FUTILITY

The loss of innocence

Owen, a young soldier himself, was very aware of the navet evinced by many of the
soldiers who enlisted. They were not prepared for what they would experience and
hardly knew how to grapple with the carnage and absurdity of war. These boys were
turned into men far earlier than they should have been. Several of Owen's poems allude
to the loss of innocence that is a concomitant of war. The soldiers enlist for superficial
reasons and dream only of glory; they fret about their lack of appeal to women once
they've returned home missing a limb; they marvel over the sleekness of weapons and
do not fathom their destructive power. Owen captures this tragedy of war - the march
of old men sending young men off to kill and die.
Brotherhood and friendship
Several of Owen's poems depict the deep bonds of friendship and understanding that
develop between soldiers. Shorn of their familial connections, these young men have
only each other to rely on. This brotherly love is even more powerful than erotic love,
Owen suggests. Roses and red lips and soft voices are no match for the coarse sounds
and images of war, for those sounds are more authentic, constituting the brutal context
in which soldiers develop camaraderie. Friendship is one of the few things these
soldiers have to live for, and Owen ably conveys its significance.
The horrors of war
Owen does not shy away from depicting the horrors of war. He makes his reader
confront the atrocities on the battlefield and the indignities of life back home. He
presents readers with soldiers who have lost their limbs and been victims of poison
gas; young men mourning their dead comrades; ghastly battlefield dreamscapes; a
cacophony of sounds terrifying in their unceasing monotony; and Nature's wrath. He
shows how the war affects the young men who fight both physically and
psychologically. The men who survive become inured to brutality. There is little to no
glory and heroism, just scared or desensitized young men fighting for a cause they do
not quite understand.
Disillusionment with religion
Owen was certainly a Christian, but he expressed profound disillusionment with
organized religion in his letters and poems. He disliked the close connection between
church and state and how the church was complicit in stoking the fires of war. He saw
the rituals of the church as being cold comfort to the boys on the battlefield or the
people who loved them back at home. Churches and statues of saints lost their potency
amidst the incomprehensible atrocities of war. Owen was not advocating atheism at all,
but he knew that faith had to be more personal and authentic than that dictated by the
church fathers who were also involved in war machinations.
Nature
Nature is a strong theme in several of Owen's poems. Nature can be peaceful, calm,
and supportive, comforting the men as they rest and revive. The sun, as a symbol of
Nature herself, is viewed as a life-giving force that sustains men. However, Owen is
convinced that war is a violation of Nature in its fury, carnage, and disruption of the
innate cycle of life and death. Thus, when fighting breaks out, Nature also reflects the
turmoil. In "Spring Offensive", most memorably, when the fighting begins, "the whole
sky burned / With fury against them". Nature can no longer save the men.
The irrationality of war
Throughout Owen's poems the theme of the irrationality of the war is woven. The
soldiers do not seem to know what they are fighting for, possessing no lofty goals and
expressing no sentiment regarding why they are there. The rulers of Europe, as

evinced by Abram in "Parable of the Old Man and the Young", seem concerned with
their nation's pride above all else. The battles depicted in the poems are unconnected
to each other, existing in a vacuum with seemingly no larger purpose. The horrors of
war are not explained away or justified by a noble cause. Owen's view that the war is
absurd and incomprehensible is quite manifest.

Emotion and feeling

No doubt drawing from personal experience, Owen is very sympathetic to the ways in
which soldiers attempted to make sense of their peculiar and terrible situation on the
front and back at home. He understands that many want to deaden and dull themselves
to their thoughts and feelings in order to stave off the anguish over what they have
done and seen. They are drained of vitality, able to laugh in the face of death. Owen
wrestles with his thoughts on this, for while he understands this psychological
response, he does not necessarily think excising all emotion is good, for it severs one's
connection to humanity. A man must still be part of the fabric of life, no matter how
difficult it may be.

----Many of Owen's poems deal with Nature in some fashion. Here, the

speaker of the poem has laid his dead friend in the sun, hoping its vibrant
rays will revive him. It is a childish longing, but he ruminates on how this
powerful life force "wakes the seeds" and the "clays of a cold star" - i.e., the
dead man. He thinks about the majesty of every human being with their
"limbs so dear-achieved" and thinks how absurd it is that life can be snuffed
out so easily and so quickly. At the end of the poem his cry becomes
anguished as he wonders why the sun even bothered to wake earth at all an expression of the poem's title, "Futility". There seems to be no meaning
in life in the face of such irrational death. Nature cannot nor will not
intervene, as war is a violation of her tenets.

