Anthem for an anniversary

For today’s anniversary, I thought we needed a poem. So here’s one that seems to work. It’s called Anthem for Doomed Youth.

What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?
Only the monstrous anger of the guns.
Only the stuttering rifles' rapid rattle
Can patter out their hasty orisons.
No mockeries now for them; no prayers nor bells;
Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs,
The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells;
And bugles calling for them from sad shires.

What candles may be held to speed them all?
Not in the hands of boys, but in their eyes
Shall shine the holy glimmers of goodbyes.
The pallor of girls' brows shall be their pall;
Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds,
And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds.

Manuscript of Anthem for Doomed Youth
held by the British Library in London

It’s one of Wilfred Owen’s powerfully moving pieces against the horror he experienced fighting in the trenches of the ‘Great War’, which wasn’t great. It was also known as the First World War, though it wasn’t really the first either (but I’m not going into that here).

Why do I think it’s remarkable? Well, to start with, it strikes me as one of the most finely built poems I’ve ever come across. It has the classic structure known as a sonnet, fourteen lines, often divided – for instance in French – into two quatrains (four-line bits) and two tercets (yep, that’s right, three lines each). This one follows the more English format of an octet (eight) and a sextet (six), but I’m not sure I like the term sextet, because it may seem to suggest something else.

I meant a six-instrument jazz ensemble, of course. What were you thinking of?

The first line of each section is a question, with the rest providing an answer, which is neat. But then Owen, in parallel, has a second structure that splits the poem into equal parts: the first seven lines are about the front line, the last seven about the home front, introduced by the reference to sad shires – the counties of Britain grieving their losses.

Overall, the poem is about the barbarity of the special kind of death meted out in the trenches, which receives none of the solemn ceremony of church services. There are no passing bells, no candles held by boys, no traditional prayers. Indeed, what prayers there are – he uses the word orisons – are pattered out hastily by the stuttering rifles and the monstrous anger of the guns.

In any case, Owen rejects all those ceremonial gestures as mere mockeries, in the face of the reality of the war. It makes no sense. It’s worth nothing. So all those lives snuffed out will be marked only by the holy glimmers of goodbyes in boys’ eyes, in the pallor of girls’ brows, and in the tenderness of patient minds.

And every time evening slowly falls, it will be like the drawing down of window blinds, traditionally a sign of mourning in English homes. 

Even the words he uses underline the pity of his message. The first line ends with the word ‘cattle’. In a war poem, you might expect it to rhyme with ‘battle’, but battle is about strategy and maybe glory, and Owen wants nothing to do with either. Young men who die as cattle aren’t doing it for honour, nor are their deaths providing honour to anyone.

It’s just like the bugle. The bugle can be the instrument that calls soldiers on to the glory of war. In Owen’s poem, it merely provides a sad lament from unhappy homes to men who can never hear it.

I’ve barely scratched the surface. If you spend a few minutes looking at the sonnet, you’ll probably find more richness concealed in those mere fourteen lines. It’s that wealth that makes Owen outstanding, It also makes me think of the preface he’d begun to write, for a collection of poetry that was never published before he died, but was found in the papers he left behind. In it he claimed:

Above all I am not concerned with Poetry.
My subject is War, and the pity of War.
The Poetry is in the pity.

The poetry is in the pity. And the savage pity of this poetry is that on 4 November 1918, which is why today’s the anniversary, Wilfred Owen was killed by the monstrous anger of guns. Another week and he’d have survived until the armistice, on the 11th.

“My subject is War, and the pity of War.” Could he have found poetry in peace? We never found out because he never got the chance to show us. 

All he left us with was poetry filled with the pity of war to remember him by.