Wilfred Owen, "Strange Meeting"
1. What is unusual about the poem's subject? How does it differ from other war poems you have read?
2. Where does the poem take place? How does the setting affect its tone and meaning?
3. What is gained by casting this subject as a dramatic encounter?
4. What are some ways language and imagery are used to intensify the poem's emotion? What are some sound effects?
5. Does this poem evoke elements of an earlier elegiac/romantic tradition, and if so, with what purpose?
6. What do the two men have to say to each other? What had been the ideals, abilities and ambitions of the man the speaker has killed?
7. What does the dead man mean by "the pity of war"? What does he predict for the future of Europe/humankind? What aspects of this prophecised future does he lament?
8. Who has the last word, and why is this important? Why had the dead man not fought to the death? Does this make a correction to the notion of valor in battle?
9. Is the final tone one of forgiveness? Does the poem achieve closure?
10. What features of the poem would you characterize as "modernist"? How does it resemble other poems we have read so far? Other WWI poems?
Wilfred Owen, “Disabled”
What physical details do we learn in the first stanza? What background noises does the veteran hear, and why are they significant?
What is the sequence of the soldier’s thoughts? What had been his life like before his enlistment?
How would you characterize the poem’s formal features? Are they appropriate for the subject matter?
Is the poem a dramatic monologue? If not, how do we experience the speaker’s train of thought?
Why do you think the stanzas are divided by ellipses, rather than, say, numbered?
What are some striking images or descriptions? Why are the incidents in the last two stanzas upsetting to him?
Wilfred Owen, “Mental Cases”
Why does the speaker ask so many questions? Can the reader provide answers?
What would be the effect of removing the title from the poem?
What are the poem's formal features? In place of end rhymes, what sounds and other devices bind the poem together?
Why do you think Owen cose to use three nine-line stanzas? What is the progression from stanza to stanza?
What is the state of the deranged veterans? What physical details are especially disturbing?
What are some examples of unexpected diction?
Are these cases of PTSD? How can you tell? Will they recover?
Who are the “us” and “brother” referred to in the final lines?
Are the last two lines effective, and if so why?
Siegfried Sassoon, "Repression of War Experience"
1. What is the subject of the poem? What is the speaker's state of mind? Does its sequence reflect psychological theories of the day?
2. What are some repeated images and thought associations? What images especially haunt him?
3. What is gained by using the dramatic monologue form?
4. How do the poem's form and stanza divisions reflect its subject?
5. What is the significance of the final line?
Isaac Rosenberg, "Dead Man's Dump"
1. What are some elements of the tone of this poem? Would you describe it as elegiac? How does it differ from a traditional elegy?
2. How does the narrator indicate this point of view?
3. What stanza form is used, and what verbal devices are used to convey emotion?
4. What are some important images? Would you describe this as an "imagist" poem? Can you see parallels with other poems we have read?
5. What is the position of the speaker, and how does this reinforce the poem's authenticity? How does he respond to his grisly mission?
6. How is language used to convey the unnaturalness of the scene? How does the poet use questions? Personification? Authorial intrusion? Do you find the use of the speaker's remarks effective?
7. Does the poem have a progression? What is important or striking about the final scene? What is shocking/surprising about the lines, "We heard his very last sound,/And our wheels grazed his dead face"? (ultimate example of in media res; speaker's cart kills the expiring soldier) Is it an effective ending for the poem?
8. Does this poem provides any form of closure? Any comfort? Would you describe it as an "anti-war poem"?
Rosenberg, "Returning, We Hear the Larks"
What characterizes the poem's form--e. g., the placement of stanzas, the meter, the use of repetitions?
What is the poem's general theme? What is poignant about the men's experience of the song of larks?
What is the significance of the poem's final metaphors?
Rosenberg, "Break of Day in the Trenches"
Why does the poet choose the image of a rat? A poppy?
What is the poem's form? What is the purpose of the shifting line lengths? What seems to take the place of formal rhyme?
What is the poet's final question to the rat? What is ironic about the implied answer? Why are the poppies "in man's veins," and why do they drop? What do you make of the poet's claim in the final line? Is it ironic? Bitter? Ominous?
What is the poem's theme?
Goll, Yvan, Recitativ
What is the poem’s form? What language choices add to its emotion?
How does the poet characterize the war?
What prompts him to call his fellow soldiers heroes? Greek dancers? Is the latter a flattering analogy?
What is notable about the description of a soldier’s killing of his enemy? What purpose is served by the allusion to Christ?
Is Goll’s attitude toward the war similar to or slightly different from that of the British poets we have read?
Rudyard Kipling, Epitaphs of the War, 1914-1918
A Dead Statesman
What claim is made against the departed politician?
What is the poem’s metrical and rhyme scheme? Is it effective?
Why is he among his “angry and defrauded young”? Who are they?
What seems the poem’s dominant tone?
Common Form
Who are the speakers? To what lies may the poet refer?
W. B. Yeats, An Irish Airman Foresees His Death
This poem was written about the son of Yeats’ close friend, Lady Gregory. Anti-war sentiment in Ireland was especially strong during the period directly before the Irish War of Independence (1919-21).
What is this poem’s form? What are its meter and rhyme scheme?
What are the speaker’s allegiances?
To what does the poet attribute the airman’s choice of occupation?
Does the poet romanticize his subject?
How would the poem’s message have changed if the reader was not told that the airman would be killed?
What are the poem’s most memorable qualities?
Madeline Ida Bedford (1885-1956), "The Parson’s Job"
Why do you think the writer chose to present a speaker whose language reveals her working-class status?
What features of the dramatic monologue are exhibited in this poem? What presumably has the auditor said to her that prompts her replies?
What are the poem’s features of rhyme, meter, and stanza form? Do these work to convey the subject matter well?
What is the effect of the speaker’s anger? Why does she express the wish to learn to pray in the final stanza?
Anna Akhmatova (1889-1966), Russian
"July 1914"
What is significant about the title?
What tone is conveyed by the opening images? What prophecies are proclaimed by the one-legged pilgrim, and are they fulfilled?
What comfort does he predict, and does this seem to come to pass within the compass of the poem?
What is the significance of the “warm red rain” which soaks the fields? Of the “empty sky”? Of the final biblical image?
Rene Arcos (1881-1954), French
"The Dead"
How do the poem’s 6 stanzas convey the same theme? What is the progression of thought and image?
Are the poem’s diction, meter, rhyme, and stanza form effective in helping to convey its point? What are some significant repetitions?
What do the “divided sons” manage to do? Are there any echoes of religious language in the final stanzas?
What does Arcos mean by claiming that the war has produced “One combat and one victory”?
Marina Tsvetayeva (1892-1941), Russian
"A White Low Sun"
What images does the poet view in the first two stanzas? Why do you think she presents an old woman chewing a hunk of bread?
What purpose is served by the questions in stanza three? Who and what produces the wail described by the narrator? What occurs in its aftermath, and is this significant?
What are the narrator’s final comments on the situation? What are some possible meanings of the line, “It’s soldiers who sing these days. O Lord God.”
Do you find this an effective poem, and if so, why? How does this modernist imagist poem differ in its form, methods, and effects from earlier, nineteenth-century poems, such as “Goblin Market” or “Jenny”?