Wilfred Owen's, ‘dulce et decorum est’ allows readers to see what actually happened during warfare, challenging the government's way of recruiting young soldiers (like Owen's at the time) via propaganda and the ideas of war. Owen's challenges these ideas through his poetry by creating sensory imagery through the dehumanization of the soldiers, and by creating irony through juxtaposition and the title.
The dehumanization of the soldier is framed by depicting the reality of warfare to the audience by projecting sensory imagery throughout the poem. The government represented war to be for handsome, young, honourable men but Owen's is giving the readers imagery that contradicts those ideas. Owen's frames the soldiers dehumanization throughout the poem by using depicting sensory imagery like in the first stanza, “beggars under sacks”, sacks being uniforms and “Coughing like hags”, giving the reader the illustration of old ugly
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The first two stanzas of the poem,“Bent double, like old beggars under sacks, knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge” is used to display the reality of warfare. This stanza is not written in iambic pentameter but instead, Owen's uses trochaic pentameter to portray the real idea of warfare. The motions your mouth goes through whilst reading the poem out loud is a representation of what Owen's is describing in the first two stanzas. Owen's uses juxtaposition in his poem to compare the ideas of warfare from different perspectives (The use of propaganda to portray the idea of war vs. the actual warfare) like; “If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs". Owen's uses the juxtaposition in the action and sensory sound of the dying soldier against the idea of ‘Dulce et decorum est’ - It is sweet to die for my
Owen uses very vivid imagery throughout the poem to describe how horrible the war was to the speaker and his fellow soldiers. He starts by describing how worn and tired he and his fellow soldiers are as they start “towards our distant rest” (Owen 695) which can be interpreted as them simply just walking back to their barracks to sleep or, in a darker sense, to their deaths. He describes how they marched asleep and how they were too tired to even hear the sounds of the gas shells dropping behind them. “Gas! Gas! Quick, boys!” (Owen 695) someone yells when they finally realize what it happening. All of the soldiers scramble to put on their gas masks but at least one man near the speaker can’t make it to his mask in time; “But someone still was yelling out and stumbling And flound'ring like a man in fire or lime...” (Owen 695).
In Wilfred Owen famous poem Dulce Et Decorum Est uses the death of a soldier from a poisons gas to call out the propagandists who praised the glories of war through posters, flyers, and newspaper articles. During the height of the war the need for recruitment of soldiers was depicted as if the women encouraged it and society embraced it. The ugly truth was never portrayed and the harsh reality, that war was horrific, terrifying, brutal, and deadly, was ignored. Owen writes the poem describing unimaginable experiences that are the harsh reality of what the war was like at the time. The first line states “ Bent double, like old beggars under sacks, Knock-kneed, coughing like hags,” is the first insight at the difference between the young, clean cut, spiffy uniform solider that was posturized to encourage recruitment to the actuality of soldiers who are exhausted beggars the complete contrary to what was depicted.
The first stanza of the poem, “Dulce Et Decorum Est”, helps to set the scene; it tells of soldiers who are beaten down and in horrible condition. They are limping back from the front lines of the war. Owen paints a terrifying picture of these tired and wounded soldiers. When one usually thinks of a soldier they think of young, strong, and confident man. However, the soldiers in the poem are compared to old beggars and hags; while they marched on, barely able to keep their eyes open from lack of sleep, they have a hard time walking. This is because they had lost their shoes in battle and their feet were “blood-shod”. (Line 6) This term means that the sol...
In ‘Dulce Et Decorum Est’, Owen compares the solders who are men to ugly, old, sick women through the simile “coughing like hags”, highlighting that the men no longer possess strength, masculinity, exceptional physical skills and potency. As a result, the soldiers’ eradicated youth and innocence portrays the dehumanising effect that the soldier’s have faced through their experiences of the war. Additionally, Owen further explores this dehumanising effect through the exaggerated movement of the soldiers in the hyperbolic metaphor “We cursed through sludge”, illustrating the ghastly and gruesome environment made up of a mix of materials such as body parts of other fellow soldiers, blood and mud. The horrendous conditions the soldiers faced for a long period of time had a drastic impact on the soldier’s mental health which in turn lead to post-traumatic stress disorder or shell-shock disorder and lost of potency. Owen also portrays that not only did the war affect a few soldiers, but all the soldiers through the repetition of “all”. Ultimately, it is conveyed that the soldiers had to unwillingly sacrifice their human attributes and was dehumanised as a result of human conflict. Similarly, in ‘The Next War’, Owen
However, as we see in the poem, the squad is the exact opposite of what we think war heroes would be like. They are scrawny and sickly with little to no energy or attention on what is going on. The war is not treating these men with the same kind of respect as they are trying their best to give to it. Another example of Owen’s use of similes to describe the theme throughout the poem is in the lines: “And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime… / Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light, / As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.”
