Sassoon. Finding a language for his own experience, he wrote the poem Anthem for Doomed Youth. He began writing Dulce et Decorum Est at about this time. His graphic descriptions of the battlefield had been triggered as

an angry response to a poem by Jessie Pope, to whom manuscript versions of Dulce et Decorum Est are dedicated.

She was the author of another kind of war poem, one of which began: Who’s for the trench – Are you, my laddie? Who’ll follow the French – Will you, my laddie? Who’s fretting to begin, Who’s going to win?And who wants to save his skin – Do you, my laddie? In Owen’s opinion, Pope’s comparison of war to a game of rugby, and the implication that the players were admirable and those on the sidelines disregarded, was simply glorifying and giving a completely unrealistic vision of war. In December 1917, Sassoon was posted to France, and in March 1918, Owen was transferred to what he described as “an awful camp” at Ripon in Yorkshire. He rented a room in a nearby cottage, which became his escape when not on duty, and over the next three months, either wrote or revised many of his most powerful poems.In early June, having been passed fit for general service, he rejoined the 5th Manchesters at Scarborough.

He had been recommended for a posting as instructor to a cadet battalion, which would have meant he would remain in Britain, but this recommendation was rejected and Owen returned to the Front. Sassoon had been shot in the head and invalided home, and Owen considered it was his duty to replace him as the poetic voice of the war. At the beginning of October 1918, Owen was awarded the Military Cross and before sunrise on the morning of 4th November, led his platoon to the west bank of the Sambre and

Oise Canal.A fierce battle ensued, and Owen was killed. Exactly one week later, as the Armistice bells were signalling the end of the war, a telegram arrived at Owen’s parents’ house, announcing his death. His poem, Dulce et Decorum Est, had been read out at a church service earlier that day.

The first two stanzas of the poem are written in traditional sonnet form, an octet and a sestet. Owen creates the mood of the poem with the opening lines: Bent double, like old beggars under sacks, Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge.The similes of these lines suggest the poor physical state of the soldiers returning to their dug-outs from the scene of the battle. These once vibrant, healthy young men have been reduced to decrepit members of society, undesirable and marginalized. The alliterative “knock-kneed” suggests the slow, rhythmic movement of the men.

The light of the “haunting flares”, used for signalling, can still be seen, even though they have their backs to the battle scene and are moving away from it, but they cannot escape from the knowledge that the battle is still raging and that they will have to return to fight again. Distant rest” is ambiguous – rest from the rigours of the fight, or eternal rest, the prospect of which hangs over them constantly. Alliteration in line 5 “Men marched asleep,” conveys the utter fatigue and exhaustion felt by the men who had been fighting for many hours in atrocious conditions. The description of the soldiers marching on, “blood-shod”, having lost their boots in the glutinous mud, also suggests that they were suffering from Trench-foot, a condition that affected

the majority of soldiers who spent many hours with their feet immersed in cold, muddy water.The animal-imagery of the phrase de-humanises the men, “shod” usually referring to horses or mules.

The use of the words “blind” and “deaf” conveys an image of men de-sensitised; they cannot hear, they cannot see, blind and deaf, ignorant and uncaring of the situation around them, such is their fatigue. In line eight, the rhythm of the poem slows as a particularly dramatic moment approaches. The men are oblivious to the noise of spent fifty-nine millimetre bullet shells falling behind them. The second stanza begins with a change of tense to the present, conveying the urgency of the succeeding lines. The exclamation “Gas! followed immediately by the repetition of the word, this time written in capital letters, suggests that the first time the word is heard its urgency is not conveyed strongly enough to the soldiers, who are in a trance-like state. Following the officer’s command to get their gas-masks on quickly, the men do so in “An ecstasy of fumbling”.

The choice of the word “ecstasy” seems a curious one, unless one considers the medical meaning of the word – a morbid state of nerves in which the mind is solely occupied with one idea. As the men get their helmets on “just in time”, it becomes apparent that one of them has not managed to do so.An anonymous soldier is “yelling and stumbling”, in his frantic effort to avoid the effects of the poisonous gas which is permeating the air. The word “flound’ring”, written with a slight abbreviation, the omission of the vowel “e”, a style common to

many of poets of earlier times, gives an image of the helplessness of the man struggling to breathe, his movements uncontrolled.

The powerful underwater simile which follows conjures up a vision of the man drowning as he succumbs to the deadly gas. The speaker introduces himself into the action through witnessing his comrade drowning, his lungs liquefying as a result of the gas.The speaker is not quite part of the picture, but is removed from its immediacy, as if looking through a window as the gas swirls around, limiting visibility. The atrocity of the event continues and the impact it has on the speaker is emphasised in the following stanza of just two lines: In all my dreams, before my helpless sight, He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning. The use of three strong verbs imparts a vivid image of the man as he desperately lunges towards the speaker, appealing for help, which the speaker is unable to give. Guttering” is a word usually applied to a candle flame as it is about to be extinguished.

The image is one, which will be re-lived many times by the speaker in his dreams. In the final stanza, the poet draws the reader into the picture. He suggests that if it were the reader, not the speaker, who had witnessed the subsequent flinging of the dying man into a wagon, it would affect the reader in the same way. This can be taken as a reference to conscientious objectors, or the people back in Britain who extolled the virtues of war, but were totally ignorant of its reality.

He invites the reader to imagine the “writhing” that denotes

an especially virulent kind of pain. Hell seems close, with the use of the curious simile “like a devil’s sick of sin”. This may suggest that even the devil is satiated by the unspeakable evil that is this war. The use of simile is continued in the description of the journey in the wagon.

The harsh “jolt” shows there was no gentle stretcher bearing, but agony intensified by the wagon’s progress over the rutted ground. The putrid images are carried on in the graphic description of the sounds and the grotesque progression of the effects of the gas on the dying soldier.As in his poem, Anthem for Doomed Youth, “those who die as cattle”, Owen uses bovine simile with “bitter as the cud”. The final lines of the poem appear to be a direct attack on Jessie Pope. His appeal to “my friend” is doubtlessly ironic. Her creed, the sweetness of correctness of dying for one’s country is denounced.

The poet refers to the quotation from which the title of the poem is taken as “The old Lie”, and the use of the capital “L” shows that this is no white lie, but a glaring mortal sin. This insult is the culmination of the poem.Anger and compassion inspire the descriptions; the poem does not stand back and invite the reader to consider and judge for himself. It is an aggressive assault on the conscience of those who perpetuate the idea of honourable sacrifice by their conditioning, and therefore their corruption, of the next generation. The spirit of the poem need not be seen as unpatriotic or even, indeed, as pacifist, but it points directly to

the discrepancies between the purpose of war and the means by which this purpose is pursued.

In other words, he shows the that the defence of life, territory or principle is being achieved by the destruction of life and territory and by the disregarding of other principles. The common soldier’s experience of war is in stark contrast to the romantic exhortations of non-combatants, and the poet has thus proven that the ideal of the quotation is not consistent with its reality. Acerbus et vitiosus est pro Patria pugno. Copyright B. FitzGerald 2004 Bibliography John Stallworthy "Anthem for Doomed Youth Twelve Soldier Poets of the First World War" Constable & Robinson 2002