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Anthem for Doomed Youth: Poets of the Great War
This is The Folio Society compendium of over 200 poems, written by those who experienced The Great War, published in 2000. Lyn Macdonald, editor, writes:
"It is more than eighty years since the guns stopped and an uneasy peace fell across the devastated battlefields and the desolate graves of the young men who had fought to defend them. And for what?... It never ceases to amaze me that interest in that momentous conflict, far from diminishing as time goes on, actually appears to increase - and with it the passions it arouses."
This book compiles works by well-known WWI poets such as Owen, Sassoon, Rosenberg, Graves and Brooke, but it also includes poems by dozens of less well-known (or unknown) others as well. The text is illustrated with many photographs of English and German soldiers in different aspects of the conflict.
Chapters
1. Happy is England Now
2. Into Battle
3. No Man's Land
4. So be Merry, So be Dead
5. The Stench of Blood]
6. Magpies in Picardy
7. The Big Push
8. On the Wings of the Morning
9. The Road to Passchendaele
10. The Mouthless Dead
11. Ghosts of War
"It is more than eighty years since the guns stopped and an uneasy peace fell across the devastated battlefields and the desolate graves of the young men who had fought to defend them. And for what?... It never ceases to amaze me that interest in that momentous conflict, far from diminishing as time goes on, actually appears to increase - and with it the passions it arouses."
This book compiles works by well-known WWI poets such as Owen, Sassoon, Rosenberg, Graves and Brooke, but it also includes poems by dozens of less well-known (or unknown) others as well. The text is illustrated with many photographs of English and German soldiers in different aspects of the conflict.
Chapters
1. Happy is England Now
2. Into Battle
3. No Man's Land
4. So be Merry, So be Dead
5. The Stench of Blood]
6. Magpies in Picardy
7. The Big Push
8. On the Wings of the Morning
9. The Road to Passchendaele
10. The Mouthless Dead
11. Ghosts of War
270 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2000
About the author
Lyn Macdonald
17 books87 followersOver the course of her career Lyn Macdonald established a popular reputation as an author and historian of the First World War. Her books are They Called It Passchendaele, an account of the Passchendaele campaign in 1917; The Roses of No Man's Land,, a chronicle of the war from the neglected viewpoint of the casualties and the medical teams who struggled to save them; Somme, a history of the legendary and horrifying battle that has haunted the minds of succeeding generations; 1914, a vivid account of the first months of the war and winner of the 1987 Yorkshire Post Book of the Year Award; 1914-1918: Voices and Images of the Great War, an illuminating account of the many different aspects of the war; and 1915: The Death of Innocence, a brilliant evocation of the year that saw the terrible losses of Aubers Ridge, Loos, Neuve Chapelle, Ypres and Gallipoli.
Her superb chronicles of popular history were notable for their extensive use of eyewitness and survivor accounts, and she drew on oceans of contemporary letters and diaries as well as capturing the memories of a dwindling supply of veterans. In doing so, she cast a unique light on the experiences of the ordinary ‘Tommy’ in the wider context of the First World War, documenting the innocence of a lost generation and bringing to life the disillusionment, the questioning and the heroism of the men of the British Army. “My intention,” she said, “has been to tune in to the heartbeat of the experience of the people who lived through it.”
Her superb chronicles of popular history were notable for their extensive use of eyewitness and survivor accounts, and she drew on oceans of contemporary letters and diaries as well as capturing the memories of a dwindling supply of veterans. In doing so, she cast a unique light on the experiences of the ordinary ‘Tommy’ in the wider context of the First World War, documenting the innocence of a lost generation and bringing to life the disillusionment, the questioning and the heroism of the men of the British Army. “My intention,” she said, “has been to tune in to the heartbeat of the experience of the people who lived through it.”
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
July 14, 2021
Somebody on here described this book as a wasted opportunity and I'm inclined to agree. The content is often rather disappointing, but like most Folio Society issues, this is a very beautiful book, and the great thing about poetry anthologies is that if there's something you don't like on one page there's probably something you like more written by somebody else on another. Too many fragments for my liking, and, respect to the dead and all that, but not everybody who scribbled in notebooks to pass the time and forget their misery in the trenches was a great poet.
