Wilfred Owen War Poet Essay Example for Free

Wilfred Owen War Poet Essay The first Word War which took place mostly in Europe from 1914 to 1918 left millions dead and shaped the modern world. After World War I poets started to write about their experiences. Most of these poets had been soldiers who wrote the poetry to reflect the horror of their experiences in an immediate and realistic way. Trench warfare in particular and the chaos of war in general were the source of the poems indignation and disgust. The high death rate and the horrific conditions suffered by those fighting in the trenches meant that the concept of ‘heroic sacrifice’ in service to one’s country became meaningless. Patriotic poetry was therefore replaced with poems that were to symbolize the futility of war, protesting against the waste of life and forcing its readers to engage emotionally with reality. Within this essay I will look at the effects the war had on soldiers who fought in the trenches and how they dealt with the unimaginable numbers of deaths they encountered daily. I will explore the way they were able to cope with the grief and loss and how attitudes towards death and mourning changed as a result of the war. Throughout this piece I will focus on one particular soldier, Wilfred Owen, and the poetry he wrote about the loss of lives and the effect that his writing had on the mourning and memories of those left behind. In writings on World War 1, the enactment of grief is often overshadowed by the drama of battle, as in the wider conflict where loss is born; grief leaves no one unaffected by its devastation. Writing, whether in the form of poetry or letters, allowed the soldiers to share their anguish as a way of coming to terms with their harrowing loss and sense of guilt as survivors. Before the war there was a system of both public and private grieving and mourning. Mourners wore black and the period of mourning was dependent upon the relationship to the deceased. Funerals could be elaborate affairs depending on social class and many of these conventions were shaped by religious and Christian beliefs which enforced a public respectability in the grieving process. After the war broke out however, death in combat demanded that soldiers and their relatives express their grief in a new way. Without the remnants of a body, or the ritual of a funeral, their descriptions through their writings were more than just words. The details of death which soldiers conveyed, offered an emotional comfort to families, but at the same time their words would also scar those families for life. Surrounded by unimaginable numbers of their comrades who had died prematurely, soldiers fumbled to find a voice to convey the meaning of such circumstances. Letter writing for many became a way they could attempt to control the chaos which surrounded them, but a few soldiers began to make sense of it all through poetry. Some critics believed Wilfred Owen to be the most individual and best of the war poets. He forged a new kind of elegy upon the anvil of modern industrialised warfare. The best of Owens poems were to be written between the summer of 1917 and autumn 1918 after meeting another poet, Siegfried Sassoon, at Craiglockhart Hospital. Owens poetry after his experiences in the trenches moved his poems towards a powerful realism where the observations are disturbing, for him the war was a tragedy and beneath the surface disgust, lays a pity and compassion that raised his poetry above simple propaganda. Some of his poems from the war help us to rethink the elegiac triad of; mourning poet, mourning reader, and mourned victim, suggesting that even in war elegies; both poet and reader may partly create the victimisation they mourn. He brought a profound but sceptical understanding of the resources available to the mourning poet in the sonnets ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’ and ‘Futility’; he resisted the traditional conventions of an elegy. ‘Anthem’ is a collective elegy for the nameless many and ‘Futility’ an elegy for a single man. Critics often treat the elegy as a therapeutic device: working through grief, creating an aesthetic substitution for loss, the elegist masters or at least manages pain. Many of Owens elegies do not fit this therapeutic model. Their task, it seems, is to maintain a certain amount of suffering, not to effect a cure; they produce not a yield of pleasure but an aggravation of pain. Some of Owens critics accuse him of consolatory mourning in ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’ suggesting that Owen participates in the religious ideology of compensatory exchange, urging us to accept memory as a substitute for human lives. The enormity of the loss of lives precludes any of the traditional rituals of consolation mourning; all that remains is the suffering of unfocused grief down an endless recession of time, and ‘each slow dusk a drawing down of blinds’. ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’ was written whilst Owen was in Craiglockhart with the encouragement of Sassoon. It is in sonnet form and is an elegy where he relates to the youth, these were very young men whose lives were most definitely doomed. Owen immediately engages readers with the use of questions as though interrogating them. He asks a question in the first line of each stanza, following with his answers for the remainder of the stanza. His first question ‘What passing-bells for these who die as cattle? ’ (1) suggests he feels the tribute made to dead soldiers is insufficient. Are they merely cattle being sent to slaughter whose lives of little importance? His second question, ‘What candles may be held to speed them all? ’ (9), shows his belief that people do not understand the nature of these deaths as he looks at how the community responds to their loss through ritual. Where we might expect the religious lexis to offer hope in a time of despair, he sees it as a mockery of the sacrifices being made. For Owen, it is not the outward show of public rituals, ‘the candles’ and ‘flowers’ that is meaningful, but inner reflection. The first part of the poem contains words made to sound like the war and weapons, ‘guns’, ‘rifles’, ‘shells’ which are ironically linked to religious imagery – ‘bells’, ‘orisons’, ‘prayers’ and ‘choirs’. In line 8 things switch from the fighting to Britain’s ‘sad shires’ where loved ones mourn, changing the tone to rueful contemplation from bitter passion. ‘And bugles calling for them from sad shires’(8) the Bugler’s ‘last post’ was traditionally interpreted as a strain of farewell at a serviceman’s funeral, whereas here Owen hears it as an unanswerable call to return to the alliterated ‘sad shires’. Owen being from Shropshire, thought of the typical Englishman as a ‘Shropshire Lad’ and the traditional, united country life where each individual was know as part of the community, his loss would be grieved by all. Owen carefully sets the chaos of the trenches against the subdued atmosphere of church. Phrases like ‘passing-bells’ (1) and ‘holy-glimmers’ (11) and ‘voice of mourning’ (6) symbolise the sanctity of life – and death – whilst suggesting also the inadequacy, the futility, even meaninglessness of organised religion against the cataclysm of war. Once again in lines 9 – 14 religious images and illusions are dominant. The ‘candles’ in the ‘hands of boys’ and the ‘pallor of girls’ brows shall be their pall’ suggesting that these things are meaningless, you just need to look into their eyes and the pale faces of the women left behind to learn the truth about war, their silent minds stand as the most fitting tribute to the sacrifices made. Owens poem begins to envisage the chaos of war as an unending condition of modern existence with every individual bearing somewhere its scars. The constant reference to religious imagery seems symbolic, representations of the spiritual, which he sees as a ‘mockery’(5), just as in his eyes, ‘candles’, ‘flowers’ and the ‘drawing down of blinds’(14) are no more gestures in a public mourning which bears no resemblance to individual experience. This moving image of closure brings the sonnet to a quiet close. The ‘drawing-down of blinds’(14) is linked to the English tradition of closing curtains or drawing down blinds in a house of mourning. As ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’ ends with the sun at dusk, the end of a day and a representation of the end of many lives, ‘Futility’ begins with the sun at dawn, the beginning of the day yet still the end of a life. Shortly after writing the poem ‘Futility’, Owen categorised his poems, placing this one under the heading of grief. Although Owen appeared to know the dead soldier written about, the anonymity allows it to be universal; it could be describing any soldier as he ponders nature’s power to create life, setting it against the futility of extinction. It takes the form of a short elegiac lyric where he uses the sun as a metaphorical framework. ‘Move him into the sun’(1), the poem begins with an instruction which seems a gentle command especially as many of the words throughout the first stanza reinforce this softness of emotion, ‘gently’(2), ‘whispering’ (3) and ‘kind’ (7). The sun is personified ‘gently its touch’(2), ‘whispering’ just as he uses personification in ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’ to give a powerful images to demonstrate the lives that are ruined through war. Once again in this poem, along with ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’, he refers to how young the soldiers were that died, ‘fields half sown’(3), a metaphor for lives not fully lived yet, they had not had time to experience life before they died at war. War for Owen was senseless, for so many men to lose their lives, especially at a young age, made him question the purpose of our existence. He was convinced that many of the people, who remained in England and hadn’t experienced the warfare, didn’t understand how the soldiers were suffering and therefore couldn’t express true sympathy. He felt by writing ‘Futility’ he would be able to portray the worthlessness of war, the uselessness of human life and arouse pity and grief in those who read it. (Mahmud 2008) The dead soldier in ‘Futility’ is not given a name perhaps to represent every soldier who was killed in the war. C. W. Gillam (1965) states that ‘the sight of the dead soldier makes the writer wonder why creation ever happened if it was to end only in such futility’. The persona wonders if we were created for this, and if this is the case, then our existence seems meaningless. Consequently, the experience of loss is universalised, the reader imagines this soldier to be a potential close relative or any human who is caught up in a chaotic world. The ‘O’ indicates the bitterness of this discovery, the poem produced an initial emotion of hope, but ends with the feeling of hopelessness. The contrast between the peacefulness of the first stanza against the grief and anger of the second makes this a poem that conveys its message of the meaningless of life and a protest against the wisdom of creating people only to have them die in such horrific circumstances. The First World War had a drastic effect on the poetry of many poets of the twentieth century. Poets like Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen, as well as many others gave us their firsthand experience of war and described the fatal effects whether physical or mental upon those who participated and those left behind. Many of the poets suffered from psychological problems during and after the war due to shell shock and the horrible mutilation they witnessed on the battlefield. Some of the poetry can help us understand the sense of grief and anger at the pointlessness of war and the anger at the sheer numbers of soldiers sent to battle to be massacred like ‘cattle’. Early on the morning of 4th November 1918 Wilfred Owen was killed by enemy fire. When the telegram arrived to inform his parents of his death the local church bells could be heard, ironically linking him to his own poetry ‘passing-bells for these who die’ even though the bells were in celebration of the Armistice. Owens’s poetry is not for everyone as it combines graphic descriptions of war and the reality for those involved on the front line. He is generally acknowledged as being both the most successful, and best, poet of wars reality. The reason why may be found in the preface to his poetry, of which a drafted fragment was found after Owens death: Yet these elegies are not to this generation, this is in no sense consolatory. They may be to the next. All a poet can do today is to warn. That is why the true Poets must be truthful.