WHAT APPEARS TO BE THEIR ATTITUDE TO WAR?
All the poets have a different approach to war. Some poets thought war was a good thing and encouraged people to go to war, other poets thought war was a dreadful thing. Some of the poets wrote about different wars.
Wilfred Owen was against war and tried to inform people how horrific war was by writing in his poems how appalling the conditions of the war really were, in his poem he says:-
If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
John McRae’s poem was different from Wilfred Owens poem, McRae wasn’t against war, in his poems he encourages people to go to war to replace the dead soldiers of the war and in his poem it says:-
Take up our quarrel with the foe
To you from falling hands we throw
Wang Chien’s poetry is unlike the other poems, Wang’s poem was not written by a soldier in a war but he was writing about his friend coming back from war and in his poem it says:-
Since I got the news you were coming back,
Twice I have mounted to the high wall of your home.
Alfred Tennyson was told to write a poem on the loss of 600 men and instead of writing about the loss of the 600 men he concentrated on the courage of the men and in one of his poem he says:-
Half a league, half a league,
Half a league onward,
All in the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.
Isaac Rosenberg only joined up in the army because he needed money. Isaac hated war, he hated the army, the trenches and most of all he hated the killing of people. A lot of his poems were about the dreadful conditions of the trenches and in one of his poems about a rat he says:-
The darkness crumbles away-
It is the same old druid Time as ever.
HOW DOES THE CONTENT OF THE POEM MAKE YOU FEEL?
‘Dulce et Decorum est’ makes me feel how horrific war is. It makes me feel what it would be like to have actually been there. I can almost see and smell the awfulness of what is happening. It tells me how terrible the circumstances of the trenches are, this part of the poem is about the shells:-
Men marched asleep. Many have lost their boots.
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of tired, outstripped Five-Nines that dropped behind
This poem also shows me that the old lie, ‘Dulce et Decorum est Pro Patria mori,’ really is a lie. ‘Dulce et Decorum est’ which makes me feel bad is different from, ‘In Flanders Fields’ because this poem makes me feel that war wasn’t such a bad thing as Wilfred Owen makes out it was, it makes me feel that it was the right thing to go to war, it also makes me feel that if you don’t go to war that the soldiers that have already died will have died for nothing, the part of the poem that makes me feel like this is:-
Take up our quarrel with the foe
To you from falling hands we throw
The torch be yours to hold it high
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders Fields
‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’ makes me feel that to fight in the war was a good thing. My feeling would be that we should honour these soldiers who fought for their country:-
Honour the Light Brigade
Noble six hundred.
‘Break of Day in the Trenches’ was written by a soldier waking to another day in the trenches. As he sits there a rat runs across his hand and that the rat will do the same to a German. This makes me feel that the soldiers of both sides in the war have nothing against each other, but it is the rulers of the countries who do not like each.
‘Hearing that his Friend was Coming Back from the War’ makes me feel sad because Wang Chien hopes that his friend comes back alive from the war. The part of the poem that makes me feel like this is:-
I am half afraid; perhaps it is not true;
Yet I never weary of watching for you on the road.
Each day I go out at the City Gate
With a flask of wine, lest you should come thirsty.
WHAT PURPOSE HAD THE POEM?
All of the poems had different purposes, some of the poems were to encourage people to go to war, some of the poems to put off people to go to war and some were for the poets own pleasure
‘Dulce et Decorum est’ was written to tell the people back in Britain how dreadful the war was and tells them that it is not a sweet and right thing to die for your country, in the poem it says:-
And watch the white eyes writing in his face
His Hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gurgling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obese as cancer, bitter as the cud
If you read this in a paper or magazine during the war, you would be put off going to war.
‘In Flanders Fields’ was the opposite of ‘Dulce et Decorum est’ because this poem encourages people to go to war, the poem is trying to tell the people back in Britain to go to war and replace the soldiers who have died, in the poem it says:-
Take up our quarrel with the foe
To you from falling hands we throw
The torch be yours to hold it high
‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’ was written by Lord Alfred Tennyson and told of the mistakes that had been made and how many soldiers lost their lives needlessly:-
Someone had blundered.
This poem would make people realise that not all war was justified and that many mistakes were made. Tennyson was told to write the poem about the loss of all the men but he also wrote about the bravery of the men so that people would know that although the men had died needlessly, and had known that the battle was a mistake, they had not questioned what they were asked to do.
Isaac Rosenberg hated war and everything about war, he only went for the money. He thought writing poetry would help him get through the horrors of war.
‘Hearing that his Friend was Coming Back from the War’ by Wang-Chien was written for his own pleasure and it was written as if it was a letter to his friend. The poem has no real purpose. It was a soldier’s friend expressing his feelings and his hope that his friend would survive the war and come back unharmed.
I thought of you, so weak and indolent,
Hopelessly trying to learn to march and drill.
HOW MUCH DETAIL IS GIVEN?
There is a lot of detail given in the poem ‘Dulce et Decorum est’. This poem doesn’t just give a lot of information about the bad things of war but it also has a lot of detail in it. In the first two lines there are two similes, the first one is:-
Bent double, like old beggars under sacks
coughing like hags,
This simile means that the soldiers were coughing like ugly old women. The first poem talks about the awful conditions of the trenches and about the shells firing at them and how they don’t have enough time to get away from the scene of the battle. The language used in this verse was difficult to understand because in this verse it doesn’t say the word shell but we know that the poet is describing the shell because ‘Five-Nine’ is a type of shell. The second verse is about the death of a soldier because he couldn’t get his clumsy helmet (this now is called a gas mask) when they were attacked by mustard gas. In this part of the poem there is a lot of detail given about the death of this soldier, it says in the poem:-
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling,
And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime . . .
