Spring Offensive

Synopsis of Spring Offensive:

On the Western front a group of soldiers rests on a hill in the shade. Some sleep leaning against each other; others
look at the sky beyond the ridge. It seems like the end of the world. It is May, late springtime. They feel the onset
of summer in the natural world around them but the sky and the ridge threaten. 
Whilst waiting, the men stare at the landscape through which they have passed, breathing peacefully. Then
everything changes with the short command to start the offensive. Without panic or heroics the men quietly brace
themselves and stare at the sun which is no longer a friend. 
The men go ‘over the top’ and run down the other side of the ridge, exposed to the enemy. As the German guns
start shelling, the shell craters create thousands of receptacles ready to catch the soldiers’ blood. Some men die in
bullet fire or by explosion, of whom it is said that God caught them before they even fell to the ground.  
But what, asks the poet, of the men who rushed into a battle where victory was achieved by evil inhumanities and
who survived? These men are amazed to crawl out alive and be able to breathe the cool air once more. The poet
wonders why they do not talk about their dead comrades.
Investigating Spring Offensive...
 This is Owen’s last complete poem. Some critics say it is his best. Why do you think they say this
o What makes it a more reflective and mature poem than any of his previous work?
 There is great pathos in Spring Offensive. Explore the ways in which Owen creates the pity in this poem.
o How does the poetry come out of the pity?

Commentary on Spring Offensive

Spring Offensive is an account of a military initiative which took place in April 1917 - of its prologue, its aftermath
and the men involved. Although a participant, Owen doesn’t write about himself and it is much more objective
than many of his other poems. 
Owen began composing the poem in Scarborough in July 1918 and finished it in September 1918 once he had
arrived in France. This, his last poem, is different to everything which he had written before. It has been described
as a poetic masterpiece. 
Spring Offensive can be read at different levels:
 as a simple report of a day on the Western Front
 as a philosophical reflection on war
 as a philosophical reflection on the existence of God
 as a tribute to the courage of the fighting man. 

In the preface to his poems, which he wrote at Ripon in March 1918, Owen had said that he had resisted writing
about heroes because English poetry was ‘not yet fit to speak of them’. In Spring Offensive, his last completed
poem, he begins to do just that.

Context 
This last poem of Owen’s is based on his experiences in the spring of 1917. His letter home dated 25th April 1917
reads:
Immediately after I sent my last letter…..we were rushed up into the line. Twice in one day we went over the top,
gaining both our objectives. Our "A" Company led the attack and of course lost a certain number of men. I had
some extraordinary escapes from shells and bullets.
More on the events of 25th April 1917?
Owen sent a draft of Spring Offensive to Sassoon with a note: ‘Is this worth going on with? I don’t want to write
anything to which a soldier would say ‘No Compris’ (I don’t understand).’ We assume that Sassoon replied with
positive encouragement.
Investigating commentary of Spring Offensive...
 Owen had written that English poetry was not yet ready to write about heroes. Siegfried Sassoon said that
war was not glorious, however superb the lads were. Do you think that Spring Offensive is about heroism?
 How does Owen balance the bravery of the men with the horror of the war?
 Explain why this final poem is/is not Owen’s masterpiece?

Language in Spring Offensive

Contrast and juxtaposition

In Spring Offensive Owen uses language which juxtaposes the men’s rest with their action, life with death, peace
with war, belief with questioning of faith.
‘Halted’, the first word of the poem, ‘easy’ and ‘at ease’ in the second line, leading to the careless ‘slept’ in line 4,
create a feeling of peace unusual in Owen’s poetry. This is continued with ‘marvelling’ l.7 the men ‘ponder’ l.13, as
Owen leads up to the natural, peaceful simile of the men breathing ‘like trees unstirred’. All this is shattered by the
‘little word’ of line 19. This throws them into action ‘like a cold gust’. The juxtaposition of the two low key similes
however changes the direction and mood of the poem
The men, once part of nature, now actively confront it as they ‘begird’ l.20 and ‘tighten’ l.21 themselves for battle.
In response, the ‘sky burned’ ‘With fury against them’ l.29-30, the earth is ready for their blood and the green field
‘Chasmed and steepened’ l.32. Although we know that this is the result of human activity, it seems as if Nature
itself is in action against them. 
One brief line, l.37, tells of the simple belief ‘some’ hold that the souls of the men have gone to heaven even
before they hit the ground dead. However, this idea of heaven is contrasted with the living ‘hell’ into which the
men rush:
out-fiending all its fiends and flames
With superhuman inhumanities
Long famous glories, immemorial shades l.41-3
Owen’s use of hyperbole (‘out-fiending all its fiends’) and oxymoron (‘superhuman inhumanities’) jumbles together
virtue and evil, ‘glories’ and ‘shames’. Will it be a triumph or a curse to remember what happened? Owen uses the
words of the final stanza to build up to his question about the survivors. What exactly have the men been involved
in, serving which power, to what end and at what cost? Is it any surprise that the participants are rendered silent? 

