Wilfred Owen: The Ugly Truth Of War

During a time of great alienation and isolation within Great Brittan during the early 20th century, World War I inspired a plethora of soldier poets who graphically depicted the horrors of modern warfare in the bloody and muddy trenches of the Western Front. One of these poets, Wilfred Owen was a second lieutenant in the fifth battalion of the British army during The Great War. In April of 1917, the enemy blasted off bloodthirsty munitions which resulted in Owen being thrown into the air and left semiconscious for several days thereafter. Once he came to, he wrote to his sister informing her that it was not the explosives that worked him up, but the fact that Cock Robin, one of Owen’s friends, did not only lay dead nearby, but had literally

That lie is mirrored in this poem’s Latin title and in the last line of the poem which roughly translates to mean that it is sweet and just to die for one’s country (To die for your country?). The ugly truth of death by gas is in direct contrast to earlier literary periods where the perception of the protagonist is that of a chivalrous, mighty, and romantic figure and their deaths were considered both heroic and glorious. In speaking to the reader regarding the dying soldier in the poem, Owen directly expresses to the reader that if they could have only witnessed the horrid happenings of that day, the wagon in which they had tossed the gassed corpse, the struggling of his cold and empty eyes, the sound of the man aspirating blood from his polluted lungs, the way his body appeared enveloped in sores and the way his face hung covered in blood, they would never tell children the blatant lie of the false glory believed to be achieved through fighting for one’s country (17-26). This powerful imagery draws a disturbing portrait of the agony and suffering preceding such a grotesque death of one of many young men. For Owen to write such audacious, vivid, and repulsive truths was very much considered overwhelming as the shock of such detailed imagery gave the early 20th Century readers a physical