The Send-off and Dulce et Decorum Est by Wilfred Owen

The Send-off and Dulce et Decorum Est by Wilfred Owen

"The Send-off" and "Dulce et Decorum Est" are two poems, both written

by the anti-war poet Wilfred Owen.

Wilfred Owen was born in England in 1893. He was the son of a railway

man who was not very rich, so because of financial hardships he moved

to France. When he was in France the First World War began (1914).

This meant that he got involved in the war and during the war he

sustained a severe head injury, which led him to suffer the rest of

his life in hospital.

During the stay at the hospital he started to write poems about war.

He became an anti-war poet because he witnessed the reality and the

suffering of war. Owen wanted to show the world how ruthless war was

through his emotional poems. The injuries he sustained during the war

finally killed him in 1917 at the age of just 24.

Owen wanted show young men that war wasn't all about honour and glory,

but that the true reality of war was death and destruction. He used

his own experiences of fighting to write about the horrors of war in

many of his poems.

"The Send-off" and "Dulce et Decorum Est" are both about soldiers in

the First World War. "The Send-off" is an ironic poem that deals with

the lack of respect given to the young men heading for the front

lines, whereas "Dulce et Decorum Est" talks about the horrors and

realities of war.

"The Send-off" is a poem in which the poet expresses his disgust at

the lack of respect the soldiers were given. The poem rhymes in an A,

C, D and B, E pattern and contains 6 verses; 2 containing 5 stanzas, 2

containing 3 stanzas and another 2 containing 2 more stanzas.

The poem starts off with cheerful soldiers, singing their way to board

"the train with faces so grimly gay". This oxymoron gives us an

indication of how the soldiers were excited yet unhappy that there