I believe I am reading the same poem as you, though in my
textbook, the poem has only two stanzas. The first stanza of the poem "Asleep" by
Wilfred Owen describes a soldier who is shot while sleeping. The second stanza moves
away from the concrete imagery of the first to imagine the soldier's fate and thus offer
commentary on the speaker's views of death and the
afterlife.
After watching the soldier die, the speaker
wonders if he will ascend to heaven:
Whether his deeper sleep lie shaded by the
shaking
Of great wings, and the thoughts that hung the stars,
High
pillowed on calm pillows of God's
making
In the lines above,
heaven is evoked by the "great wings" of supposed angels, and the "calm pillows of God's
making," that classic image we all have of our loved ones lounging on fluffy
clouds.
The speaker then goes on to wonder if the
soldier will merely decay and become one with the
ground:
Or
whether yet his thin and sodden head
Confuses more and more with the low
mould,
His hair being one with the grey grass
And finished fields of
autumns that are old
Within
these lines is an implied question: Is there an afterlife, or do we just cease to exist
when we die?
The speaker's answer for himself is
nihilistic, though not surprising: "Who knows? Who hopes? Who troubles? Let it pass!"
The speaker, revealed in the end as a fellow soldier, says in essence, "Who cares?"
According to the speaker the dead soldier is luckier than
others:
He
sleeps tremulous, less cold
Than we who must awake, and waking, say
Alas!
The speaker must keep
fighting and continue to face pain, hardship, and danger, while the soldier, whether he
is in heaven or simply dead, is at peace.
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