Wait a second!
More handpicked essays just for you.
More handpicked essays just for you.
Wilfred Owen as a war poet
Wilfred Owen as a war poet
Wilfred Owen as a war poet
Don’t take our word for it - see why 10 million students trust us with their essay needs.
Wilfred Owen describes some of the horrors of war in his poem “Dulce et Decorum Est”. His time as a WWI soldier served as the inspiration for all of his pieces. In perhaps his most vivid work, Owen recalls a memory that torments him in the form of a dream. The death of his comrade haunts him because of the helplessness and violence of it, and uses it as a warning to the world.
“Dulce et Decorum Est” is filled with vivid imagery that Owen uses to describe the dreadful death of his fellow soldier. Owen’s comrade is the only one of their group to not put his gas mask on in time and subsequently succumbs to the fumes. His death is violent, like one of “a man in fire or lime” (Owens 12) and Owen must watch helplessly as the man “plunges at [him],
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.
Hardships from hostile experiences can lead to the degradation of one's mental and physical state, breaking down their humanity. Wilfred Owen's struggles with the Great War has led to his detailed insights on the state of war, conveying his first-hand experiences as a front-line soldier. 'Dulce et Decorum Est' and 'Insensibility' displays these ideas and exposes the harsh and inhumane reality of war. From the imagery and metaphors, Owen's ideas about the deterioration of human nature resonates with the reader of the repercussions of war.
Dulce et Decorum Est by Wilfred Owen is about the First World War. The title is sweet and right, but the story behind it is totally different to the title, which is ironic. The poet clearly mentions the horrible and appalling conditions that happened to soldiers in the First World War. The techniques that have been mentioned in the poem are imagery, language, and tone. The poet changes his tone of voice to angry and bitter, as he explains and describes the horrifying image that happened around him in the war.
Wilfred Owen’s “Dulce et Decorum Est” is a poem about World War I. Owen describes the horrors of war he has witnessed first-hand after enlisting in the war. Prior to his encounter with war he was a devote Christian with an affinity towards poetry, and after being swayed by war agitprop he returned home to enlist in the army; Owen was a pacifist and was at his moral threshold once he had to kill a man during the war. The poem goes into detail about what the soldiers had to endure according to Owen, “many had lost their boots / but limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind; / drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots” (5-7). Owen’s conclusion to the poem is that “the old Lie; dulce et decorum est / pro patria mori” (27-28), Latin for “it is sweet and right to die for your country,” is not easily told when one has experienced war. In his detailed poem Owen writes about the true terrors of war and that through experience you would probably change your conceived notion about dying for your country.
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...
... middle of paper ... ...is used to stress the moral horror of the war when Owen compares the victim’s face to ‘a devil sick of sin’. and when he compares the poisoned blood to the physical diseases of cancer and ‘vile incurable sores’. All these similes bring out the awfulness of dying in a gas attack, making a strong message to. contradict the vague, Latin phrase about how sweet it is to die for.
Owen then moves on to tell us how even in their weak human state, the soldiers march on, until the enemy fires gas shells at them. This sudden situation causes the soldiers to hurriedly put their gas masks on, but one soldier did not put it on in time. Owen tells us the condition the soldier is in, and how, even in the time to come, he could not forget the images that it left him with. In the last stanza he tells the readers that if we had seen what he had seen then we would never encourage the next generation to fight in a war. Owen uses imagery constantly to convey the conditions and feelings experienced during this war.
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.
