With his effective use of imagery, diction and irony, Wellford Owens strips away the glory of war and reveals the horror of what it was really like to fight in WWI. Imagery is one of the powerful devise Owen uses to show the realities of war in his poem. Owen uses descriptive words and graphic imagery to provoke feeling and deep emotions within the reader as a way of driving home his anti-war message. For instance, he writes of “froth-corrupted lungs,’’(22)”sores on innocent tongues” (24)and even describes the dying man’s face as a “devil’s sick of sin“(20). As a reader one cannot help but get a mental picture of the terrible war condition as well as feel deep compassion for the soldier.
Dulce Et Decorum Est Wifred Owen’s war poem “Dulce Et Decorum Est” is poem in which there is incident vividly in a scene. Wilfred Owen expreses how it is so sweet and honourable to die for your country but also disagrees with this. Owen uses great word choice and through this technique this cause emotional and also dramatic stanza’s which include death. ‘Dulce Et Decorum Est’ tells us of the horrors and traumatizing effects of World War I. Wilfred Owen achieves this by using descriptive language to tell us of the terrible state of the weary soldiers and trench life. He then goes on to describe the horrific and deadly gas attack that takes the soldiers by surprise.
Throughout this extract it is clear that Bertrand Russell holds conflicting views towards World War One. Much of the language he uses is extremely emotive; he describes the men’s deaths as being ‘slaughtered’, his own feelings like being ‘tortured’ and the fighting as ‘barbarism’. Immediately this portrays that he himself has strong feelings and emotions towards the war and uses effective language to show this. In addition to this, he separates his views accordingly. This is particularly evident in the first paragraph in which he expresses a clear anger towards Asquith and Grey, the Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary at the time of writing, even talking of ‘murder’, showing the extent to which he feels a pacifist.
Owen wrote this poem to express his feelings about war and ‘the pity of war’, which he speaks about in the preface to his collection of poems published posthumously in 1920. When Owen says ‘the pity of war’ he is trying to address to the reader the horrors of the war and sympathise with the victims of war. Owen conveys ‘the pity of war’ throughout all of his poems by making them gloomy and adverse, often decorating his poems with horrific imagery and condemnation, which in turn made them unfavorable to the patriotic British person. ‘Dulce et Decorum est’ is dramatic monologue while also being an elegiacal poem, a poem meant to reflect on the lives lost at the western front during the first world war and impugn the conditions that the soldiers had to brave through everyday. Owen makes this piece an elegy by portraying the battlefield as hell ‘like a man in fire or lime’ or terrible enough to make the devil feel sick ‘like a devils sick of sin’ in order to make people realise that war will only achieve loss and sadness and convey the sadness and fear the soldiers had to face every day.
Isabelle Moran English Speech Wilfred Owen “Texts have the power to shape our perception of the world” This statement is demonstrated in Wilfred Owens poem’s Mental Case and Disabled. Through these poems’ Owen exposes and explores the reality of war by using his own terrifying experiences on the battle field to influence individuals perspectives on war. Owen’s poem mental case, a powerful poem, captures the damage to mens’ minds due to war. Owen utilises language and form to shock and describe in detail the appalling physical symptoms of mental torment. Through the title Owen displays men that were in their prime turn into wrecks.
He said his main concern was ‘war and the pity of war’ He felt it was his responsibility as a poet to tell the truth and bring to light to atrocities of modern warfare, in a way others could or would not. Once he had properly experienced war his poetry became a form of education, he wanted to expose the belief war was good and noble and prove wrong the propaganda that bombarded Britain. No knowledge, imagination or military training could properly prepare Owen for the reality of war and the suffering of front line experience it brought along with it. Within twelve days of arriving in France the ‘easy-going’ chatter of his letters turned to a ‘cry of anguish’. ‘The Sentry’ was written by Owen when he was receiving treatment at Craiglockhart in Edinburgh in 1917, finished in September later that year whilst in France.
How do different poems portray different attitudes to war? Wilfred Owens’s poem ‘’Dulce et decorum est’’, aims to transmit the human elements and the reality and irony of war, or as he said ‘’ my object is war and the pity of war, the poetry is in the pity’’. Owen portrays the idea of war as a cause of physical and spiritual mutilation. Jessie popes poem ‘’ who’s for the game?’’ attempts to encourage young man to go and fight at war. All through out the poem she is trying to put pressure on those who don’t want to go to war.
Mental Cases illustrate the disconnection many soldiers face in society. The rhetorical question opening the first stanza “who are these?” labels these soldiers as unearthly all the while dehumanising them by accumulating their animalistic features. Descriptions like “drooping tongues” and “baring teeth” emphasises the plight of soldiers who have experienced trauma and are unable to overcome their shock. Owen’s use of inclusive language in “surely we have perished” creates a distance between these men and the rest of society as Owen refers to them as “hellish”. Depictions of warfare and accumulated images of death in the second stanza answer the rhetorical questions in the first stanza about the origin of these creatures.
Wilfred Owen’s poem “Dulce Decorum Est” is a bleak poem designed to shock the reader by using provocative and interesting word choices to condemn and contradict the government and its supporter’s war propaganda. Particularly the quote “obscene as cancer” includes and interesting word choice. The impact of the word “obscene” is the reader thinks of something completely repulsive and disgusting. This would imply that Wilfred Owen finds cancer disgusting and derogatory. Owen is comparing the effects of cancer to the horror of war.
In the poem “Dulce et Decorum est” the title translates to “It is a wonderful and great honor to fight and die for your country”. The Title in itself is very ironic and it is one main point the writer is making. He says “you could hear , at every jolt, the blood/come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs” this shows the irony in the title because dyeing this way is not wonderful, as the poems title makes out to be. Another comparison of these two poems is the writer’s use of similes. A simile is a comparison often using the words like or as.