The Full Text of “Anthem for Doomed Youth”
1What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?
2 — Only the monstrous anger of the guns.
3 Only the stuttering rifles' rapid rattle
4Can patter out their hasty orisons.
5No mockeries now for them; no prayers nor bells;
6 Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs,—
7The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells;
8 And bugles calling for them from sad shires.
9What candles may be held to speed them all?
10 Not in the hands of boys, but in their eyes
11Shall shine the holy glimmers of goodbyes.
12 The pallor of girls' brows shall be their pall;
13Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds,
14And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds.
The Full Text of “Anthem for Doomed Youth”
1What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?
2 — Only the monstrous anger of the guns.
3 Only the stuttering rifles' rapid rattle
4Can patter out their hasty orisons.
5No mockeries now for them; no prayers nor bells;
6 Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs,—
7The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells;
8 And bugles calling for them from sad shires.
9What candles may be held to speed them all?
10 Not in the hands of boys, but in their eyes
11Shall shine the holy glimmers of goodbyes.
12 The pallor of girls' brows shall be their pall;
13Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds,
14And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds.
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“Anthem for Doomed Youth” Introduction
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"Anthem for Doomed Youth" was written by British poet Wilfred Owen in 1917, while Owen was in the hospital recovering from injuries and trauma resulting from his military service during World War I. The poem laments the loss of young life in war and describes the sensory horrors of combat. It takes particular issue with the official pomp and ceremony that surrounds war (gestured to by the word "Anthem" in the title), arguing that church bells, prayers, and choirs are inadequate tributes to the realities of war. It is perhaps Owen's second most famous poem, after "Dulce et Decorum Est."
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“Anthem for Doomed Youth” Summary
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What church bells will ring for the young men slaughtered like farm animals? Instead, these young men just hear the fearsome rage of firing guns. The only prayers they get are the quick and jarring rhythms of rifle fire. These men will have no inappropriate rituals in their names, whether prayers or bell-ringing. No voice will mourn them, except the choirs—the high-pitched and hellish noises of falling artillery. Bugles will call for the young men from sad hometowns and villages.
What candles can be lit to help the dying soldiers in their passage from life to death? Instead of young boys holding these faint lights, the soldiers' eyes will show the fading light of life as they say their goodbyes to the world. Instead of drapes over their coffins, the soldiers will be remembered by the grief-stricken faces of women and girls. Instead of flowers, perhaps the dead will be honored by peace and diplomacy—by more patience in the world. The end of every day will also be a kind of ritual, as those who live on after the war draw down their window blinds.
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“Anthem for Doomed Youth” Themes
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Nationalism, War, and Waste
“Anthem for Doomed Youth” is a poem about World War I, which is estimated to have caused the deaths of around 17 million people worldwide. Written by WWI combatant Wilfred Owen while recovering from the trauma of battle, the poem makes a clear statement: war is a hellish and futile waste of human life. It is, then, a kind of protest poem—subverting the usual use of “anthem” as a symbol of nationalism (that is, taking undue pride in your home nation) into an anti-war message.
From start to finish, the poem foregrounds the wastefulness of war. The reader gets a sense of the way war hollows out society, particularly in its relentless destruction of young men. Men are disposable, the poem suggests, their deaths merely part of the price of war. Note how, in the poem’s very first line, these men are compared to “cattle.” These men are like farmed animals, brought into life only to grow big enough for their own slaughter. Furthermore, the poem makes no attempt to glorify war or paint these men as heroic or noble. It doesn’t say that they’re not these things, but instead makes the case that these traits—heroism and nobility—are rendered practically irrelevant by the sheer brutality of the conflict.
Accordingly, instead of populating the poem with examples of bravery, the poem is full of the daily realities of battle. There are guns, the relentless fire of rifles, and wailing shells falling overhead. All of these are portrayed as hellish and terrifying. The guns fire in “monstrous anger” and the shells scream like “shrill, demented choirs.” In other words, they take on the emotions that represent the worst of humanity: fury and violent madness—the very things that cause war in the first place (along with politics, oppression, and so on).
