Comparison between Tennyson's 'charge of the light brigade' and Owen's 'Dulce et Decorum Est'.

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Comparison between Tennyson’s ‘charge of the light brigade’ and Owen’s  ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’.

During this essay I am going to try and prove to you that these two war poems have a different meaning to them and a different message behind them. Obviously they are both trying to get the point across about what the poets believe war to be like but I feel Wilfred Owen’s poem is a lot more detailed whereas Alfred Lord Tennyson’s has a more vague approach!

           Firstly, I will discuss Tennyson’s impression of war and how he shows us that war is full of honour, bravery and heroism. Throughout this poem Tennyson sticks to a very brief description of soldiers, death and general war! Tennyson is trying to tell us that the soldiers who fought in this war were brave and should be honoured and respected. Proof of this is in the quote ‘Honour the charge they made’. From Tennyson’s point of view he must of felt that the soldiers were brave and courageous enough for us to honour them which is asked of us in this quote. In this poem it is as if there is no hope for these soldiers, like they are already dead and this effect is proven by many of the gloomy quotes which are portrayed throughout the poem- “while horse and hero fell emphasising the word “fell”. Many of the quotes in ‘Charge of the Light Brigade’ are negative because when we read these lines it makes the soldiers sound more brave and heroic, as they already knew they were going to die but they still went ahead and fought for their country. If Tennyson is trying to get the impression across that people who fight for their country are brave and heroic then he has achieved this in my eyes because even though they are risking their lives and probably will die they still do not back down from war. We know that probably many of them are going to die because of the quote “into the valley of death”. This is an example of bravery at the highest level!

           Wilfred Owen has a different way of looking at war because he see’s it as a tragic place to be. As he has experienced war he obviously understands it better than Tennyson so therefore can be more detailed in his approach. He almost definitely thinks of war as a devastating place because of how vigorously he describes pain and death in his poem! – ‘ the blood come gargling from the froth corrupted lungs,’ this is horrific because of how brutal it is. Just the thought of corrupted lungs is awful but Owen has been there so he knows what he is talking about therefore we cannot argue this point. Throughout the poem Owen focuses on just one person, no exact number is mentioned but he talks bout an individual on a number of occasions - he’, ‘a man’ or ‘someone still was yelling’. Here an individual is singled out but in Tennyson’s poem he tends to stick to ‘they’, ’them’ or even ‘the six hundred’. I think we can put this close detail down to Owen’s experience in battle but Tennyson does not get as detailed because of his lack of knowledge about war!

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            The war Tennyson is actually referring to is the battle of Balaclava in the Crimean war and because Tennyson’s information is only second hand, derived from other sources and people, we do not actually know for sure that what he is describing really did happen! Where as we could argue that as Owen did actually fight in world war one he needed no second hand information to write a poem. So everything we read in ‘Dulce et Decorum est’ really did happen or something very similar to it happened!

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