Gas! Quick, boys! !” this achieves the sense of haste the writer was trying to achieve by using short sentences and exclamation marks to grab the attention of the reader, also this contrasts with the first verse describing the sense of exhaustion to the one of extreme panic and anger. “Owen’s fear of the ‘haunting flares’ creates the impression that war is a nightmarish and horrific experience. The simile that compares the soldiers with coughing ‘hags’ emphasises this and the corrupt, unhealthy connotations
Soldiers frequently got injured and lots of them died in battles or of illness in the deplorable conditions of the army. The poem is indignantly ironic about the war and emphasizes the bitter aftermath. 'The Soldier' focuses on the glory of sacrifice for one’s country, not mentioning the process of sacrifice, i.e. being injured and dying. Brooke writes about the dead soldier instead of one that has survived.
There were also a lot of gas attacks. Owen really tries to get the reader to understand how bad it was by using horrid imaginary by telling us how tired the soldiers were by writing ‘Men march asleep’ and ‘Drunk with fatigue’ and of his description of watching a soldier dying because he couldn’t get his gas mask on in time of a gas attack. Owen poem is so descriptive that when reading it, you can imagine it in your mind playing like a film whilst reading it. The poem begins with the simile ‘Bent double like old sacks, knock-kneed coughing like hags’ we imagine the soldiers walking slowly like the elderly due to tiredness, and bent double due to all the equipment that they carried at the time with the sounds of five-nines exploding around them. ‘Coughing like hags’ the conditions was not great in the trenches in World War 1, it was full of diseases and the weather conditions would make fighting a great deal harder.
In the short period of four years from 1914-1918, the First World War killed six million men and destroyed countless more lives. Wilfred Owen was a British soldier who became bitter and cynical about the war after suffering from shell-shock. He turned to poetry and one of the poems he produced 'Dulce et Decorum Est'. Dulce et Decorum Est opens with a simile, setting the scene of war time, and Owen's opinion that war is not a noble thing. The first stanza ends with a hint of danger 'of gas shells dropping', but the soldiers, too tired and numb to notice, ignores it for the moment.
Dulce ET Decorum EST “Dulce et Decorum Est” is a powerful poem by Wilfred Owen which depicts the horrific conditions endured by young soldiers during World War One. The poem is divided into four sections: a description of the numbed, shell shocked conditions as they struggle to return from the frontline, an account of a gas attack, its haunting effects on Owen and a plea not to glorify war. Owens’s use of vivid imagery is particularly interesting in Verse one. For example the soldiers are described as “knocked kneed coughing like hags”. This is good word choice because it shows us how the men are suffering and that they are tired.
Wilfred Owen was an officer in the British army and was very anti-war. He was in the battle of the Somme and was blown-up. He suffered from concussion and shellshock. This led to him coming back to Britain and meeting one of his literary heroes, Siegfried Sassoon who encouraged him to start writing poetry. He died one week before the war ended.
"Knock-kneed" is a condition that makes knees hit together when walking. Owen employed this in his poem to show the reader how tired the soldiers were. They could not stand up and walk straight because they had already "cursed through sludge" for many miles. He also utilized the phrase "blood shod", which is when a horseshoe gets put on too hard and the horse's hoofs start to bleed. This exhibited the physical pain that the soldiers were going through.
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
‘Dulce et Decorum Est’ is an anti-war poem written by Wilfred Owen back in1917, published in 1920.Dulce et Decorum est means ‘it is great to die for your country’. The poem describes a gas attack encountered by a group of tired, dying soldiers who have just finished their front line duties ‘are marched asleep’ back to their camp for a few days rest in a battlefield during the World War I. The poet is trying to depict a picture of the war’s cruelties, gruesome and atrocities through shifting rhythms, vivid descriptions and rich, raw images. Owen’s intention is to convince reader that the horror of the war far outweighs the patriotic clichés of those who glamorize it. Owen, a British Army officer, who was also took part in the war, was very much against the war.
He survived the war living to eighty years old but was deeply affected by the horrors of war. Wilfred Owen, also a lieutenant, was shot on the 4th November 1918, one week before Armistice Day. Owen met Sassoon at Craighart Hospital in Edinburgh, where Owen was suffering from shell shock after being blown up by a mortar. Sassoon’s poem, ‘Suicide in the Trenches’ has a simple four line stanza with four stanzas in total. This regimental stile of writing is reflecting a regimented lifestyle.