Anthem for Doomed Youth

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1920

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Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Background

Historical Context: World War I

World War I began in August 1914, pitting Germany and its allies against Great Britain, France, and their allies. Britain sent an expeditionary force of 90,000 soldiers that assisted the retreating French armies and checked the German advance. By November, however, the army held only about 20 miles of the line and needed reinforcements. Britain rapidly trained more recruits and by the beginning of 1915 a large force was available. By then, the Western front was characterized by trenches and barbed wire. These were defensive positions made necessary due to the highly destructive weaponry of modern war, such as artillery and machine guns. Trenches were mostly built with sandbags and wooden planks. From the coast of Belgium and down across northeastern France as far as the Swiss border, there were about 475 miles of trenches. Conditions in the trenches were extremely difficult: Trenches were often deep in mud and infested with vermin. Unsanitary conditions caused what was known as trench fever, and trench foot was also common. Caused by the constant damp conditions, trench foot could result in amputation or even death.

Over the course of the war, each side launched attacks on the enemy trenches. This involved going over the trenches into what was called “no man’s land”—a desolate area between the enemies’ lines. These attacks resulted in huge casualties and very little in territory gained. By the beginning of 1916, the French sustained nearly two million casualties and the British about half a million. At the beginning of July, the Battle of the Somme began. The first day was a disaster for the British, who sustained 57,470 casualties, including 19,420 dead: It was the deadliest day in the history of the British Army. In spite of the staggering losses, the British continued the offensive, and the battle lasted until mid-November. Total casualties on all sides amounted to over one million: 425,000 British, including 125,000 dead; 200,000 French; and 500,000 German.

From March to May 1918, Germany launched various offensives on the French front, but from July the initiative passed to the Allies, who now included U.S. troops. Eventually, the collapse of Germany led to the armistice of November 11, 1918. Around 8,700,000 lives were lost during the war, including about 780,000 British.

Literary Context

In the early months of WWI, patriotic poems were published in England presenting the war as a glorious enterprise. The poets included John Freeman, especially his poem “Happy Is England Now,” and Beatrix Brice, whose 1914 poem “To the Vanguard” contains the following verse:

And for the thunder of the cloud’s applause,

Crash upon crash the voice of monstrous guns,

Fed by the sweat, served by the life of England,

Shouting your battle-cry across the world.

As the years went by, however, a number of men with firsthand experience of trench warfare wrote powerful poems conveying the grim reality of life on the Western front. In addition to Wilfred Owen, one such poet was Siegfried Sassoon ("Wirers"), who fought in the trenches beginning in 1914 and participated in the Battle of the Somme in 1916. The following year he was shot in the chest and sent back to England. By then, Sassoon had turned against the war and sent a statement to his commanding officer in which he said what started as a defensive war had changed into a war of aggression and conquest. The military responded by sending Sassoon to Craiglockhart War Hospital in Edinburgh where he met Wilfred Owen.

Sassoon’s poems are bitingly ironic, and he spares nothing in his attacks on the church, the government, and the generals who he blamed for the carnage of the war. In Sassoon’s poem, “They,” a bishop tells his men that when the soldiers go home, “[t]hey will not be the same, for they’ll have fought / In a just cause” against the “Anti-Christ.” In the second verse, the men seem to agree, replying, “[w]e’re none of us the same!” but then list a catalog of what has happened to them: “For George lost both his legs; and Bill’s stone blind.” Unmoved, the bishop replies, “The ways of God are strange!”

Isaac Rosenberg (1890-1918) enlisted in 1915 and was killed in action on April 1, 1918. His poem “Dead Man’s Dump” is a grim meditation on death in war. A soldier rides in a mule-drawn carriage to set up barbed wire entanglements on the battlefield. The carriage rides past and over many of the dead, who are yet unburied: “Burnt black by strange decay / Their sinister faces lie.” The soldier also hears the last weak cries of a dying man: “And our wheels grazed his dead face.”

The work of the WWI poets was thus in marked contrast not only to the confident patriotism expressed in many early poems, but also to the more tranquil, romantic, and traditional poetry of the early 1910s. The war poets were the harbingers of the disillusionment with Western civilization characteristic of the 1920s.