The Use Of Figurative Language In Wilfred Owen’s “Anthem For Doomed Youth”
Line one of Wilfred Owen’s “Anthem for Doomed Youth” wonders if any soldiers, those who got killed on the battlefield in a similar fashion as animals butchered for food, will hear the mourners who commemorate their deaths by ringing instruments. Then the next three lines, lines two through four, point out that any requests to a higher power for the servicemen done by people back home cannot be heard by the soldiers because they are canceled out by prayers already coming from their noisy weaponry. The following lines, lines five through seven, state that no real expressions of sorrow in general, including singing, get heard by the men, so there is no reason to do so because like prayers, singing is already provided to the men by their explosive devices. Lines eight through nine ask where the dying soldiers can hear a bugle or what candles would be enough or available to them to help with their current state. Lines ten and eleven say that while the soldiers may not have candles to aid them, they have tears that burn like the flame of candles in their eyes and which remind them of who they are fighting for (their country and family) from which they bid farewell and the reason they are there. Lines twelve and thirteen describes how the grief experienced by the soldiers’ female family members or friends causes their faces to become ghostly as they go through their fallen relative, lover, or friend’s funeral. Lastly, line fourteen says that the sun goes down at the conclusion of the admiration given to soldiers’ day in and day out.
A multitude of figurative language was used by the poet to convey messages that he was trying to send out to his readers. In line one, a simile was used to compare the falling of men on the battlefield to slaughtered cattle. In addition, personification adds life to some non-human objects. An example of this is, “Only the monstrous anger of the guns / The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells. The poet most likely chose to personify the sound of the guns and the “singing” of the soldiers’ shells to show how the sounds that the soldiers heard were not even minimally pretty. Instead, the guns spat out horrendous noises, giving off a feeling that they were livid as the bullets from within them came bursting out, ready to hit any target in sight. Furthermore, the shells to which the soldiers used, while not angry, made a different sound as compared to the guns, this one more annoying and described as a form of crying that could come from young children.
Moreover, assonance can be found on line six and true alliteration on lines three and eleven. The assonance on line three involves the vowel sound “o” being repeated. The line describes grieving for lost people, so Owen may have intended the assonance for the use of emphasizing the sound of someone enveloped by grief. Furthermore, alliteration was used in line three with the words “stuttering”, “rifles’”, “rapid, and “rattle”. This line described the sound of rifles as they were being fired. Just like emphasizing the sound of mourning, Owen most likely used the alliteration to do the same thing. More alliteration in line eleven involved the words “glimmers” and “goodbyes”. By using this alliteration, Owen seemingly wanted to draw attention to these words to describe the tears shed by the soldiers.
To successfully allow readers to vividly hear the battlefield’s sounds, onomatopoeia was present throughout the poem. For example, the words “wailing shells” on line seven, “stuttering rifles” and “rapid rattle” on line three, along with “patter out” on line four. For the most part, Owen’s “Anthem for Doomed Youth” follows the guidelines of a Shakespearean sonnet because it is an iambic pentameter, meaning that each line has five feet and syllable-wise, there is an unstressed syllable with a stressed one afterward. However, on two of the lines, lines two and three, the words do not follow an iamb. Instead, they at least partially go along with the pattern of a stressed syllable followed by an unstressed syllable, or trochaic feet.
Shakespearean sonnets generally follow the rhyme scheme of abab cdcd efef gg and has end rhyme. In this case, the rhyme includes masculine and true rhyme with some slant rhyme present between the words “guns” and “orisons” on lines two and four. The rhyme scheme for this sonnet is abab cdcd effe gg. The third quatrain of this sonnet, whose rhyme scheme is effe, does not match that of a Shakespearean sonnet. Instead, this type of rhyme scheme belongs to the Petrarchan sonnet, whose rhyme scheme includes abba abba, and variations of cdecde. Note that for a normal Shakespearean sonnet, the Volta is right before the couplet in the twelfth line. In a Petrarchan sonnet, however, the Volta is the ninth line. For Owen’s sonnet, the Volta is on line nine, so it aligns with the Petrarchan sonnet.
