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Analysis of two war poems By Thomas McGregor 6 E I am going to compare the two poems Dulce et decorum est by Wilfred Owen and Channel Firing by Thomas Hardy. The poem by Hardy talks about the great German guns Big Bertha's which fired across the channel at the nearest coastal villages, and how the noise of these guns is so terrific that it wakes the dead in their graves. Dulce et decorum est is a poem about a group of tired, worn out soldiers who are making their way back from the front line. They come under a gas attack and Owen describes to us the scene which is presented to him of a fellow soldier and companion drowning in his own mucus. Both poems portray a sense of helplessness to this exposure to the war!
In the poem Dulce et decorum est we are being told of the gas attack directly by Owen in the first person plural. It is an immensely vivid description that Owen describes to us and his message is hits the reader right between the eyes with its certitude. In the poem Channel Firing, however, Hardy uses two narrative voices. One is the voice of the dead who describe being awoken by the noise of the great guns, the other is God! IN this the message is more abstract because of the way Hardy jokes with us about the war and Gods views on it.
Wilfred Owen's poem "Dulce Et Decorum Est" was written during his World War I experience. Owen, an officer in the British Army, deeply opposed the intervention of one nation into another. His poem explains how the British press and public comforted themselves with the fact that all the young men dying in the war were dieing noble, heroic deaths. The reality was quite different: They were dieing obscene and terrible deaths. Owen wanted to throw the war in the face of the reader to illustrate how vile and inhumane it really was. He explains in his poem that people will encourage you to fight for your country, but, in reality, fighting for your country is simply sentencing yourself to an unnecessary death.
The breaks throughout the poem indicate the clear opposition that Owen strikes up. The title of the poem means "It is good and proper to die for your country, " and then Owen continues his poem by ending that the title is, in fact, a lie. Aligned with powerful imagery and a vast irony, the author was eventually killed in the very war he opposed. Before his death, he was thought to be one of the best poets of the Twentieth century.
War is not worth it, as Owen proves with the lie told across the world: It is good and proper to die for your country. Thomas Hardy's poem Channel Firing was written in 1914. His poem looked at the comical and ironical view of the war. In This poem Hardy portrays us humans as being so small and insignificant that god mocks us and finds ways of joking about the war.
God says, Ha, ha. It will be warmer when I blow the trumpet (if I needed I ever do; for men and rest eternal sorely need). Hardy is trying to expose to us that this war was started for almost no reason at all and that we Europeans are so arrogant and so full of our-selves that we lack the self discipline to look past our grudges and prejudices, for a better world. These two poems written by Poets at two completely different periods of the war, Hardy's poem written in 1914 and Owens poem written in 1917, both talk about the First World War and its causes and effects. They both however have the same message about human nature and how we are often mislead by our ignorance, patriotism and leaders.
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