Wartime Poem Analysis

Comparing Wartime Poems The four stories that are compared include “The Man He Killed,” “Dulce et Decorum Est,” “Dover Beach,” and “Patterns.” There is a similarity between the first three stories, and that is that all those stories are told in a man’s perspective. The last poem “Patterns” has a little more of a different emotion of the speakers because it is told in the woman’s perspective rather than the men’s. All the poems have a sense of sadness to them because they are about war. War is usually not anything other than depressed, saddened, horrific stories told from broken soldiers. The first story “The Man He Killed” is about a man in the bar who is talking about his experience being in the war. This poem is written around the time of the Boer War in Africa between the British and the locals of South Africa. He begins to discuss how he had to kill another man while in the military yet he was uncertain if that was the right or wrong choice. The soldier then begins to describe how in the war, you either kill or be killed. The tone He later describes in the poem that he had “sold his traps” (p370). The writer describes this to paint the picture that as a

The tone goes from clam to a little frightened as he talks about a war coming. The couple feels frightened because of the horrific violence that comes with war. The writer tells the reader to now listen to the waves and we no longer hear them as being calm and “tranquil” but rather now we hear the waves as a “grating roaring.” The writer uses imagery in the poem because the reader can understand how the waves sound. The setting of this poem is in England; the man can feel a war coming and because he has gone through many different wars he knows what to expect. Him and is lady can only then focus on how dark and fearful the place will be when war