"On My Songs": Poetry as a Cure for Loneliness and Misery Benji Flacks 12th Grade

In “On My Songs”, Wilfred Owen gives us an intellectual insight into the emotion of loneliness through the eyes of a young man, newly thrown into the world out of the arms of his loving mother. Owen also tells us of his idolisation of the Romantic poets, and the power that poetry holds in curing people of their misery. Owen presents these ideas in a manner of ways such as by exploring diction, using sound and language devices, by manipulating structure and by using symbolism.

In the first Shakespearian quatrain, Owen talks about how these great poets are able to cure his sadness “as if they knew my woe”. By capitalising “Poets” in line 1, he shows just how highly he thinks of these men, and by using the word “unseen” it reveals to the readers that even though these poets are not here, they are still able to “ease” Owen’s despair, as though they are almost spiritual. The word “fashioned” brings up images of the immense skill needed to create such poems, and it again shows just how much Owen idolised these poets – in particular the Romantic ones such as Keats. The repetition of the word “many” in “many and many a time” can be physically interpreted as the countless times that Owen has read through these poets’ work, so much that...