Wilfred Owen’s Anthem for Doomed Youth and Siegfried Sassoon’s Attack
Explore the ways in which Sassoon’s and Owen’s words convey powerful
feelings about the First World War in these two poems.
Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon are seen as the two greatest
British First World War poets. ‘Attack’ and ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’
attempt to dissuade young men to go to war and to stop them from ‘dying
as cattle’ on the front. These views were not conventional. The British
Government and the people on the Home Front were urging people to go
to war and said it was ‘a noble thing to die for your country. In these
poems and many of their other poems Owen and Sassoon redefine war,
from being a noble thing to die for you country to the poets mocking the
war and describing the brutal reality of trenches and the Western Front.
Therefore it is a very controversial poem. Sassoon used his powerful
poetic voice to shock Britons and warmongers. His poems savaged the
smug cruelty of the generals who sacrificed hundreds of lives of innocent
soldiers and told people about the reality of the Great War. Owen had the
same views on the war but his work had not yet been published but
when he met Sassoon at Craig Lockhart Hospital during the war Sassoon
noticed his talent as a poet and it was there that Owen was most inspired
writing poems such as ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’.
Wilfred Owen’s ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’ is a fine example of a
poem which attacks the glory of war. It starts with a rhetorical question‘What passing bells for those who die as cattle?’ He is asking how can you
possibly recognise slaughter on such a scale. He uses the word ‘cattle’
because the soldiers are like cattle and die without funerals and in their
masses. He uses this simile to emphasise that people are sending out their
young lads to war as they would send a herd of cattle to a slaughterhouse. The question is aimed at the ignorant civilians and the complacent
generals. He goes on to answer his question, what prayers to the soldiers
get?, with ‘Only the monstrous anger of the guns.| Only the stuttering
rifles’ rapid rattle | Can patter out their hasty orisons.’ He uses
personification in line 2 by describing the guns as angry which brings out
his anger for the brutality that the men are facing from the guns.
He also describes the ‘anger of the guns’ as ‘monstrous’. This makes
the line more vivid and enlarges the anger that the guns possess. Owen
uses alliteration in ‘rifles’ rapid rattle’ to emphasise the firing of the guns.
‘Rapid’ and ‘rattle’ are also onomatopoeia as the machine guns make that
noise when they are fired. ‘Stuttering’ is the sound the bullet makes as it
hits the soldiers’ jackets or bodies. Owen in these few lines is describing
the sounds of the war and trying to convey the brutal reality of the
trenches, as he is appalled and angry at the carnage taking place. ‘Patter’,
line 4, again resembles the sound of bullets hitting objects such as humans
or sandbags. So, the rhetorical question is asking what prayers do the
soldiers get and he answers – only the sound of guns and rifles can patter
out their prayers.
The poem is very much concerned with the way the soldiers die
without funerals as we saw in lines 1-4. He uses language that would be
fit for the description of a funeral. For example: ‘passing bells’, ‘orisons’,
‘choirs’, ‘bugles’, ‘candles’, ‘good-byes’, ‘pall’, ‘flowers’, and the ‘drawing
down of blinds’. All these words and phrases signify an ironic way that in
the battlefield there is no funeral but just the ‘shrill, demented choirs of
wailing shells.’ This line again refers back to a funeral.
The choirs are likened to the shells because they come in numbers and
shrill/wail.
The word ‘mockeries’ in line 5 shows us clearly that he is using it to
emphasise the fact that he is mocking the idea of a glorious death and
that people believed that they would feel pride dying for the country.
Owen is trying to highlight that that is not the case; in fact they die en
masse without a funeral or proper burial.
The tone of the first stanza is angry, loud, and captures the sounds
of war. It puts across the devastation of the war and the brutal reality of
the trenches. It uses lots of hard, jarring words like ‘rapid’, ‘rattle’,
‘stuttering’, and ‘shrill’.
Both of the stanzas start with a rhetorical question. The second
stanza, however, is more concentrated on the home front. It has a more
sombre tone and Owen uses language to soften words and to slow down
the speed and inharmonious jarring of the language in the first stanza. In
the first stanza Owen uses words like ‘patter’, ‘hasty’, and ‘stuttering’
resulting in the tempo being fast and upbeat. The second stanza on the
other hand uses language like ‘eyes’, ‘byes’, and ‘minds’, which have long
vowel sounds to slow down the pace.
In the rhetorical question at the beginning: ‘What candles may be
held to speed them all?’, Owen is asking how can they be remembered or
their deaths be justified by candles held in a church (‘speed them all’
means to help them to heaven). Owen answers this by saying that the
soldiers can be only remembered in the eyes of their loved ones. This is
because ‘glimmers’ signify tears of genuine sadness.
Owen uses the word ‘pallor’ in line 12 because it suggests that the
girls look dead like the soldiers, and without their loved ones they might
feel ‘dead’. It is a sheet-like paleness like the ‘pall’ (line 12), which goes
over the coffin. Owen is not angry here as in the first stanza but is showing
the sadness of war not just for the people who fight and are sent out to be
slaughtered, but also their loved-ones at home who are numbed through
the deaths of the soldiers- ‘their flowers the tenderness of silent minds’.
