"Anthem for Doomed Youth is a well-known popular poem written by Wilfred Owen which incorporates the themes of the horror of war. It employs the traditional form of a petrarchan sonnet, but it uses the rhyme scheme of an English sonnet. Much of the second half of the poem is dedicated to funeral rituals suffered by the families deeply affected by World War I. The poem does this by following the sorrow of common soldiers in one of the bloodiest battles of the 20th century." Written between September and October 1917, when Owen was a patient at Craiglockhart War Hospital in Edinburgh recovering from shell shock, the poem is a lament for young soldiers whose lives were unnecessarily lost in the First World War. While at hospital, Owen met and became close friends with another poet, Siegfried Sassoon. "Owen asked for his assistance in refining his poems rough drafts. It was Sassoon who named the start of the poem "anthem", and who also substituted "doomed" for "dead"; the famous epithet of "patient minds" is also a correction of him."

Related to the title, “Anthem for Doomed Youth”, we have to say that it is ironic on using the juxtaposition of “anthem”, which is associated with praise and triumph, with “doomed”, which means certain demise.

Owen wrote the poem from the perspective of a soldier on a battlefield. In the first eight lines (octet), the soldier asks and answers a question. We can notice that the answer appears in the present tense and focuses almost exclusively on the sounds of war. "Phrases with onomatopoeia—stuttering rifles, rapid rattle, patter out, and wailing shells—imitate the sounds on the field."

Throughout the poem, Owen uses alliteration to promote rhythm and euphony, as in rifles' rapid rattle and glimmers of good-byes.

In the octet, two personifications call attention to the terrifying rage and insanity of war: monstrous anger of the guns (comparison of guns to angry humans) and demented choirs of wailing shells (comparison of the shells to deranged humans).

"In the sestet, three metaphors center on the suffering of the mourners at home. One compares the holy glimmers in the eyes of boys to candles, and another compares the pallor of the girls' brows to the pall that covers the casket. In the third, the tenderness of patient minds becomes the flowers that adorn the soldiers' graves."

In my opinion, through doing this, Owen shocks the reader and introduces him into the theme of the poem, the death of soldiers, and gets the audience to question himself about the war. Moreover, I think that the word “youth” accentuates the "innocence" of the soldiers, and his message of the wrong of the war.