Again, the motif of harsh weather conditions is emphasized as nature has become the real enemy of the soldiers • "Stare, snow-dazed" (line 22) shows alliteration and emphasizes the [s] sound which allows readers to hear the sound of the wind and sense the lonely atmosphere the soldiers are in • Words such as "Forgotten dreams" (line 22) show the soldiers reaming of what their lives could have been if they had stayed safe at home • There is slant rhyme when Owen writes "sun-dozed" (line 23) as if reinforcing the fact that the weather is causing the suffering of the soldiers • When Owen writes "Is it that we are dying?" (line 25), he asks a rhetorical question to show the extent of the suffering the soldiers are going through • The sixth stanza shows contrast between the cold, harsh conditions at war and the warm and happy atmosphere at home using words such as "crusted dark-red jewels" (line 27) • Punctuation such as dashes and colons are used to create pauses before and emphasize certain messages that Owen thinks are important. Colons are also used before a statement is further elaborated on.
In this poem, the narrator is describing a wounded soldier recalling exactly why he joined the war as he sits in a wheel chair. The narrator states that the soldier remembers that he joined the war because “someone said he’d look a god in kilts”, and “to please his Meg” (Disabled 25-26). The soldier in this poem has faced a great tragedy in which he lost both his arms and his legs and is now living in an institution. In line 3 of the poem, Owen refers to the wounded soldier as “legless, sown short at [the] elbow.” Through this imagery that Owen uses to describe the soldier, the reader can see that the soldier has seen both the brutality and tragedy that war comes with.
The words Owen chooses to use in the poem describing the soldiers are peculiar choices. The speaker refers to them as “[b]ent double, like beggars in sacks” (line 1), very different from a typical idea of a soldier. From the beginni...
At some point, the poet records that the soldiers struggled to keep their helmets. The poet who writes as a soldier states how they faced hardships, “…men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots but limped on, blood-shod.” (Owen). He also notes that he watched a friend with “white eyes writhing in his face” (Owen).
The use of delicate sounding words could be there to show how the anti-climax can be a silent or the covert assassin, who seems innocent compared to artillery in the poem. Indeed, think about a questioning scene - it is attractive and often peaceful but with confusion. Owen is highlighting that this weather has two very different sides depending on the context, and highlights both by contrasting soft sounds with violent images in the reader's
Owen opens his poem with a strong simile that compares the soldiers to old people that may be hunch-backed. ‘Bent double, like old beggars like sacks.’ ‘like sacks’ suggests the image that the soldiers are like homeless people at the side of a street that is all dirty. This highlights that the clothes they were wearing were al...
It goes through the worst parts of the war and describes them in detail. The horrors in these descriptions contradict the glorification of the war The poem consists of four stanzas, the first describes the soldiers, the second a gas attack, the third Owen’s nightmares and last an accusation to the people back home. Owen’s poems are suffused with the horror of battle, and yet finely structured and innovative. The first stanza sets the scene as it describes the conditions the men fought in and their feelings. Owen immediately shocks the readers by describing the young soldiers as ‘bent double’ emphasising their exhaustion and the way they slump along, deformed by fatigue, I think this is an effective simile because no one back home will be expecting their proud soldiers described as beggars.
The tone is bitter and intense in a realistic way. It is achieved by the vivid and gruesome images in the poem. Wilfred Owen 's use of imagery in this poem is by depicting emotional, nightmarish, and vivid words to capture the haunting encounters of WWI that soldiers went through. In the first stanza, Owen depicts his fellow soldiers struggling through the battlefield, but their terrible health conditions prevent them from their strong actions in the war. When Owen says, “Bent double, like old beggars under sacks, knock-kneed, coughing like hags” (lines 1-2). This provides the readers with an unexpected view and appearance of soldiers, as they usually picture as strong, noble, and brawny-looking men. Soldiers sacrifice themselves to fight for their country and are exhausted from their unhealthy lifestyle. In lines 7-8, “Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots of gas-shells dropping softly behind,” they have lost the facade of humanity and their bodies are all wearied and weak on their march. This reveals a glimpse at the soldiers’ actions, as well as inferring to a psychological effect of the war. Then in line 5, “Men marched asleep,” the author is making abnormality to be one of the major purposes of the war, that it