In the poem The Falling Soldier, which is in relation to the photograph by Robert Capa, Duffy begins the poem by using colloquial language such as ‘flop’ and ‘kip’ to create a very casual everyday image about how the photo could be interoperated. Even though the poem starts off with a positive tone, the tone quickly shifts with the phrase ‘No; worse.’ then following with ‘The shadow you cast as you fall is the start of a shallow grave’ as she describes the truth and reality of the soldiers fall. She makes it sounds as if it was inevitable and was always going to happen. ‘They give medals though, to the grieving partners, mothers, daughters, sons of the brave.’ This almost sarcastic phrase expressing that as if a medal they can’t even accept for themselves makes it all ok and worth dying for. She distinctively uses ‘they’ in this phrase, to emphasise the fact that these people are nameless and are too cowardly to take responsibility for what they causing.
The war poem collection could also be considered to face other aspects of war not necessarily the graphic events, but the hatred of civilians, justified details and distractions from war such as coping mechanisms. On the other hand many of Owen’s poems describe situations where emotions and unpleasant details could be seen as exaggerated, even though most of these could be seen as reconstructing the truth. ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’ is a poem from the collection written in 1918. The poem’s title is written in Latin and literally to English as “It is sweet and right to die for your Country”. At first glance it seems ironically patriotic, but when one starts to understand Wilfred Owen’s message to the reader, we can see his anger and protest against the military propaganda enlistment.
You get a real sense of Owen’s tiredness of the war in this stanza. His personification of the enemy bombs is a really effective way of giving the enemy, unseen in this poem, a face. And that face is fearful and never-ending, but also, like Owen, weary of the war. The rhyming scheme in this stanza is also significant, giving a sense of slow marching, of dreariness, however due to the more formal structure a sense of purpose and organisation is also felt. To the reader it appears to be a formal and proper poem, this confirms my idea that this poem was written to Owen’s educated peers.
Harrison gives us some form of backstory for each of the characters except for the narrator. This is a very deliberate technique used to try and emotionally attach us to these characters before they are abruptly removed from the story as if they never existed. “Better out of it.” Harrison gets the reader to believe that if a soldier is killed in battle or dies from a disease that they are better off than if they were still alive, but by still applying a backstory albeit small to the characters who die we are made to feel like the narrator as he sees all his comrades fall one by one around
The results of war are shown both similarly and differently in the two poems. The contexts also differ due to the poet’s experiences of war. Wilfred Owen died fighting in World War One whereas Alfred Tennyson learned about the battle second hand therefore they have different perspectives. In ‘Futility’, Owen uses metaphors that could represent the feelings of the soldiers but Alfred Tennyson tells the story of the battle. In ‘Futility’, Owen utilizes personifications such as ‘The kind old sun will know’ and ‘Woke once the clays of a cold star’ to create a sense of desperation on the part of the soldiers.
Also it is man vs. society because of the whole war going on. The author created suspense when at the end the soldiers were going to take Cush away and Johnny told them that the war was over and luckily let him go. I inferred that Cush and Johnny would become friends because whenever two
The book “All Quiet on the Western Front” by Erich Maria Remarque is a novel which although very profound and harrowing, depicts the story of a young German soldier, Paul Baumer, during World War I. The novel was written to reflect the horrific nature of war, and to illustrate some of the effects which it has on individuals who are embroiled in it. The novel illustrates the process of war through the eyes of a young man, who initially believes, along with his friends, that war is a glorious conflict however this viewpoint begins to change during the course of the novel. This paper has been written to provide a comprehensive critique of the book and to demonstrate an understanding of whether the writer succeeded in their aims, and it will also present a thesis about the book. The thesis which will be investigated and illustrated is how Paul Baumer is representative of the Lost Generation, and that his character development throughout the book reflects this change in attitudes towards war of the young men who went to fight in World War I.
A common theme used throughout the novel was dehumanisation in which the soldiers were deprived of their basic human qualities and personality due to the numerous horrors of war they faced each day. Remarque manages to introduce and develop the theme of dehumanisation through such techniques as symbolism, imagery and first person perspective which therefore effectively engages the reader’s interest in the novel. In the epigraph Remarque says that he “simply try to tell of a generation of men who, even though they may have escaped its shells, were destroyed by war.” Ironically Paul and his comrades represent a whole generation of men known to history as “the lost generation” in which eight million men were died in battle, twenty one million were injured and over six and a half million civilians were killed. This also reveals Remarque’s hatred towards the war and how affective it can be although soldiers may escape its physical injuries. The novel is continuously in first person from Paul point of view which makes it seem more real and dramatic as we can see exactly how he feels at a specific time.
Dear America challenges the assumptions of mainstream America about the war. Allen Paul illustrates in a letter to a woman his first experience of war by stating “…it sure was an ugly sight.” This enforces the falsity of the assumption made by mainstream America about the war being easy and painless. The brutality of war is further recognised when George Olsen describes in his letter a wounded soldier momentarily dying being resuscitated by stating “...in a way, he was the luckiest one out there” purely because his injuries resulted in him returning home. Mainstream America assumed the war to be quick, easy and painless; when for the soldiers it was a long, hard and painful experience that only other combatants would
All Quiet on the Western Front: This novel was very interesting and very vivid. Also the novel is so intense and very detail of the lifestyle of war. The way the book is different from the others is by how the novel takes the readers to the war by telling the vivid details and the characters thoughts and also the lifestyle of the characters. The novel tells the story of Paul Baumer, the main character of the story, a soldier who was persuade and urged by his school teacher Kantorek to join the German army shortly after the start of world war 1. Before the War, Paul was a creative, sensitive, and passionate person, writing poems and having a clear love for his family.