Anthem for Doomed Youth

    'Anthem for Doomed Youth', as the title suggests, is a poem about the waste of many young men in the First World War. The word ‘anthem’ in the title, unlike a national anthem that glorifies a country, is ironical, for there is just the opposite of glory in the absurd death of the young people shooting each other for noting. The youth in the poem is doomed less by other than by his own decision to join the battle. The poem reminds us of the sonnet that Mr. Brooke wrote to glorify war and England in that jingoistic manner; Owen has used the same sonnet form (that was originally used to express love) to demystify the conventional glorification of war, by exposing the meanness and absurdity of dying in the battle. The poem is written in the form of a sonnet. The poem as a whole is about how to conduct the funeral of a certain (or any) soldier who has died in war.
    The first eight line stanza describes how the guns and rifles, bursting bombs and the bugles will take the place of church bells, choirs of religious hymns, prayers, voices of people mourning and wailing, and the calling from the sad countryside. In the second six lines, he replaces more conventional objects and activities in mourning and funeral by more abstract and symbolic things back at home. The first stanza is full of images of war that will do the mourning, so that no human sympathy and ritual is necessary, because this is not natural and meaningful death. The second stanza is more devastating in its irony.
    The octave begins with a rhetorical question. “What passing-bells for these who died as cattle?” The soldiers die like cows; their death doesn’t evoke much sorrow. The persona is not actually so apathetic; the viewpoint is ironically that of the indiffere4nt people who stay in the protection of home and never know that war is horrible and disgusting. The rhetorical assertion that no bells may be rung in the name of these soldiers is not so much about the manner of their dying but the...