June 30, 2018
Rupert Brooke and Wilfred Owen are my favorite poets of the Great War.
May 2, 2018
This book is a wasted opportunity.
Most of the poetry isn't very good. Some of the poems are pretty good, and some at least have an evocative line or two, but for most of them, the value is in conveying the thoughts and feelings and abilities of a generation of soldiers, and should have done a better job of honoring them.
Giving a brief biography of the writer with his picture, and perhaps some details about what would have inspired the poems, could have been really good. Instead there is a pretty condescending foreword, poems arranged kind of by chronological topic, photos of the war in general and of the poets, but never a photo of the poet near one of his poems, and then biographical information is a name, rank, and date and age of death.
Then just to really be difficult, the poems are printed on a brown paper that doesn't show up well unless the light is really bright, so you keep squinting at bad poetry.
Most of the poetry isn't very good. Some of the poems are pretty good, and some at least have an evocative line or two, but for most of them, the value is in conveying the thoughts and feelings and abilities of a generation of soldiers, and should have done a better job of honoring them.
Giving a brief biography of the writer with his picture, and perhaps some details about what would have inspired the poems, could have been really good. Instead there is a pretty condescending foreword, poems arranged kind of by chronological topic, photos of the war in general and of the poets, but never a photo of the poet near one of his poems, and then biographical information is a name, rank, and date and age of death.
Then just to really be difficult, the poems are printed on a brown paper that doesn't show up well unless the light is really bright, so you keep squinting at bad poetry.
July 4, 2026
A reading guide to the essential poems in this collection, in order of appearance.
══════════════════════════════════════════
1. THE SOLDIER — Rupert Brooke (p. 18)
Chapter 1: Happy is England Now
"If I should die, think only this of me: / That there's some corner of a foreign field / That is for ever England." The speaker accepts death serenely, imagining his body enriching foreign soil with English virtue. There is no blood, no suffering — only an idealized vision of England carried abroad. It is the defining poem of the war's early romanticism, and the poem every later soldier-poet was writing against.
Read at St Paul's Cathedral on Easter Sunday 1915 by Dean William Inge; published in The Times the next day. Brooke died three weeks later, and his grave on Skyros made him literally the corner of a foreign field he had imagined.
Brooke died April 23, 1915, aged 27, from sepsis caused by a mosquito bite en route to Gallipoli. He never saw the trenches he wrote so romantically about.
══════════════════════════════════════════
2. BREAK OF DAY IN THE TRENCHES — Isaac Rosenberg (p. 71)
Chapter 3: No Man's Land
At dawn, a rat crosses the speaker's hands as he plucks a poppy. The rat moves freely between the British and German lines — indifferent to both sides — while the soldiers are locked in mortal opposition. The poem says nothing directly about the horror of war. That is its power.
Widely regarded as the finest lyric poem actually written in the trenches. It does not mourn, accuse, or console — it simply observes, with an irony that is all the more devastating for its quietness.
Rosenberg was killed on patrol April 1, 1918, aged 27, near Arras. A working-class East End Jew of little formal education, he is now recognised as one of the greatest war poets.
══════════════════════════════════════════
3. 'ALL THE HILLS AND VALES ALONG' — Charles Hamilton Sorley (p. 81)
Chapter 4: So Be Merry, So Be Dead
Sorley tells his marching comrades to sing cheerfully on their way to die. The earth will absorb them and continue regardless — no glory, no special honour, just nature's indifference. It strips away every romantic consolation Brooke offered, and does so before the Somme had even happened.
Found among his papers after he was killed, it is remarkable for how early it saw through the war's idealism. Sorley had written critically of Brooke's romantic sonnets in letters shortly after Brooke's death.
Sorley was killed at the Battle of Loos, October 13, 1915, aged just 20. He left only 37 poems.
══════════════════════════════════════════
4. RENDEZVOUS — Alan Seeger (p. 84)
Chapter 4: So Be Merry, So Be Dead
The speaker makes a formal appointment with Death, treating it with the dignity of a medieval knight honouring a pledge. He knows he will die in the coming spring campaign and accepts it without bitterness — driven only by personal honour. Romantic in tone, utterly sincere, and eerie in its accuracy.