The latter image of the choirs is especially important. War is often presented along nationalistic lines, with young men encouraged to fight for their countries out of a sense of patriotism. Indeed, in one of Owen’s other famous poems, he ironically quotes the Roman poet Horace: “Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori” (“it is sweet and right to die for one’s country”). But the members of this choir don’t sing the soldiers' national anthem—they sing a bloodthirsty, banshee-like cry of war. The poem makes the point that these men, fed to the war like nameless cattle, will never return home anyway—their actual national anthem is no longer relevant. The bugles will call “for them from sad shires” ("shires" refers to the different parts of Britain), but this call will forever be unanswered.
Ultimately, then, “Anthem for Doomed Youth” asks the reader not to romanticize war. Though it’s a lyrical and beautiful poem, its power comes from the way in which it brings the horrors of war to life. War is held up to the light, exposed as futile, horrific, and tragic.
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Ritual and Remembrance
“Anthem for Doomed Youth” argues that the horrors of a war like WWI render the usual tributes to the dead—e.g. the ringing of bells, collective prayer, choir singing, the draping of coffins with the national flag—practically meaningless. Furthermore, most of the men who die in such conflict will never be honored with such rituals anyway—there are too many fallen soldiers. The poem shows the usual ceremonies to be inadequate and argues in favor of different forms of remembrance that are more appropriate for such a terrible conflict.
In the first stanza, the poem looks at some of the ways that dead soldiers might be honored and transforms them into the sounds and sights of war itself. The rituals referenced—the ringing of bells, prayers in churches, singing choirs—are presented as “mockeries” that fail to do justice to the fallen. That is, these things are so removed from the horrible reality of war that they mock the people they are supposed to honor.
Furthermore, the church and the government are big parts of why these men went off to die in the first place: the soldiers were asked to defend their country and its (Christian) values. The hypocrisy also has to do with how these supposedly solemn rituals take place in relative safety, while the soldiers themselves experience the horrors of war.
Indeed, the only fitting “passing-bells,” “orisons” (prayers), and “choirs” that can pay honest tribute to the war are the weapons of war themselves. Only they deal with the reality of war because they are the reality of war. Of course, the speaker doesn’t really see gunfire as a form of prayer, but rather sees its sound as a truer and more authentic representation of what war is actually like for the soldiers.
In the second stanza, the poem moves to describes more fitting forms of tribute. Instead of the weak light of remembrance candles, for example, the speaker suggests honoring the “holy glimmers of goodbyes” in the soldier's eyes—that is, the dying light of life in their eyes as they realize that their time is up. Then, the speaker goes on to mention the “pallor of girls’ brows,” the “tenderness of patient minds,” and the “drawing-down of blinds” each day. Each of these, the speaker suggests, is a more honest form of tribute.
The first example describes how, rather than having their coffins draped with flags, the young men will be remembered better by the grief-stricken faces of their loved ones—particularly the "girls" who may be their sisters, wives, or girlfriends. Then, the “tenderness of patient minds” suggests that the best tribute that could be made to the dead is the calmness, patience, and understanding that could prevent war from ever happening again. Finally, the “drawing-down of blinds” is in part an image of the darkness of death. But it’s also a more literal sign of the continuation of everyday life: blinds are drawn, people go to sleep, and they wake up the next day to go on living. The image suggests that the simple existence of an everyday life would be the most authentic tribute to the dead soldiers, because it means that others are enjoying the peace for which the war was fought.
In summary, “Anthem for Doomed Youth” criticizes the usual forms of ritual and tribute used to commemorate people who have died in war. It’s not saying that these rituals don’t have their place, but rather that they're not enough in the face of war's horrors. In the second stanza, the poem presents memory, kindness, and gratitude as more fitting memorials.
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Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of “Anthem for Doomed Youth”
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Line 1
What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?
"Anthem for Doomed Youth" opens with an unflinching rhetorical question: what bells will ring to mark the deaths of those fighting in the trenches in World War I?
"Passing-bells" are meant to be part of a memorial service, the kind that usually takes place in a church. But the simile at the end of the question reveals why the speaker is asking this question in the first place. The young men fighting on the front line die like animals in a slaughterhouse. Accordingly, there are far too many of them dying for each to get a proper funeral service—and many of the dead bodies won't make it back home in the first place. Not only are "passing-bells" impractical, but they also seem inappropriate for deaths that are, in a sense, a business-like occurrence that's as commonplace as cows being killed for food. The speaker questions what good "passing-bells"—and other forms of ritual—really do in the face of such indiscriminate slaughter. In other words, this first line introduces the idea that there is too much of a disconnect between the pretentious symbolism of religious ceremony and the grim realities of warfare.
