Anthem for Doomed Youth

Owen’s concern is with the cruelty and savagery of war and the terrible toll it takes on human life. Early drafts of the poem were titled “Anthem for Dead Youth.” Changing “Dead” to “Doomed” not only makes the title more powerful, it conveys a sense of helplessness: The men were doomed—ill-fated—from the beginning. As apparent from the first (octave) stanza, the men had no chance. The octave depicts the constant barrage of machine guns and the wailing of the shells hurtling through the air to their targets. The soldiers’ flesh is no match for this murderous assault of flying metal. The brutality and sheer scale of the destruction mocks human dignity and courage. The soldiers, Owen is certain, deserve something better than this bleak and terrifying landscape that is no more than a slaughterhouse. There is no glory in this war; Owen does not mention noble goals or a fight undertaken for moral reasons. There is only the “monstrous anger” (Line 2) of deadly weaponry and the shedding of human blood—a hellscape erupting in the formerly tranquil French fields.

This theme of the cruelty of war emerged from Owen’s experience. His credentials for writing such a poem were unimpeachable: He was there. No more than eight or nine months before he completed “Anthem for Doomed Youth” in September 1917, he was one of those vulnerable men, just as likely as any other to “die as cattle” (Line 1). He waded through flooded trenches and endured machine-gun fire, shelling, and even a poison-gas attack. In a letter home on February 4, 1917, he wrote the following:

The universal pervasion of Ugliness. Hideous landscapes, vile noises, foul language […] everything. Unnatural, broken, blasted; the distortion of the dead, whose unburiable [sic] bodies sit outside the dug-outs all day, all night, the most execrable sights on earth. In poetry we call them the most glorious. (quoted in C. S. Lewis’s introduction to The Collected Poems of Wilfred Owen, New Directions, 1965, p. 22)

The last sentence shows Owen’s awareness that poetry glorifying war would no longer suffice. He was committed to showing the truth of how things were rather than romanticizing or adopting a fervent patriotism. In the preface to the poetry collection he was outlining before his death, he wrote: “This book is not about heroes. English poetry is not yet fit to speak of them […] My subject is war, and the pity of war. The poetry is in the pity.”