President Kennedy's favourite poem — Jackie memorised it for him and would recite it on request. Seeger was killed on July 4, 1916, American Independence Day, during the Battle of the Somme.
Seeger was an American living in Paris who enlisted in the French Foreign Legion in 1914. He was killed aged 27. His poems were published posthumously.
══════════════════════════════════════════
5. SONG OF AMIENS — T. P. Cameron Wilson (p. 107)
Chapter 5: The Stench of Blood
Soldiers on rest leave laugh and drink in the cafés of Amiens. The refrain "Lord! How we laughed in Amiens!" captures their desperate joy. But each stanza the war intrudes — a dead comrade's name mentioned, the eastern sky lit with artillery fire, the "unsleeping guns" noticed and ignored. The poem is about joy that cannot quite outrun death.
It captures something the more famous poets miss: the brief, ferocious happiness of men behind the lines, and the terrible knowledge that sits underneath it.
Cameron Wilson was killed March 23, 1918 at Hermies during the German Spring Offensive. He has no known grave and is commemorated on the Arras Memorial to the Missing.
══════════════════════════════════════════
6. THE BALLAD OF FLORENTIN PRUNIER — Georges Duhamel (p. 113)
Chapter 5: The Stench of Blood
(Originally written in French; presented here in translation)
A mother sits at her dying son's bedside in a field hospital and refuses to leave. She stops eating. Her gnarled hands clasp his thin ones. He tells her the cough is taking his strength. One morning when she finally falls asleep from exhaustion, he dies quietly so as not to wake her. An elegy for one ordinary man — not a hero, just Florentin Prunier — and the mother who could not save him.
Unlike every other poem in this guide, it is written from the bedside, not the battlefield — by a surgeon who witnessed this, not a soldier who endured it. The yellowing butter in the untouched pot beside the mother who can no longer eat is one of the most quietly devastating images in the entire collection.
Duhamel (1884–1966) served as a frontline military surgeon for all four years of the war. His prose account Civilisation 1914–1917 won the Prix Goncourt. He was elected to the Académie française in 1935.
══════════════════════════════════════════
7. IN FLANDERS FIELDS — John McCrae (p. 120)
Chapter 5: The Stench of Blood
The dead soldiers speak from beneath their poppies: they lived, loved, and now lie here. The final stanza is not an elegy but a rallying call — take up our fight, or we died for nothing. It is written in the rondeau form, a tight French verse structure that gives it its haunting circularity.
Written May 3, 1915, the day after McCrae presided over his friend Lieutenant Helmer's funeral during the Second Battle of Ypres, with Helmer's grave in view. Published anonymously in Punch, December 1915. It directly inspired the red poppy as the symbol of remembrance.
McCrae was a Canadian physician and artillery officer. He died of pneumonia January 28, 1918, worn down by years of frontline medical service.
══════════════════════════════════════════
8. BASE DETAILS — Siegfried Sassoon (p. 147)
Chapter 7: The Big Push
Sassoon imagines himself as a fat, comfortable Staff Major living safely behind the lines, eating well and shaking hands with men going up to die — before returning to his hotel. Short, furious satire with no wasted words.
Its moral authority comes from who wrote it: Sassoon held the Military Cross and was known as "Mad Jack" for his battlefield courage. This was a decorated officer attacking the system from inside it.
Sassoon survived the war. He issued a public anti-war declaration in 1917, was sent to Craiglockhart Hospital instead of court-martial, and there met Wilfred Owen. He lived until 1967, aged 80.
══════════════════════════════════════════
9. BEFORE ACTION — W. N. Hodgson (p. 152)
Chapter 7: The Big Push
A simple prayer before battle: let me live long enough to notice the world one last time, then help me die with courage. No glory-seeking, no patriotic flourish. Just a man making his peace. The final line — "help me to die, O Lord" — is among the most honest in the war's poetry.
Published June 29, 1916 in The New Witness — two days before the Somme began. Hodgson was killed on July 1, 1916, the first day. He sent the poem off for publication and went to war and died.