Speaker in "Futility"
This soldier wonders why the warm sun will not revive his dead comrade,
and tries to reconcile Nature's life-giving force with the brutality of war and
the multitude of dead young men.

Futility
The front line on a bright winter morning. A soldier has recently died though we
don't know precisely how or when. Owen appears to have known him and
something of his background and he ponders nature's power to create life,
setting it against the futility of extinction.

Only five of his poems were published in Wilfred Owen's lifetime. FUTILITY was
one of them. It appeared, together with HOSPITAL BARGE, in "The Nation" on
15th June 1918, shortly after being written - at Ripon probably - although
Scarborough is a possibility. At about this time Owen categorised his poems,
FUTILITY coming under the heading "Grief".
It takes the form of a short elegiac lyric the length of a sonnet though not
structured as one, being divided into seven-line stanzas. Owen uses the sun as
a metaphorical framework on which to hang his thoughts.
The sun wakes us (lines 2 & 4), stimulates us to activity (3), holds the key of
knowledge (7), gives life to the soil (8), gave life from the beginning, yet (13) in
the end the "fatuous" sunbeams are powerless.
"Move him into the sun". "Move" is an inexact word yet we feel the movement
has to be gentle, just as the command has been quietly spoken. (What a
contrast with the body "flung" into the wagon in DULCE ET DECORUM EST.) Of
course, we may have been influenced by "gently" in line 2 which reinforces the
previous impression, while "touch" again not quite an exact word, is surely
light, reverent even.
A similar tone characterises line 3 with "whispering", so soft a sound. "Fields
half-sown" ("unknown" in an earlier version) has its literal sense of work on the
farm that this man will never now complete, and a metaphorical one as well,
suggesting the wider tragedy of life left unfulfilled.
"Even in France" (line 4). No fields here to speak of, no seeds to grow on ground
devastated by war. Does the mention of snow startle? Sun, sowing, may have
put a different picture in our minds.
Line 7 "kind old sun" again suggests the softer emotions, "old" being literally
true of the sun but again, as used here, a term of affection.
Stanza 1, then, seems tender, almost unchallenging. Stanza 2 is very different.
"Awoke", "woke", "rouse". This poem is about their opposite. In stanza 2 Owen
invites us to share his thoughts, and soon a note of bewilderment is struck that
becomes near despair. The questions he asks, prompted by the sight of his
dead comrade, seem direct and rhetorical at the same time. So much has gone

into the making of a man ("so dear achieved"), how can the sun that has done
all this in the end do so little? Line 12's "Was it for this the clay grew tall?" has
life, in man, reaching its peak merely to come to nothing, and the poem ends,
fittingly, in ambiguity:
- O what made fatuous sunbeams toil
To break earth's peace at all?
Why ever did the sun do anything so fatuous is one question, while another is what was the cause of the sun behaving in this way? Depending whether the
stress falls on "what" or "made" in line 13. A clever end to Owen's set of
imponderables.
Notice the simplicity of the diction which together with the use of so many
words of one syllable accords with the elegiac, deeply felt mood. Owen is
careful, however, to avoid smoothness. The first and last lines of each stanza
are shorter than the rest. Some lines begin with the stress on the first syllable
(trochee), some on the second (iamb). He makes much use of his favourite
pararhyme (half rhyme): sun-sown, once-France, seeds-sides, star-stir, tall-toil,
snow-now; which also helps to disturb the natural rhythm.
The problem Owen faces in FUTILITY is how to reconcile the miracle of
creation with the evil of that creation laid waste, which intimates futility in two
senses, first the futility behind the paradox of life made death, and second the
futility of trying to find an answer. Where Owen stood at that time in relation to
his practice as a Christian is impossible for us to know. At least the bitterness
of ANTHEM FOR DOOMED YOUTH and DULCE ET DECORUM EST, in FUTILITY
gives place to the pity that characterises his finest work, and manages, I think,
to transcend the pessimism and the bleakness.
ANTHEM FOR DOOMED YOUTH, Wilfred Owen
1.WAR POETRY
The First World War was a military conflict which took place mostly in
Europe from 1914 to 1918. It is clear that it left millions dead and shaped the
modern world.