Wilfred Owen is undoubtedly one of the greatest First World War poets, revealing the true horrors of the war and the appalling and horrendous impact that it had on those on the front line. Owen was not anti war; in fact he is well documented in stating that there was a place for war, volunteering himself to go to the front line. Unlike many of his predecessors, Owen did not glorify the War and ignorantly celebrate it, instead he became increasingly discontented with the purpose behind it. He began to loose confidence in the purpose of the War and his opinion on the War, having originally enlisted full of hope and jubilation, took a dramatic change. Owen questioned whether or not the ultimate sacrifices being made were really appreciated by those at home, whilst they glorified and encouraged the War. This essay aims to examine in detail how Owen depicts his disillusionment with the First World War through his poetry. It will focus on poems including, ‘Disabled’, ‘Anthem for the Doomed Youth’ ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’. I will focus on the literary techniques used by Owen throughout the poems including word choice, imagery and symbolism. I will examine how Owen uses these techniques to portray his increasing change in attitude towards to War and his disgust at the scale of human sacrifice.
" This not only says that they are tired, but that they are so tired they have been brought down to the level of beggars who have not slept in a bed for weeks on end. Owen also compares the victim's face to the devil, seeming corrupt and baneful. A metaphor even more effective is one that compares ".vile, incurable sores." with the memories of the troops. It not only tells the reader how the troops will never forget the experience, but also how they are frightening tales, ones that the troops will never be able to tell without remembering the extremely painful experience.
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...
Owen emphasises that the massacres caused by war do lead to crippling physical damage. In ‘DEDE’, he conveys this by the use of simile paired with alliteration “Bent double, like old beggars under sacks, Knock-kneed, coughing like hags”. These two lines, to begin ‘DEDE’ sets the mood of the poem, giving the audience a bitter greeting and asserts their fatigue. The comparison the men to beggars emphasises their ageing prematurely and that they have a lack of control over their life. Owen forcefully highlights how these men are going to war young but dying old due to the ageing of this war
In Dulce et Decorum est, Owen offers a counter-narrative to the glorious tale of war offered by his country. His description of “...under a green sea, I saw him drowning / in all my dreams” (Owen) tells of a soldier dying from poison gas and seeing “His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin”(Owen). In WWI, it was common for soldiers to come back having seen many grotesque deaths. Here, Owen addresses the potential trauma WWI soldiers experienced when seeing morbid things. Owen’s inability to suppress the images of the soldier’s death is literal and affects his mental health. However, the last lines of his poem also discuss“The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est / Pro patria mori”(Owen). While gore and death exist and impact the mental health of soldiers, they’re unaddressed in Owen’s society and ignored to create their own ideas of a “glorious” war. This purposeful refusal to address soldiers’ trauma and gory nature of WWI warfare marginalizes those soldiers affected by traumatic experiences and undiagnosed PTSD. While large-scale, explicit refusal to address trauma causes invalidation, individuals influenced by misconceptions can also discredit soldiers’ experiences. In Slaughterhouse-Five, Billy Pilgrim’s daughter Barbara doesn’t believe her father is traumatized by the war and writes off his Tralfamadorian ramblings as pure madness. Barbara, “thought her father was senile... because of damage to
Wilfred Owen can be considered as one of the finest war poets of all times. His war poems, a collection of works composed between January 1917, when he was first sent to the Western Front, and November 1918, when he was killed in action, use a variety of poetic techniques to allow the reader to empathise with his world, situation, emotions and thoughts. The sonnet form, para-rhymes, ironic titles, voice, and various imagery used by Owen grasp the prominent central idea of the complete futility of war as well as explore underlying themes such as the massive waste of young lives, the horrors of war, the hopelessness of war and the loss of religion. These can be seen in the three poems, ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’, ‘Dulce Et Decorum Est’ and ‘The Last Laugh’, in which this essay will look into.
Wilfred Owen’s rich graphic imagery and gruesome description beckons us into his world of brutality and horror. In ‘Dulce et decorum est’ and ‘Anthem for doomed youth’ he displays the pity of war and compels the audience to feel pity. Wilfred Owen wrote only about ‘the pity of war’, not ‘anything about glory, honour, might, majesty, dominion or power’. Owen destroyed the romanticisation of the war by presenting the dehumanisation of it to the naive civilians on the home front. In both poems he vividly illustrates the changing conditions on the war front, his experiences as a soldier making it much more personal.