Hodgson was 23. He is buried in Devonshire Cemetery near Mametz. The memorial inscription reads: "The Devonshires held this trench. The Devonshires hold it still."
══════════════════════════════════════════
10. AN IRISH AIRMAN FORESEES HIS DEATH — W. B. Yeats (p. 183)
Chapter 8: On the Wings of the Morning
An Irish pilot knows he will die in the clouds. He does not hate those he fights or love those he guards. The war's outcome will change nothing for his people in Galway. No law, duty, or cheering crowd drove him — only a "lonely impulse of delight," the pure joy of flying. He weighs past and future and finds both a waste of breath. Only this moment, this life, this death, has weight.
Unlike Brooke (who glorifies dying for one's country) and Owen (who condemns the war), Yeats asks why a man would choose death for a cause he does not believe in — and answers with something no general could use: personal joy. Written at the moment Ireland was seeking independence from the very country Gregory died fighting for.
Yeats (1865–1939) did not serve. The poem memorialises Major Robert Gregory, son of his friend Lady Augusta Gregory, killed January 23, 1918 by friendly fire over Italy. Yeats won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1923.
══════════════════════════════════════════
11. DEAD MAN'S DUMP — Isaac Rosenberg (p. 197)
Chapter 9: The Road to Passchendaele
Soldiers drive a cart carrying barbed wire over the bodies of the newly dead. The poem describes this with unflinching physical precision. In its most shattering moment, a dying soldier reaches toward the passing cart — and dies just before it reaches him. No consolation. No meaning. The dead are simply dead.
Considered by many critics the greatest poem about war ever written. Where Owen uses moral outrage, Rosenberg simply describes — raw, physical, and relentless.
(See Rosenberg's biography at poem 2, p. 71.)
══════════════════════════════════════════
12. DULCE ET DECORUM EST — Wilfred Owen (p. 200)
Chapter 9: The Road to Passchendaele
Soldiers march exhausted from the front. A gas attack. One man fails to get his mask on and Owen watches him drown in the green light. The final stanza addresses the reader directly: if you saw this, you would not repeat the Latin phrase used to glorify dying in war — Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori: it is sweet and fitting to die for one's country. He calls it "the old Lie."
Early drafts were ironically dedicated to Jessie Pope, a civilian poet whose verse encouraged young men to enlist. The title comes from Horace's Odes — an ancient authority Owen takes and destroys with one witnessed scene. The most famous anti-war poem in the English language.
Owen was killed November 4, 1918 — one week before the Armistice. His mother received the telegram as the church bells rang for peace. Only five poems were published in his lifetime.
══════════════════════════════════════════
13. STRANGE MEETING — Wilfred Owen (p. 226)
Chapter 10: The Mouthless Dead
A soldier escapes into a tunnel that turns out to be Hell and meets the German he killed the day before. The dead German mourns not just his life but all the wisdom both of them might have given the world. The poem ends: "I am the enemy you killed, my friend." The men on both sides of the wire were the same, and war destroyed both equally.
Sassoon called it Owen's "passport to immortality." T. S. Eliot called it "a technical achievement of great originality." It uses pararhyme — near-rhymes with shifted vowels (escaped/scooped, hall/Hell) — giving it a haunting, unresolved sound perfectly suited to hell.
(See Owen's biography at poem 12, p. 200.)
══════════════════════════════════════════
14. ANTHEM FOR DOOMED YOUTH — Wilfred Owen (p. 231)
Chapter 10: The Mouthless Dead
A sonnet asking what funeral rites exist for men dying in industrial warfare. The answer: none. Only the sounds of war itself serve as bells, prayers, and choirs. Those at home grieve in darkened rooms — the drawing of blinds being the British custom when a death was announced — with no ceremony and no comfort.
Originally titled "Anthem for Dead Youth." Sassoon changed "dead" to "doomed" — shifting it from an elegy for the fallen to a prophecy for those still to die. Owen wrote to his mother: "Sassoon supplied the title 'Anthem' — just what I meant it to be." The manuscript in both their handwriting is held in the British Library. Later set to music by Benjamin Britten in his War Requiem (1962).
(See Owen's biography at poem 12, p. 200.)
