Anthem for Doomed Youth

Tone
The tone of the poem is quite oratorical as you can almost imagine someone
reciting the poem before an audience: the words are uttered with deep
feeling and left to ring in pregnant pauses (especially where the rhetorical
questions are used) while the audience is moved to a reflective silence about
inhumanity of war and the need to commemorate the lost soldiers. The tone
also expresses anger while at the same time creating a pervading sense of
melancholy, thus mirroring how inescapable grief and bereavement can feel.
In the first stanza for example, the tone is satirical; the soldiers fight and die
without receiving the proper religious commemoration for their sacrifice, their
deaths marked by gunfire instead of bells, and the burial rites of the Church are
described as “mockeries.”
The octet portrays a melancholic tone of anger and the demeaning nature of
war through Personification of weapons and the assigned animal
characteristics to the soldiers. This creates irony as inanimate objects are
given more human respect than the humans themselves.
The sestet that follows presents a similar tone as the octet to help maintain the
empathy created within the reader. The synecdoche in particular aids in
accentuating the depressing tone “pallor of girls brows shall be their pall” (pall
refers to coffin cloth )