Mental Cases was written to demonstrate the mental consequences of war on participating soldiers in World War I. The subjects of this poem are the inmates in a military hospital. The poem displays a part of the war that to some civilians can be considered worse than losing your life, losing your mind due to shellshock. Owen describes how they are now forced to re-live the terrible acts that they have witnessed on the battlefield. The mood of the poem is one of fury, this is shown throughout the poem with the use of imagery.
In this poem Wilfred Owen describes many of the harsh sounds of war on the battlefield. It starts off with a question, “What passing-bells for those who die as cattle?” The question contains a simile, “die as cattle”. This refers to the soldiers being treated as cattle and creates an image of cattle being slaughtered in huge numbers. Nobody mourns the death of cattle; similarly, a soldier’s death was one of little meaning. This has a great effect on what you think about the poem and the war.
The poet is saying that people should not talk about war as enthusiastically as it gives the impression that war is glorious. Furthermore, he says that the idea that ’it is sweet and right’ to die for your country is entirely untrue. Through this, we are able to form the opinion that war is not okay because it is a serious thing that carries many negative consequences. In Wilfred Owen’s poem Dolce et Decorum est, the use of similes conveys the harsh reality of war on soldiers as it changes them dramatically and kills the majority of them. In the first two lines of the poem, Owen uses the similes “Bent double like old beggars under sacks, knocked kneed, coughing like hags” to paint a grim picture in readers minds of how the soldiers were.
This exhibited the physical pain that the soldiers were going through. Even though they had lost their boots, they still struggled on in order to survive; although their feet were caked with hard, dried up blood. Cud is previously swallowed food by cattle that is regurgitated and swallowed a second time. Owen made the phrase, "bitter as the cud" to illustrate how the man that was dying from the gas attack was indeed dying a slow and painful death by the regurgitation of his own blood. The use of the graphic animal imagery in this poem brings out all the soldier's painful sufferings.
13 He thought how 'Jack', cold-footed, useless swine, 14 Had panicked down the trench that night the mine 15 Went up at Wicked Corner; how he'd tried 16 To get sent home, and how, at last, he died, 17 Blown to small bits. And no one seemed to care 18 Except that lonely woman with white hair. Big White Lies: Analytical Essay of The Hero by Siegfried Sassoon In “The Hero”, poet Siegfried Sassoon expresses his contempt towards the hypocrisy of warfare and especially his critical view of the authorities’ attempt at glorifying a soldier’s death. In this poem he provides stark contrast between the harsh truth and reality, employing the use of irony, imagery, contrast, and even alliteration. Firstly, Sassoon effectively uses irony to illustrate the contrast between the soldier’s real and glorified death, as well as the impression of a close-knit military unit, as opposed to the truth that no one had the compassion to care for a fallen soldier.
Stephen Touma Wilfred Owens poetry is driven by a passionate exploration of humanity at its worst. Refer to 2 poems Poetry written by Owen is directed by an intense examination of the human condition and society at its most negative state. Owen doesn’t merely search or subliminally display these experiences he heatedly exposes humanity at its absolute worst. Owen illustrates these experiences through his explanation of the exhaustion of soldiers and their movement between the battlefield, and the sacrifices of war. This can be seen in his two poems ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’ and ‘Parable of the Old man and the Young’.
This is effective as it shows how much slush and mud was in the trenches. Both poems use nightmare underwater imagery, in ‘Dulce...’ Owen describes a soldier as he starts “drowning” under a “green sea” when he is overcome by gas. This creates a disturbing psychological image for the reader and conveys how toxic the gas was. Similarly, in ‘The Sentry’ the soldier’s body is described as “sploshing in the flood”, this representation conveys the harsh environment the soldiers had to live in. Repetition is also used in both poems.
Sassoon’s poetry described the horrors of the war and how disgusting it is. Two poems which show the perspective of war is: Firstly, Counter-Attack, which describes how war is like; and secondly, died of wounds, which show the condition of war. The poems relate to the feeling and emotion war creates. Also it shows how horrible war is. The techniques that Sassoon has used in the poems are: imagery, simile, metaphor and onomatopoeia.
Owen wants his reader to feel exactly what he felt about the war, persuade his reader to believe the terror, pain and torture of the war, how devastating can a war effect a human being. He uses imagery and innovative metaphors through the poem. In the first two lines, ‘Bent double, like old beggars under sacks, Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge’, Owen is using figurative language combined with simile and alliteration literary devises to reveal the reality of the war. Soldiers are
The mention of the coughing portrays the many illnesses that soldiers suffered from in the trenches. Although both of them present the war and soldiers as unheroic and cowardly, they do so in very different ways. The style of Owen's poetry, which is much longer and contains more description than that of Sassoon's, allows him to expand on the main points and simple description that he experienced during the war. In his poem, he describes in graphic and horrific detail the death of a man who was not able to fit his helmet in time during a gas attack. He uses words such as “flound’ring”, “guttering, choking, drowning”.