Owen’s new concern was now to show ‘the pity of war’ and to warn the public that war was far from glorious and honourable as popularly suggested by many governments’ propaganda machines. This was where he met Siegfried Sassoon, a decorated soldier and an already established anti-war poet, who became a strong influence on Owen’s poetry. Injuries during battle and consequent psychological trauma led to him being treated for shell shock at Craiglockhart War Hospital in Edinburgh in 1917. He soon experienced the horrors of front line warfare. He enlisted in the army in October 1915, and following training was fighting in the trenches from June 1916 onwards. When the First World War broke out in 1914, he working was as a private English and French language tutor in France and despite feeling unaffected by the conflict, he eventually gave in to the strong propaganda messages for young men to join the war efforts to fight for King and country. His upbringing was humble: he was born in Shropshire, was a devout Christian on account of the strong relationship he had with his mother, and in his early adulthood worked as a lay assistant to a priest in the south of England. Wilfred Owen is perhaps the most renowned poets of the British First World War.

Lancashire, Leicestershire, Bedfordshire Shires – regions of England often end with ‘shire’ and can be referred to as ‘the shires’ e.g. Patter out – in this context it means to speak quickly īugles – a horn instrument sounded at at military funerals Passing-bells – when a church would announce someone’s death by ringing their bells Furthermore, on the home front there are no ceremonies, candles nor acts of commemoration to bid them goodbye but solemn faces of boys and girls and those who silently think of them with ‘patient minds’ as they grieve these lives lost too soon. As these soldiers die all that surrounds them are the sounds of warfare, far from any semblance of an orderly funeral service with prayers, choirs and bugles announcing their deaths. He bemoans that the soldiers who die or are dying are senselessly slaughtered like ‘cattle’ and that, in the heat of battle, they are not given the kind of funeral and send off that they deserve.

The poem has a very telling title, which reflects the speaker’s anger and mourning for the deaths of young soldiers sent to battle during the First World War.

Anthem for doomed youth