The Last Laugh Poem Analysis

Through his poems “The Last Laugh” and “Dulce Et Decorum”, Wilfred Owen reveals to civilians the truth about the horrors and psychological effects of war. Owen argues in “The Last Laugh” that weapons possess more power than compared to religion, family, and love. Weapons overpower the feeble strength of soldiers and their faith for help and protection during war. “Dulce Et Decorum Est” conveys the sorrow and terror of war to highlight the traumatic experiences soldiers encounter. However, war, replete of negative effects, is not acknowledged by civilians for its truth. To civilians, war is something of glory, righteousness, and the chance to die for one’s country. Owen, who personally experienced World War I, found battle to be traumatizing;

Owen illustrates the irony in which weapons, rather than the soldiers, get the last laugh in battle. “The Last Laugh”, a title so aptly named, identifies the way in which weapons have more power than religion, family, and love. In the first stanza, “The Bullets chirped—In vain, vain, vain” (Owen line 3), the bullets are mocking the soldier’s religion. Perhaps the weapon hit the soldier to make him curse at God and die in vain. Therefore, the soldier is paying the consequence of war by death whilst the weapons get to laugh at him. In line 4, “Machine guns chuckled—Tut-tut! Tut-tut!”; the sounds associated with the guns is an onomatopoeia for rhetorical effect to express disapproval of his religion. Furthermore, thoughts of families prove to be pointless when the soldiers seek protection in the war. In line 6, “Another sighed, -- ‘O Mother, --mother,--Dad!” the soldier is crying out to his parents through the sufferings of war, although nothing good comes out of it. Here, love shows a sense of faith, but it does not conquer the difficulty of war. The character is inferred to be a young person who is unmarried, since he wishes for his parents instead of a loved one during his depressing moment of time. The word “childlike” in this line suggests that the character is indeed at a young age who is yearning for his parents as any child would. This juxtaposition between the

He states, “At the same time, this reading, in my view, adds a new resonance to the poem 's specification of the horror and the cost of war” (Hughes 1). This quote suggests an insight that war is a haunting experience in the mind and body of the soldiers who have never faced the psychological effects of war. Hughes discuss the effects of the war, “On the one hand, then, the inimitable account of the soldiers ' reduced state, and on the other, the evocation of what is experienced, despite the dehumanizing factors of the situation, as a common predicament” (1). The soldiers’ reduced state could be the appearance of the body and their actions, such as being “bent-double like old beggars,” “drunk with fatigue,” or “marching asleep.” These factors dehumanize the soldiers on the battlefield, which proves that war transforms them to become weak-oriented and arise in an unstable state of mind. One of the traumatic experiences of the soldiers convey that it “precisely does not stabilize into an objective scene, any more than the haunting image of the man as drowning in a “green sea” could simply be psychologically processed” (1). This also refers to the soldiers’ effect on the cost of the war. Not only do they encounter the disturbing sense of reality on the battlefield, they also have to face their chances