Though this is only the first line, the meter has an interesting variation here. The poem generally follows an iambic pentameter metrical scheme (line 6 is a solid example of this basic pattern), and accordingly each line should end with a stress (a strong syllable). But this line is talking about dying, and senseless dying at that. And many of the deaths which the line refers to involve a kind of literal fall, with men going over the top of the trenches to—most likely—be mowed down by gunfire soon after. The final word of the line ("cattle") adds an additional weak (and thus, falling) syllable to what would otherwise be a straightforward line of iambic pentameter:
What pass- | ing bells | for these | who die | as cattle?
This extra syllable deliberately weakens the line, calling to mind the fallen soldiers. Even in the space of just one line, the poem has already set up both of its main themes: the horror and futility of war, and the inadequacy or irrelevance of the way that the war dead are remembered back home.
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Lines 2-4
— Only the monstrous anger of the guns.
Only the stuttering rifles' rapid rattle
Can patter out their hasty orisons. -
Lines 5-7
No mockeries now for them; no prayers nor bells;
Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs,—
The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells; -
Line 8
And bugles calling for them from sad shires.
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Lines 9-12
What candles may be held to speed them all?
Not in the hands of boys, but in their eyes
Shall shine the holy glimmers of goodbyes.
The pallor of girls' brows shall be their pall; -
Lines 13-14
Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds,
And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds.
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“Anthem for Doomed Youth” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language
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Alliteration
Alliteration is used to powerful effect in "Anthem for Doomed Youth."
The first example is in line 3, and this is perhaps one of the most famous examples of alliteration in English poetry. Indeed, it is often used to illustrate the definition of the poetic device:
Only the stuttering rifles' rapid rattle
This line uses the repeated /r/ sounds (including the consonantal /r/ in "stuttering") to emulate the sound of relentless gun fire. The alliteration is deliberately heavy and obvious, calling to mind the hail of bullets that WWI soldiers had to face when they went out of the trenches. As the stanza talks specifically about the horrible sounds of warfare—contrasted with the pleasant but meaningless "passing-bells" in churches back home—it makes sense for the poetic "volume" to be turned up so loud with this alliteration.
The next example is in line 5:
No mockeries now for them; no prayers nor bells;
These /n/ sounds are linked with the concept of negation—that is, the closing-down or rejection of possibilities. Essentially, they link the words "no" (and "nor") with the word "now," subtly pointing out that for those who have died in the war there is no now—they are no longer part of the present, but rather part of the past.
Lines 7, 8, and 11 also have alliteration, but that specific type is covered in the sibilance section. Line 12 ties "pallor" and "pall" together through similarity of sound. This is part of the line's metaphor that, rather than a flag draped over their coffins, the dead young men will be honored in the grief-stricken faces of their loved ones (in particular "girls" like their sisters, wives, and girlfriends).
The last line also features alliteration, with the /d/ sounds of "dusk" and "drawing-down" combining with gentle consonants to bring the poem to a hushed close (in contrast to the bombastic music of national anthems, which the speaker has previously made clear is an inappropriate way to honor soldiers' deaths).
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Anaphora
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Caesura
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Consonance
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End-Stopped Line
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Enjambment
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Personification
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Rhetorical Question
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Sibilance
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Simile
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Metaphor
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"Anthem for Doomed Youth" Vocabulary
Select any word below to get its definition in the context of the poem. The words are listed in the order in which they appear in the poem.
- Passing-bells
- Patter
- Hasty
- Orisons
- Mockeries
- Demented
- Wailing
- Bugles
- Shires
- Speed
- Pallor
- Pall
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These are church bells that mark somebody's "passing"—their death.
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Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “Anthem for Doomed Youth”
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Form
"Anthem for Doomed Youth" is a sonnet. This can be seen in the clear division between the two stanzas: an octave and a sestet, with the sestet ending in a couplet. This makes the poem, in part, a Petrarchan sonnet. But the rhyme scheme is more Shakespearean than Petrarchan. Cleverly, this makes the poem a hybrid of mainland Europe (Petrarch's Italy, and the site of the war) and the United Kingdom (Shakespeare's nation, and the home country of this poem's soldiers). In its form, then, the poem represents both home and the foreign lands in which the main part of the war was fought.
