“Good Poets Make Readers Think About Their Own Lives Not Only By

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“Good poets make readers think about their own lives not only by What they say but how they say it” A personal reflection. The value of poetry to me is its power to move my emotion with ideas. Poets depict their experiences using words, creating feelings in me about situations I think about but may never experience. Poems act like art; somehow they bypass the conscious and go straight to the heart. The two poems I wish to discuss are, “Anthem for Doomed Youth”, which is about the senseless waste of young lives on the battlefields of World War One, and “Dulce et Decorum Est” which is about how fighting wars for your country isn’t sweet and patriotic, but war is actually a waste of lives. Both these poems are written by Wilfred Owen who died in action at the age of 25, in 1918. His poems describe some of the horrific experiences of trench and chemical warfare in World War One. “Anthem for Doomed Youth” is about wasted youth and the lack of any ceremony for these men dying on the battlefield. The poem poetically counterpoises the sounds of a normal church burials, bells chiming, choirs, sobbing girls, with the heartless noise of the battlefield:”anger of the guns... rifles rapid rattle... walling shells”. I think the poem is written with a hopeless and ironic tone. There will be: “no bells” signalling the soldier’s death, there will only be the: “monstrous anger of guns”, and “stuttering rifles rapid rattle”. Owen says “there will be no mockery now for them”. To me it means in normal situations when young men die the priest explains how it was God’s will. The irony of this is God wouldn’t won’t to take the lives of innocent youth, so thankfully the dead soldiers are spared this type of “mockery”. I feel Owen is trying to make us aware of the pity and countless loss of young soldier’s lives, “those who die as cattle”. This

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