══════════════════════════════════════════
SUGGESTED READING ORDER:
Brooke (p. 18) → Cameron Wilson (p. 107) → Duhamel (p. 113) → McCrae (p. 120) → Hodgson (p. 152) → Yeats (p. 183) → Owen: Dulce (p. 200), Strange Meeting (p. 226), Anthem (p. 231). The journey from Brooke's serene idealism to Owen's controlled fury tells you everything about what the war did to a generation.
══════════════════════════════════════════
1. THE SOLDIER — Rupert Brooke (p. 18)
Chapter 1: Happy is England Now
"If I should die, think only this of me: / That there's some corner of a foreign field / That is for ever England." The speaker accepts death serenely, imagining his body enriching foreign soil with English virtue. There is no blood, no suffering — only an idealized vision of England carried abroad. It is the defining poem of the war's early romanticism, and the poem every later soldier-poet was writing against.
Read at St Paul's Cathedral on Easter Sunday 1915 by Dean William Inge; published in The Times the next day. Brooke died three weeks later, and his grave on Skyros made him literally the corner of a foreign field he had imagined.
Brooke died April 23, 1915, aged 27, from sepsis caused by a mosquito bite en route to Gallipoli. He never saw the trenches he wrote so romantically about.
══════════════════════════════════════════
2. BREAK OF DAY IN THE TRENCHES — Isaac Rosenberg (p. 71)
Chapter 3: No Man's Land
At dawn, a rat crosses the speaker's hands as he plucks a poppy. The rat moves freely between the British and German lines — indifferent to both sides — while the soldiers are locked in mortal opposition. The poem says nothing directly about the horror of war. That is its power.
Widely regarded as the finest lyric poem actually written in the trenches. It does not mourn, accuse, or console — it simply observes, with an irony that is all the more devastating for its quietness.
Rosenberg was killed on patrol April 1, 1918, aged 27, near Arras. A working-class East End Jew of little formal education, he is now recognised as one of the greatest war poets.
══════════════════════════════════════════
3. 'ALL THE HILLS AND VALES ALONG' — Charles Hamilton Sorley (p. 81)
Chapter 4: So Be Merry, So Be Dead
Sorley tells his marching comrades to sing cheerfully on their way to die. The earth will absorb them and continue regardless — no glory, no special honour, just nature's indifference. It strips away every romantic consolation Brooke offered, and does so before the Somme had even happened.
Found among his papers after he was killed, it is remarkable for how early it saw through the war's idealism. Sorley had written critically of Brooke's romantic sonnets in letters shortly after Brooke's death.
Sorley was killed at the Battle of Loos, October 13, 1915, aged just 20. He left only 37 poems.
══════════════════════════════════════════
4. RENDEZVOUS — Alan Seeger (p. 84)
Chapter 4: So Be Merry, So Be Dead
The speaker makes a formal appointment with Death, treating it with the dignity of a medieval knight honouring a pledge. He knows he will die in the coming spring campaign and accepts it without bitterness — driven only by personal honour. Romantic in tone, utterly sincere, and eerie in its accuracy.
President Kennedy's favourite poem — Jackie memorised it for him and would recite it on request. Seeger was killed on July 4, 1916, American Independence Day, during the Battle of the Somme.
Seeger was an American living in Paris who enlisted in the French Foreign Legion in 1914. He was killed aged 27. His poems were published posthumously.
══════════════════════════════════════════
5. SONG OF AMIENS — T. P. Cameron Wilson (p. 107)
Chapter 5: The Stench of Blood
Soldiers on rest leave laugh and drink in the cafés of Amiens. The refrain "Lord! How we laughed in Amiens!" captures their desperate joy. But each stanza the war intrudes — a dead comrade's name mentioned, the eastern sky lit with artillery fire, the "unsleeping guns" noticed and ignored. The poem is about joy that cannot quite outrun death.
It captures something the more famous poets miss: the brief, ferocious happiness of men behind the lines, and the terrible knowledge that sits underneath it.
Cameron Wilson was killed March 23, 1918 at Hermies during the German Spring Offensive. He has no known grave and is commemorated on the Arras Memorial to the Missing.