Both stanzas begin with rhetorical questions, which shows that this is a searching poem. This isn't a triumphant celebration of war, but rather an attempt to cast doubts on the myths and rituals that surround it. Though they start in a similar way, the two stanzas are quite different in content. The first is preoccupied with bringing the horrors of war to life for the reader, and with showing the irrelevance of church bells, prayers, choirs and so on when it comes to paying tribute to the fallen.
The second stanza deals more with life after the war, looking at the way the soldiers should actually be honored. Interestingly, though the sestet definitely does mark the sonnet's traditional turn, line 8 is sort of a turn too. Here, the poem looks homeward, rather than at the theater of war, setting up the discussion that the sestet will continue.
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Meter
"Anthem for Doomed Youth" is a metrically regular poem written in iambic pentameter (as many sonnets are); this means the poem has five iambs, or poetic feet with an unstressed-stressed syllable pattern, per line. Generally, the slow and steady iambs give the poem a mournful tone. Take line 9, for example:
What cand- | les may | be held | to speed | them all?
But the poem does contain some interesting variations on that basic pattern. The first line, for example, has an extra weak syllable at the end of the first foot. This extra syllable undercuts the rhetorical power of the iambic pentameter as early as the first line. Furthermore, the weakness of that final syllable evokes the fall of soldiers under a hail of bullets, while the way it extends the line reflects the sheer number of young men dying:
What pass- | ing bells | for these | who die | as cattle?
This extra syllable at the end of the line's final foot is technically known as hypercatalexis. In this context, it means that the powerful rhetorical question ends with a note of weakness, not strength. This makes sense, as the poem is about death and argues against the empty rituals and nationalistic posturing of traditional "anthems."
Lines 2 and 3, with their repeated anaphora of "Only the," are both metrical variations too. In both of them, the first foot is reversed from an iamb to a trochee (stressed-unstressed):
— Only | the mons- | trous an- | ger of | the guns.
This change makes the speaker's answer to the opening line's rhetorical question more forceful and dramatic, emphasizing the word "Only" to convey that there is truly nothing else for the soldiers beyond the horrifying sounds of war.
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Rhyme Scheme
The poem has a regular rhyme scheme that is closest to the Shakespearean sonnet scheme (rather than the Petrarchan sonnet scheme). Though the poem is divided into an octave and a sestet, the rhyme scheme sounds more like four quatrains and a closing couplet:
ABAB / CDCD / EFFE / GG
The use of a closing couplet lends extra power to the poem's last lines. What they express is deliberately a kind of quiet ("patient minds" and drawn blinds), but the rhyme lends it that peacefulness a sense of authority as well.
It's also worth noting that the A, C, and E rhymes are all very close to rhyming with each other too. For example, consider the sounds of "cattle" (A rhyme) "bells" (C rhyme), and "all" (E rhyme). These similar sets of sound give the poem a subtly heightened sense of sound patterning, which is important as so much of the poem is specifically about sounds—whether church bells or falling artillery.
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“Anthem for Doomed Youth” Speaker
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The speaker is unspecified but, as with many WWI poems, the speaker here is generally assumed to be drawn from the poet's personal experiences. Indeed, it is the fact that Wilfred Owen served—and died—in the war that partly contributes to his poems' authority and power. It is a subtle kind of authority based more on authenticity than dominance; that is, the reader believes the message of the poem in part because the poet's backstory relates so directly to the poem's content.
The reader doesn't learn anything specific about the speaker; their age, gender, and other personal details remain hidden. The one thing that is clear, however, is that the speaker is keen to address what they see as an injustice—the way that the church and state seem to encourage war on the one hand, while offering hollow tributes and rituals to honor those killed on the other. The speaker, the reader learns in the second stanza, is interested in a more genuine day-to-day way of honoring the dead, rather than an elaborate symbolic one.
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“Anthem for Doomed Youth” Setting
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The poem has two distinct atmospheres or settings. The first of these is the battlefield of WWI (described in lines 1 through 7), which is powerfully conveyed by the poem's focus on the terrifying and deafening sounds of weaponry. In this setting, guns and rifles seem to be firing from all directions, and "wailing shells" are falling overhead. It's a horrific scene that contrasts sharply with the mild images of church bells, prayers, and choirs.
