In the poems "Soldier", and "Anthem for Doomed Youth", what are the tensions that lie between the dream of battle and reality?

The poets portray the feelings about war in a plurality of ways in the poems “The Soldier” and “The Anthem of Doomed Youth”, both poets employ the use of linguistic techniques, structure and reoccurring motifs and themes to convey that families grieved and suffered because of death in war and how they came to terms with it. Wilfred Owen and Rupert Brooke differ in many ways with what they feels about war: Owen thinks it is a melancholy and terrible place although Brooke thought it was wonderful and honourable to fight in the war for England, Though he never fought himself but died on the way the Battle of Gallipoli.

‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’, a wartime Sonnet by Wilfred Owen The poem uses many techniques to convey its meaning. By our understanding of the use of these techniques, the poem becomes easier to understand and at the same time, more is revealed to us. Wilfred Owen was a soldier during WW1 and therefore gives us a firsthand experience of war. He was against war and was appalled by the effects of war on people and their families.                                      .     
By using a sonnet for the structure of his poem, Wilfred Owen introduces a touch of irony. The conventional function for a sonnet is love, but this poem has a sort of anti-love, or rather, a love that turns bad. The young male population have so much patriotic love, and are so eager to serve, but this love turns sour. They spend time rotting in the wastes of the trenches, only to be mown down in the blink of an eye by a machine-gun. Not only are their lives wasted, gone without the holy rite of a funeral, but the lives of their loved ones at home are also ruined.

The technique of comparison is used a lot in this poem. Owen explores the monstrosity of war in various examples of comparison. The boys 'die as cattle, ' this conveys the idea that the young men going to war is the same as cattle going to a slaughter house to be killed - with no real purpose but to be mindlessly massacred. Through personification, the guns responsible for taking so much human life are made out to be monstrous, even evil. The poem also links their deaths to a funeral between ones held by the church and ones on the battle field, but one where the bells are shots from machine guns, and the mourning choirs are the army's bugles.  The drawing down of the blinds, the traditional sign to show that the family is in mourning, has been compared to the drawing of a sheet to cover the dead. 

Through various literary techniques, Wilfred Owen enhances the meaning of the poem. The title itself has significant use of assonance, 'Doomed Youth.' The sound is intended to be drawn out, long and melancholy, as melancholy as the subject of war itself. Onomatopoeia is used to make the sounds real: as if we were really there. We hear the 'stuttering rifles' and the 'patter out their hasty orisons.' Repetition and alliteration have also been used to make the poem reflect the ordeal that the soldiers had to face: monotonous boredom in the terrible conditions, then their death, inevitable from the start, will come.

The poet structures the poem in a fascinating way. The poem is split into two parts, one part contains eight lines and the second part contains six lines. In the octet a question is asked in the first line and answered in the remaining seven lines. The poet also uses the same techniquthe sestet from the octet by a question. “