His aim is not poetry, but to describe the full horrors of war. In this essay I have firstly decided to analyze two poems by the war poet Wilfred Owen, taken from his writings on the First World War. Both 'Dulce et Decorum est' and 'Disabled" portray Owen's bitter angst towards the war, but do so in different ways. Then I will analyze a very different poem 'Who's for the Game?' written by Jessie Pope, and finally contrast this with the poems by Owen.
Generals Die in Bed Charles Yale Harrison’s war novel, Generals Die in Bed, uses a very discrete kind of writing that assists the reader in understanding the sad, miserable and degrading reality of what life in the trenches was actually like. To the general public, troops in the trenches were perceived as heroic and glorious, however Harrison manages to sway the readers opinion by using deliberate writing techniques to help them see the truth. His short, powerful, but brief sentences about emotion, the repetition of certain events, the limited backstory on the characters and the songs he has the characters sing are all methods with which he is able to get the reader to see what life in the trenches was really like. The trenches were always filled with emotion, most of which was fear and sadness. Harrison showed that the emotions within the trenches could change in an instant.
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.
This notion is further emphasised through the use of jargon in the lines, “The Japs used to weigh us, to see how thin our bodies could get before we started dying”. This statement implies the nature of the camp to be brutal and unforgivable. Misto has incorporated both visual images and jargon to create an effective sense of authority to therefore relive their experience of war through memory. Likewise, the poem Dulce et decorum est by Wilfred Owen is how the post himself saw war with no knowledge, imagination or training which prepared Owen for the shock and suffering of front line experience. Its horrifying imagery has made it one of the most popular condemnations of war ever written.
English 124-Literary Essay October 19, 2011 “Dulce et Decorum Est” and “The Soldier” Although the poems “Dulce et Decorum Est “by Wilfred Owen, and “The Soldier” by Rupert Brooke, share the elements of writer passion and subjectivity, they differ with regards to tone, theme and literary devices. The lyrical poem, “The Soldier” was written during the period before the World War, and thus presents an unrealistic viewpoint of war. The speaker is simply regurgitating ideas and concepts about war instilled in him by his country England. The phrases, “England bore, shaped, made aware” and “the thoughts by England given” solidify this theory. It is evident that he has not physically engaged in warfare, nor has he observed the explicit nature of the battlefield because his focus remains on England, rather than the war itself.
One of the soldiers fails to fit the gas mask in time, and Owen masterfully describes himself witnessing the soldier’s gruesome death. Owen ends the poem with the Latin proverb from Horace's Odes (III.2.13) ‘Dulce et decorum est, pro patria mori’, meaning 'It is sweet and proper to die for one's country' (Dr. Stuart Lee, 1997). With those last few lines, Owen expresses his deepest disapproval of the war. He is rejecting the traditional view that glorifies war, calling it ‘The old Lie’ (line 27). Owen is addressing the reader, who possibly doesn’t have the first hand experience of the war, and criticising the enthusiasm with which the war is described, particularly to vulnerable children (BBC, 2013).
Die for your country Moral contradiction in a moral principle: utilitarianism. Homicide can be an appalling achievement, but while killing under utilitarianism jurisdiction of war can dismiss the horrific matters of taking lives. When putting death in a context of “dying for your country” the direness of the situation transforms into an admirable one. Propaganda, and the sociological aspects of not going to war, utterly employs all men into the army in complete blindness of reality. This is portrayed through WW1, in books such as Quite on the Western Front.
¿Poetry invites us to explore interesting ideas. Bruce Dawe effectively does this through his use of language in war poetry. Bruce Daweâs Homecoming, predominantly focuses on the dehumanization of the soldiers at war as it is an antiwar protest poem. It talks about the process and meaning, of grieving and treatment of the soldiers in Vietnam. The words âmortuary coolnessâ accurately describes the mood or emotion felt in this poem, as it is rather passive for an antiwar poem.
This positive representation of conflict could be linked to Tennyson’s role of Poet Laureate under Queen Victoria’s reign. On the other hand Futility could be considered as an elegy for the unnamed solider and opens with a tender and sad tone shifting to pointlessness in the second stanza. The use of the pronoun him in the opening line suggests this could be any soldier from World War one demonstrating the number of men who would remain unnamed and unclaimed during this conflict and how bad it was that so many people died, and even the most patriotic soldiers would still die, unnamed in the end. The Charge of the light Brigade comprises of six stanzas, of varying in length from six to twelve lines and goes in chronological order. This could offer the reader the sense of riding in to the battle with the soldiers.
“Attack” and “The Charge of the Light Brigade” are similar only because both poems address issues of war. “Attack” is a poem clearly written with a cry for help, while help is needed in “The Charge of the light Brigade”, but one could not tell by the way that the author writes the poem. One narrator is a reporter of optimism and buoyancy whereas the other narrator is a reporter of trepidation and atrociousness. In the poem Attack, author Seigfreid Sassoon presents the dreadful side of war. Throughout the whole poem, he uses words of terror not words of joy.