The poem’s speaker makes a desperate attempt to end the abhorrence of war by telling the truth about it. Many anti-war poets during World War I hoped that if people knew what modern warfare was really like, they would turn away from war and stop supporting it. They thus countered the heroic myths of contemporary poets such as Rupert Brooke, whose poem “The Soldier” sentimentalizes death in war by stating that after he dies in battle, the patriotic soldier-speaker will be “at peace,” resting serenely “under an English heaven.”

In contrast, poets like Owen and his mentor, the English writer Siegfried Sassoon, made it their poetic mission to tell the truth about the particular inhumanity of modern warfare, in which technologies such as nerve gas could be used to brutally kill and wound many men at once. As Owen notes in another poem, called “Anthem for Doomed Youth,” there is no real glory for men “who die as cattle”: as collateral sacrificed on the altar of the nation. The only “passing-bells” these soldiers can expect to mark their deaths are the guns, shells, and bugles of war.

Owen was killed in battle in 1918, very shortly before the war ended. He was just twenty-five at his death. The bulk of his poems did not appear until after his death and the end of World War I, but nevertheless, they convey a stark, powerful message about war’s futility and horror.