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WILFRED OWEN's poem, ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’, ends with the poignant lines:

    The pallor of girls’ brows shall be their pall;

    Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds,

    And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds.1

When the poem was first published, in 1920, its concluding image of dusk as a ‘drawing-down of blinds’ was particularly evocative as it alluded to the common British practice of drawing window blinds to indicate that a household was in mourning.2 During the First World War, because British regiments were recruited locally, this custom often had a strong visual impact when a regiment suffered severe casualties and entire communities were consequently affected. In London, for example, after a major battle in France, almost all the houses on some streets had the blinds drawn; there was little traffic, none of the habitual conversing on street corners and, out of respect for grieving families, no loud or unnecessary noise. A reverential silence would fall over localized areas of the normally bustling metropolis.3 Owen, it appears, struck just the right balance between poignancy and social realism in the last line of his famous poem.4

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