Comparison of Anthem for Doomed Youth and An Irish Airman Foresees His Death

Comparison of Anthem for Doomed Youth and An Irish Airman Foresees His Death

William Butler Yeats has written many pieces of literature, mainly

about Ireland as that is his passion and cause of writing. However

his poem “An Irish Airman Foresees His Death” is not solely about

Ireland and even though it includes that theme it is rather a

criticism of apathetic people who have no reason for going to war.

The form of Yeats’ poem is very structured and regular. The rhyme

scheme is ABAB the whole way through the poem and has an unstressed,

stressed beat every time. The poem is made up of one sixteen-lined

stanza and has a straight forward structure. Yeats has used this

format for emphasis to get his point across. He has made the poem

using paired lines which balance with one another neutralising any

feeling that there may have been. Yeats has also made the layout of

the poem very simple and uncomplicated to make Robert Gregory’s reason

for going to war stand out which is also simple and uncomplicated-He

just wants to fly a plane.

Wilfred Owen’s poem was influenced by another war poet Siegfried

Sassoon. Their conversations about the horrors of war together

provided the framework to many of the poems that Owen wrote. As a

soldier at war, Owen was affected by the traumatising horrors of the

trenches that he saw while he was out there. He was so badly affected

that he was diagnosed with shell shock and sent to hospital in

Edinburgh. These horrific scenes caused Owen to write such gruesome

yet realistic compositions. Like Yeats’ poem, “Anthem for doomed

youth” is also a criticism only this time it is a criticism of how the

young soldiers who die at war do not get the recognition or heroic

funeral that they so...

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... a more realistic tone. Like Yeats, Owen uses rhyme,

rhythm and imagery only he makes his more varied, frequent and

complexed. To do this, Owen has used an assortment of literary

devices such as metaphors, similes, personification, onomatopoeia and

alliteration. This helps Owen to elaborate his poem in more serious,

gruesome detail which he often does, even in other literature and a

good example of this would be another poem called “Dulce et

docormest.” He has seen the horror and futility of war first hand and

this is reflected through his use of emotive language. The two poems

are diverse to one another as Owen uses numerous amounts of imagery

and has a lack of structure which results in an abundance of emotion

where as Yeats is the complete opposite and comprehends constant

structure and image deficiency which consequently leads to a lack of

emotion.