Christina Kirchner
English 10
November 18, 2015

Religious Rituals

In his sonnet Anthem for Doomed Youth, Wilfred Owen criticizes war. His tone is first bitter, angry and ironic. It is filled with intense sadness and an endless feeling of emptiness. Owen strongly uses imagery and sound to convey his idea of war. Throughout the poem, he uses an extended metaphor to contrast a funeral at war to a traditional funeral at home. Owen opens the poem with images of death on a battlefield. He jolts the image of a slaughterhouse and the men “who die as cattle.” He displays the image of the way men are treated like “cattle,” being slaughtered. The vast number of soldiers dying emphasizes the absence of bells rung: “What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?” Instead of pleasant church bells, “the monstrous anger of the guns” and “the stuttering rifles” marks the deaths of the soldiers. Owen turns his poem into a mockery of a religious funeral service. He states the absence of a traditional funeral with prayers and bells for the dead soldiers. The prayers and bells are thought to glorify the deaths of the soldiers and that fighting is noble and purposeful. The “hasty orisons” are irreverence. Instead of sounds of a choir’s holy songs, Owen hears the sound of chaos and the explosions of bombs. He is drawn to another sound of mourning when the sounds of the bugles call to mind the remaining towns with half their men killed:
No mockeries now for them; no prayers nor bells;
Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs, —
The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells;
And bugles calling for them from sad shires. Religious images dominate the second stanza. Owen transitions into the second stanza with images of a traditional funeral at home, where the families can say their farewells and mourn. He states that altar boys and candle bearers are irrelevant to the religious rites: “What candles may be held to speed them all? / Not in the hands of boys.” The wives of the solders learn the truth about war as they mourn for their fallen loved ones: “their eyes / Shall shine in the holy glimmers of goodbyes.” Owen concludes that only tears and the pale, drained faces of their loved ones will send the fallen soldiers off; the “tenderness of patient” minds are like flowers on their graves: “The pallor girls’ brows shall be their pall; / Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds.” The lines ending the poem has a note of finality, of lingering sadness, darkness and an inability to avoid the reality of death and grief. The final line of the poem uses visual imagery to evoke the deaths of the soldiers: “And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds.” The dusk is “slow,” for that is the way time passes for those who mourn. The “drawing-down of blinds” acts as an image to the ending of a life or acts as a symbol of separating the realities of war. Owen’s poem clearly communicates the sorrow and horror he experiences during the war. In the poem, the noise of battle gives way to silent grief. Young men who should have lived died in the chaos of battle. In place of the usual funeral rites, sounds of battle, distant grief and nature’s close of day were what they had to mark their deaths. Throughout the poem, Owen employed imagery to bring to life the sorrow and horror of war – by describing the sounds and sights, by comparing a fitting funeral to the reality of death in war and by questioning the sufficiency of religion to provide solace in the face of such brutality.