After nobody attempted to help him because of his jacket, he realized that he was going to die. He became more aware of the important things in life. He didn’t want to die by the street ramble. Consequently, the title of Royal brought him death and took everything that he could have in life. “I'm Andy, he screamed wordlessly, I'm Andy.” (P. 196) He began to hate his identity as a Royal and he want to die as Andy.
Imagery is used to show Plath as an aggressive person, such as through the line “smash it into kindling”. The emotive line “The bloody end of the skein” creates the sense of abandonment and eternal suffering that by no means that one could be aware of. It suggests that Plath’s mind, the labyrinth, was something that Hughes struggled to understand, and propose that her psyche was beyond his control. He also utilises speech in The Minotaur, creating a sense of truth in Hughes’ part. While he is not seen as a saint within the poem (he remarks in a sarcastic matter to Plath in the poem), he positions the reader to empathise with him, painting the image that he is the placid one in the relationship, and the one who encourages her to embark on her creative pursuits “Get that shoulder under your stanzas/ And we’ll be away.”.
The poem's (and therefore Brooke's) attitude to war is emphasised even more so by the poet's disdain towards those who did not sign up to fight in the war. 'leave the sick hearts that honour could not move' means that those men who decided not to fight in the war have 'sick hearts', and that there must be something wrong with them since even the promise of honour
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.
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. The title of the poem ‘Dulce et Decorum est’ originates from the Roman poet, Horace ‘Dulce et Decorum set Pro patria mori’ and can be roughly translated into English as It is Right and Fitting to die for your Country. The title is a satire and instead of writing pro-war poetry, he puts an ironic slant on the maxim challenging the historical conventions and attitudes towards war. The reader is also able to
“Maud: A monodrama” is a complex exploration of love, death and society, conveyed through an erratic narrative with a near-schizophrenic speaker who laments the death of his lover, Maud. Received badly by most contemporary critics, the idea of “Maud” being both “mad” and “mud” shall be examined in this essay and the reasons why certain critics may have regarded it in such a way. The speaker’s madness, delusion and cynicism pervade the poem. The neurotic, frantic and exasperated speaker may have led to certain critics regarding the poem as “Mad”. In the first stanza, the environment in which the speaker’s father committed suicide is personified as having “lips” that are “dabbled with blood-red heath” and “red-ribb’d ledges”.
Hardy in ‘The Man He Killed’ is trying to tell us how war is futile as men are killed just because they are on opposing sides. The poem, compared to ‘Drummer Hodge,’ is much more retrospective. Hardy uses a dramatic monologue throughout the poem, making the poem itself much more personal and leaving a larger impression on the reader, whereas Drummer Hodge is written in the third person; this allows Hardy to describe the treatment of the dead
The poem then goes on to explain that it is the total emptiness and the destined void meant by death that make us afraid of death. In the next stanza, two counter-arguments are taken on—the religious view about afterlife is simply laughed at, while the logic that we should not fear what we can’t feel is taken on by saying that not being able to sense the world is actually what we fear. Finally, the conclusion is drawn that since death will come whatsoever, it is no use to be brave in the face of death. At last, the person comes back to reality and finds out that we just have to carry on to live our busy lives because although we cannot accept death, we can’t escape from it either. William Gass, however, doesn’t seem to totally agree with Larkin in his essay Exile.
“Floundering like a man in fire or lime” The literal images depict the horror of death in war, abolishing the romantic notions of war set up previously by jingoistic poets of the time, such as Jesse Pope. Owen goes on to further confront these patriotic views in the final four lines of the poem. “My friend you would not tell with such high zest, to children ardent for some desperate glory, The Old Lie: Dulce et Decorum est, Pro patria mori.” This sardonic address to the aggressive nationalist views of the era causes a strong reaction in readers as they realize the truth about war – how horrific and desolate the scene actually is. “Anthem for Doomed Youth” explores another aspect of a soldier’s life in World War One. Death is corrupt and vile, and the soldiers must suffer all by themselves.
Jessie Pope is of a different view, she was not a soldier like Owen and had no experience in warfare at all and especially trench fighting. Wilfred Owen’s poems are very sad and bleak; there is a harsh realistic feel to them. Jessie Pope on the other hand uses her poetry as an advertisement for the war and describes it as a ‘game’ and ‘fun’. The contrast is quite extreme, on one side the war is being described, by an ex-serviceman as a horrific, terrifying experience, but on the other side a comparison to a team game. The two writers were very different; Jessie Pope had a few excuses for misinforming the public with her poetry, firstly she was an inexperienced journalist and she did write ‘Who’s for the Game’ in the early stages of the war and therefore not many battles had been lost by the British army yet, so there was still a lot of confidence in the British public.