Owen's Dulce Et Decorum Est

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Wilfred Owen's Dulce Et Decorum Est The poem is one of the most powerful ways to convey an idea or opinion. Intense imagery and compelling content in a poem gives a reader the exact feeling the author wanted. The poem "Dulce Et Decorum Est," an anti-war poem by Wilfred Owen, makes great use of these devices. This poem is effective because it combines both the mechanical and emotional parts of poetry. Owen's use of diction and figurative language emphasizes his point, showing that war is horrid and devastating. The use of very graphic imagery also adds to his argument. Through the intense content of the poem "Dulce Et Decorum Est," Wilfred Owen shows the reader the horrors of war. Owen compared the soldiers to animals in order to bring out their suffering. "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. Even though they had lost their boots, they still struggled on in order to survive; although their feet were caked with hard, dried up blood. Cud is previously swallowed food by cattle that is regurgitated and swallowed a second time. Owen made the phrase, "bitter as the cud" to illustrate how the man that was dying from the gas attack was indeed dying a slow and painful death by the regurgitation of his own blood. The use of the graphic animal imagery in this poem brings out all the soldier's painful sufferings. Owen used a gas attack and related it to being underwater. The reader would most likely not know what it would be like to be in the middle of a gas
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