Wait a second!
More handpicked essays just for you.
More handpicked essays just for you.
Theme of war in wilfred owen's poetry
Point of poetry during war
Theme of war in wilfred owen's poetry
Don’t take our word for it - see why 10 million students trust us with their essay needs.
Recommended: Theme of war in wilfred owen's poetry
Throughout his poems, Wilfred Owen uses dramatic imagery to emphasise the carnage and destruction of war. His use of imagery does this by helping to recreate some of the sounds, visuals, emotions, and impacts of armed combat. Specifically, in his poems Dulce Et Decorum Est (Dulce) and Strange Meeting, Owen highlights the gore on the battlefield, and the detrimental effects on soldiers after being there. He uses religious references to further his points. Owen also shows the broader loss in society as a result of war.
Owen draws attention to the carnage on the battlefield throughout Dulce. Lines 5 and 6 read, “…Many had lost their boots/But limped on, blood-shod…” There is so much gore around them; soldiers are wearing ‘shoes of blood’. This
…show more content…
Line 8 of Strange Meeting reads, “Lifting distressful hands as if to bless.” This line causes the reader to form an image of hands clasped in prayer, and makes them picture Jesus Christ. Owen is comparing the wrongful and unjust death of Christ to the sacrifice of the soldiers that are massacred in war.
Owen uses another reference to Jesus in lines 34 and 35. “Then, when much blood had clogged their chariot-wheels,/I would go up and wash them from sweet wells”. The chariots represent machinery used in war to drive the attack. Owen presents a picture of the amount of bloodshed caused in battle, to the point where machinery is ‘clogged’. ‘I would go up and wash them from sweet wells. Owen is referring to healing and the washing away of sins as done by Jesus in the bible. Owen uses religious imagery to help conjure images on the carnage and bloodshed during war.
Owen looks ahead to the impact of war on the world. He touches on it in line 25 of Strange Meeting, “The pity of war, the pity war distilled”. Owen personifies war, saying war is a distiller creating nothing but pity. As distilling is to reduce something to its purest form, Owen is suggesting the only outcome of war is pity and destruction, nothing good comes of it. This conveys his feelings of regret and sorrow the war happened to the
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.
To draw into the poet’s world, the poet must draw relations between them, including the reader, making them feel what the poet feels, thinking what the poet thinks. Wilfred Owen does this very creatively and very effectively, in both of his poems, Dulce et Decorum Est Pro Patria Mori and Anthem of Doomed Youth, who is seen as an idol to many people today, as a great war poet, who expresses his ideas that makes the reader feel involved in the moment, feeling everything that he does. His poems describe the horror of war, and the consequences of it, which is not beneficial for either side. He feels sorrow and anger towards the war and its victims, making the reader also feel the same.
On the first read-through of Wilfred Owen’s Dulce et Decorum Est it seems to just be a poem describing a soldiers experience in World War I, but there is much more to the story than that. Through the use of several literary techniques, Owen is able to vividly describe the speaker’s experiences and at the same time make them relatable to the people reading the poem. He also is able to criticize the people who he thinks are at least partly responsible for “tricking” a younger, more gullible him into the situation in the first place.
Evaluating the poem by Owen’s “Dulce et Decorum Est,” it illustrates a soldier’s view into the world of war. The poem begins by describing how soldiers are “bent double, like old beggars, under sacks.” The people are “coughing like hags” and walking through mud. “Haunting flares we turned our backs”, the men continued marching tired with lost boots. The soldiers are “drunk with fatigue.” The soldiers yell, “Gas! Gas!” The soldiers put...
The use of compelling figurative language helps to reveal the reality of war. In the first line, "Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,"(1) shows us that the troops are so tired that they can be compared to old beggars. Another great use of simile, "His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin,"(20) suggests that his face is probably covered with blood which is the colour symbolizing the devil. A very powerful metaphor is the comparison of painful experiences of the troops to "[v]ile, incurable sores on innocent tongues."(24) This metaphor emphasizes that the troops will never forget these horrific experiences. As you can see, Owen has used figurative language so effectively that the reader gets drawn into the poem.
