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Why ‘The Last Laugh’? Because death (or Death) will have the last laugh in the end. Not love, nor life, not any religious consolation (although strong religious believers would doubtless disagree with that). The machinery of death will always triumph over the human will.
- Stanza One
- Stanza Two
- Stanza Three
The first stanza opens with the death of an anonymous soldier. Ripped from life, he only has time to utter ‘O Jesus Christ! I’m hit’, and the second line follows with ‘whether he vainly cursed or prayed indeed’, leaving it ambiguous, and up to the reader to determine. Owen was devoutly religious, of course; however, there were a great many men who ...
The second stanza takes a different soldier – one who calls out to his family at the moment of his death, to no avail. ‘Then smiled at nothing, childlike, being dead’, shows the return of innocence for the dead soldier – though it is ironicthat the soldiers are smiling at the moments of their death, and also the use of the word ‘childlike’ shows, i...
The final stanza follows yet another soldier. This one, dying, calls out to his lover, but it is to no avail; she is far from home, and she is not hearing him. The irony of the dying soldier falling down to kiss the ground, rather than his lover, shows at once the loneliness of their deaths: far from home, they die in fields alone and in pain, with...
- Female
- Poetry Analyst
The main idea Wilfred Owen wanted to convey was that it’s not the soldier’s who get the last laugh since many people died and many soldiers would not laugh about it. He shows that the machinery of the war is the master of the soldiers and that the weapons had the last laugh.
The tone of this poem is more foreboding and condemnatory, not only describing the training soldiers but outright degrading their forced involvement as morally wrong. With themes rooted in the brutality of warfare and loss of innocence, both “The Last Laugh” and “Arms and the Boy” express similar messages but in different contexts.
The poem “The Last Laugh” by Wilfred Owen demonstrates the death of a soldier and the music played by the war tools. However, the borrowing of the phrase by Owen shows the main ideas of the poem are war, death, and the price of victory.
The armaments of war have knocked morality sky high and theirs is unquestionably the last laugh. We may ask whether Owen ever wrote a more cynical, dispiriting poem than this, in which nihilism reigns and everything amounts to nothing in the end.
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‘The Last Laugh’ is a poem by Wilfred Owen (1893-1918), drafted in February 1918 (as ‘Last Words’) but only first published after Owen’s death in November 1918, one week before the Armistice. Although not his most famous poem by any means, ‘The Last Laugh’ is one of his most stark and direct.
