What do you think?
Rate this book
Spring Offensive
‘Spring Offensive’ by Wilfred Owen, an anti-war poem, portrays how a group of soldiers embraced the cold breast of death having no way out. Whereas, some of them managed to escape the death-route. The title of the poem, ‘Spring Offensive’ is a reference to the Kaiser’s Battle of 1918. The consecutive attacks of Germans on the Western Front during the First World War are collectively called Spring Offensive. Here, “offensive” means a “military attack”. From the title, it becomes clear Wilfred Owen presents an episode of Spring Offensive in this poem. Moreover, the use of imagery and symbolism in the poem help readers to imagine what happened on the actual battlefield.
26 pages, Paperback
Published September 15, 1989
1 person want to read
About the author
Wilfred Owen
178 books234 followersLibrarian Note: There is more than one author by this name in the goodreads data base.
Wilfred Owen was a defining voice of British poetry during the First World War, renowned for his stark portrayals of trench warfare and gas attacks. Deeply influenced by Siegfried Sassoon, whom he met while recovering from shell shock, Owen’s work departed from the patriotic war verse of the time, instead conveying the brutal reality of combat and the suffering of soldiers. Among his best-known poems are Dulce et Decorum est, Anthem for Doomed Youth, and Strange Meeting—many of which were published only after his death.
Born in 1893 in Shropshire, Owen developed an early passion for poetry and religion, both of which would shape his artistic and moral worldview. He worked as a teacher and spent time in France before enlisting in the British Army in 1915. After a traumatic experience at the front, he was treated for shell shock at Craiglockhart War Hospital, where Sassoon’s mentorship helped refine his poetic voice.
Owen returned to active service in 1918, determined to bear witness to the horrors of war. He was killed in action just one week before the Armistice. Though only a few of his poems were published during his lifetime, his posthumous collections cemented his legacy as one of the greatest war poets in English literature. His work continues to be studied for its powerful combination of romantic lyricism and brutal realism, as well as its complex engagement with themes of faith, duty, and identity.
Wilfred Owen was a defining voice of British poetry during the First World War, renowned for his stark portrayals of trench warfare and gas attacks. Deeply influenced by Siegfried Sassoon, whom he met while recovering from shell shock, Owen’s work departed from the patriotic war verse of the time, instead conveying the brutal reality of combat and the suffering of soldiers. Among his best-known poems are Dulce et Decorum est, Anthem for Doomed Youth, and Strange Meeting—many of which were published only after his death.
Born in 1893 in Shropshire, Owen developed an early passion for poetry and religion, both of which would shape his artistic and moral worldview. He worked as a teacher and spent time in France before enlisting in the British Army in 1915. After a traumatic experience at the front, he was treated for shell shock at Craiglockhart War Hospital, where Sassoon’s mentorship helped refine his poetic voice.
Owen returned to active service in 1918, determined to bear witness to the horrors of war. He was killed in action just one week before the Armistice. Though only a few of his poems were published during his lifetime, his posthumous collections cemented his legacy as one of the greatest war poets in English literature. His work continues to be studied for its powerful combination of romantic lyricism and brutal realism, as well as its complex engagement with themes of faith, duty, and identity.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 of 1 review
October 26, 2021
After Wilfred Own was killed on 4 November, “among his papers a draft Preface was found for a future volume of poems. The most famous part of it is the following:
“This book is not about heroes. English poetry is not yet fit to speak of them. Nor is it about deeds, or lands, nor anything about glory, honour, might, majesty, dominion, or power, except War. Above all I am not concerned with Poetry. My subject is War and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity ... all a poet can do today is warn. That is why the true Poets must be truthful.”
Owen conveyed a sensible ideal, wrought with resentment and sarcasm.
While many of his colleagues were writing poetry filled with irony and disparagement at the injustices of war, Owen wrote in a more stable, consequential way, depicting the futility of the fighting, the awful conditions the soldiers had to contend with in the trenches, in a powerful, sometimes understated but always empathetic and alarming fashion.
In “Spring Offensive”, the exquisiteness of spring is contrasted with the repulsion and spitefulness of war. Here nature is unreceptive to warring man. Nature’s aggression towards man varies with man’s destructiveness.