In ‘Dulce Et Decorum Est’. Owen, throughout the poem, creates the impression of the trenches for the reader and stanza one helps to set the scene. The soldiers, who have been fighting for a long time in the trenches, are finally returning to their billets to rest. The exhaustion of the men is shown here through similes which compare the men to old beggars and hags, ‘like beggars under sacks’ and ‘coughing like hags’, although they were young men, showing just how exhausted they were and the effects the war is having on them physically. Also, the men are ‘blood-shod’ which makes them seem more like horses than human beings. Owen also uses metaphors in stanza one to describe the terrible tiredness the men were suffering from, ‘men marched asleep’. The stanza describes how the poor conditions of the trenches are putting a strain on the soldiers, until they are ‘knock-kneed’ and having to ‘trudge’ through the ‘sludge’ to get to their place of rest. They are ‘drunk with fatigue’ and limping with wounds or loss of boots. This stanza also illustrates the ...
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...
Owen uses imagery constantly to convey the conditions and feelings experienced during this war. Firstly I will be exploring Metaphor as it is used so much in this poem. The first metaphor which I will examine is: “Haunting Flares” on line 3 of the first stanza. This quote has so many connotations, my first opinion on this was that the flares which the enemy are firing to light up the battle field are said to be representing the souls of the soldiers fallen comrades. This could also be said to represent the power the enemy has on their own mortality as the bright flares would light up the battle-field exposing everything to their view, this indicates that the enemy always seem to have power upon the soldiers, almost godly. The second metaphor which I will explore is:
Owen's poems the irony between the truth of what happens at war and the lie that was
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
To conclude this essay, with regards to all of the analysis above, I have concluded that Owens poem shows how cruel war is in our time but Shakespeare's speech is mainly to inspire and motivate whether Owen's poem is to inform about the reality and the harshness of war it self. Owen has experienced the war personally and is so able to write about it in detail hence the similes and the metaphors. However due to the fact the Shakespeare has no experience in war itself, he would have to improvise and make up some limes.
Human conflict is a violent confrontation between groups of people due to differences in values and beliefs. During World War I, poet and soldier, Wilfred Owen, faced the harsh realities of human conflict, dying at a young age of 25, only six days before the war ended. Owen’s personal encounters during war had a profound influence on his life as reflected in the poems and letters he wrote before his passing. In using a variety of poetic devices to write about the suffering and brutality of war, vividly captured in his poems ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’ and ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’, Owen effectively conveys his own perspective about human conflict. ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’ depicts the horrific scenes on the battlefield and a grotesque death from drowning
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.
...e see a young boy being taught how to use weapons. In “Exposure”, Owen depicts a group of soldiers freezing to death at war, even though they aren’t in the midst of fighting. Lastly, in “Dulce Et Decorum Est” we read about a soldiers who struggles to get his mask on during a gas attack (when the enemy releases a gas deadly upon inhale). Owen describes the soldiers slow death in detail. Not only do these images provide the reader with first hand accounts of war, but they also show Owen’s feelings towards the war. All of these images that are glued into his head will be there forever, which is why he incorporates these realities in his poems, so that everyone can realize that war is nothing more than a inhumane act of terror.
Wilfred Owen is a British poet, well known for his works relating to World War I. Many of his most famous works such as, “Dulce et Decorum Est,” “The Sentry,” and “The Show” were influenced by Owen’s personal life. Owen strived to tell the truth in his poetry, a factor that would expose the world to war’s deepest secrets. In Wilfred Owen’s poem “Dulce et Decorum Est”, the soldier’s perceptions of War are shaped by his involvement on the battlefield; propaganda on the home front presents war as an honour however, the use of violent imagery illustrates war as a corruption of the mind and body.