There were two powers: the Allied Powers, led by France, Russia, the British
Empire, and later, Italy and the United States, and the Central Powers, led by
Austria-Hungary, Germany, and the Ottoman Empire.
World War I created a decisive break with the old world order that had emerged
after the Napoleonic Wars, which was modified by the mid-19th centurys
nationalistic revolutions. The outcomes of World War I would be important
factors in the development of World War II 21 years later.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_World_War)
After World War I, a big amount of poets started to write about it. Those
poets were called war poets, more of whom had been soldiers. So, they
wrote about their experiences of the war.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_poets)
There was probably at least as much poetry written on the German side
of the Western Front, but it was in English poetry in which the war poem
became an established genre which was highly popular among the population.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_poets)
One of the most important war poets was Wilfred Owen, together with his
friend Siegfried Sassoon. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_poets)
So, the First World War produced some of the most gifted and progressive
authors, poets and artist of a generation, each channelling their individual and
collective experiences into their chosen art form.
(http://www.bbc.co.uk/religion/remembrance/poetry/wwone.shtml)
2.WILFRED OWEN
Wilfred Edward Salter Owen was born the 18th of March 1983 at Plas
Wilmot, in Shropshire, of mixed English and Welsh ancestry. After the dead of
his grandfather, the family was forced to move to lodgings in the back streets
of Birkenhead. He was educated at the Birkenhead Institute and at Shrewsbury
Technical School. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilfred_owen)
From the age of nineteen Owen wanted to be a poet and immersed
himself in poetry, being especially impressed by Keats and Shelley. But he
wrote almost no poetry of importance until he saw action in France in 1917.
(http://www.warpoetry.co.uk/owena.htm)
On 21st of October 1915 he enlisted in the Artists Rifles. He was in
training at Hare Hall Camp in Essex during the next seven months. In January
1971 he was commissioned as a second lieutenant with The Manchester
Regimen. After some traumatic experiences, which included leading his platoon
into battle and getting trapped for three days in shell-hole, Owen was
diagnosed as suffering from shell shock and sent to Craiglockhart War Hospital
in Edinburgh for treatment. It was there where he met his friend Siegfried
Sassoon. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilfred_owen)
In July of 1918, Owen returned to active service in France, although he
might have stayed on home-duty indefinitely. His decision was almost wholly

the result of Sassoons being sent back to England. Sassoon was violently
opposed to the idea of Owen returning to the trenches. Aware of his attitude,
Owen did not inform him of his action until he was once again in
France. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilfred_owen)
Seven days later the war was over Owens parents, Susan and Tom, received
the telegram announcing their sons death as the chuch bells were ringing out
in celebration. (http://www.warpoetry.co.uk/owena.htm)
As part of his therapy at the hospital, his doctor encouraged him to
translate his experiences into poetry. Owens most famous poems are Dulce et
Decorum Est and Anthem for Doomed Youth.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilfred_owen)

3. ANTHEM FOR THE DOOMED YOUTH

What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?
--Only the monstrous anger of the guns.
Only the stuttering rifles' rapid rattle
Can patter out their hasty orisons.
No mockeries for them from prayers or bells,
Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs,The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells;
And bugles calling for them from sad shires.
What candles may be held to speed them all?
Not in the hands of boys, but in their eyes
Shall shine the holy glimmers of goodbyes.
The pallor of girls' brows shall be their pall;
Their flowers the tenderness of silent minds,
And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds.
By: Wilfred Owen (1893-1918)
BIBLIOGRAPHY: (http://www.angelfire.com/wa/warpoetry/Anthem.html)
4. ANALYSIS OF THE POEM: Anthem for Doomed Youth

Wilfred Owen only published six poem during his life, three of them in
Hydra, the hospital magazine he edited. So, his reputation grew rapidly after
his death, when his friend Sassoon collected and edited his Poems in 1920.
Among the best known are Dulce et Decorum Est and Anthem for Doomed
Youth.
(http://www.arlindo-correia.com/021100.html)