══════════════════════════════════════════
6. THE BALLAD OF FLORENTIN PRUNIER — Georges Duhamel (p. 113)
Chapter 5: The Stench of Blood
(Originally written in French; presented here in translation)
A mother sits at her dying son's bedside in a field hospital and refuses to leave. She stops eating. Her gnarled hands clasp his thin ones. He tells her the cough is taking his strength. One morning when she finally falls asleep from exhaustion, he dies quietly so as not to wake her. An elegy for one ordinary man — not a hero, just Florentin Prunier — and the mother who could not save him.
Unlike every other poem in this guide, it is written from the bedside, not the battlefield — by a surgeon who witnessed this, not a soldier who endured it. The yellowing butter in the untouched pot beside the mother who can no longer eat is one of the most quietly devastating images in the entire collection.
Duhamel (1884–1966) served as a frontline military surgeon for all four years of the war. His prose account Civilisation 1914–1917 won the Prix Goncourt. He was elected to the Académie française in 1935.
══════════════════════════════════════════
7. IN FLANDERS FIELDS — John McCrae (p. 120)
Chapter 5: The Stench of Blood
The dead soldiers speak from beneath their poppies: they lived, loved, and now lie here. The final stanza is not an elegy but a rallying call — take up our fight, or we died for nothing. It is written in the rondeau form, a tight French verse structure that gives it its haunting circularity.
Written May 3, 1915, the day after McCrae presided over his friend Lieutenant Helmer's funeral during the Second Battle of Ypres, with Helmer's grave in view. Published anonymously in Punch, December 1915. It directly inspired the red poppy as the symbol of remembrance.
McCrae was a Canadian physician and artillery officer. He died of pneumonia January 28, 1918, worn down by years of frontline medical service.
══════════════════════════════════════════
8. BASE DETAILS — Siegfried Sassoon (p. 147)
Chapter 7: The Big Push
Sassoon imagines himself as a fat, comfortable Staff Major living safely behind the lines, eating well and shaking hands with men going up to die — before returning to his hotel. Short, furious satire with no wasted words.
Its moral authority comes from who wrote it: Sassoon held the Military Cross and was known as "Mad Jack" for his battlefield courage. This was a decorated officer attacking the system from inside it.
Sassoon survived the war. He issued a public anti-war declaration in 1917, was sent to Craiglockhart Hospital instead of court-martial, and there met Wilfred Owen. He lived until 1967, aged 80.
══════════════════════════════════════════
9. BEFORE ACTION — W. N. Hodgson (p. 152)
Chapter 7: The Big Push
A simple prayer before battle: let me live long enough to notice the world one last time, then help me die with courage. No glory-seeking, no patriotic flourish. Just a man making his peace. The final line — "help me to die, O Lord" — is among the most honest in the war's poetry.
Published June 29, 1916 in The New Witness — two days before the Somme began. Hodgson was killed on July 1, 1916, the first day. He sent the poem off for publication and went to war and died.
Hodgson was 23. He is buried in Devonshire Cemetery near Mametz. The memorial inscription reads: "The Devonshires held this trench. The Devonshires hold it still."
══════════════════════════════════════════
10. AN IRISH AIRMAN FORESEES HIS DEATH — W. B. Yeats (p. 183)
Chapter 8: On the Wings of the Morning
An Irish pilot knows he will die in the clouds. He does not hate those he fights or love those he guards. The war's outcome will change nothing for his people in Galway. No law, duty, or cheering crowd drove him — only a "lonely impulse of delight," the pure joy of flying. He weighs past and future and finds both a waste of breath. Only this moment, this life, this death, has weight.
Unlike Brooke (who glorifies dying for one's country) and Owen (who condemns the war), Yeats asks why a man would choose death for a cause he does not believe in — and answers with something no general could use: personal joy. Written at the moment Ireland was seeking independence from the very country Gregory died fighting for.
Yeats (1865–1939) did not serve. The poem memorialises Major Robert Gregory, son of his friend Lady Augusta Gregory, killed January 23, 1918 by friendly fire over Italy. Yeats won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1923.
