In "The Next War," Death is personified as a fellow soldier, engaged in all the tragedies of warfare as well as the day-to-day companionship formed among soldiers. Death is humanized: he coughs, spits, eats, shaves, and is even described as a "chum." This idea of Death as a friendly, almost unremarkable presence is quite striking, but the personification of Death is nothing new—poets, writers, and oral storytellers have given the abstract concept of death various figurative embodiments in many cultural contexts. Here, we'll examine and compare a range of these personifications, discussing their cultural contexts and uses in literature.
Wilfred Owen's poem may be influenced by the character of the Grim Reaper, a European personification of Death that arose in the fourteenth century—around the time of the epidemic known as the Black Death. Though the idea of an "angel of death" was nothing new in Christian cultures, this new, ominous figure likely came about during efforts to make sense of the plague, which killed about one-third of Europe's population. The Grim Reaper is typically pictured as a robed figure, armed with a scythe, an agricultural tool. Indeed, Wilfred Owen describes Death shaving with a scythe in "The Next War." In agriculture, a scythe is used to harvest crops that have finished growing, offering an apt metaphor: like a farmer cutting crops loose, the Grim Reaper cut people off from their earthly lives. The genesis of this folkloric figure, tied to a uniquely deathly outbreak of disease that permanently altered European history and culture, suggests that artists tend to seek out new metaphorical representations of death during times of crisis. Certainly, Wilfred Owen's reimagining of death accompanied a similarly seismic mass death event—in his case, a war rather than an epidemic.
Long before the idea of the Grim Reaper was born in fourteenth-century Europe, the ancient Greeks had their own god of Death—Thanatos. Thanatos, who was especially associated with natural or nonviolent deaths, was often described as a kind of guide, showing the newly dead to the underworld. In this sense, he differs greatly from the Grim Reaper, perhaps revealing a different orientation towards death generally. Rather than cutting people off from life, creating an unbridgeable divide between the realms of the living and dead, he bridged the divide between the two groups by moving people between those realms. The poet Hesiod, in his work Theogeny—a detailed genealogy of the Greek gods—wrote that Thanatos is the child of Nyx and Erebos, the gods of night and darkness. He was also commonly described as having a variety of siblings, including the god of sleep, Hypnos, and the female death spirits known as the Keres. While Thanatos was considered emblematic of nonviolent deaths, the Keres were associated with violent or bloody death. While portrayals of Thanatos changed throughout the history of Ancient Greece, Thanatos echoes a conception of death quite different from the one embodied by the Grim Reaper—one in which nonviolent death has more in common with sleep than with violent death.
In Hinduism, meanwhile, Yama is the god of death and the judge of the newly dead. Like Thanatos, Yama is related literally and metaphorically to a range of other deities. These include the sun god Surya and a river goddess, Yamuna, who is generally associated with life. Thus, rather than relating to sleep or night, he is intertwined with his opposite. Yama is often portrayed riding a buffalo and holding a noose or a mace. In Hindu iconography, he has four arms and green, black, or blue skin. After a person's death, Yama is said to hear all of their deeds read out loud. He then makes a decision about whether they will be reborn, sent to hell, or allowed to remain in Yama's own kingdom. Thus, Yama's own power is merely that of an enforcer, hearing and responding to the independently made decisions of the dead. The weapons he carries are, according to Hindu texts, used in order to punish or discipline the dead.
These are only a few of the many ways death has been given a face and name throughout history, but these personifications reflect the sheer range of ways in which death can be thought of. Following a sudden, shattering plague, Europeans tended to conceive of death as a lone and ominous figure seeking to unforgivingly split the dead from the living. Yet the Ancient Greeks classified peaceful death in a category unto itself, metaphorically associating it with the quiet of sleep and night. Meanwhile, both Greek and Hindu personifications of death, broadly speaking, viewed the personified figure as a guide or judge—a figure of transition rather than partition.
