Comparison of ‘Vergissmeinnicht’ and ‘Dulce Et Decorum Est’

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Comparison of ‘Vergissmeinnicht’ and ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’ Thomas Roddy Poetry often comes from feelings of strong emotions which can be seen over centuries of time with Shakespeare’s frustration of love in his sonnets, to John Donne expressing his relationship with religion. The First World War understandably brought a period of strong emotion, due to the futility, and produced some of the great poets, such as Wilfred Owen. On the other hand, World War Two was underway and the newspapers were asking “Where are the war poets?” and so the likes of Keith Douglas were titled as soldier poets. Therefore, Owen’s ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’[1] and Douglas’ ‘Vergissmeinnicht’[2] seems like an appropriate comparison of these two periods. Poetry did develop and change after World War One as the 1930s brought a stress-free period where there was almost a silliness about poetry, with a lack of concern with social decay and more of an embrace in popular culture. One example of this was W.H. Auden, who astonished readers with the ‘light comic tone and domesticity’ of his poems[3]. Despite this advancement in poetry, when war broke out in 1939, there was understandably going to be an influence from poets of the First World War as this generation had grown up reading their poetry and were experiencing the same thing. In both poems the reader can see the use of a narrative, with Douglas reminiscing of the day he came across the dead German and the photo of ‘Steffi[4]’, and the description of a gas attack seen in Owen’s poem. The similarity in the two poets’ styles is seen in the use of the narrative, however, the way in which they actually describe them is very different. Owen’s description of the gas attack in the second stanza is very powerful and quick in pace with the use of exclamation marks and capital

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