The poem is structured as a Petrarchan sonnet with a Shakespearean rhyme scheme and is an elegy or lament for the dead.

Sassoon was older and more cynical, and the meeting was a significant turning point for Owen. The poem owes its more mature imagery and message to Owen's introduction to another WWI poet, Siegfried Sassoon, while he was convalescing in Edinburgh's Craiglockhart Hospital in August 1917. It may be a response to the anonymous preface from Poems of Today (1916), which proclaims that boys and girls should know about the poetry of their time, which has many different themes that 'mingle and interpenetrate throughout, to the music of Pan's flute, and of Love's viol, and the bugle-call of Endeavor, and the passing-bells of death.' It was written in the fall of 1917 and published posthumously in 1920. This searing poem is one of Owen's most critically acclaimed. The pale faces of the girls will be what cover their coffins, patient minds will act as flowers, and the 'slow dusk' will be the drawing of the shades.

There are no candles held by the young men to help their passing, only the shimmering in their eyes to say goodbye. They get no mockeries, no bells, no mourning voices except for the choir of the crazed 'wailing shells' and the sad bugles calling from their home counties.

They have only the ragged sounds of the rifle as their prayers. The speaker says there are no bells for those who die 'like cattle' – all they get is the 'monstrous anger of the guns'.

Owen anthem for doomed youth