Point of View

Though the poem as a whole represents a first-person perspective, that of Wilfred Owen himself, the point of view of each stanza shifts to emphasize different aspects of war. The opening stanza, an eight-line octet, features a first-person plural perspective in phrases like “we cursed through sludge” (2) and “towards our distant rest began to trudge” (4). By opening the poem in this way, Owen emphasizes the solidarity of the soldiers, who move together through an unwelcoming environment. But this first-person plural point of view only lasts through the first four lines, or quatrain, of the octet. The second quatrain shifts abruptly to a third-person plural point of view, where “Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots” (5) and “All went lame; all blind” (6). The curious absence of first-person plural pronouns here suggests a dissociation of the speaker from the experience, right as the gas-shells dropped. The...