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.
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.
By using a sonnet for the structure of his poem, Wilfred Owen introduces a touch of irony. The conventional function for a sonnet is love, but this poem has a sort of anti-love, or rather, a love that turns bad. The young male population have so much patriotic love, and are so eager to serve, but this love turns sour. They spend time rotting in the wastes of the trenches, only to be mown down in the blink of an eye by a machine-gun. Not only are their lives wasted, gone without the holy rite of a funeral, but the lives of their loved ones at home are also ruined.
The theme of ‘’Dulce et decorum est’’. Has been established form the very first line ‘’ Bent double like old beggars under sacks’’, is a metaphor established to convey there’s no nobility and honor in war or fighting for your country. Here the poet has made an illusion to Homers poem ‘’The Iliad’’, which talks about the nobility of dying in war. But instead the author has written the poem to accurately describe the misery and terror soldiers had to live with, he wanted people to see the real truth behind war and stop them from telling future generations the ‘’old lie’’ that it is sweet and honorable to die for ones country. ‘‘Who’s for the game?’’ is attempting to evoke the opposite to the above; the poem refers to dying in battlefields as glorious and impressive.
However if you read deeper in to the text you find that Owen is criticising the term because his poem shows the exact opposite. "Bent double, like old beggars under sacks." Owen is describing how the war has turned young fit men to near critical health conditions to the extent of Owen saying that the young men are now becoming like old women. The similie is very effective in the context because the reader feels sympathy toward the soldiers because they are being worked near to death. "Knock-kneed, couging like hags, we cursed through sludge."
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
In the poem “Dulce et Decorum est” the poet writes about soldiers in the battle field and all the grueling things about war. I feel the meaning of this poem is to give an idea and insight to the reader of how war is very gruesome and just down right awful with no sugar coating. In both of these poems the writers use irony and similes to help get the reader to understand the point they are making. The first comparison about the two poems is the use of irony. In “Rite of passage” the line “short men, men in first grade” the writer is calling the young boys men.
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.
Not only does For the Fallen show aspects of emotive language and poetic techniques but it also shows imagery through stanza 3 with the quote “They fell with their faces to the foe” meaning that the soldiers in battle died with dignity and pride. It gives us the images of men dying in the faces of their enemies and that their triumphs will not go unnoticed in the eyes of the ‘mother’ country England. Glory of war is shown through Rupert Brooke’s poem “The Dead” with the use of emotive language which is seen in stanza 1 line 7 “That men call age; and those who would have been”. The quote plays on our emotions as it makes us feel despair for the young men who died in battle and how they died before the could become middle aged or old and live life the way we do now. Another example from the poem “The Dead” is “But, dying has made