Known for his abrasive and heart-wrenching depictions of war, Wilfred

Owen is known for going right to the heart of the reader through his poetry to
evoke his or her raw emotions. In the poem, Anthem for Doomed Youth, he
once again finds the shortest and most abrupt descriptions he possibly can to
describe soldiers being slaughtered on the
battlefield. (http://www.warpoetry.co.uk.owena.htm).
He is not only describing his die, but also how they die: with indifference
among them. There is no emotion for each man, whose death will also mean
little until their bodies are taken home to be laid to rest among their families.
Related to the structure of the poem, we can say that this poem is a
variation of the Elizabethan sonnet. Owen has divided the fourteen lines of this
sonnet into two stanzas, the break coming at the end of the line 8. As is the
case with the Elizabethan sonnets, this poem has ten syllables of iambic
pentameters, because there are five feet, and each foot contains a short
syllable followed by a long one.
The rhyme scheme is ABAB CDCD EFFE /GG, which differs slightly from the
classical Elizabethan sonnets, whose rhyme scheme is ABAB CDCD EFEF / GG.
(http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soneto#El_soneto_en_lengua_inglesa).
By using a sonnet for the structure of his poem, Wilfred Owen introduces
a touch of irony, because the conventional function of the sonnet is love, and
this poem is sort of anti-love, I mean, the young soldiers have to spend their
time in the trenches. So, their lives are wasted and, overall, the lives of their
loved ones at home are also ruined. (http://www.191418.co.uk/owen/anthem.htm)
Talking about the tone, we must say that the poet depicts a strong anger
at the futility of war, because he is an anti-war poet.
If we read the poem, we can observe that in the first octet Owen makes a
catalogue of the sound of war, the weapons of destructions such as guns
(line 2), rifles (line 3) and shells (line 7), which are linked to religious
imagery such as orisons (line 4), bells (line 5), prayers (line 5). In contrast,
in the second stanza the poem talks about the other side of a war: the families
of those who die in the war.
As we have said before, Wilfred Owen is an anti-war poet, since he is
suffering from being in the first line of the trenches. So, his aim is to show
through the use of shock images how inhuman war is.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilfred_owen)
We can see these grotesque images, for example, in the first line, when he
makes a simile showing how the soldiers are no more important than cattle
which are lead to the slaughter without felling (What passing-bells for these
who die as cattle?).
Throughout the poem, Wilfred Owen uses a lot of comparisons, one of
these is the simile between a typical funeral in a church and what would

happen to a soldier killed in battle (http://www.warpoetry.co.uk.owena.htm). For

example, he compares the church bells with the noise of a gun-fire; the prayers
with the rapid rifle fire; the choirs with the wailing of shells; the candles head
by altar boys with the lights of the sky reflected in the dead eyes of the
soldiers
Related to the title, Anthem for Doomed Youth, we have to say that it is
definitely ironic on using the juxtaposition of anthem, which is associated
with praise and triumph, with doomed, which means certain demise.
In my opinion, through doing this, Owen shocks the reader and introduces them
into the theme of the poem, the death of soldiers, and gets the audience to
question themselves the war. Moreover, I think that the word youth
accentuates his message of the wrong of the war.
Wilfred Owen uses various literary devices through this poem. Firstly, the
title itself has a significant use of assonance: doomed youth. In my opinion,
the sound is intended to be long and melancholic. Secondly, repetition is used
in the poem to make it seem monotonous. Finally, by using personification,
Owen makes the enemies guns seem evil and monstrous. I think that this can
cause us to feel some of the emotions felt in the trenches.
Related to the final couplet, its syntax implies that this drawing-down of
blinds (line 14), along with the tenderness of patient minds (line 13) stands
in place of the flowers that would adorn a funeral or a grave, and flowers, like
blinds, close as night falls. This silent grieving stands in stark contrast with the
noise and violence of the battlefield not only in mood but also in meaning:
instead of representing a poor parody of the rites of burial, this grieving
transcends more outward observance, replacing ritual with a deeply felt and
lasting interior observance.

