Discuss how Owen and Sassoon make war vivid and consider their intentions and motives in writing their poetry.

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Discuss how Owen and Sassoon make war vivid and consider their intentions and motives in writing their poetry.  (Discuss the language used, the tone of the poem, the views of the poets.  Discuss in detail the methods/devices used by the poets to bring the poems alive/ie. Make vivid.  Make the poets’ intentions clear.)

Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon experienced war for themselves as soldiers.  When Sassoon met Owen at Craiglockhart War Hospital in Edinburgh, he encouraged Owen to write about his experiences and express his feelings in poetry.  Sassoon had been admitted for shell shock and so took this time to write poetry.  When Owen died at the front Sassoon published Owen’s work and continued to write about his experiences.  It then became apparent to Owen that his duty lay in sharing the suffering of his men and returned to active service.  Although he survived a shot to the head from one of his own men, he died a week before the Treaty was signed.

Both Owen and Sassoon had their own criticisms of war and so the analysis of these poems will help us to understand their experiences and criticisms of war.  To do this they both use different methods to make war more vivid.

   

Owen’s “Dulce et decorum est” is about a group of fatigued soldiers returning to a temporary rest place from the front line.  Suddenly a surprising gas attack alarms them and all the soldiers manage to put on their gas masks.  But in all the confusion one of them is left desperately fighting for his life as he doesn’t have a gas mask.  Owen then describes his feelings and talks about how we might feel seeing a dead man with his eyes wide open being heartlessly flung into the back of a truck and his body being dumped on a separate field full of dead bodies.  He suggests to us that there is no pride in dying for your country.

The stereotype of a soldier was that he would be fit, strong, healthy, young, smart and honourable.  In the first line of the poem Owen immediately destroys this stereotype by saying that they were,

        “Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,

         Knock-kneed, coughing like hags,”    

This makes them sound old and shabby like old people who are seriously ill.  In this first stanza Owen uses onomatopoeic words such as ‘sludge’ and ‘trudge’ to describe the muddy battlefield and how they had to slowly progress along the ground with unnecessary difficulty.  It is monotonous when talking about the men,

        “Men marched asleep.”

This suggests that they were walking in a trance and it was as though they did not care about what was going on in their surroundings.  They were limping and had lost their boots so their journey was made more difficult:

        “Many had lost their boots            

         But limped on, blood shod.”

When it talks about them being “Drunk with fatigue” it suggest that they are so tired that they walked as if they were drunk and had a clumsy walk.

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The second stanza describes the gas attack and it is described in particular detail as to show the horror and severity of a disastrous and life endangering gas attack.  

        “Gas! Gas! Quick, boys! – An ecstasy of fumbling,

 But fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;”

The soldiers are being alerted by an officer of a gas attack, suggesting that they react quickly and protect themselves.  Owen uses the word ‘ecstasy’ to describe the panic and rapidity of their reaction to the sudden warning.  But then the soldier puts the helmet on his head just in time and ...

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