‘When you sit by the fire in an old man’s chair
When your neighbors talk of the fight?
Will you slink away,’
These lines refer to when the young readers reach old age. They can live normal lives and have friends because every time the war is mentioned it hits you
‘as it were from a blow,’
This suggests that the embarrassment will be like a physical blow.
‘I was not with the first to go,
But I went, thank God, I went?’
This gives them away out, showing that they will survive and be happy.
The final stanza makes the reader feel guilty by suggesting that they are unpatriotic.
‘Is it naught to you if your country fall,”
Begbie writes that it is wrong to be enjoying life while others are risking their lives.
‘Is it football still and the picture show,
The pub and betting odds,
When your brothers stand to the tyrant’s blow’
Begbie uses shame to persuade men into enlisting. He shows that this shame will follow them through out their lives. Begbie’s attitude to war is, however, unrealistic and unfair, as he never joined the war.
‘The Soldier’ by Rupert Brooke is in the style of a sonnet. Traditional love poetry is often written in this way. The fact that he has chosen this form demonstrates, from the start, that Brooke has a great love for his country.
‘If I should die, think only this of me:
That there’s some corner of a foreign field
That is forever England.’
These lines show how Brooke believes that dying in battle is noble and the place in which he dies, in France, will become English heritage. His patriotism is shown clearly here. As he was brought up in England, ‘breathing English air,’ he believes that his body is blessed and where it lies England shall forever be there.
Brooke believes that if he should die and be buried in foreign soil - that soil will be the richer for his English remains:
‘In that rich earth, a richer dust concealed; A dust whom England bore,’
His view of England is however an unrealistic one. It is one of a rural paradise, when the truth is that there was a post industrial revolution, where the reality of life for the English was one of urban poverty
‘flowers to love’
‘ways to roam’.
These quotes show Brooke’s romantic vision.
Brooke believes that any bad he once did will not matter any longer as his sole has gone so his body is cleansed.
‘all evil shed away’
He thinks that he will be remembered forever.
‘A pulse in the eternal mind’
The reality is that few are remembered as individuals except by their immediate family although the collective memory of the dead of two world wars continued to be remembered each autumn, by millions, on Remembrance Sunday.
Brooke feels that he is content to give his life in return for that which England has already given him.
‘Her sights & sounds; dreams happy as her day;
And laughter learnt of friends.’
He believes that this is a religious fight and god is on the side of the English.
‘under an English heaven.’
The irony is, however, that Brooke died from a fever and not bravely in battle.
Wilfred Owen enlisted, so that they could protect Britain. However, in the trenches he realized how horrific the war was and started to make notes about the conditions. Then later in a military hospital he edited and collected these notes into poetry.
‘Dulce et Decorum Est’ is Latin for: It is sweet and fitting to die for one's country. By repeating a line at the beginning and the end it is made more memorable. This line needs to be remembered as the poem is based on the idea of it as ‘the old lie’ mocking the established belief of nationalism and duty to your country. The futility of war is shown in the first part of the poem where we see the soldiers, exhausted and wounded, returning to base camp.
‘Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots,
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame, all blind;
Drunk with fatigue;’
The slow and steady movement of time felt whilst reading the beginning of this extract is due to the subdued and disheartening attitude of the soldiers. You see what the conditions where like for the soldiers, how some of them don’t even have boots and are forced to walk blood soaked and weary. The placement of words directly reflects the exhaustion felt by the weary boys. The image of them marching slowly, bloody and “Drunk”, evokes similar feelings of tiredness in the reader, which are quickly interrupted by
‘Gas! Gas! Quick boys!’
As a reader I feel the relative stillness of the men's quiet attitude being quickly interrupted by these loud words. A contrast is established. This image, and the one of the lone soldier dying awakens the minds of the people who read the poem to the reality of war as being a terrifyingly sad way for young people to die, and that ideology of patriotism and honor is the cause of such sickening circumstance. Owen is, effectively, placing the blame of the war's consequences on the society that supports it.
Owen uses vocabulary such as ‘stumbling’, ‘floundering’, and ‘fumbling’ to describe the desperate actions of the dying man. The verbs such as ‘yelling’ and ‘drowning’ give the reader a feeling of chaos. The simile, ‘like a man on fire’ is used to describe the agony, which the man is encountering, it suggests how the man is writing and twisting in desperation as the gas burns him!
‘As under a green sea, I saw him drowning’
This describes how the gas causes a thick green misty haze around the men. This is a useful phrase as it enables us to visualize what is happening and use our imagination, it also gives us a sense of how unreal it all is.
‘guttering, choking, drowning.’
He uses pauses in several places so that the reader will stop and his message sinks in then continues. He also ends strongly which is very important so the audience has something to immediately reflect on.
Wilfred Owen is often said to be one of the most gifted poets who died in battle and the only one I’m analyzing in this assignment. He joined up in 1915 and wrote Dulce et Decorum Est in 1918 and died on November 4th later that year on the Sambre Canal. The poem describes the fatigue, blindness, evil, obscenity, death, sufferings, and disgust of war. It shows the true life of a soldier, lying low, endlessly trudging through mud with bloody feet. The poem is one of the most powerful ways to convey an idea or opinion. I consider it to be the most effective and realistic of the three. On the other hand I believe Brooke’s The Soldier is the most unrealistic. It holds ‘the strongest ideas of goodness, home, the countryside – encapsulated exactly how the English wanted to see themselves. They contrast starkly with the poet’s nasty death of blood poisoning’ This quote was taken from Jeremy Paxman’s The English. This makes me think that Brooke wrote this poem not to show what’s real but for what people want to believe. Harold Begbie’s recruiting poem was written for a newspaper highlighting the general trend of belief that war was noble and there was nothing to be scared of.
