Compare the techniques that the poets you studied use to explore the idea that truly significant battles are fought within oneself.
Poets such as Robert Frost, Sylvia Plath, Seigfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen use a variety of techniques including metaphor (imagery), satire and personification to express their emotions from the battles they fight within themselves. These techniques are used to raise emotional relations and the association of the difficulties people face within their life to the events in the poem to help influence the reader to explore the idea of the significant battles that are fought within oneself. Frost uses his poetry to describe his view on life’s decisions, demons he faces after making these decisions and that the past
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Frost uses this technique in his poem The Road Not Taken, saying “Two roads diverged in a yellow wood”. This is a metaphor for a tough decision in life, the two roads represent a tough decision that must be made. The narrator realises that this decisions will have a significant affect on his future. This technique is also used in another poem of Frosts Fire And Ice although it is an implied metaphor Frost compares fire and ice without implying it , the fire becomes a metaphor for human desire “From what I've tasted of desire”. The ice becomes a metaphor for hatred “I think I know enough of hate”.The poem investigates the destructive power of human passion (metaphors of desire and hate) through the symbolism of destruction by fire or ice. Plath uses this technique similarly in her poem Daddy. The metaphor used in this poem contain dark literal meanings, these dark meanings are used to describe how she feels in a scenario. An example of this is when Plath states “An engine, and engine/Chuffing me off like a Jew./A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen./I began to talk like a Jew./I think I may well be a Jew.” The Jew is used as a metaphor to show her father is a German, she compares her treatment of her to the attack of the Germans on the Jewish …show more content…
In Dulce et Decorum Est, Owen uses satire to sarcastically describe how horrific and dehumanising war is. The title of the poem is Latin and once translated to English it means ‘sweet and proper’ which is completed in the last stanza stating ‘sweet and proper to die for ones country’. The poem concludes saying that the statement is an “old lie” as there is nothing sweet dying for ones country. The full statement was not provided at the start of the poem as Owen wanted the reader to decide for themselves the reality of war. In a similar way in Owens poem Futility, satire is used in an ironic way to show that war is irreversible and harsh. The poem states that the dead mans previous occupation before war was a farm worker of some sort as the reference “fields half sown” is related to a young mans life cut short because of war. Plath uses sarcastic comments in her poem The Applicant to sarcastically criticise societies views on what a wife and husband should be.”It is waterproof, shatterproof, proof./Against fire and bombs through the roof” as Plath states the perfect partner to marry it is clear that no human is ‘shatter proof’ and shows that all marriages will not be perfect and societies idea of them is not correct. Frost uses sarcasm and irony in
“Dulce Et Decorum Est” is a World War One poem written by Wilfred Owen, to express the dreadfulness of war and that no glory awaits men.
“Daddy” contains allusions to World War 2 with images of a swastika in the sky (line 46-47) and references to German concentration camps, “A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen” (line 33). She states her father clearly to be a German man with “I thought every German was you” (line 29), “with your Luftwaffe” (line 42), “And your Aryan eye, bright blue” (line 44). Plath alludes to the popular anti-Semitism of her era in Germany depicted in lines 31-40. She then describes herself as a “Jew” to degrade herself against her German father. The diction of her lines “Chuffing me off like a Jew” (line 32) and “I think I may well be a Jew” (line 35) dehumanizes Jews in which she uses to also describe herself. To describe even more hatred towards her father, the multiple usages of the word “black” (lines 2, 51, 55, 65, 76) depicts her father as a dark menacing shadow in her life that has a evil dark “black” heart. She compares him to the man she married when Plath states, “I made a model of you” (line 64). She then describes that husband as a vampire that drank her blood (lines 72-74), because he reminded Plath of her father in the statement “They always knew it was you” (line 79). In Plath’s mind she only married her husband to be reminded of her father but soon realized it was a toxic relationship in line 80 in which she says “Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I’m through”.
