Owen then goes on to describe how the mental trauma becomes worse. “In all my dreams, before my helpless sight, he plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.” This tells us the soldiers mind is haunted by the sight of his fellow soldier dying from the horrible gas. He is dramatizing this scene some time after it occurred, and his dreams are still filled with this unforgettable sight, which becomes a regular nightmare for the soldier. Wilfred Owen wrote this to shock the reader, and to make the reader think about what
Owen compares soldiers fighting in war to sick old men because it shows that soldiers are like outcasts from society. At the top left of the poster, the image shown represents the difficulty and the terrible physical outcomes, soldiers found travelling on ground particularly in sludges as Wilfred Owen states in the first stanza: “Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge” The use of the word Knock-kneed is alliteration for emphasis, a hard, staccato sound to echo the harsh mood of these lines and soldier’s misery. It stresses echo the brutality of the soldiers’ destruction, their transformation from healthy young men into ‘beggars’ and ‘hags’. The use of the word coughing compares men to sick women, showing how they are unrecognisable; they have lost their masculinity, youth, health and therefore are now deemed to be outcast’s within the society. The word sludge is onomatopoeia to imply how heavy and difficult the ground is to cross for soldiers.
The first stanza reflects the severe condition of the worn out soldiers which is implied by hyperbole, such as “All went lame; all blind”(line 6), expressing the vehemence of the poets feelings more than the tragedy of the soldiers. The auditory and visual images Owen conjures in this stanza, however, create a shocking contrast with Horace´s idea that dying ‘heroically’ for one´s country is glorious, , “blood-shod”. Furthermore, by using the simile “bent double, like old beggars under sacks” in the first line, the poet further conjures the image of destitute persons, exhausted from the heavy weight of their bags and
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.
“Dulce et Decorum Est”, which translates from the Latin Poet Horace, “It is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country”. The Title is Ironic because Wilfred Owen portrays the exact opposite in this poem. I believe this poem demonstrates the traumatic occurrence when people die for one’s country and to die for ones country in this poem projects anything but something fitting and sweet. This poem is about men dying from gas shells. Ones who died from these toxic gases were in a painful and miserable death.
‘Dulce et Decorum est’ by Wifred Owen Katriona Downie Wilfred Owen’s “Dulce et Decorum Est” is a magnificent, and horrific, description of a gas attack suffered by a group of soldiers in France in World War 1. One of his friends in his group is unable to get his helmet on in time and suffers horribly that Owen had to witness. This was an image he found extremely difficult to get out his head and kept coming back to him in his reoccurring nightmares. He writes this poem from the trenches while serving in war. Through his rhythms, dramatic description, and raw images, Owen seeks to convince that the horror of war far outweighs the patriotic clichés of those who glamorize war and increases my understanding of war and the horrors that come with it.
The use of the graphic animal imagery in this poem brings out all the soldier's painful sufferings. Owen used a gas attack and related it to being underwater. The reader would most likely not know what it would be like to be in the middle of a gas
Unlike other authors, Owen’s purpose was to reveal the awful truths of war and let us see past what was said to be glorious. His poems ‘Dulce et Decorum est ‘ and ‘Disabled’ tell of his personal experiences of battle and how war continues to inflict pain upon returned soldiers. Similes and metaphors are two language features Owen used that helped me understand the important idea of the true horrors of war, which is worth learning about today. In ‘Dulce et Decorum est’ one language feature used was similes, displaying the awful scene of physically drained men and a gruesome gas attack which depicted the important idea of the true horrors of war. The poem begins with the vivid simile “bent double, like old beggars under sacks”.
In Barker’s ‘Regeneration’, characters such as Burns are traumatised by their experiences of war, as he is traumatised by being launched head first onto a German corpse, “... he’d had time to realise that what filled his nose and mouth was decomposing human flesh. Now whenever he tried to eat, the taste and smell recurred”. The use of words such as ‘decomposing’ and ‘flesh’ show the reader how World War 1 is horrific, as the soldiers are physically scarred by witnessing suffering and death. Similarly, the narrator in ‘To the
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”.