Tennyson creates a feeling nobility with his use of poetic devices, such as rhetorical repetition:
'Cannon to right of them,
Cannon to left of them,
Cannon in front of them´,
and alliteration:
'Stormed at with shot and shell,
While horse and hero fell´ By saying this he is trying to convince us that dying in war is dignified and well worth sacrificing your life for. He leaves out the gruesome truth that any man deserves to know. This differs from Owens honest and clear view on war and the deaths that occurred
In the final stanza Tennyson creates a sense of the immortality of the soldiers´ bravery with a rhetorical question and commands:
'When can their glory fade?
O the wild charge they made! …
Honor the charge they made,
Honor the Light Brigade,
Noble six hundred!´
The repetition of 'the six hundred´ at the end of each stanza reminds the reader of the enormous loss of life, but at the end of the poem they have become the 'Noble six hundred´ and are celebrated as heroes. This again deludes the reader into thinking that dying in such a horrific way is all worth fighting for the country.
Wilfred Owen in his poem is asking us to question Tennyson’s views of war. The theme of 'Dulce´ is that war and dying for one´s country are not at all not glorious. This message portrayed throughout the poem from the first stanza to the last line. In the opening stanza you get a very different image of the soldiers from what you might expect from the title. Tennyson thinks of soldiers as smart, proud, marching, and fighting, but Owen´s picture is based on his personal experience of the battlefield. There is nothing dignified about Owen´s soldiers. They are
'Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge´ Again this is very honest and showing a completely different side of war to the respectable one which Tennyson tires to inflict on us.
Owen presents the reader with details of what people looked like and how they felt.
'Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. ´
The men are not really marching but are so tired that they are like old women and beggars trudging through the mud. They are the opposite of Tennyson´s 'Noble six hundred´. Owen´s picture is not glorious at all and the very first line would shock people at home who imagined the men gallantly charging forward to attack. Owen catches the mood of the scene very well. The first stanza is very slow and inactive and such words like 'trudge´ capture the atmosphere. He says 'we´ when he is talking about the men’s actions so we are reminded that he was there. The second stanza is very active and frantic in comparison. This shows the agonizing boredom the men had to put up with and then suddenly they could be killed instantly after a rush of adrenaline.
'GAS! Gas! Quick, boys!-- An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time´
The contrast of 'ecstasy´ and 'fumbling´ is an effective way of showing this. At first, the reader is relieved that the gas masks are on, but then we realize that someone hasn’t got his on yet. A man is helplessly stumbling and Owen can not save him. This is not a glorious death. By using vivid imagery Owen gives the reader the feelings of horror and disgust that he wants them to feel at the sight of the sight of the soldier poisoned by gas:
'In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.´
This not only shows how the soldier is suffering, but that he is in terrible pain. The reader can imagine the soldier´s life flickering away.
In Owen´s poem death is intensely presented as the opposite of glorious:
'…the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin´
It is as if he is filling the poem with as many ugly images as he can:
'………………………….the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues´.
During the man´s death it is as if you are reliving his torture.
Owen gives us a detailed picture of the war: he talks in the first person, 'I saw him drowning´, and describes one dying man, in contrast to Tennyson´s rather impersonal 'six hundred´. He wants us to imagine that we are actually there on the battlefield so we get an idea of what it was like. This poem is the closest we will get to experiencing war and if we had, Owen tells us in the final lines, then we would not try to glorify the war any more.