Owen is speaking out against the warmongers and trying to depict
the cruelty of the war in the home front as well as the western front. The
last line of the poem: And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds’
signifies the end of the poem with blinds being drawn at the end of the
day but also when someone draws one’s blinds it denotes the death of a
person in the family. And Owen writes this because at each dusk it is like a
mourning at each person’s house as people constantly die in the war.
Siegfried Sassoon also conveys powerful feelings about the First
World War in his poem ‘Attack’. The poem is also a sonnet but it has not
got much of a rhythmic structure and it is all jumbled up. This could be
interpreted as the soldiers in the poem who are confused and floundering
in the mud during the attack: ‘clumsily’.
In the first four lines Sassoon uses no punctuation, which suggests
and conveys a slow unfolding of visual images. The world ‘emerges’
emphasises the idea that the sun is revealing the smoking battlefield.
Sassoon conveys the battlefield as dark, mysterious and almost shocking.
He uses words such as ‘wild purple’, which gives it a surreal quality; it
almost doesn’t seem right. And ‘glowering’, which suggests that the sun
is not just shining but nearly frowning. This personification characterises
the battlefield as being evil and dangerous.
An even better example of this would be line 4 – ‘the menacing scarred slope’.
The personification of the scarred slope makes the phrase more vivid.
We can compare this to Owen’s poem when he writes: ‘the monstrous
anger of the guns’. These phrases personify objects, making them feel
more monstrous/menacing, and enlarges the anger that the poets have
for the war. They are nearly accusing the objects of war for the
devastation they have caused.
Sassoon uses unusual language in line 5 of ‘Attack’. He describes
the tanks movements as ‘creep’ and ‘topple’. These are words not
normally associated with tanks but suggest the movement of men going
over the top. He later describes the men to ‘jostle and climb to meet
brisling fire’. It suggests that they have become like the tanks and that
they are automatic and without any real human control. This can be
compared to ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’. Like Sassoon, Owen
dehumanises the soldiers and makes them look like animals: ‘What
passing-bells for those who die as cattle?’ The poets are livid at the fact
that the soldiers are not seen as people but are dying in thousands
without recognition and proper burials. They are appalled and angry and
try to emphasise this is their writing. Yet they admire the soldiers for
being so courageous.
Alliteration is used to emphasise the points Sassoon is trying to
convey. The two ‘t’s in ‘time ticks’ emphasise the ticking of their watches.
The two ‘b’s of ‘blank and busy’ sounds short and punchy like the time
ticking on. Time is personified in this line: The ‘blank’ implies the
disinterest of the time. It has no role yet the ‘busy’ indicates that it does
not stop. In these words Sassoon is conveying that even though time does
not or cannot stop and had no role in the war, every time it ticks another
soldier has been killed as if it is the fault of the ticking of their watches
that the soldiers are dying. Sassoon is trying to get this point across more
strongly by using the alliteration and it could be interpreted that Sassoon
is asking for the time to stop hoping that this will stop the war: ‘O Jesu,
make it stop!’
The idea of the second half of this poem is that it had become
nearly impossible to stop these innocent solders from dying. He suggests
this in line 9: ‘Lines of grey, muttering faces, masked with fear’. The ‘grey’
symbolises the colour of fear but also a ‘dead-like’ image. Grey is colour
associated with ashes and dead-bodies. It gives a sense that they are as
good as dead as they are about to be massacred after going over the top.
We can compare this to Owen’s ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’: ‘pallor of
girls’ brows’. The pallor indicates that the girls almost look dead. ‘Pallor’ is
an unhealthy paleness of the skin much like the ‘grey, muttering faces’.
Sassoon also describes their faces as ‘masked with fear’ but it is more
than fear that we can see on their faces; it is death.
He strengthens this idea with the last 2 lines of the poem: ‘hope,
with furtive eyes and grappling fists, | Flounders in mud.’ This implies
that the hope that the soldiers have got of surviving is now failing and the
soldiers have no hope in surviving. Hope is personified here as if hope
itself is struggling to survive.
Sassoon uses words such as ‘grappling’ and ‘flounders’ to emphasise
this point. These words give a sense of desperation and hopelessness. The
last few lines of the poem give it a prayer like quality. Sassoon even adds
‘O Jesu, make it stop!’ The ‘O’ is a cry from the heart and again, gives a
sense of desperation. Sassoon is really begging from the heart for peace
and an end to the war. He is praying for the end to the deaths of
hundreds of thousands of soldiers.
He also uses effective use of punctuation in this line. The caesura
signifies the end of the floundering and also of the sentence. It
emphasises the early end to the lives of the young soldiers like the early
cut-off of the line. Sassoon is mourning over the deaths of many young
soldiers but also is angry for the warmongers for telling the young lads
that it is a noble thing to die for your country.