At first nature is beneficent, as long as the soldiers authorize her to offer her gifts. Then the soldiers ignore the warnings — in ‘the imminent line’ and ‘fearfully flashed’ — and in doing so rebuff the ‘beneficent aspects of nature. “But clutched to them like sorrowing hands” implies in a serene tone that nature is trying to stop the soldiers from going the battlefield.
Later on, the recurrence of ‘no’ reinforces the ironic hush prior to the battle, which relies on surprise: “No alarms / Of bugles, no high sags, no clamorous haste”. Similar to “Futility”, the sun is personified lighting that warfare is contrary to nature.
O larger shone that smile against the sun, — .
Mightier than his whose bounty these have spurned.
In the above line the soldiers are about to reject the huge sun with all its benefices. They may appear ‘mightier’ than the sun only in the sense that the sun’s power in the poem is restricted to helping creation, which they can destroy. Because of ignoring nature’s warning, all nature is in arms against them:
And instantly the whole sky burned
With fury against them; earth set sudden cups
In thousands for their blood;
The rhythm changes to a rapid pace as the violence of the battle is presented. It highlights the unnaturalness of warfare by showing nature at first hostile and then damaged and brutalised by warfare “chasmed and steepened sheer to infinite space”.
The horror of the carnage is demonstrated with the use of imagery associated with the rite of communion. Further the guilt of survival is shown with the allusions to hell.
The poem demonstrates the physical horrors of the men experienced in war. Owen suggests that god and nature had set a trap, for just as the soldiers had turned their back on nature and religion, so too had God and nature rejected the soldiers. God in his mercy may catch some of them as they fall, but the antagonism of nature confirms the culpability, which is compounded into the survivors’ silence:
“Why speak not they of comrades that went under?”
‘Spring Offensive’ is a vivid account of what warfare is like. The soldiers spurn safety and the peace and love of nature to destroy it all instead. They negate nature, remove themselves from the nurture of nature, alienate themselves from what gave them life in the first place; and thus, they reject all characteristics of humanity, to kill, maim and destroy.
This is the dehumanization of man, in the violation of nature. To Owen, this is part of the pity of war — that mankind could turn its back on all its values to become base creatures. It is only with their deaths that these men are forgiven, and are reunited with their creator, whose creation they tried to destroy “...plunged and fell away past this world’s verge, / Some say God caught them even before they fell.”
But for those who commit such a crime yet survive, they are “The few who rushed in the body centre hell, / And there out-of ending all its fiends and flames”; those who never regain the Immunity they lost, for they have been to hell and back, and are no longer as human as others.
Owen was a great artist. His poetry is never devoid of poetic truth and poetic beauty. In Spring Offensive, the awful reality of war is expressed in a masterly way. Without creating any propagandistic literature, Owen has truly brought out the great message of his poem through highly suggestive images.
The diction used by Owen is never annoying. It has a melody of its own, which is brilliantly balanced with the elevated tune of the poem. There is rounded felicity of expressions reminding one of Keats. The use of irony has a telling effect or the significance of the theme.
The title Spring Offensive is an oxymoron itself. Spring is a time of joy calm, and happiness1 and the word ‘offensive’ shows fear, and hatred. The poem starts with a very natural tone, showing happiness and ease. But toward the end, it begins to turn into hatred, fear and regret. The world turns against’ them, shown when he says ‘earth set sudden cups / In thousands for their blood; and green slope Chasmed and deepened sheer to infinite space’.
This shows that the ever so natural fields, are turned into holes, from the blasts of bombs. It becomes an endless, perpetual space of war, and the reader gets a sense of this appalling battleground, where no one is spared.
The poem changes a lot, and the reader must keep a constant eye out for a change of tone.
“This book is not about heroes. English poetry is not yet fit to speak of them. Nor is it about deeds, or lands, nor anything about glory, honour, might, majesty, dominion, or power, except War. Above all I am not concerned with Poetry. My subject is War and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity ... all a poet can do today is warn. That is why the true Poets must be truthful.”
Owen conveyed a sensible ideal, wrought with resentment and sarcasm.
