hello and welcome to another video looking at the five key quotations in a poem this will dramatically speed up your revision we only need five quotations because you can't possibly write about more than that in the exam when you're comparing poems and as usual I'm going to link those quotations to the phosphate where we talk about the form the opening the language features the structure and the ending because this method always gets you at least a grade seven now Wilfred Owen is a genius of a poet and almost every line is packed with something that we can comment on so your annotations on this poem are probably enormous I hope you find that just concentrating on the five that I offer you will really make you much more efficient so as always we start with the beginning because this is where the poet introduces their first viewpoint to their point of view our brains ache in the merciless ice east winds that nervous we read we keep awake because the night is silent and so this completely upsets our expectations about war we imagine that the danger in war of course is the enemy but here the knives are not from the enemy but from the winds so this is a terrible irony that nature itself is attacking the men now we could perhaps look at this as a reaction from nature turning against the barbaric nature of man and killing them as though nature is part of some divine punishment and if it is it is utterly merciless it is taking no mercy on these men because of the horror of the war that they have brought to the land Owen also conveys that with the assonance of the repeated eyes so in and merciless iced wings nervous ever assonance slows down the rhythm of the lines and also mimics the exposure that's the poet is feeling they're out there in these merciless conditions for a long time we can also see that I think in the incredible length of all of the lines they're all round about 12 or 13 syllables much longer than you'd expect we're conditioned to finding lines of ten syllables or fewer but Owen draws that out in order to mimic the length of time that these men are being exposed to these terrible conditions which will kill them in this poem now he also challenges us in other ways here so we would expect a silent night to be brilliant that would make us sleep but here the soldiers keep awake because the night is silent and so what he's suggesting here is that in war everything is turned upside down our expectations no longer work the way they do in real normal life so the silence might suggest that the enemy is getting ready for an attack and wanting therefore to conceal that attack by not being noisy about it he conveys how tiring this effort to stay awake is with the alliteration of the W's which again draw out time we read we awake it slows down the way that we speak and conveys the long time it is taking for this night to pass next we can look at some more language features so here we have this brilliant personification of the clouds coming from the east dawn massing in the east her melancholy army so we've got this image of the weather now arming itself and actually being better armored than the soldiers that they're facing than the enemy so the word massing here suggests that there is much more danger from the weather than there are from German soldiers in the trenches there's an interesting pathetic fallacy going on here so the weather is melancholy reflecting the emotions of the men means miserable but on another level he's also suggesting that nature is miserable itself it doesn't want to attack the men with this army but it's miserably reluctantly feeling it has to do it as though to expel this great horror of war from nature the repetition of ranks and ranks and the sound the assonance again of ranks and attacks the a sounds use in assonance here suggests that the attack from nature is endless and goes on and on and the soldiers can do nothing about it again we have the pathetic fallacy where the ranks of clouds are shivering which actually conveys the shivering of the soldiers on the ground next Owen gives us these images of how the soldiers escaped from this they escaped in their minds now I love these descriptions because they work with a brilliant kind of word association so everything we see in it is a description of summer but actually these aren't random things he's picking on things that he can see now so the blossoms that he can see now are actually white and the Association of course is with the snow he's seeing the flakes of snow come down and imagining them as spring like blossoms the sound of the wind that is bringing these melancholy gray clouds on them and now like the sounds of the blackbird but they're not pleasant sounds they're irritating the black bird is fussing away in the hedgerows it's so in even his summer memory here or his spring memory he's irritated by that sound just like he's irritated by the wind now we would also associate the idea of blossoms with warmth and beauty but look at how he describes the blossoms as being littered with blossoms that means there would be plenty of them and therefore beautiful but the use of the word littered also suggests that this is refuse it's rubbish it's a very negative description then we come to this idea of moments of peace in the sunshine so we'd rowels Sun dozed we can imagine getting sleepy in the Sun which is a lovely pleasant lazy feeling but here getting sleepy is a threat if you fall asleep out in these harsh cold conditions you will literally freeze to death while you're sleeping now if we look at the sibilants here of so and rouse Sun dozed it's really seductive and that's being used ironically because nature is seducing him to go to sleep in the cold in order that it may kill him this is the enemy tactic which he must avoid and that's one reason he asks is it that we are dying so he can feel his mind slowing down he can see himself having these illusions almost where the snow appears like blossom where he's getting these memories of home and it's suggesting to him that he's not thinking straight does this mean that his brain is suffering with illusions that convey a damage to the brain remember it began with our brains ache and then the other way that this question works is he's asking himself whether the brain is actually letting go here so is his brain realizing that the cold is killing him and therefore choosing to think of these happy memories because they're his last now in the penultimate stanza he starts describing more thoughts of home and of course defending home is the reason that they've come out to fight and on the first reading this quotation suggests that that's a justification for why they're there so in a way they're happy to make this sacrifice therefore not loathe so not hating it we lie out here in other words we're happy to lie out in these trenches in these conditions because we're defending our home therefore were born so that was the reason that we were born in order to do our patriotic duty to defend our families and our country full love of God seems dying so countries may be turning away from Christianity and the whole idea of thou shalt not kill but we are defending our own country and therefore what we're doing is a worthwhile sacrifice but there is another way to look at this quotation so we've got obviously to double meaning of lie so he could be suggesting here that we are actually lying now here when we say there is a good patriotic reason for our fighting and those of you know anything about Wilfred Owen we'll know that he was furious about the conduct of the war and wrote about it frequently his most famous poem is dulce at decorum essed which is latin for it is sweet and fitting and the rest of the phrases to die for one's country and he wrote that whole poem to show that it was a disgusting idea to die for one's country so it would be odd if he wrote about it being a really good