Regeneration Case

A funeral won’t bring them back.

Wilfred Owen’s “Anthem for doomed youth” sounds like another one of those instances where an adult is taking their disliking of adolescents and expressing it through a letter, or rather or a poem. But the piece comes off more as a poem about someone with a fear of, or distaste for funerals. This is quite evident in the last stanza, which reads:

“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;

Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds,

And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds.”

The advanced funeral references indicate the author’s familiarity with the event. Words like pallor, the pail look of a dead person, and pall, a substitute word for casket, are not terms that the average person is familiar with. This is a tale of a soldier who is fed up with attending his fellow soldiers funerals.

The Narrator talks in a depressed state and has a pessimistic attitude towards the funeral services. In the second stanza, the author says:

“No mockeries for them; no prayers nor bells;

Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs, --“

The author is repeatedly saying “No matter how good a service you have, no matter how good the reflections are, no matter how good the choir is, it is not going to bring back a soldier.

“What candles may be held to speed them all?” is the first line of the last stanza of the poem.