Throughout many of Wilfred Owens’ poems, we witness him speaking of the brutality of war. Looking at poems ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’ and ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’ his depiction of war is always negative. He represents the horrors of war with the use of powerful imagery and poetic devices which enables him to captivate his audience and emphasise how wrong and horrifying the reality of war actually was.
First of all, the meaning of the poem ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’ revolves around the emotions anger, devastation and sorrow. The emotions helps Owen express his overall feeling of disgust at war. As the sonnet begins, we receive an immediacy of war with the use of present tense. The rhetorical question in the first line gets the audience involved and thinking straight away. The speaker gives us an image of soldiers being treated as mere cattle. This comparison illustrates that these innocent soldiers were treated with no respect nor value. In addition, he emphasises the fact that so many were dead, there was no time to ring ‘bells’ for each individual. Owen continues the negative tone of the stanza as we notice that he focuses almost exclusively on the sounds and frantic pace of war.
In line three, the alliteration of letters ‘r’ and ‘t’ in ‘rifles rapid rattle’ imitate the sounds on the field which show that even the guns are angry of what is happening to these boys – not men, but boys. The lines ‘No mockeries now for the ... / ... choirs of wailing shells’ also imply negative connotation with the repetition of the words no/nor. These negative connotations are stressed because no emotions can be shown due to the fact they’re dead.
The second stanza, along with the first starts with a rhetorical question. We notice the contrast of both stanza’s with the second being softer and calm. Owen is no focusing entirely on the mourning period including the funeral rites. Within the first two lines, he mentions candles being held by altar boys, though the metaphor ‘holy...