One of Wilfred Owen's best known Anti war poems 'Spring Offensive' was written in 1918, and first published on 21st march 1918. Owen expresses here the situation of first world war implacable incidents in the poem. The poet ”Being a soldier himself and talking past in the first World War”. He had first hand experienced of the gruesome terrifying reality. The title is taken from a real incident first World War actuality known as "Spring Offensive", it refering to "The consecutive attacks on German on the Western front during during the first World War" that describes the inhuman portrayal of innocent lives being butchered.
We know from this poem what happened on the actual battlefield. According to Owen's another 'Strange Meeting', "It deals with the atrocities of World War I, The poem is narrated by a soldier who goes to the underworld to escape the hell of the battlefield and there he meets the enemy soldier he killed the day before. Wilfred Owen's poem 'Spring Offensive' consists of five stanzas, some stanzas contain 14 lines. In this poem, the poet uses the regular rhyme scheme. And the overall poem is composed of both the iambic and trochaic meter.
At the beginning of the first stanza, the soldiers are resting behind the hill, and they took food, and lying, and they were tired. The blackness of the sky is an extension of the void and emptiness that become a very part of their meaningless existence. The blackness of the sky thus become a mirror reflection of the purposelessness and futile living that the soldiers are subjected"To stark the face, blank sky beyond the ridge". The soldiers were thinking that "knowing their feet had come to the end of the world". The may breeze was murmuring where the soldiers were resting. Moreover, the natural setting of Spring and in contrast the soldiers’ fear about their approaching death anytime.
In the third stanza, we see that the soldiers have passed a lot of time, and the buttercups has blessed their boots. The little brambles interrupted "clutched and clung to them like sorrowing hands". And they were breathing like inanimate. Every soldiers' body were begird and tighten because the war is near to them. The war has been started with "No alarms Of bugles, no high flags, no clamorous haste—". And the fire is burning in their eyes while they were climbing on the hill.
The soldiers smile to see the sun as if it is the last time they are looking at their before facing death. After crossing the hill, they noticed all the enemies have grabbed the areas.
In this moment, "instantly the whole sky burned" because there the war has been started. "With fury against them" means they were firing each other. They were completely falling to infinite space because there were created chasmed and steppened.
The poet Wilfred Owen expresses here that the soldiers were running back and forth to get a shelter. And they "Leapt to swift unseen bullets, or went up". consequently, they can not go to heaven. Some of them got killed by bullets and others fell to the cliff. All soldiers could not be killed. After defeating their enemies, some of them come back to the home with glorious.
In the concluding stanza, Wilfred Owen's 'spring offensive' tells story that the activities of the soldiers from an omniscient point-of-view. The poet is an overlooker of the poem that how a soldier surffers in the battle. In the magnificent line, the poet used a biblical line "Opened in thousands for their blood". The poet expresses here that they can not go to the heaven because they worked "with superhuman inhumanities". Lastly, the poet Wilfred Owen tells us War is not a symbol of peace nature. And we undoubtedly decide that it is an anti war poem.
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