Depicting the ungracious trench life during 1915 till 1918, Wilfred Owen is one of the most prominent poets from his genre. By using many well-known techniques in poetry, Wilfred Owen successfully characterizes his closed form poems through personification, Alliteration, and allegory. Illustrating a gas attack upon a trench, Dulce et Decorum Est is a embittered first hand portrayal of his first hand experience during the war. The poem is primarily written in three sections: an account of the soldiers withdrawing from the battlefield; a surprise gas attack; and lastly a stanza confronting those exalting the war.
Beginning with a series of descriptions about the soldiers returning from the frontline, Owen shows us how these men contradict the model soldier portrayed in the recruitment posters. The soldiers that we see now have become beaten down with pain, and exhaustion: “old beggars, bent double” and “hags”. Here Owens shows us the true reality of war, and its impact upon the soldiers, he; shows us how the everyday combat has taken its toll upon the generation, practically taken out the whole cohort. Wilfred Owen goes on to describe the soldiers in even deeper description, and along the way he uses the term “blood-shod”. The term “blood-Shod” brings the idea of blood shed, again representing the overall scene of weariness, and death. With the final line of the stanza being a personification of the “Five-Nines dropping behind”, we begin to see that war is not such a wonderful thing. This may be an allegory, where Owen actually states how it is not the ground that is “tired” and “outstripped”, but in fact it is the soldiers who are beaten down.
Jolted from the previous somnambulant genre of the first stanza, the reader is greet...
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...meet to die for one’s country. Taken from the opening lines of an Ode by Horace, it was frequently used to urge young men to enlist. It is the serving up of spewed out, second hand patriotism from a previous era, when war was considered valiant and heroic, that Owen compares to the “incurable sores on innocent tongues”.
Although loosely written in iambic pentameter, the variations in the syllable counts for each line, added to the use of caesura, prevent any flow or rhythm in the poem. Owen wanted to break with tradition to show how moral values had broken down. He also broke with traditional language and imagery in an attempt to shock the complacent who send young men to their deaths based upon “The old lie”. The Latin used at the end of the poem means 'It is sweet and honorable to die for your country', a concept Owen is strongly denying. This is an allegory.
“Dulce Et Decorum Est” is made up of grotesque diction scattered all across the poem to illustrate the conditions in which soldiers try to retain their humanities both physical and psychological, whereas “Suicide in the Trenches” offers little description of the horrendous physical aspects of war. Right from the get-go, Owen jumps into the brutality of war as he recalls, “Bent double, like old beggars under sacks, Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,” (Owen). His use of words like beggars, knock-kneed, and ha...
Wilfred Owen’s “Dulce et Decorum Est” and E. E. Cummings’, “next to of course god america i” are poems that critique patriotic propaganda. Both poems use words and images to effectively depict the influence that patriotic propaganda has on war. “Dulce et Decorum Est” uses descriptive words to create realistic images of the horrors soldiers are faced with during combat, whereas “next to of course god america i” uses sarcasm to inform readers that the abuse of propaganda can be used to manipulate others. The attitudes they convey are quite similar; both suggest that propaganda is a lie; it is not sweet and fitting to die for one’s country. It is ingrained in soldier’s minds that to die for ones country is a great and honourable sacrifice.
Owen as a young soldier held the same romantic view on war as majority of the other naive soldiers who thought that war would be an exciting adventure. The documentary extract illustrates how markedly Owen’s perspective of the war changed, as noted in a letter to his mother while he was still in the front lines: “But extra for me, there is the universal perversion of ugliness, the distortion of the dead ... that is what saps the soldierly spirit.” In ‘Dulce Et Decorum Est’, Owen’s change of heart is evident through the irony of the poem title and the ending line “The old Lie; Dulce et Decorum est, Pro patria mori.”, an allusion to the Roman axiom made famous by Horace, which translates to “The old Lie; It is sweet and right to die for your country.”. The line depicts Owen’s realisation that the horrific nature of war through human conflict is not sweet and right at all, rather, it is appalling and “bitter as the cud” as death is always present on the battlefield. Additionally, Owen indirectly responds to Jessie Pope’s poetry, a pro-war poetess, through the reference “My friend, you would not tell with such high zest… The old lie…”, further highlighting his changed perspective towards the war which has been influenced
The poem is divided into three sections with each part dealing with a different stage of the experience. In the first stanza, Owen describes the state the soldiers are in. The first line states that the platoon is “Bent double, like old beggars” (1). This gives the reader a vision that they are exhausted and compares them to the look of beggars on the street, who often times, look very ragged and shabby. The line “coughing like o...
