David’s class is studying The Poems of Wilfred Owen (Wordsworth edition) as one of its A2 exam texts. His teacher has set an essay question that requires him to compare Owen’s famous sonnet ‘1914’ with another Owen sonnet of his own choice. The essay title is ‘Commenting closely on feature and effect, compare the power of “1914” with your favourite of Owen’s minor sonnets’. David received a grade ‘D’ for this essay from his teacher. Where is he going wrong?
David has chosen to compare Owen’s sonnet ‘On My Songs’ with ‘1914’. This is a good poem to contrast with ‘1914’. ‘On My Songs’ is a deeply personal sonnet in which Owen meditates on his own place in poetic history and his relationship to past poets. Fittingly, it uses traditional, even archaic, poetic language. It is likely that it was written in January 1913, a crucial turning point in Owen’s career as a poet. ‘1914’, probably Owen’s first poem about the war, was written in December 1914, perhaps in response to the German shelling of Scarborough that month which left 16 dead and 443 wounded. ‘1914’ is a public, civic poem which uses violent, cataclysmic imagery. ‘On My Songs’ adopts a more personal and plangent register. Yet both sonnets share a sense of foreboding, of imminent apocalypse.
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