Wilfred Owen

An extraordinary human experience is one that is very rarely or unusually undertaken; one that reaches beyond what is ordinarily felt and encountered, an experience that forgoes standard emotions and events.                                               Wilfred Owen’s, a poet from World War 1, poetry explores this concept and conveys how an intense focus on these experiences helps to shape meaning.                                                               Each poem in his collection directly relates to the experiences of both he and his fellow soldiers during and due to the war and emphasis the suffering, pain and distress as well as the pity, sympathy and the sorrow encountered by each of them in the hardships and misfortune of war. Each of Owens poems is an expression of outrage at the horrors of war and of pity for the young soldiers that were sacrificed in it. The poems illustrate these emotions and unpick the experiences each of them went through.                                                                                     By exploring ‘Anthem for the Doomed Youth’ a questioning and aggressive manner towards the battlefield is shown and the feelings of families back home are uncovered, were as the poem ‘Disabled’ exposes the unseen mental torment of war on the individual in a bitter and naked tone.

Criticises war. The use of the word Anthem implies a pride or celebration, an ‘anthem’ is a song of praise and is somewhat jolly, and is ironically used as the soldiers extraordinary experiences identify the war as anything but.
The tone is first bitter and ironic filled with negativity. This is shown by the aggressive rhetorical question “what passing-bells for these who die as cattle?” The use of the word “cattle” is a metaphor and illustrates how faceless war is, each solider is just another solider, nameless and blank, like when cattle is herded in and slaughtered, no one cow or sheep means more to the farmer than the last, this helps to develop...