Due to his plight, he sees the bridge as a dead end for him: “I am seventy six years old. I have come twelve kilometers now and I think now I can go no further.”(2) The war has affected his state of mind and destroyed the love of life in him. Through this character Hemingway is actually making an example of the old man WITH the aim of describing the effects of war on the state of mind of innocent civilians. Neither his tired body nor his confused mind seems capable of grasping or coping with the sudden collapse of his entire world. By the end of the short story, the narrator, who is a soldier in this war, , reports to the reader that the old man “got to his feet, swayed from side to side and then sat down backwards in the dust.”(3) This description is very telling because it reflects the inevitability of death when it comes to war.
In this essay I will explore the emotions and moods portrayed in two poems, ‘Suicide in the Trenches’ by Siegfried Sassoon and ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’ by Wilfred Owen. Siegfried Sassoon was twenty-eight years old when he joined the Army, this was old by the standards at the time with the average age of recruits being 16/17 years. Sassoon was a 2nd lieutenant in charge of leading these boys as he seen them. He was nicknamed ‘Mad Jack’ for his near suicidal exploits on the battlefield. He survived the war living to eighty years old but was deeply affected by the horrors of war.
Speech – Good Morning students and teachers today I will be talking about some Wilfred Owen Poems that conveyed the experiences of wars. The two poems that will be discussed are “Dulce Et Decrorum Est” and “Anthem for Doomed Youth”. Many of his poems show that wars are bad and it is not needed. Wilfred Owen was born on the 18th march 1893 and died on 4 November 1918, he is best known as one of the most powerful war poets, who detailed the reality and horrors of the First World War. Owen's first experience of the war was in hospitals treating the wounded soldiers.
The poem begins with the vivid simile “bent double, like old beggars under sacks”. Owen harshly compares the soldiers to beggars, the lowest of the low, as they’re no longer young and vibrant but old and crippled. In this case they’re not begging for money or food, but their lives. We see how they are stooped over from their time in the trenches and buckling under the weight of their heavy packs. This simile is effective in helping us understand the sheer extremity of the soldiers’ exhaustion.
Firstly, Sassoon effectively uses irony to illustrate the contrast between the soldier’s real and glorified death, as well as the impression of a close-knit military unit, as opposed to the truth that no one had the compassion to care for a fallen soldier. The first, most obvious irony is in the title itself: The Hero. From the title we expect to read a poem dedicated to the fall of a great soldier, courageous and chivalrous, who sacrificed himself to fight for his country. This impression is further affirmed in the first stanza. There, we are introduced to the mother as she receives
Wilfred Owen uses contrast in this poem to help show the major changes for example “ There was an artist silly for his face, For it was younger than his youth, last year. Now, he is old; his back will never brace” This talks about before the war he would have people wanting his picture. But now no-one wants to see him, he looks old even though he is still young and his back will not support him. Many soldiers lost their limbs in battle and this poem helps people realise the pain the soldiers went through both physical and mental. “Mental Cases” is about the men who went crazy due to the events of World War I. it helps explain how these men looked with the use of half-rhymes, metaphors and similes “ drooping tongues from jaws that slob their relish, Baring teeth that leer like skullls teeth wicked?” This talks about what the men looked like after going crazy.
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.
Ones who died from these toxic gases were in a painful and miserable death. The ones that survived will never forget these images they saw and horrific experiences they had went through. Through Wilfred Owen’s imagery and Irony’s in his poem we can detect the tone, “Dulce et Decorum Est” is a horrific battle scene from World War I. The strong use of figurative language helps to interpret the real meaning of war. In the first line, "Bent double, like old beggars under sacks”, shows us that the troops are so tired that they look like old beggars, slouching from being so drowsy.
In the first two lines of the poem, Owen uses the similes “Bent double like old beggars under sacks, knocked kneed, coughing like hags” to paint a grim picture in readers minds of how the soldiers were. He compares the young and fit soldiers to old sick men. This comparison goes against society’s perception of how the soldiers were in world war one and two. In the
Wilfred Owen had a good education as well, but (unlike Rupert Brooke) he went to war, and saw what it was it was really like, the bad conditions, the lack of food and meaningless deaths, Wilfred Owen realised that the war was cold and cruel, not like people imagined it. This poem is very negative, and quite sad, unlike ' The Soldier' it expresses the tormented thoughts and recollections of a teenage soldier in the 1st World War, who has lost his limbs in battle and is now confined, utterly helpless, to a wheelchair. I think Wilfred wanted people to realise that the war was not as glorious and victorious as people thought, there were so many men whose lives were thrown away even if they did physically survive it.. Unfortunately Wilfred Owen died on the 4th of November 1918, before the end of the war. To conclude, these two poems are different in many ways (attitude, mood, tone, ect..) One was to encourage the people to fight for their country and go to war, one was to make people see that the war destroyed many men's lives, it had no mercy.