Frost uses a religious allusion to further enforce the objective of the poem. Whether Frost's argument is proven in a religious or scientific forum, it is nonetheless true. In directly citing these natural occurrences from inanimate, organic things such as plants, he also indirectly addresses the phenomena of aging in humans, in both physical and spiritual respects. Literally, this is a poem describing the seasons. Frosts interpretation of the seasons is original in the fact that it is not only autumn that causes him grief, but summer.
The first technique he uses is imagery. Frost does this at the beginning of the poem by talking about all of the beauty of nature that is around the boy. For example, he talks about the mountains in the distance that the boy does not see because he is too busy working. Another example and the most important use of imagery in this poem is the snarling and rattling of the saw. This is essential because it gives the readers a since of life to the saw. Lastly, the sweet-scented stuff when the breeze drew across it gives the reader not only smell but also touch. All of these examples of imagery helps set the mood for the reader and puts them into the poem as an onlooker. Another technique that he uses is figurative language. The saw “snarled and rattled” is the use of figurative language and onomatopoeia because it represents the fate of the boy and the animal-like noise that accompanies the fate. Also, “Call it a day” is figurative language because this represents that if the boy was told to stop working earlier he might have never lost his and hand and would not have died. Frost also uses figurative language when he wrote “The life from spilling” meaning that literally the blood is gushing from his arm and so his life is quickly fading away because the more blood loss the faster arrival of death will come. Irony can also be found in “Out, out” when the boy laughs after his hand is cut off by the saw. This ironic because usually people do not laugh at these types of situations and have the complete opposite reaction which is usually panic. Frost also uses blank verse and no stanzas to convey emotion throughout the poem. He does this by showing the light heartedness of the setting at the beginning of the poem and is invested in the boy, but then as the poem continues he detaches himself from the emotional aspect of the situation the boy is in. For example, when is says, “Call it a day , I
Similarly, Wilfred Owen’s poem “Dulce et Decorum Est” describes a soldier who witnesses the death of his comrade from poisonous gas. Using imagery and irony, Owen presents a blunt contrast between the propaganda practiced for recruitment and the truth behind the suffering endured by the soldiers. While presented in different formats, both literary works criticize the romanticism of war, arguing that there is no glory in the suffering and killing caused by conflict.
Throughout the poem, Plath contradicts herself, saying, ‘I was seven, I knew nothing’ yet she constantly talks of the past, remembering. Her tone is very dark and imposing, she uses many images of blindness, deafness and a severe lack of communication, ‘So the deaf and dumb/signal the blind, and are ignored’. Her use of enjambment shows her feelings and pain in some places, in other places it covers up her emotional state. She talks of her father being a German, a Nazi. Whilst her father may have originated from Germany, he was in no way a Nazi, or a fascist. He was a simple man who made sausages. ‘Lopping the sausages!’ However she used this against her father, who died when she was but eight, saying that she still had night mares, ‘They color1 my sleep,’ she also brings her father’s supposed Nazism up again, ‘Red, mottled, like cut necks./There was a silence!’. Plath also talks of her father being somewhat of a general in the militia, ‘A yew hedge of orders,’ also with this image she brings back her supposed vulnerability as a child, talking as if her father was going to send her away, ‘I am guilty of nothing.’ For all her claims of being vul...
Dulce et Decorum Est In Wilfred Owen’s poem “Dulce et Decorum Est” the speaker’s argument against whether there is true honor in dying for ones country in World War I contradicts the old Latin saying, Dulce et Decorum Est, which translated means, “it is sweet and honorable to die for the fatherland”; which is exemplified through Owen’s use of title, diction, metaphor and simile, imagery, and structure throughout the entirety of the poem. The first device used by Owen in the poem is without a doubt the title, which he uses to establish the opposing side of the argument in the poem. The poem is titled, “Dulce et Decorum Est”, which comes from Horace’s Odes, book three, line 13, and translated into English to mean: “It is sweet and honorable to die for the fatherland”. With this title it would seem as if the Owen himself condones the patriotic propaganda that resulted in the deaths of young men in World War I, tallying upwards of hundreds of thousands.
