Studying ‘The Last Laugh’
When studying a poem there are a few questions you can ask yourself.
1) What is the poem about?
2) How is it structured?
3) What is the poet trying to say?
4) Is he/she using any special devices or images to get across the message?
Read the poem and you should be able to answer ‘1’. In terms of structure we can see that it is broken into three bits, or stanzas as they are called in poetry. Each stanza looks the same doesn’t it? We have two long lines and then three shorter lines.
What do you think Owen is trying to say in his poem? At the start of each stanza a soldier dies, and then the weapons of the war seem to mock him. Look at the words used with the weapons – ‘in vain’, ‘tut-tut’, ‘guffawed’ (laughing loudly), ‘fool’, ‘tittered’, ‘grinned’, etc.
