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Comparing and contrasting &quot;Anthem for doomed youth&quot; and &quot;Attack&quot;.

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Comparing and contrasting "Anthem for doomed youth" and "Attack". We have been studying two poems, the "Anthem For Doomed Youth" by Wilfred Owen, and "Attack" by Seigfried Sassoon. These poems are both anti war poems and were written during the time of the First World War. Owen's poem is about the lack of appropriate burials and respect to the dead soldiers. The other poem, Attack, is a narrative about an attack on the British soldiers. In some ways the poems are very similar. As I mentioned before both are anti war. I can tell this from the way they describe people dying. In Owen's poem the men are described as, "Dying like cattle." In Sassoon's poem they are said to have, "Grey muttering faces masked with fear." Death is inevitable. ...read more.


Words like "monstrous" and "menacing" give us pictures of the battle scene, whilst words like "roars" and "stuttering" provide the sound effects. However, the poems do have their differences. "Attack" is more factual than the "Anthem" and the emotion doesn't come until the end when you can hear, as if your right next to him in the trench, him cry out, "Jesu make it stop!" In "Anthem" you can sense Wilfred Owens anger all the way through by just allowing yourselves to hear the bitterness in which he asks, almost sarcastically, "What passing bells for these who die as cattle?" The form of the poems is very different. Sassoon's is set out all in one verse whereas Owen's is set out as a sonnet with an octave and a sestet. ...read more.


Whereas in Owen's it follows the traditional of ending in a rhyming couplet of a sonnet Sassoon's is very unusual, AACDBEDEDGGD. Owen uses rhetorical questions to speak out to us, "What candles may be held to speed them all?" Sassoon uses direct speech and this only comes in on the very last line where he cries out "O Jesu make it stop!" I think that Wilfred Owen's poem is better, I feel the anger that grips you all the way through, although it's awful to find that it ends so quickly because I would have liked it to go on forever. However I do like the final line of Sassoon's poem when he shows emotion as it seems as though he is really there at the scene. Amie Whitfield 10W ...read more.

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