thing in this poem and then changing his mind in the next so I think that secondary meaning of lie is what he's got in mind here that the soldiers are lying to themselves when they say that this is a worthwhile sacrifice and that's the reason that they were born and that also helps make sense of this line for love of God seems dying so here I think the metaphor is suggesting that love is dying and especially the love of God and war is the proof of that if we actually loved God we couldn't possibly go to war we couldn't claim that God was on our side because God would disapprove of war in the first place that's why we have the commandment thou shalt not kill this is an easy way to contrast with other poems that deal with these images of God like war photographer and charge of the Light Brigade you need to know here that Wilfred Owen was going to chained trained as a vicar before the war so that this war appears like an attack on his Christian faith right now we're going to end with the final couplet here so the burial party pours over half known faces all their eyes are iced but nothing happens so this is another description of how the men are literally and metaphorically dying the literal death is conveyed in the half known faces of the men that they're burying half known might suggest that they've died quickly I don't mean that it's been an instant death but they've only been a month or two at the front line and then died during the course of the war and therefore there's not been time to get to know them but another possibility is that they may have been there a long time but the soldiers have deliberately not got to know each other because they didn't want to form emotional attachments knowing that the pain of those friends deaths would be much worse than if they hadn't really treated them as friends they were just faces who were almost anonymous and therefore their deaths less damaging to the psyche of the soldiers who have survived and this idea is also picked up in the metaphor of their eyes being iced so if we think about the dead soldiers we've got the idea of them dying with eyes open but their eyes are now like ice because the bodies are literally frozen stiff and the eyes are frozen like ice cubes but this also describes the burial party and their eyes have become like ice because they are completely unfeeling war has taken away their ability to empathize we also have the homophone here of eyes meaning I myself and so another way that we can interpret this is he's suggesting that their identities have become ice their personalities the eye that makes up them has become ice so they're completely on able to feel now when we come to the final line but nothing happens we ask what exactly does Wilfred Owen want to happen well there are several really interesting possibilities one could be that the death at the hands of the bitter winter is worse than being shot in battle and so they'd actually prefer a battle to this incessant cold another interpretation comes from this idea where he's exploring the reasons for war and how they rely and so here he also wants a political something to happen which is a solution to the war he wants peace or it could be a call from release from war through death he could actually be suggesting that death is preferable to this ongoing suffering oK we've really clearly revised the opening and the ending and the language features but what are we so far discussed about structure well remember we talked about the number of syllables in the line being much longer than we expected and that reflecting the kind of endless stretch of time in which they're exposed to this awful weather we can now also talk about the half rhyme so us half rhymes with nervous silent half rhymes with salient and we have to come up with a reason why that half rhyme is there and the easiest interpretation is that half rhyme unsettles us it seems as though it's going to give us something rounded and neat but actually it doesn't and that of course is the sentiment in the poem that poet wants a neat solution to the war but the opposite happens nothing happens it doesn't get there which if you like the half rhyme mimics the rhine doesn't happen we also have the structure where we had the soldiers under attack then the weather or nature developing that attack with rank upon rank followed by the way the soldiers try to escape that attack by retreating into their memories of home but finding actually that when they do that they discover that the reasons for the war were wrong and that there is no justification for it and the final lines which suggests that their selves have been destroyed their identities have already been destroyed by war because they are no longer able to feel empathy or emotion for their fellow men and now we need to talk about the form of the poem and as you remember I asked you to write about that first because writing about form immediately makes the examiner anchor their expectations that you're going to be a grade 7 or above so here we have a great tension in the form every stanza is written in five lines and the five lines are approximately the same length with this short final line on each one these if you like suggest that the poet is in control but then we've seen the tension where that control isn't realized in the rhyming so those half rhymes appear all the way through and also these short final lines of each stanza don't rhyme with what's gone before or with each other the repetition of but nothing happens as a kind of refrain throughout the poem marks it out as a political message we know this must be his main point because he keeps repeating it and therefore we ask what does he want to happen well he obviously wants the end of the war so the form of the poem here conveys to us the poet's purpose he wants the reader to be appalled at the conditions that the soldiers are fighting in and also want to campaign for an end to that war now the poet probably can't expect that to happen and on a practical level it may well be written just to get the members of the public at home and indeed the army to equip the soldiers with better clothing so that they don't freeze to death I know that sounds like a quite mundane sort of thing to request in an anti-war poem but actually if you are out battling these conditions yourself in the First World War that wouldn't seem like a mundane point it would seem like a difference between life and death you actually want warm clothing to keep you from being killed by winter so the poet's purpose doesn't have to be some massive grand gesture which is going to end all wars it can be a very practical one of needing delivery of clothing that's actually going to keep them alive and this is a thing that we see even in modern warfare so if the you think of the wars that we fought recently so this is from the independent in 2002 Army's equipment exposed as unfit to fight desert war there's a whole list of equipment that actually led to soldiers being killed because in work properly and included in that still is the wrong sort of solemn clothing giving to the soldiers now the reason I've shown you that is to enforce the fact that writing about the clothing is not a mundane thing it literally was a way of preserving life if you could get the right clothing to survive these bitter winters and that's important to realize that he's not using hyperbole which means over exaggeration he's not using over exaggeration hyperbole when he's talking about the wind nything us and killing us it literally did happen so hopefully you will be well armed forgive the pun well armed to tackle this exam now and get grade 7 or above don't forget to subscribe if you want more give me some comments if these kinds of videos are really helping you I know lots of you have been asking me to do them on all the poems and I will do so before the exam see you soon on my channel