Onomatopoeia
In Spring Offensive Owen uses onomatopoeia to create some of the contrasts which make the poem so powerful. 
 The long grass ‘swirled’, insects are ‘murmurous’ and ‘the summer oozed’. Owen borrows from Keats’
poem Ode to Autumn to create a sonorous peaceful scene:

Until they think warm days will never cease;  10

For Summer has o'erbrimm'd their clammy cells.

Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;   15

Or on a half-reap'd furrow sound asleep,       
Drowsed with the fume of poppies

Thou watchest the last oozings, hours by hours.  22

 By contrast the subterranean hell opening before the men ‘blasts’ them.
Alliteration and assonance
Owen’s use of alliteration and assonance in Spring Offensive serves to emphasise the pastoral scene of the early
verses, the men’s action in the middle stanza and the questioning reflection of the last verse.
 ‘Halted’ on a ‘last hill’ l.1 arrests our attention
 Men ‘stood still’ facing the ‘stark .. sky’ l. 5, the abrupt ‘st’ and ‘sk’ conveying a moment of tension in the midst
of the balmy scene
 In the second stanza the drowsy consonance of ‘Marvelling’ l.7 in the ‘May breeze’ l.8 ‘murmurous with ..
midge’ l.8, and the long vowels of ‘breeze’, ‘ooze’, ‘bones pains’ changes to the more threatening short, tight ‘I’
sounds of ‘imminent’ l.11 and ‘mysterious’ l.12.
 The softness of the ‘m’ sound is picked up in the soft plosive ‘b’ sounds in stanza three: ‘buttercups .. blessed ..
boots’ l.14-5 and ‘brambles’ clung to them. The men ‘breathe’, momentarily part of that nature and life
 Their final contact with nature is as they go over the top of the ‘hill’ covered in ‘herb and heather’ l.27-8 in the
fifth verse. Owen then uses the plosive ‘b’ to create the sound of battle: the sky ‘burned’. 29, men offered up
their ‘blood’ l.31 to the ‘bullets’ l.43 and the ‘blast’ l.35.
 In the final stanza Owen uses a sibilance to emphasise his question and to draw out the pain of the survivors.
The first seven lines of the last verse contain sibilants which hiss and extenuate the poetry. In the final couplet
they are used in the ‘peaceful’ air and the final question: ‘Why speak not they of comrades’?

Tone
In the juxtaposition of tranquillity and terror in Spring Offensive Owen creates a real sense of tension. The mood of
the poem is one of peace followed by apprehension, death and survival. Yet throughout the poem the tone is
balanced. There is a solemnity both in the pre action and the aftermath of the attack. The tone is measured and
solemn.
Investigating Language and tone in Spring Offensive...
 Owen looks at the events in Spring Offensive almost at a distance. He does not write directly about his own
responses and emotions. How does the language Owen uses in the poem contribute to this more objective
approach?
 Compare the tone of Spring Offensive to the tone of Dulce et Decorum Est where Owen is a much more central
figure.

Structure of Spring Offensive

In each of the seven verses Owen tells us of a different stage in the attack:
 Stanza one: Owen sets the scene of the men resting after a march, the ease of the scene conveyed by the
fluidenjambement of lines 2-3. He then uses a caesura in l.4 to introduce the motif of tension, as the men
observe the scene and look to the future
 Stanza two has a similar structure, of relaxation brought up sharp by what the ‘imminent line of grass’
actuallysymbolises – the brink of destruction
 Stanza three conveys the interminable pause, waiting for orders – it is as if Nature itself is holding its breath,
both men and trees ‘unstirred’ l.18. The fact that Owen has taken three verses/18 lines to get to this point has
also teased the reader who knows, from the poem’s title, that action is imminent 
 Stanza four: At last the command arrives. Owen begins to build up the tension as the men prepare for battle,
enjambement from l.19-21 conveying the controlled rapidity with which the men get ready. A pause in l.22
then prepares us for the enormity of what is about to happen, and in the two extra lines of the stanza Owen
sets the actions of the men against a more universal context
 Stanza five: Owen shows the men running as one as they attack, and disrupts the flow of action with caesurae
in l.29, 30 and 31, just as the landscape is thrown into turmoil by the gunfire
 Stanza six is full of active verbs – ‘running’, ‘Leapt’, ‘went up’ (i.e. blew up), ‘plunged’ and ‘fell’ (twice) as Owen
describes the manner of the men’s deaths in battle. The relative brevity of the stanza perhaps echoes the
sudden cutting down of the soldiers’ lives
 Stanza seven: Owen describes the drastic fighting and wearied return of the survivors, surprised to be alive,
framed by a reiterated question in the first and final lines of the verse. He leaves it unanswered.

