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Wilfred Owen wrote Dulce et Decorum Est about the first World War, in which he had personally fought. It was addressed to Jessie Pope, a writer of other poems concerning the War. Specifically he wrote the poem to counteract her poem Whos For The Game? . Owen felt that Pope did not comprehend the seriousness of the war in her portrayal of the battle as a rugby game.
Pope conveyed the participants of the game were admirable and those who sat on the sidelines shunned and disregarded. His poem seems very depressing and gloomy, particularly in comparison, but is it not more realistic? Owen was a soldier himself, would he not know more about the horrors that war brings than the female poet, who could only be permitted to watch from the outside of her competitive yet carefree game of rugby? Personally, I think he would. At the time, Owen was put into a psychiatric hospital because the war had so badly affected him, broken his character. It was there that he met Siegfried Sassoon, who had been put into psychiatric care for writing poems that the authorities thought put the war into a negative light.
It was Sassoon who encouraged Owen to become a poet, and they became good friends. The way Owen writes is very much sane and some would say he was quite an influential character. So how does Owen compare the horrors of war? From the very first line you become aware that the poem is not likely to be as light and cheerful as Popes poem. The line is; Bent double, like old beggars under sacks which is already a rather miserable tone.
We see how Owen has begun to set the mood for his piece already. He describes the soldiers crooked stance and compares them to old beggars, uncomfortable and undesirable. In the second line he goes on to say that the men are knock-kneed and compares their coughs to those of hags. Again the undesirable, slightly unpleasant note is illustrated through the diction.
The soldiers sound unwell, probably due to their harrowing lives in the trenches, which makes them dirty, sodden and more prone to illness. In the third line the poet describes flares, long flames often used for signalling, as haunting to the soldiers. This suggests that they are sick of the war and hate the constant reminders of it. Obviously they cannot get away from the war and the monotonous, dire lifestyle they faced every day in the ranks.
Everywhere they turn constant reminders of the war surround them, weapons or perhaps even people that remind them of the loathsome duties they have to carry out. I know if it were I, I would feel that a sense of claustrophobia, an unease and repulsion of the things that I would be forced to cope with and an irrepressible urge to escape. I would hate the feeling of knowing that I could not just leave when I pleased and had to face the same tragic scene every day. This may be somewhat deep for the first few lines of a poem, but I feel that these kind of subjects are already beginning to emerge. The line continues to say that the man turned their heads on the haunting flares, maybe in a half-hearted effort to shut them out of their minds.
Line four is even less enthusiastic it describes the men as trudging to their distant rest. At least the men have something to look forward to, but then again maybe not, maybe the sentence has a double meaning, maybe distant rest is meant to be read further into and is a disguised synonym of the deaths that eventually the men will encounter. If this is the case then the line is quite dark, but if the line is taken as it is written then there is a little more optimism being displayed. Lines five to eight keep on with the tired, droning tone of those prior to them; they describe how the men were marching almost subconsciously, regardless of losing boots or small explosions in their wake.
Such events as injury occurring around you may be shocking to most usually, but to people fighting in the war they have become the norm. The men are portrayed as limping and blood-shod. It is not surprising that the men would be limping in their state, but blood-shod is not a recognised English term. It is similar to the expression blood-shot, which is customarily connected to the eyes, meaning a blood vessel has burst and blood seeped out into a network of red lines, rather unattractively. Also shed (as in bloodshed) is likely to be a word that could be paired with shod. If bloodshed and bloodshot are welded together you will inevitably come up with blood-shod, which I think may be a mixture of the two blood has been shed by the men and has exuded over the area of the wound.
Lines seven and eight also describe the almost subconscious actions of the men. Some of the words used are lame (although this may be literal as evidently men are liable to injury in a war situation), blind (probably meaning ignorant of the occurrences around them) and deaf (see the definition of blind). Line eight, the final line of the first stanza, includes a similar situation to that in line three. Owen describes the men as being deaf and blind to the noisy bombs (specifically Five-Nines) that fell after the soldiers.
Like when they turned their backs to the flares, so they are, at least metaphorically, turning their backs on the bombs. The second stanza starts with the word Gas! . The word is then repeated, this time in capitals. I think this usage of words creates an effect of a double take, as if the first time the word is heard the urgency is not delineated strongly enough. The monotonous, droning tone of the events in the last verse are carried through to the second and the reaction times of the soldiers has been affected in their fatigued predicament.
The word takes a while to get through to the men properly but the second time they hear it they realise the imperative situation and know they have to think fast to help themselves. The rest of this line and the line proceeding it outline the mens rush to put on the masks, and their clumsiness in their haste. The third line of this stanza, line eleven in the poem as a whole, begins to tell of how one soldier did not manage the operation quickly enough and was yelling for attention. The next line is: And floundering like a man in fire or lime This line sums up the groping, desperate movements of the man enveloped in this deadly gas. The word floundering, for whatever reason written as a slight abbreviation in the style of many historic poets and authors i. e.
using an apostrophe in place of the appropriate vo...
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