Wilfred Owen expresses his feelings about war in “Anthem for a Doomed Youth”, which revolves around the events that took place in World War I. Throughout the sonnet, the speaker talks bitterly about modern warfare, noting the harsh sounds of war and questioning the treatment of the soldiers that perish. In the octave, the speaker wonders what can be done to honor the soldiers that died, but realizes negatively that the soldiers only receive death instead of ceremonies. In the sestet, the speaker expands upon this idea of a proper ceremony for the deceased soldiers, saying that the families must be the ones to properly honor their dead. Owen’s use of the Petrarchan sonnet with a Shakespearean rhyme scheme, helps him express his frustration about war and its subsequent treatment of the dead.
Just as the poem is written in a rhyme and rhythm that makes poetry easy to follow, the vivid imagery helps one to picture more easily what is going on in the poem. Owen brilliantly chooses words and phrases that illuminate the scene, making the reader feel as if he is physically in the scene along with the characters. For example, Owen describes that the Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots/ But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;/ Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots/ Of tired, outstripped Five-Nines that dropped behind (Gioia 782). A feeling of sadness and pity is felt as one hears the previous words. It is almost as if the scene of the soldiers trudging through the battlefield is being painted for the reader to actually visually ...
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.
In Wilfred Owen’s poem “Dulce et Decorum Est” the speaker’s argument against whether there is true honor in dieing 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.
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.
... Instead of idealizing war in a romantic way, war poets such as Wilfred Owen aimed to expose gruesome truths about these wars and how they impacted lives. It points a finger and criticizes the governments and authorities that wage these wars but don’t fight in them themselves but rather watch as lives are lost. It exposes propaganda for what it is, a tool for brainwashing. It puts into question the notion of dying for ones country to be noble, honourable and admirable.
World War I impacted poetry profoundly. Poets who served in the war were using poetry to share their horrific stories about the hardships they faced. These poets became known as “war poets.” They wrote about the traumatic, life changing experiences that haunted them once the war was over. Intense poems started emerging that portrayed the mental and physical struggles soldiers faced. Two examples of the impact that World War I had on poetry is seen in the poems “Dulce et Decorum Est” by Wilfred Owen and “Repression of War Experience” by Siegfried Sassoon.
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.
Owen also informs the readers that fighting for one’s country is a show of patriotism, but dying in a brutal manner for that course is insipid and unpleasant. This study is significant in exploring all these ideas as they manifest in the piece by Owen. Owen’s Arguments
At this point, Owen had faced the death of many of his comrades, and each time his thoughts were the same. “…not that they have died in vain, but that they have died without ceremony” (Cash). Owen believed the war to be one which was fought in vain. While these men were risking their lives for their country, they did not fully understand why they were fighting. This war would take everything from them, including their ability to have a proper funeral. Owen goes through his poem defining the different feelings the men are capable of feeling due to the “insensibility” of the war. In stanza II, Owen states one of the biggest problems the men seem to face, “And some cease feeling. Even themselves or for themselves” (Owen). The horror of the war has left the men feeling numb. They no longer believe they are capable of making it out alive or if they have the ability to help their comrades save themselves. They have become immune to the horrors of the war, however; it has left them empty and lost. In stanza III, Owen goes on to explain how those who have lost their imagination are deemed insensible. During war, imagination was considered a burden, and those without it were got through the war in a different way. They no longer feared the sight of bullets or their
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...