While many of his colleagues were writing poetry filled with irony and disparagement at the injustices of war, Owen wrote in a more stable, consequential way, depicting the futility of the fighting, the awful conditions the soldiers had to contend with in the trenches, in a powerful, sometimes understated but always empathetic and alarming fashion.
In “Spring Offensive”, the exquisiteness of spring is contrasted with the repulsion and spitefulness of war. Here nature is unreceptive to warring man. Nature’s aggression towards man varies with man’s destructiveness.
At first nature is beneficent, as long as the soldiers authorize her to offer her gifts. Then the soldiers ignore the warnings — in ‘the imminent line’ and ‘fearfully flashed’ — and in doing so rebuff the ‘beneficent aspects of nature. “But clutched to them like sorrowing hands” implies in a serene tone that nature is trying to stop the soldiers from going the battlefield.
Later on, the recurrence of ‘no’ reinforces the ironic hush prior to the battle, which relies on surprise: “No alarms / Of bugles, no high sags, no clamorous haste”. Similar to “Futility”, the sun is personified lighting that warfare is contrary to nature.
O larger shone that smile against the sun, — .
Mightier than his whose bounty these have spurned.
In the above line the soldiers are about to reject the huge sun with all its benefices. They may appear ‘mightier’ than the sun only in the sense that the sun’s power in the poem is restricted to helping creation, which they can destroy. Because of ignoring nature’s warning, all nature is in arms against them:
And instantly the whole sky burned
With fury against them; earth set sudden cups
In thousands for their blood;
The rhythm changes to a rapid pace as the violence of the battle is presented. It highlights the unnaturalness of warfare by showing nature at first hostile and then damaged and brutalised by warfare “chasmed and steepened sheer to infinite space”.
The horror of the carnage is demonstrated with the use of imagery associated with the rite of communion. Further the guilt of survival is shown with the allusions to hell.
The poem demonstrates the physical horrors of the men experienced in war. Owen suggests that god and nature had set a trap, for just as the soldiers had turned their back on nature and religion, so too had God and nature rejected the soldiers. God in his mercy may catch some of them as they fall, but the antagonism of nature confirms the culpability, which is compounded into the survivors’ silence:
“Why speak not they of comrades that went under?”
‘Spring Offensive’ is a vivid account of what warfare is like. The soldiers spurn safety and the peace and love of nature to destroy it all instead. They negate nature, remove themselves from the nurture of nature, alienate themselves from what gave them life in the first place; and thus, they reject all characteristics of humanity, to kill, maim and destroy.
This is the dehumanization of man, in the violation of nature. To Owen, this is part of the pity of war — that mankind could turn its back on all its values to become base creatures. It is only with their deaths that these men are forgiven, and are reunited with their creator, whose creation they tried to destroy “...plunged and fell away past this world’s verge, / Some say God caught them even before they fell.”
But for those who commit such a crime yet survive, they are “The few who rushed in the body centre hell, / And there out-of ending all its fiends and flames”; those who never regain the Immunity they lost, for they have been to hell and back, and are no longer as human as others.
Owen was a great artist. His poetry is never devoid of poetic truth and poetic beauty. In Spring Offensive, the awful reality of war is expressed in a masterly way. Without creating any propagandistic literature, Owen has truly brought out the great message of his poem through highly suggestive images.
The diction used by Owen is never annoying. It has a melody of its own, which is brilliantly balanced with the elevated tune of the poem. There is rounded felicity of expressions reminding one of Keats. The use of irony has a telling effect or the significance of the theme.
The title Spring Offensive is an oxymoron itself. Spring is a time of joy calm, and happiness1 and the word ‘offensive’ shows fear, and hatred. The poem starts with a very natural tone, showing happiness and ease. But toward the end, it begins to turn into hatred, fear and regret. The world turns against’ them, shown when he says ‘earth set sudden cups / In thousands for their blood; and green slope Chasmed and deepened sheer to infinite space’.
This shows that the ever so natural fields, are turned into holes, from the blasts of bombs. It becomes an endless, perpetual space of war, and the reader gets a sense of this appalling battleground, where no one is spared.
The poem changes a lot, and the reader must keep a constant eye out for a change of tone.
Displaying 1 of 1 review