A Critical Analysis Of “The Send Off” By Wilfred Owen Essay

This essay in disco biscuitds to examine the verse The air out Off by Wilfred Owen. Owen wrote this poem while he was stati unrivalledd at Ripon soldiery camp. He was based there after being a forbearing at the Craiglockhart War Hospital, this is where he met Robert Graves and Siegfried Sassoon. Owen was at Ripon mingled with treat and June, 1918 and died in action on the fourth of November 1918.The Send Off is a poem about some troops that have just go in from a sending off ceremony before departing by train, presumptively to the front direct contrasts of military personnel warfare One. The poem has many themes running through it. some of these are death, strangers, flowers, secretiveness and healing.The poem opens with a very claustrophobic inaugural line follow out the close, darkening lanes they sing their wayThe words down, close and darkening provide the reader with a whole step of doom, claustrophobia and apprehension of uncertainty. The determine of differen ce down provides the reader with the images of death, darkness, being buried, walking the trenches and going to hell. This opening line also provides a rather prophetic image of people being sent to concentration camps, by train, in World War Two. Further enhanced by siding shed. From the accent they sang their way2 there is an opposed feeling of enjoy custodyt to the claustrophobia. However, the singing changes from happiness when the poem is read again and the other themes are considered.Flowers are the succeeding(prenominal) prominent theme displayed in this poem. They appear in line four, stanza one and line fifteen, stanza three.Their breasts were stuck all white with miscellany and sprayAs mens are, dead.The flowers are described as white and in wreath form, the reader may imagine in this line that white lilies are associated with funerals. The language in this line gives the theory that the troops are cover in white flowersand that the flowers are stuck to their breasts as in a coffin. This is supercharge enhanced by the abrupt end to this line dead. The impression is that the soldiers are predresseed for their own funerals.Nor there if they yet mock what women meantWho gave them flowers.In this line the poet is asking if the women, who gave the troops the flowers, realise that the flowers are symbolising the reality of the horrors and the intimately certain death that these troops are going to face in the frontline.The theme of funerals is picked up again in stanza two Dull porters watched them, and a casual trampStood staring hard,The strangers, the porters, tramp, guard and women are all ceremonial the troops, covered in flowers march from their army camp to the train station. The troops, in deliberately, are predressed for their funeral and there are no apparent cheers or voices in the poem as they depart, they are leaving silently, secretly and this leaves the reader feeling that it is a funeral convoy passing by and that the troops are ex periencing venture of doom and may well be resigned to their dower on the frontlines.They sang their way dimly gayfurther shows that the troops are resigned to their fate and are singing their way to almost certain death..interestingly, there is a large amount of secretiveness throughout this poem. It is first apparent in stanza three So secretly, like wrongs hushed-up, they went.This line makes the reader question wherefore the troops are departing so secretly, then in line thirteen the phrase We never heard to which front these were sent.Shows that the troops and general existence were not aware of where the troops would go to fight, or what the true disposition of the realities would be when they got to their destination and that the public were not made aware of these realities and truths, in fact it was concealed from them. The secretiveness is also mentioned in stanza two, lines nine and ten Then unmoved, signals nodded, and a lampWinked to the guard.Here the theme of sec retiveness is displayed through the resourcefulness of the signals nodded and a lamp winked, the reader feels conspiratorial messages conveyed through Morse code.In the farthest stanza the secretiveness theme appears again, but this time, it is linked with the fork out of the soldiers. This stanza implies that only a few of these soldiers are likely to survive the war and return to their homes. However, they allow creep back implies that the soldiers may not wish to return as heroes and may need to heal themselves both mentally and physically.In closure The Send Off by Wilfred Owen starts off as a poem about a sending off ceremony towards the end of the war but in fact goes on much deeper to discuss the differences between what people at home perceive the war to be and the unfeigned realities that the soldiers face at the frontlines. The last stanza hints at healing, and suggests that those few soldiers who do return may wish to do so silently, and not as heroes, and may not w ish to discuss the realities and horrors that they have experienced. Thus, thetitle is rather ambiguous.