Who Should Feel Guilty? George Michael Grima 11th Grade

The notion of guilt is very strong in Owen’s poetry. He uses guilt in his poetry so as to highlight the indifference of those back at home as well as the authorities. These should feel guilty for sending their youth to die but they do not feel so. On the other hand, Owen also expresses his own guilt as well as the soldiers’ guilt. In doing so Owen means to emphasize on the mental torment that the soldiers suffer from due to this guilt.

In Inspection the theme of indifference is very evident. Here the authorities are aware of the suffering that the soldiers are going through but they claim that ‘blood is dirt’, meaning the sacrifice is not worth acknowledging. Here the use of blood imagery signifies the sacrifice of the soldiers. At various instances throughout the poem this sacrifice is meant to be eradicated and not known of; the ‘stains’ are to be washed out and the ‘cheeks’ to be not so ‘red’. The authorities continue to hide the soldiers’ sacrifice and their own guilt simultaneously for the sake of national pride, since it was themselves that cause these premature, untimely deaths of these young soldiers. This idea ties in with the ‘Ram of Pride’ mentioned in The Parable of the Old Man and The Young. The deviation from the...