Purpose of Anthem for a Doomed Youth Essay

Owens purpose in writing Anthem for a Doomed Youth is to reveal the cruel domain of war which was always hidden from the public in World War One and to show kindle to the people who sent him to the trenches. He says in his preface All a poet can do immediately is warn. this shows he aims to pr even upt war from happening in later generations.One way that Owen conveys passionateness is through the workforce not getting the recognition that they deserved. He does this by dehumanizing the sol gagrs and comparing them to cattle which shows that they were however seen as instru ments of war by the government. Throughout the poem the men not recognized as individuals, simply ar referred to as they, these or them, by referring to them as a collective he gives a expression that people other than family did not care about(predicate) the mens well being at war. If and when the men do die, the prayers to remember them are hasty and careless, this is because too many people die in a day to give the true amount of respect they needed showing the futility of war.In the coda line of the poem a drawing take of blinds, this metaphor infers death but in disparate ways. Firstly, in Owens time if a funeral car drove past people would pull their blinds down to show respect to the deceased this shows that everyday someone in a town will die and did not come home, so the blinds are drawn for funerals that did not take place as men were lost in battle. At the end of everyday blinds are drawn down this can constitute the sun as well as going down at the end of a day or finality when someone dies, the blinds of their life are drawn. Finally it infers that people might have drawn their blinds down, or sour their back, to the truth about the war, because maybe it was too brutal to think of their loved ones in the middle of it.Owen also proves in this poem that people, on the battle field and back in Britain, lost their faith in God during the war. Even the title of the piece is ironic in a way. An anthem is usually compose for a religious purpose, but when contrasted with a doomed youth it shows not only that war was wrong portrayed as heroic to the men, but also that the war was doomed from the start and not even God could have helped them. Also, no one stoppedto mourn the fallen, the only choirs are the voices from the shells and bombs on no-mans land.Whilst the men are dehumanized, the rifles, shells and other machines are personified and given human feelings such as stuttering and demented showing that the equipment of war meant more to the government than the men. Also, world war one was the first war to introduce industrial methods of state of war so the guns were seen as better and given more care than the men. When dehumanizing the soldiers and personifying the arms Owen is criticizing the war by formula that the guns mean more than the men controlling them. But although the guns are given feelings and characteristics, they are negativ e. The artillery are stuttering which can be caused by shell-shock this implies that the soldiers disabilities have been transferred to the weapons.The form of the poem is a sonnet, sonnets first started out as romantic but truthful poems by poets such as Wordsworth. By Owen using a sonnet as the poems form he conveys irony and conflict as the poem is about aggression and struggle.To conclude, Owen uses Anthem for a Doomed Youth to criticize the war and to expose the true reality of the trenches, he does this by using many language techniques such as dehumanization, metaphors, oxymoron, onomatopoeia and personification.