I chose this poem first because I find the life, and work, of Wilfred Owen deeply fascinating. In this class, we have read many stories that have been against the war because of its horrors and the impact it had on peoples’ lives. But when we get to Owen’s poetry, the anger and emotion he puts behind his work is palpable. This war ruined not only his life, but those he knew, and those he didn’t know, and it moved much of his work. The fact he was also killed after returning to the front a week before the armistice is so tragic to me, too. His life, his death, and his legacy are all centered around a war he despised and wrote against, and one has to wonder if that’s what he wanted. Did he want to be known for more? What life could he have lived if it weren’t for the war? Or would he be glad knowing that his work and his words have captured the horrors of the war well enough that he’s discussed to this day? We can’t know.

I also chose this poem because it focuses less on the action happening in the war, and more on the tragedy of the deaths it caused. The opening line describes the boys as cattle, you don’t get more anti-war than that, really (also mind that he refers to them as boys and girls, not men and women). There’s no great battle or sacrifice to be spoken of in this poem. The deaths he writes of are of the “cattle”, and the fact he writes about how the last things they will ever get to hear are the sounds of the battlefield is haunting. This one specifically resonated with me because of the times we live in right now. To me, it feels like we, as a society, are nothing but cattle to be sacrificed and used by those in power. Of course, we live in a time that is very different from World War I era Europe, but as a society, we’ve never moved out of the dehumanisation of industry, of the working class. In the poem, and in much of Owen’s work, those who are fighting on the front are the ones doing all of the hard, dirty work for the elite who are waging the fights. The ones who fight didn’t ask to be part of this, and even if they did, they had no way of fully knowing what they were signing up for. And that is almost identical to how the heads of corporations and even our own government act. They pick fights and dole out these massive consequences that don’t affect them, but that affect everyone beneath them. We may not live in an active world war right now, but we do live in a world that enables those in power to treat everyone beneath them like shit. That’s why this poem resonated so much with me.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/16qPTfdOkw1m0darTv11MbJyOThtSAgo2/view?usp=sharing