But citizens back home had no way of knowing what this war was like, especially on the front line. Without television or radio to communicate to them, they were only left to imagine the truth or read the often manipulated papers and other publications. If people had realised the true extent and the horrors of what was actually happening, morale would have been severely affected. There are many ways that the representation of war was expressed through poetry, with very different views and opinions. Wilfred Owen portrayed conflict as a negative event, using his poetry to draw a very vivid picture of life for the soldiers in many different situations.
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.
Dulce Et Decorum Est (Written during his recuperation at Craiglockhart) * The title is ironic – intention to shock civilians at home who believed war was noble and glorious * Owen is vitriolic(spiteful, bitter)in his condemnation of those who support war and thereby, by inference, support and condones the suffering that accompanies it. * Owen writes as himself, an officer troubled by dreams or recurring memories of particularly horrific incidents * A powerful protest addressed to those who wrote recruiting literature that represented war as honourable or sporting. The “old lie” should not be promoted. * Latin title and final lines are from the Roman poet Horace. * The poem refutes the “old lie” with depiction of anguish and agony that shatter any illusion that war is glorious * The famous Latin tag means “It is sweet and decorous(honourable/noble) to die for one’s country.
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.
This word helps the reader to identify the speaker’s emotional standpoint of the separation. One can assume he feels as if his ex-lover has ripped his heart apart from hers. In the last line of the first stanza, “truly that hour foretold sorrow to this,” the speaker shows the readers that the pain and grief he feels in the moment of their separation does not ease with time. The feelings he felt in the moment of separation was just foreshadowing the greater sorrow the speaker would feel later on. In the second stanza, it describes the speaker’s atmosphere as being cold.
Sample Essay English In these poems “Suicide in the Trenches”, “Glory of Women” (Seigfried Sassoon) and “Break of Day in the Trenches” (Issac Rosenburg) the poets displayed a negative point of view towards war from educated men who were fighting in the front line or artillery at times. And these poets are two of the more well known of the poets of war many poems or other forms of literature were probably lost. In the poem “Suicide in the trenches” Sassoon uses techniques such as Alliteration in “simple soldier boy” and “Slept soundly” helps to display his young and innocent aimless outlook on life. Whereas in the second stanza, the same technique is used for showing the stage where war has lost its excitement factor or “Game” (As in game hunting etc). This is shown in the statements “lice and lack of rum,” and “bullet through his brain”.
Generic Question: What aspects of Wilfred Owen’s poems made the greatest impact on you? Wilfred Owen portrays the horror, suffering and waste of lives in war by using poetic techniques in a very powerful way. Two poems which clearly show this are “Disabled” and “Futility”. (You might briefly introduce each poem, linking it to the specific question. In “Disabled” Owen’s represents his views on the horror, suffering and waste of war through the perspective of one young soldier who has been wounded and is now in a veterans’ hospital.
Having experienced the appalling conditions of the front line, some of Owen’s greatest criticism is upon those that encouraged “boys” to enlist themselves. Whilst Owen acknowledges their oblivious nature, he is quick to condemn the encouragement provided by family relatives. In his poem ‘The Dead-Beat,’ Owen illustrates the cruel nature of war through the story of a soldier that “dropped, - more sullenly than wearily,” suggesting that it is their fractured state of mind that caused him to collapse rather than physical exhaustion. Yet this “dead-beat” is described as a “scum” who is “malingering,” revealing the pure merciless shown to these soldiers as Owen suggest that this man is suffering from shell-shock but he is still being described as weak and that he is faking. In doing so, the “bold uncles, smiling ministerially” appear as sickening and out of place as they are proud of their nephews going to war even though they are almost certainly going to be injured or killed.
Through the title Owen displays men that were in their prime turn into wrecks. The men in the poem are stripped from humanity as the opening references them as ‘these’ and ‘they’ representing them as one, not individuals. The rhetorical question in the first line already initiates an intellectual response from the reader. Their nameless state establishes those whose mental health was crushed by the experiences endured during the wartime. ‘Who, wherefore’ and ‘why’ utilises a questioning tone demanding a response and showing the similarities between the terrors of mental break down and war.
Owen has divided the fourteen lines of this sonnet into two stanzas, the break coming at the end of the line 8. By using a sonnet for the structure of his poem, Wilfred Owen introduces a touch of irony, because the conventional function of the sonnet is love, and this poem is sort of anti-love because the young soldiers have to spend their time in the trenches. So, their lives are wasted and, overall, the lives of their loved ones at home are also ruined. Talking about the tone, we can say that the poet depicts a strong anger at the futility of war having experienced the horrors himself. In the first octet, we see that Owen makes a catalogue of the sound of war, the weapons of destructions such as “guns” (line 2), “rifles” (line 3) and “shells” (line 7), which are linked to religious imagery such as “orisons” (line 4), “bells” (line 5), “prayers” (line