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
‘In Flanders Fields’ doesn’t give as much detail as ‘Dulce et Decorum est’. This poem doesn’t give a lot of detail about the war. This poem is telling the target audience that the soldiers who had died, just a few days before were just ordinary people living and feeling ordinary things.
‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’ had a lot of detail but the language was of the time that it was written (the 1850a). It talked of a sabre which was the blade at the end of a gun. It gives a lot of facts about what the battle was like and how the soldiers felt:
Shatter’d and sunder’d
Then they rode back, but not,
Not the six hundred.
‘Hearing that his Friend was Coming Back from the War has been translated from Chinese into English. In English it doesn’t really read as a poem, more like a diary. There is no rhyming but in the original Chinese poem, there might have been. There is not very much detail about the war itself, more about how the writer was feeling and looking forward to seeing his friend again, and what the waiting was like:
Since I got the news that you were coming back,
Twice I have mounted to the high wall of your home.
‘Break of day in the Trenches’ doesn’t give much detail. It is more about how a rat would see the war. The language is very old – fashioned and uses words that wouldn’t be used today:
It is the same old druid Time as ever.
A queer sardonic rat.
Droll rat, they would shoot you if they knew.
WHAT IS THE THEME OF THE POEM?
The theme of ‘Dulce et Decorum est’ is of the awfulness of war and how mustard gas affected the soldiers. It is about watching the suffering of someone who has breathed in the gas. The poem is very explicit and doesn’t try to hide the horrors the soldiers faced. It obviously wants those back home to know how terrible it is. It is targeting the people back in Britain and trying to persuade them not to go to war.
‘In Flanders Fields’ is a more gentle poem and the theme is to tell people back home how brave the soldiers who died were and that they should honour their dead and carry on the fight so that will not have died in vain. The theme is also obvious:
Take up our quarrel with the foe.
The target audience is the same as ‘Dulce et Decorum est’ but has a different purpose – to persuade people to go to war.
The theme of ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’ is about a particular battle and again is to tell those back at home about the brutality of war and about the deaths of ‘the six hundred’. It hides nothing and doesn’t spare those who will read it. But it wants those who died to be honoured.
‘Hearing that his Friend was Coming Back from the War had no real theme but was about someone expressing his feeling about his friend coming back from the war. It is quite obvious because it tells about the soldiers in the war and about his friend in particular and how he feels waiting for his friend to come home. This poem was written for himself and not really for anyone else to read.
The theme of ‘Break of Day in the Trenches’ is that there is no difference between the British and the Germans. Underneath they are just the same, soldiers fighting for their country. It is also asking the question “What is it all for?” The theme is more hidden and is trying to make the reader figure it out for themselves. The poet wrote the poem to help him get through the horrors of the war because he hated the war and the killing.
‘THE BAND PLAYED WALTZING MATILDA’ AND ‘WITH GOD ON OUR SIDE’
‘The Band Played Waltzing Matilda’ and ‘With God on our Side’ are very different from the poems above. They are songs rather than poems. They rhyme and therefore flow much more easily.
The Band Played Waltzing Matilda is about a young man being sent to war:
And the band played “Waltzing Matilda,”
As the ship pulled away from the quay,
And amidst all the cheers, the flag waving, and tears,
We sailed off for Gallipoli.
He remembers the terrible day when the soldiers were slaughtered:
We were butchered like lambs at the slaughter.
He tells how he tried to survive in the madness that was war until he was injured by a Turkish shell and ended up in hospital. But when he saw what the shell had done to him, he realised that living was now worse for him than dying. He had lost his legs. He then tells how the wounded were taken back to Australia:
The armless, the legless, the blind, the insane,
Those proud wounded heroes of Suvla.
The theme of this poem is again about the glory of going to war, then the awfulness of war, and it is also about those who survive and are disabled.
The second poem or song ‘With God on our Side’ is really about wars in general and that no matter which side you are on you always have God on your side. It is also about forgiving your enemies:
When the Second World War
Came to an end
We forgave the Germans
And we were friends
Though they murdered six milliohm
In the ovens they fried
The Germans now too
Have God on their side.
The poem starts with the war between the Indians and the white man, then the Spanish-American war, the Civil War, the First World War, the Second World War. Then it goes on to say how the writer has learned to hate Russians and that if there is another war, they are the enemy. He also talks of modern warfare
But now we got weapons
Of the chemical dust.
The theme of the poem is really to ask in war whose side if God on?
In a many dark hour
I’ve been thinkin’ about this
That Jesus Christ
Was Betrayed by a kiss
But I can’t think for you
You’ll have to decide
Whether Judas Iscariot
Had God on his side.
He finishes by saying
If God’s on our side
He’ll stop the next war.
CONCLUSION
All these poems are very different and look at war from different perspectives. Some glorify war and believe it is right to fight for what you believe in while others think that war is wrong and that there must be a better way to sort out differences.
After comparing these poems I believe that William Sherman was right. War is hell for those who have been there and seen at first hand the horrors that man inflicts on his fellow man. Those who don’t go to war believe that it is a glorious thing to fight and even die for your country. But these people never see the brutality of war and this is exactly what William Sherman was trying to say.
Adam Dillon 11A1
