Anthem for Doomed Youth

Wilfred Owen(1893–1918)

Poems, 1917

What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?Only the monstrous anger of the guns.Only the stuttering rifles' rapid rattleCan patter out their hasty orisons.No mockeries for them; no prayers nor bells,Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs,—The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells;And bugles calling for them from sad shires.

What candles may be held to speed them all?Not in the hands of boys, but in their eyesShall shine the holy glimmers of goodbyes.The pallor of girls' brows shall be their pall;Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds,And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds.

Written in 1917 and published after his death in Poems (1920); via the English Wikisource transcription.

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About the poem

«What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?» Owen wrote this sonnet in 1917, in a military hospital, while recovering from the front. The question opens an elegy for soldiers who fall without a funeral: instead of bells, «the monstrous anger of the guns»; instead of prayers, «the stuttering rifles' rapid rattle».

The sestet turns homeward: the candles of mourning will burn not in hands but in children's eyes; «the pallor of girls' brows shall be their pall», and «each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds». Owen would be killed in action in 1918, a week before the Armistice.