5. CONCLUSION
After World War I, a big amount of poets started to write about it. Those
poets were called war poets, more of whom had been soldiers. So, they
wrote about their experiences of the war.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_poets)
One of the most important war poets was Wilfred Owen, whose most important
poems are Dulce et Decorum est and Anthem for Doomed Youth. Wilfred
Owen was an anti-war poet, since he had been suffering from being in the first
lines of the trenches. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_poets)
So, in the poem Anthem for Doomed Youth, Wilfred Owen asks what burial
rites will be offered for the soldiers who die on the battlefields of World War I
and argues that in place of normal funeral, these men will receive, initially, a

parody of funeral rites, encated by noise of guns, and later the more authentic
rites of mourning supplied by the enduring grief of a family and friends at home.
To end this essay about the poem Anthem for Doomed Youth, I want to give
my opinion. I didnt know that poem, and when I found it on the internet I
thought that my essay had to be about it. It is a very beautiful and sentimental
poem. In my opnion Wilfred Owen was one of the doomed youth he speas of in
this poem, because he survived through for years of World War I to be killed
during the last week of the war.
So, I recommend that poem to everyone, because it concentrates very well on
the horror of war and especially in the death of young men on the front line.
Moreover, all that is said through this poem, is true!

Summary
The speaker says there are no bells for those who die "like cattle" all they
get is the "monstrous anger of the guns". They have only the ragged sounds
of the rifle as their prayers. They get no mockeries, no bells, no mourning
voices except for the choir of the crazed "wailing shells" and the sad bugles
calling from their home counties.
There are no candles held by the young men to help their passing, only the
shimmering in their eyes to say goodbye. The pale faces of the girls will be
what cover their coffins, patient minds will act as flowers, and the "slow
dusk" will be the drawing of the shades.
Analysis
This searing poem is one of Owen's most critically acclaimed. It was
written in the fall of 1917 and published posthumously in 1920. It may be a
response to the anonymous preface from Poems of Today(1916), which
proclaims that boys and girls should know about the poetry of their time,
which has many different themes that "mingle and interpenetrate
throughout, to the music of Pan's flute, and of Love's viol, and the bugle-call
of Endeavor, and the passing-bells of death."
The poem owes its more mature imagery and message to Owen's
introduction to another WWI poet, Siegfried Sassoon, while he was
convalescing in Edinburgh's Craiglockhart Hospital in August 1917. Sassoon
was older and more cynical, and the meeting was a significant turning point
for Owen. The poem is structured as a Petrarchan sonnet with a

Shakespearean rhyme scheme and is an elegy or lament for the dead.

Owen's meter is mostly iambic pentameter with some small derivations that
keep the reader on his or her toes as they read. The meter reinforces the
juxtapositions in the poem and the sense of instability caused by war and
death.
Owen begins with a bitter tone as he asks rhetorically what "passing-bells"
of mourning will sound for those soldiers who die like cattle in an
undignified mass. They are not granted the rituals and rites of good
Christian civilians back home. They do not get real prayers, only rifle fire.
Their only "choirs" are of shells and bugles. This first set of imagery is
violent, featuring weapons and harsh noises of war. It is set in contrast to
images of the church; Owen is suggesting organized religion cannot offer
much consolation to those dying on the front. Kenneth Simcox writes,
"These religious images...symbolize the sanctity of life and death while
suggesting also the inadequacy, the futility, even meaninglessness, of
organized religion measured against such a cataclysm as war. To 'patter
out' is to intone mindlessly, an irrelevance. 'Hasty' orisons are an
irreverence. Prayers, bells, mockeries only."
In the second stanza the poem slows down and becomes more dolorous,
less enraged. The poet muses that the young men will not have candles
the only light they will get will be the reflections in their fellow soldiers'
eyes. They must have substitutions for their coffin covers ("palls"), their
flowers, and their "slow dusk". The poem has a note of finality, of lingering
sadness and an inability to avoid the reality of death and grief.
Anthem for Doomed Youth: Wilfred Owen - Summary and Critical Analysis
Anthem for Doomed Youth, as the title suggests, is a poem about the waste of
many young men in the First World War. The word anthem in the title, unlike a
national anthem that glorifies a country, is ironical, for there is just the
opposite of glory in the absurd death of younger people shooting each other for
nothing. The youth in the poem is doomed less by other (which the poem
doesnt mention) than by his own decision to join the battle.The poem reminds
us of the sonnet that Mr. Brooke wrote to glorify war and England in that
jingoistic manner; Owen has used the same sonnet form (that was originally
used to express love) to demystify the conventional glorification of war, by
exposing the meanness and absurdity of dying in the battle. The poem is
written in the form of a sonnet. The poem as a whole is about how to conduct
the funeral of a certain (or any) soldier who has died in war.

