![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() The ultimate funeral pall is no sheet placed over the tombs of dead soldiers but the pale brows of the young girls the men left behind (first for war and then, tragically and more permanently, in death), girls who have lost their sweethearts and are pale with grief. How interesting, then, that the mechanical twisting of religious acts of devotion and respect which we are presented with in the octave should, in the sestet, be turned on its head: Owen tells us that the most sincere ‘holy glimmer’ of respect for the dead soldiers is not found in the glimmer of candles (lighted as an act of remembrance) but in the brightly shining eyes of young boys (suggestive not only of the children made fatherless orphans by the war but also of their slightly older brothers, young boys of sixteen or seventeen who had gone off to fight in the war). ![]()
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