Versification

Rhythm
Owen uses a broken rhythm in Spring Offensive. The pentameter is varied by shorter or longer lines. Owen
introduces atrochaic metre at different points in the poem which unsettles the more regular and anticipated iambic
pentameter. The effect is to create a tension in the reader.

Rhyme
As with the rhythm of the poem, Owen also varies his rhyme scheme. Owen uses fully rhyming couplets such as in
lines 2 and 3 where the ‘ease’ of the men is heightened by the rhyme created by the resting places they find on
each other’s ‘chests and knees’. Owen continues to use rhyming couplets to create the sense of peace in this place
which seems like ‘the end of the world’ l.6 (and for many will be exactly that) as the men watch as ‘the long grass
swirled’ l.7. Owen’s third rhyming couplet allows some of the coming horror to creep in. Although ‘summer oozed
into their veins’ l.9 it is shadowed by ‘their bodies’ pains’ l.10. Coldness descends on the poem. An ominous
rhyming couplet in l.11 and l.12 shifts nature from being a benign force to being blank and potentially pitiless:
Sharp on their souls hung the immediate ridge of grass
Fearfully flashed the sky’s mysterious glass
At this point Owen momentarily abandons rhyming couplets as he takes us through the detail of the attack. He
returns to them in the last verse which opens and closes with two couplets. The first emphasises the actions in
battle of the survivors who on ‘the brink’ of death l.38 are ‘too swift to sink’ l.39. The latter ends with the question
about the consequent silence of those ‘few’ who, crawling back, have ‘Regained cool peaceful air in wonder-‘ but
at the cost of ‘comrades that went under’.
Investigating structure and versification in Spring Offensive...
 Owen’s versification in Spring Offensive demands careful study. Read the poem aloud with a friend,
scanning each line so as to identify where the lines of irregular length occur.
o Try to establish why Owen chose to alter these particular lines.
 Look at the pattern of rhyming in the poem.
o Which, if any, take you by surprise and why?

Imagery, symbolism and themes

Imagery 
In Spring Offensive Owen opens the poem with an ambiguous image:
Halted against the shade of a last hill
The sense of pastoral ease which this opening phrase creates can as easily be interpreted as a dark foreshadowing
of the final horrors to come. To be ‘halted’ is a pleasure when desired but not so when enforced. ‘Against the
shadow’ is desirable on a hot day after a long march but when coupled with an enforced halt it takes on the sinister
overtones of death. A ‘last hill’ is even more unequivocal.

Similes
Owen uses a series of closely related similes in Spring Offensive to illustrate the men’s condition and the moment
of change when their resting world becomes a battle. Although summer soothes them it is ‘Like the injected drug
for their bones’ pains’ l.10. Even as ‘They breathe like trees unstirred’ l.18 ‘the little word’ l.19 which will change
their lives forever comes ‘like a cold gust’ in the very next line. As if nature is aware of the hell the men are about
to enter, the brambles ‘clutched and clung to them like sorrowing hands’. The image is reminiscent of the New
Testament account of the daughters of Jerusalem mourning Christ as he ascended to his place of execution,
wearing a crown of thorns (Luke 23:27-8, Mark 15:17). The soldiers look at the sun ‘like a friend with whom their
love is done.’ Their relationship with nature and the all-powerful sun is about to be over.

