Alliteration In Wilfred Owen's Anthem For Doomed Youth

The ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’ is a poem written by Wilfred Owen on September 1917. Wilfred Owen was born on 18th March 1893, in Oswestry, United Kingdom, and his poems are famous through the use of descriptive words to portray the pity of the war, which is a common theme throughout all of his poems. Owen wrote most of his poems between August 1917 to September 1918 before he was killed on 4th November at Sambre-Oise canal in France. ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’ is a poem about a soldier dying in foreign country, and no one is praying for them; at the same time, the family in home country just can pray and do nothing other than that. Owen describes the theme of this poem agony of forgotten soldiers by using several literary devices such as imagery,

“Only the stuttering rifles’ rapid rattle” is an example from the third line of first stanza. Owen constructs the rhythm “rifles’ rapid rattle” by using alliteration to allows us to get the sound, and the image of the strong sound of rifles’ fired. The onomatopoeia ‘rattle’ usually comes with the word ‘rapid’, to emphasise how fast it is, and also to express the violence of the rifle. Rhythm of the poem helps develop the feelings and the mood of sorrow and anger to the reader to convey the theme. The rifles express how evil and how reckless the war was for the soldiers to keep on shooting guns while the fellow members are passing away, suffering with the pain they got from the shot from the rifles from the enemy forces. This connects to the theme because they are not treated individually once they die, but treated only as one of the people died, which is forgotten. “And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds” is from fourteenth line in second stanza. Owen ends the poem by giving you the image of weak lights coming through the blinds on twilight. It does not give you any violent, and rough image, but instead calm image of a new day. By using the word

“Only the monstrous anger of the guns” is from second line in first stanza. This line represents the gun as a person, as it says it has a feeling of monstrous anger. By describing as monstrous anger, it would mean it is at the very high level of anger that no one could stop it, since anger already describes how violent the guns’ act towards the people. Referring to the line one from stanza one, which is the previous line, it is answering its own rhetorical question. In the battle field, what marks people death is the bullet from the monstrous gun. The pain that the soldier could get from guns could only last for a moment, but it also could be a pain that comes slowly, gradually and kills you with tough and suffer, which is an agony for mentally and physically, connecting to theme. “The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells” is from seventh line in first stanza. Owen also uses symbol to describe the scene of soldiers dying in the battle field by comparing with actual funeral in church with friends and families grieving his death. However, there are no beautiful calming voice choirs from the church in the battlefield to make the dead person rest in peace; no people to grieve, no funerals there. Instead, they here the sound of dull and big sound of shells attacking them. Owen uses the word ‘demented’ to express how vile and uncomfortable to hear the sound of shells but also giving the image of the soldiers