summary of "The send off"
Answers
The Send-Off describes a group of soldiers being waved off to the war. They leave by train, with their uniforms decorated with flowers they have been given by the women. Although the troops have come from a cheering crowd, by the time they get to the station there are not many people still watching. Those that are there are described as "dull porters" and a "casual tramp". The train moves off, and the narrator wonders whether they will come back in "wild train-loads" together in celebration, but concludes that too few of them will return.
Although it is apparently about going off to war, the poem is really about how many soldiers are killed in war, and the contrast between the excitement of the send-off and the realities of death.
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Explanation:
an ironic and dark humored description of how the soldiers we’re sent off to the battlefront, during World War I (keyword “The Send-Off”). In this poem, Owen conveys to us that the soldiers are being sent to their doom.
From the very start we sense the soldiers’ lost fate. The soldiers go to the train, they are singing joyfully, as if they are being sent to a country picnic, but of course the narration is omniscient, we know what lies ahead of them, and so simultaneously the lanes are darkening around them. Secondly, the soldiers are surrounded by wreath and spray, a wreath and a…show more content…
Those same flowers are brought up again, in this case, as if the soldiers mock what the women meant by the offering of these flowers, the wreath and spray, almost as if the women know that the soldiers, their husbands and relatives: the men will die. The irony present in this poem is best seen in the tone of the poem. When the question arises, whether the soldiers will come back to a great parade of joy on their homecoming and it great numbers, in “wild train-loads,” Owen rhetorically answers first “a few,” then again “a few” and finally “too few for drums and yells.” The loss of life during the war will be to tragic for anybody to celebrate, and too few soldiers will return for anybody to celebrate. And when the few soldiers come back, there will be no joy to return to, and so they “creep back, silent, to village wells, up half-known roads.” They creep almost as if they are avoiding or cower from the tragedy itself, a shameful situation. The shame is seen also in the taboo of the situation, “so secretly, like wrongs hushed-up, they went. They were not ours: We never heard to which front these were sent,” everybody knew their doomed fate except the soldiers themselves, thrown to the wolves blindfolded.