Anthem For Doomed Youth 2023
After seven years, I've fulfilled my ambition of rewriting a powerful war poem for the 21st century
Wilfred Owen died on November 4, 1919, at the age of 25. He was among the last of 9.7 million military personnel who lost their lives during World War I – a conflict that, in many ways, is still being fought.
Owen’s war poetry was different from the work of his contemporaries. He raged against the wrongs he saw all around him, rather than glorifying the deaths of nearly 20 million people in total. One of his poems, the short-sharp-shock that is Anthem For Doomed Youth, was written in 2017; it was inspired by the the contrast between village church services for fallen soldiers and the way in which most of them died.
I’ve always found it a striking piece of work – not least because he plays with the “rules” of sonnet construction, preferring to focus on how the poem feels rather than how it’s arranged. The great Sean Bean gives a great reading of it here:
When Donald Trump was elected US president in 2016, I found myself thinking of Owen’s Anthem and its theme of the world being left to younger generations. I don’t think any modern concern is more important than that. It’s just horrifying to feel that we live on a planet that values money more than its children. (Even though that’s not entirely the case, of course.)
I began playing about with Anthem, with the vague aim of updating its references. But I could never push it the point where I felt it was worthy of taking Owen’s title in vain. The first version was entirely about Trump and the people who believe his approach to life is the right one. By 2018 it included other global characters as Trumpism encouraged a run on bloodthirsty greed. By 2020, of course, there entered the suggestion that we were living in more than one kind of epidemic.
I don’t know how many versions I’ve done (I’ve only kept a few) but about a week ago, inspiration suddenly struck, and within about 20 minutes I was reading back what I felt the poem should always have been. That inspiration came in the form of Kelly Phillips, a very dear friend who’s going to become a mum in February. I don’t have children, but over the past few months Kelly has been wonderfully honest and open with me about the process of pregnancy – and, importantly, how she feels about the future.
I don’t think it was anything specific; actually I think I just got to the point where I’d absorbed enough (and understood some of it) to visualise the character of someone speaking like Owen would.
As a stubborn sort of a person, I’ve spent a lot of time over the past two years trying to avoid being angry at the way things seem to be going. There’s another powerful poem underway that’s been significantly held up by my avoidance of the subject matter - sorry, Matt, I’m on it again!
So here’s Anthem For Doomed Youth 2023 – featuring the heartbeat of Kelly's daughter Ava, who’s due to arrive in February 2024, with music and production by my incredible friend Andy Glass of Solstice.
The current form of society seems to have taken “if you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem” to a brutal extreme, something like “make other people victims to avoid being one yourself.” Too many people are going along with it because it’s easy, and they’ve suspected for a long time that they’re wrong, and they deserve anger. Because they’re making victims of their children, and when you’re deeply hurt when you’re very young, it’s incredibly difficult to forgive those who caused the pain. I know society desperately, urgently needs to change, but that seems like a very tragic and victimising way for it to go.
Maybe a bit of anger now will save us all some serious rage later. Maybe Wilfred Owen would have expanded on that theme if he hadn’t become a victim of people who victimised other people in order to survive a cruel, twisted culture of war.
