What did Wilfred Owen feel about the First World War? If this sounds like an easy question, the answer is not always as obvious as it might be:

Is the poem happy about such destruction, or not? Of course not: the war has buried Christ, the gates of Hell are prevailing, and in flattering then battering the immaculate Virgin, the war is linked with blasphemy, seduction and rape; Owen was attracted to Catholicism, despite (or because of) his Evangelical upbringing. But then amid the destruction, the Virgin's very untouched nature leaves her looking slightly foolish, out of touch, naïve, as if she couldn't see the suggestion of ‘flatten’ lurking within ‘flatter’. The saints are similarly unworldly, lying ‘packed up’: safely stored but also not working, as in ‘my machine gun's packed up’. And they ‘lie serried’ – lying down, or merely not telling the truth; serried, as in serried ranks of angels, or serried files of soldiers. In other words, are their close ranks a point of sympathy with the soldiers or an ironic comment?