The other setting is back home, in the country from which these soldiers came. This setting is described in lines 8 through 14, and specifically, it's the nation of England (as demonstrated by the phrase "sad shires," which refers to different areas of England). Indeed, it is line 8 rather than the more traditional line 9 that begins the sonnet's turn, shifting the focus from the war front to the "home front" (the home country in which civilian life goes on). The post-war future predicted in the second stanza is a mournful, tentative one. But while this is a grief-stricken society, the speaker does gesture towards life moving on as the second stanza draws to a close.
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Literary and Historical Context of “Anthem for Doomed Youth”
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Literary Context
After "Dulce Et Decorum Est," "Anthem for Doomed Youth" is probably Wilfred Owen's most famous poem—and one of the most celebrated war poems more generally. Its distinct power comes from its lack of sentimentality, its refusal to buy into nationalistic propaganda, and its insistence on more appropriate and personal forms of remembrance. It was written in 1917, while Owen was in the hospital recovering from the trauma of his own experience in the war.
In fact, it was in this Scottish hospital that Owen befriended one of the other most celebrated poets of WWI, Siegfried Sassoon. Sassoon was a little bit older than Owen and from a more privileged background, but the two men got along well. Their friendship also shaped Owen's work; for example, both the "doomed" of the title and the "patient minds" of line 13 were in part Sassoon's suggestions.
Owen and Sassoon share an unflinching and realistic way of looking at the horrors of war. This perspective contrasts with the kind of nationalistic propaganda that the government used to make young men sign up to fight and to keep the public in favor of the war. Owen's and Sassoon's poetry, which looks at the realities of trench warfare, differs from the more celebratory and patriotic verse of writers like Rupert Brooke.
Additionally, Owen was heavily influenced by the Romantic poets, and in particular by John Keats. In this poem, the reader can perhaps see the influence of Keats's famous phrase about a poet's responsibility to their poems: Keats said that they must "load every rift of [their] subject with ore." This poem is packed full of powerful sonic effects and exactly the kind of unrelenting intensity that Keats described.
Historical Context
The historical context of this poem is, of course, World War I. At the time, this war was described with the term "the war to end all wars"—a phrase that of course turned out to be tragically inaccurate with the onset of World War II. Around 16 million people died directly in WWI, with many more perishing in the great flu outbreaks and genocides (for example, the Armenian Genocide) that followed.
The war began with the assassination of Archduke Franz-Ferdinand, who was the heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire (which ruled a large section of central and Eastern Europe at the time). The assassin, Gavrilo Princip, wished to see an end to Austro-Hungarian rule in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Previously arranged allegiances soon brought Germany and Russia into opposition, and before too long this conflict pulled the other countries of Europe into the war as well. In 1915, the Germans sank a British passenger ship called the Lusitania, killing many civilians. Among other reasons, this event drew the United States into the conflict as well.
As described in the poem, WWI was a horrendously destructive war. Life in the trenches of Europe was terrifying and deadly, and the poor conditions caused frequent sickness and disease. Wilfred Owen fought in France, part of what was called the Western Front, which was the war's main theater of war (the term "theater of war" refers to the actual sites of a war's armed battles). And in a turn of fate that perhaps underscores the tragedy of war, Owen himself very nearly survived to see its end. He was killed one week before the Armistice (the truce) that was signed on the 11th of November 1918, with news of his death reaching his parents on the very same day that church bells were ringing out to signal the end of the war.
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More “Anthem for Doomed Youth” Resources
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External Resources
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Poems in Response to Owen — A BBC show in which three contemporary poets respond to Wilfred Owen's poetry.
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Learn More About War Poetry — A series of podcast documentaries from the University of Oxford about various aspects of World War I poetry, including some excellent material specifically about Wilfred Owen.
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More Poems and Biography — A valuable resource of Owen's other poetry, and a look at his life.
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A Reading by Stephen Fry — Internationally famous actor, comedian,and writer Stephen Fry reads the poem (with a bugle call in the background).
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Bringing WWI to Life — In this clip, director Peter Jackson discusses his recent WWIfilm, They Shall Not Grow Old. Though technology, Jackson brings old war footage to vivid life, restoring a sense of the soldiers as actual people.
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LitCharts on Other Poems by Wilfred Owen
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