Metaphors
Spring Offensive contains some powerful figurative images of nature:
 ‘Summer oozed into their veins’ l.9 makes it seem like a soporific comfort
 ‘Sky’s mysterious glass’ (glass being an archaic term for mirror) suggests personification in l.12 as does the
priest-like ‘Buttercups’ which ‘blessed’ their boots with gold in l.15
 The sun is personified in l.26 as a god-like provider on whose bounty (i.e. life giving gift) they are turning
their backs (‘spurned’ l. 26)
 ‘The whole sky burned with fury’ suggests another god-like personality whose anger is turned against the
men l.29, as ancient Greeks once believed that thunder was the roar of Zeus
 The ‘earth set sudden cups’ l.30 like vessels for libation offerings to some god (many pagan deities
demanding the sacrifice of a living being or its blood) or the medieval apothecary’s practice of ‘cupping’ a
patient (draining blood off into cups) as a means of curing illness.

Owen uses equally powerful metaphors to communicate the level of aggression the men experience in Spring
Offensive:
 Fury is conveyed in ‘hell’s upsurge’, throwing men up into the air l. 35
 The image of ‘the world’s end’, which was established in line 6, re-emerges in line 36 as men ‘fell away past
this world’s verge’.
 The horror of combat is a rush ‘to enter hell’ l.40. The metaphor is extended as he describes those who will
survive as ‘out-fiending all its fiends’

Investigating imagery in Spring Offensive...

 Spring Offensive is as much about the ‘few’ who survive as about the dead. Compare Owen’s presentation
of the few ‘crawling back’ from the edge in this poem to the ‘few, too few’ who creep back in The Send Off.
 Compare the survivors in Disabled and Mental Cases with the survivors in Spring Offensive

Symbolism
In this final completed poem Owen seems to use all the symbols he has employed in his previous poems:
 Nature, spring and summer symbolising the life and potential of the men is a key motif which in the course
of the poem is overturned by the horror of war with its emblems of blood and bombs
 Religious symbols are provided by the blessings bestowed by the buttercups and the chalice like
receptacles the earth creates in which to catch the sacrificial blood of the slain
 Heaven and hell are tokens of life and death, peace and pain. The very air itself symbolises life / breath
 Eyes are one small but significant symbol: ‘the eyes’ l 23. Here the men lift their sights to the sun - the
source of life. However the eyes ‘flare’ suggesting anger - in the reflected light from that ‘friend with whom
their love is done’. The men can no longer be part of nature. They have spurned the ‘bounty’ of the sun
(l.26) which is life itself, willingly sacrificing themselves and committing those ‘superhuman inhumanities’
l.42 which define them as being out of nature / unnatural
 Silence: Owen’s final symbol is the powerful one of silence kept by ‘the few’ who are left.

Investigating symbolism in Spring Offensive...

 In Spring Offensive Owen uses the eye to symbolise seeing the truth of the situation as the men see it
before the attack. Revisit the way in which Owen uses the eyes of men in the following poems:
o Dulce et Decorum Est
o Mental Cases
o The Sentry
o Strange Meeting
Themes in Spring Offensive

Camaraderie
A major theme in Spring Offensive is one which was dear to Owen’s heart: that of the relationship between
comrades-in–arms (camaraderie). It begins and ends this poem. The men sleep ‘carelessly’ on the nearest chest or
knee because they trust each other so completely. The few who remain at the end of the poem are unable to
speak of those they have lost. We recognise that greatest theme of all Owen’s war poetry: the pity.

War as hell
That war is hell is a clear theme in Spring Offensive. The power of nature and man’s place in nature is countered by
man’s inhumanity to man. The sacrifice made by all, both those who died and those who survived, is clearly
articulated. With the concept of sacrifice comes the theme of religion. Belief in God and loss of faith in the face of
slaughter was a major concern for Owen. In Spring Offensive he acknowledges that there are some who believe
that the dead are blessed. However the larger question is what those who survive think and feel and why they
seem unable to comfort themselves with similar views.

Silence
The theme of silence is a new and potent theme in this last poem. The inability of those left behind to articulate
their feeling about their lost comrades was something which remained true for veterans of WWI even into the
twenty first century.

Heroism
The theme of heroism, about which Owen felt so ambivalent and which Sassoon rejected, is understated but
present. The theme of ‘long-famous glories’ resulting from the bravery of the men is balanced by the ‘immemorial
shames’ which will also remain with them forever. 
There is a seam of guilt in this poem (as in so many others). However it is the pity of war which runs through every
aspect of Spring Offensive. In Owen’s last completed poem, the final irony may be that the pity is too deep to be
spoken.
Investigating themes in Spring Offensive...
 What does this poem say about Owen’s thoughts and feelings for his men?
 The last line of the poem is the last question Owen poses about his main theme: the pity of war. Learn it by
heart.
 What do you think is the answer?