Comparison of Anthem for Doomed Youth and An Irish Airman Foresees His

Comparison of Anthem for Doomed Youth and An Irish Airman Foresees His Death William Butler Yeats has written many pieces of literature, mainly about Ireland as that is his passion and cause of writing. However his poem â€Å"An Irish Airman Foresees His Death† is not solely about Ireland and even though it includes that theme it is rather a criticism of apathetic people who have no reason for going to war. The form of Yeats’ poem is very structured and regular. The rhyme scheme is ABAB the whole way through the poem and has an unstressed, stressed beat every time. The poem is made up of one sixteen-lined stanza and has a straight forward structure. Yeats has used this format for emphasis to get his point across. He has made the poem using paired lines which balance with one another neutralising any feeling that there may have been. Yeats has also made the layout of the poem very simple and uncomplicated to make Robert Gregory’s reason for going to war stand out which is also simple and uncomplicated-He just wants to fly a plane. Wilfred Owen’s poem was influenced by another war poet Siegfried Sassoon. Their conversations about the horrors of war together provided the framework to many of the poems that Owen wrote. As a soldier at war, Owen was affected by the traumatising horrors of the trenches that he saw while he was out there. He was so badly affected that he was diagnosed with shell shock and sent to hospital in Edinburgh. These horrific scenes caused Owen to write such gruesome yet realistic compositions. Like Yeats’ poem, â€Å"Anthem for doomed youth† is also a criticism only this time it is a criticism of how the young soldiers who die at war do not get the recognition or heroic funeral that they so... ... a more realistic tone. Like Yeats, Owen uses rhyme, rhythm and imagery only he makes his more varied, frequent and complexed. To do this, Owen has used an assortment of literary devices such as metaphors, similes, personification, onomatopoeia and alliteration. This helps Owen to elaborate his poem in more serious, gruesome detail which he often does, even in other literature and a good example of this would be another poem called â€Å"Dulce et docormest.† He has seen the horror and futility of war first hand and this is reflected through his use of emotive language. The two poems are diverse to one another as Owen uses numerous amounts of imagery and has a lack of structure which results in an abundance of emotion where as Yeats is the complete opposite and comprehends constant structure and image deficiency which consequently leads to a lack of emotion.