Wilfred Owen's poem "Dulce Et Decorum Est" was written during his World War I experience. Owen, an officer in the British Army, deeply opposed the intervention of one nation into another. His poem explains how the British press and public comforted themselves with the fact that all the young men dying in the war were dieing noble, heroic deaths. The reality was quite different: They were dieing obscene and terrible deaths. Owen wanted to throw the war in the face of the reader to illustrate how vile and inhumane it really was. He explains in his poem that people will encourage you to fight for your country, but, in reality, fighting for your country is simply sentencing yourself to an unnecessary death. The breaks throughout the poem indicate the clear opposition that Owen strikes up. The title of the poem means "It is good and proper to die for your country," and then Owen continues his poem by ending that the title is, in fact, a lie.
In the poem, “Daddy,” Sylvia Plath shows her character to have a love for her father as well as an obvious sense of resentment and anger towards him. She sets the tone through the structure of the poem along with her use of certain diction, imagery, and metaphors/similes. The author, Sylvia Plath, chooses words that demonstrate the characters hatred and bitterness towards the oppression she is living with under the control of her father and later, her husband. Plath’s word choice includes many words that a child might use. There is also an integration of German words which help set the tone as well. She creates imagery through her use of metaphors and similes which allow the reader to connect certain ideas and convey the dark, depressing tone of the poem.
William H. Pritchard, an author of Modern American Poetry, points out, “But his attempt at poultry farming was none too successful and by 1906 he had begun teaching English at Pinkerton Academy, a secondary school in New Hampshire” (1). Although Frost failed at other occupations, those failures pushed him into teaching which also helped blossom his poetry. “Then took the other, just as fair and having perhaps the better claim” (1026) Frost claims. Eventhough he has a bitter childhood, a rocky start to his young adulthood, and was unsure of which career path to take, his love of poetry led him to best
Wilfred Owen’s poem “Dulce et Decorum Est” makes the reader acutely aware of the impact of war. The speaker’s experiences with war are vivid and terrible. Through the themes of the poem, his language choices, and contrasting the pleasant title preceding the disturbing content of the poem, he brings attention to his views on war while during the midst of one himself. Owen uses symbolism in form and language to illustrate the horrors the speaker and his comrades go through; and the way he describes the soldiers, as though they are distorted and damaged, parallels how the speaker’s mind is violated and haunted by war.
“Dulce et Decorum Est” showing an anti-war side, the poem was originally entitled to Jessie Pope. It shows a tone through out the poem of depression, sadness Owen gets his message across very rapidly and makes the reader feel like they had just experienced the war in the few minutes of reading ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’ this is done from the metaphors and magnificent imagery used to show a terrible side of war.
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, Frost is traveling when he comes across two roads split at a fork. The “yellow wood” shows that it is autumn. The poem seems like it’s just about two roads, but they become metaphors for decisions in his life. And sorry I could not travel both He realizes that he could not go down both paths.
In analyzing the poem 'The Road Not Taken'; by Robert Frost, it represents 'the classic choice of a moment and a lifetime.';(pg 129) He relies much on the reflections of nature to convey his theme. However, this poem seems to be in essence very simple but
The Poem The Road not Taken by Robert Frost explores the fundamental question of free will often pondered in philosophy. Frost is speaking and indirectly addressing the unique path each person will end up traveling in their lifetime. Every day humans are faced with decisions; nevertheless, humans are also granted with the ability to choose their future. While humans may attempt to weigh each choice and predict the consequence of the given decision, it is not possible to predict the future outcomes. Also, it is likely that those making a decision often attempt to look down one path as far as one can "to where it bends in the undergrowth" or as far as one can predict.