Wilfred Owen's Song Of Songs

Analyze Owen’s developing style through the poems, ‘Sonnet (on seeing a piece of our artillery brought in to action)’ and ‘Song of Songs’.

Wilfred Owen’s developing style throughout his poems changes dramatically through these two poems in the way that he uses imagery and structure. These two poems were written in 1917, however, they both talk about different things. Artillery Sonnet talks about war and Song of Songs talks about love. This is strange due to the fact that themes of war riddled his poems at this time. Owen’s developing style changes through how he uses emotive language, one poem displays anger and the other displays romantic imagery.

Artillery sonnet is a conventional sonnet, with an Italian sonnet rhyme scheme. Despite the

The title itself is a biblical reference, to the book in the old testament of the Bible, Song of Solomon, also known as Song of Songs. The book in the Bible was all about physical love, narrated by both a male and a female. This is the only book of the bible that does not refer to God or Yahweh a single time, while the poem does not refer to war a single time – there is no reference to battle or fighting and to some of the concerns that dominate Owen’s

The structure of the Artillery sonnet is broken up in to two parts – the octet shows the period of time when Owen respected the power of it but the sestet shows that after the magnificence of the great gun wore off, he wanted people deserving of punishment to be punished by God. On the other hand, the structure of Song of Songs is more established in four stanzas – the three line verses represent the times of day he spends with his lover doing different things. The two poems have completely different subject matter, as Artillery Sonnet only speaks of war and vengeance while Song of Songs only speaks of love – the two are directly contrasting to each other, however Song of Songs is one of the only poems to not mention war at all, which is unusual as Owen was constantly writing about battle to some caliber at that time. The two poems are also stark contrasts with imagery, however both use archaic language but for different reasons. Artillery Sonnet uses violent imagery with archaic language to help display the fact that God will punish those deserving and the fact that the persona of the poem was one of importance, much like God. On the contrary, Song of Songs uses sweet and soft imagery with archaic language to highlight the timelessness and everlasting factor of love. However, in developing style, he has utilized audible devices, such as assonance, alliteration, sibilance, pararhyme and