══════════════════════════════════════════
11. DEAD MAN'S DUMP — Isaac Rosenberg (p. 197)
Chapter 9: The Road to Passchendaele
Soldiers drive a cart carrying barbed wire over the bodies of the newly dead. The poem describes this with unflinching physical precision. In its most shattering moment, a dying soldier reaches toward the passing cart — and dies just before it reaches him. No consolation. No meaning. The dead are simply dead.
Considered by many critics the greatest poem about war ever written. Where Owen uses moral outrage, Rosenberg simply describes — raw, physical, and relentless.
(See Rosenberg's biography at poem 2, p. 71.)
══════════════════════════════════════════
12. DULCE ET DECORUM EST — Wilfred Owen (p. 200)
Chapter 9: The Road to Passchendaele
Soldiers march exhausted from the front. A gas attack. One man fails to get his mask on and Owen watches him drown in the green light. The final stanza addresses the reader directly: if you saw this, you would not repeat the Latin phrase used to glorify dying in war — Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori: it is sweet and fitting to die for one's country. He calls it "the old Lie."
Early drafts were ironically dedicated to Jessie Pope, a civilian poet whose verse encouraged young men to enlist. The title comes from Horace's Odes — an ancient authority Owen takes and destroys with one witnessed scene. The most famous anti-war poem in the English language.
Owen was killed November 4, 1918 — one week before the Armistice. His mother received the telegram as the church bells rang for peace. Only five poems were published in his lifetime.
══════════════════════════════════════════
13. STRANGE MEETING — Wilfred Owen (p. 226)
Chapter 10: The Mouthless Dead
A soldier escapes into a tunnel that turns out to be Hell and meets the German he killed the day before. The dead German mourns not just his life but all the wisdom both of them might have given the world. The poem ends: "I am the enemy you killed, my friend." The men on both sides of the wire were the same, and war destroyed both equally.
Sassoon called it Owen's "passport to immortality." T. S. Eliot called it "a technical achievement of great originality." It uses pararhyme — near-rhymes with shifted vowels (escaped/scooped, hall/Hell) — giving it a haunting, unresolved sound perfectly suited to hell.
(See Owen's biography at poem 12, p. 200.)
══════════════════════════════════════════
14. ANTHEM FOR DOOMED YOUTH — Wilfred Owen (p. 231)
Chapter 10: The Mouthless Dead
A sonnet asking what funeral rites exist for men dying in industrial warfare. The answer: none. Only the sounds of war itself serve as bells, prayers, and choirs. Those at home grieve in darkened rooms — the drawing of blinds being the British custom when a death was announced — with no ceremony and no comfort.
Originally titled "Anthem for Dead Youth." Sassoon changed "dead" to "doomed" — shifting it from an elegy for the fallen to a prophecy for those still to die. Owen wrote to his mother: "Sassoon supplied the title 'Anthem' — just what I meant it to be." The manuscript in both their handwriting is held in the British Library. Later set to music by Benjamin Britten in his War Requiem (1962).
(See Owen's biography at poem 12, p. 200.)
══════════════════════════════════════════
SUGGESTED READING ORDER:
Brooke (p. 18) → Cameron Wilson (p. 107) → Duhamel (p. 113) → McCrae (p. 120) → Hodgson (p. 152) → Yeats (p. 183) → Owen: Dulce (p. 200), Strange Meeting (p. 226), Anthem (p. 231). The journey from Brooke's serene idealism to Owen's controlled fury tells you everything about what the war did to a generation.
June 23, 2013
I don't know much about poetry, but I do know that many times in the reading of this collection I was deeply moved. This book is powerful, and can only be read incrementally; there is too much content (in my view) to digest and comprehend in just a few sittings.
If you think war changes for the people who fight it, then read this text. Ask yourself if these men are any different than who we are today. If but for an accident of birth, would we not be in their places?
If you think war changes for the people who fight it, then read this text. Ask yourself if these men are any different than who we are today. If but for an accident of birth, would we not be in their places?
August 1, 2023
I do not have the words to do this collection of WWI poetry justice, save to say that it should be read by all who would study humanity - for any such study must include humanity's incomprehensibility, and Anthem For A Doomed Youth must surely be a premier handbook for the incomprehensible.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews