In "Anthem for Doomed Youth" Owen compares the trappings of a normal funeral, a dignified, ceremonial commemoration of death, with the horrific reality of violent death on the battlefield. Out there in the corpse-strewn no-man's-land, where carnage and slaughter is the order of the day, there are no flowers, candles, or prayers, as there would be at a church funeral, but only the call of the bugle, the "rapid rattle" of stuttering rifles, and the "shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells".

Right throughout the poem, Owen makes a sharp distinction between the peace and calm associated with traditional funeral practices and the noise and clamor of war. In doing so, he draws attention to a side of war that most people would rather not see.

Such an unblinking approach to the horrors of war was felt by many of Owen's contemporaries to be decidedly unpatriotic. They believed that only the heroism of war should be immortalized in verse, not the blood, mud, and bullets. But for Owen, the deaths of so many young men at the front do not constitute a noble sacrifice, but little more than mindless slaughter, the kind that can never be ennobled by a dignified send off in a quiet country church.