A Comparison of two poems: The charge of the Light Brigade (Lord Tennyson) Dulce Et Decorum Est (Wilfred Owen)

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By Mathew Du Port                                                                                           1/10/02                    

GCSE English Course work

A Comparison of two poems:

  • The charge of the Light Brigade  (Lord Tennyson)
  • Dulce Et Decorum Est  (Wilfred Owen)

The two poems that I have been studying are each about war. They both describe about the terrors of war and the suffering of each side’s men and what they had to go through. The two different poets have very different views on how the war actually progressed.

The first poem “The Charge of the Light Brigade” is a piece of propaganda for the army; similarly for “Dulce Et Decorum Est.” It was most likely that the poet in the first poem was nowhere near the actual war and was probably sitting at some clerk’s desk back home, having been instructed to write such propaganda. You can tell this because of some of the phrases he uses. Phrases like “They that had fought so well” show the inaccuracies that the poet showed because in reality most of the men were killed before they even got to the Russians guns, because they were under so much heavy fire, “Stormed at with shot and shell”. Shot was a type of projectile that fragmented so it would kill or injure a lot of men all at once, and shell was a type of cannon ball that exploded in mid-air.

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The other thing that suggests that the poet wasn’t near the battlefield is that he says that the men did not question what was happening, “Their’s not to reason why”. But I am sure that in real life some of the men would have asked what they were doing. The other thing that this poem does not do is it doesn’t show the suffering that the men had to go through. Instead it tries to tell us how the men were all brave and heroic wanting to fight “Boldly they rode and well”.

 

The other thing that ...

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