The first eight line stanza (octet) describes how the guns and rifles, bursting
bombs and the bugles will take the place of church bells, choirs of religious
hymns, prayers, voices of people mourning and wailing, and the calling from
the sad countryside. In the second six line stanza (sestet), he replaces more
conventional objects and activities in mourning and funeral by more abstract
and symbolic things back at home. The first stanza is full of images of war that
will do the mourning, so that no human sympathy and ritual is necessary,
because this is not natural and meaningful death. The second stanza is more
devastating in its irony.
The octave begins with a rhetorical question. What passing-bells for these
who died as cattle? The soldiers die like cows; their death doesnt evoke much
sorrow. The persona is not actually so apathetic; the viewpoint is ironic that of
the indiffere4nt people who stay in the protection of home and never know that
war is horrible and disgusting. The rhetorical assertion that no bells may be
rung in the name of these soldiers is not so much about the manner of their
dying but the little value that the society attaches to their death. So at the
deeper level, the poem also reads like a direct invective scorn expressed by
someone exasperated by war and senseless killing of the young. If a man dies,
the bell is rung at the church but when the cattle die, we dont ring the bell in
the church. When a soldier dies, in situations like the World Wars, there is no
much value attached to the death of mere soldiers.
By using the fixed form of the sonnet, Owen gains compression and a close
interweaving of symbols. The structure depends, not only on the sonnet form
but also on a pattern of echoing sounds from the very first line to the last, and
upon Owens careful organization of groups of symbols and of two contrasting
themes in the octave the mockery of doomed youth, and in the sestet the
silent personal grief which is the acceptable response to immense tragedy. The
symbols in the octave suggest cacophony and the visual images in the sestet
suggest silence. The poem is unified throughout by a complex pattern of
alliteration and assonance. Deposited its complex structure, this sonnet
achieves an effect of impressive simplicity in theme.
Irony is another important device in this poem. It is a terrible irony that men
are dying as cattle. It is ironical that sympathy seems to have dried up, and
men are patient about the death of the thousands of soldiers. Amidst these
terrible ironies, the poet suggests ironically how we, as typical war lovers,
conduct the funeral. Since the soldier loves to glorify the gun, it is perhaps his
wish that the beloved guns sing the hymns after his death. The church is not as
important as the bombs that will do the prayers. The second stanza is even
more devastating in its irony. The poet has replaced not only the normal
religious rituals; he has also supplied new materials for the funeral program.
These metaphorical symbolic materials like the sad voice, the mourning, the
pale expressions, patient minds and brightness of the eyes will no longer come
to use, because they had been used to conduct the funeral of the soldier the

very day he had decided to leave normal life and chosen to go to the battlefield
and die! When the poet remembers today, he feels that the shining in the eyes
or sad girls who said goodbye to the foolish soldiers was the funeral candle for
them that very day! This idea of leaving funeral is certainly exaggerated, but it
is also very true because the decision to go to kill your brothers is well high a
departure for death. So the poet says that the funeral in human terms had been
done and therefore it is no longer necessary now. Their death was a foregone
conclusion, nothing shocking; that is why the people are patient. What is left
now is for the guns and bombs to perform (or celebrate) the funeral of the
soldiers who die as cattle.
The poem is remarkable for its sound symbolism. The sounds of the guns and
rifles are echoed by the words like monstrous, anger, stuttering, rifle, rapid,
rattle, patter hasty orisons, demented, and the like, all of which contain sounds
like /r/ /d/ /t/, etc. The alliteration imitates the sound of the bullets blowing in
the battlefield. In the sestet there is no sound of war but a vast funeral service
for the dead soldiers. The poet asserts that there is no need for candles. The
candles are replaced by the glimmering tears in the eyes of beloveds. Their
glimmering tears become the candles for the funeral services. The flowers
come from the tenderness of patient minds. A drawing of curtain symbolizes
the darkness or the passing of the sun. The sestet concerns with different
insight. It pictures the melancholy state of the mind of the beloved who thinks
of her dead lover. She sees her fate caste with darkness.