Explore the poem

This is one of Wilfred Owen’s best known poems, and was written while he was a patient at an Edinburgh hospital recovering from shellshock. The title was contributed by fellow war poet Siegfried Sassoon. His choice of the word ‘anthem’ is especially interesting because it has multiple meanings. Look it up and think about how this ambivalence might contribute to your reading.

The poem is a finely controlled expression of Owen’s anger. The powerful emotion is somehow held in check by the poem’s shape – its sonnet structure, measured rhythmic pattern and its rhyme scheme. The poem also mixes terrible images of war with the imagery of funeral rituals in the Christian tradition. In the first stanza, for example, the ‘choirs’ attending a soldier’s death are the ‘shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells’. Where else can you find this mixing of war imagery and religious imagery. What effect does it have on the mood and meaning of the poem?

This is not the only time Owen would address the effect of war on young people sent to the front line, but this is the best-known example. It forms a robust response to poetry written in the early days of the war to encourage young men to sign up.

About Wilfred Owen

Wilfred Owen is remembered as one of the most passionate and eloquent voices of the First World War. Most of the poems for which he is now famous were written in a period of intense creativity between 1917 and 1918.

Appalled by the suffering and waste of human life in a war that seemed increasingly futile Owen set out to show what he called the “Pity of War”.

Owen enlisted in 1915 and two years later he was wounded and suffered shell shock. He was sent back to England in 1917 to a Scottish military hospital where he met and was influenced by Siegfried Sassoon who encouraged Owen to write. On his return to the front Owen’s courage and leadership were recognised with the award of the Military Cross. He did not survive the war dying in action just days before the end of hostilities.

His work is full of compassion and outrage and technically highly skilful. Perhaps more than any other poet of the First World War he was able to show the reality and horror of war.