Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon both were brave officers in the war. Neither was pressurised to join the fronts but volunteered.

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Emmily Nonas 10W        

Poetry Assignment

18th December 2004

   Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon both were brave officers in the war. Neither was pressurised to join the fronts but volunteered.

   Wilfred Owen was born in 1893 in Oswestry, Shropshire. He was a son of a railway worker and poetry had been encourage by his mother since boyhood. Owen returned to France in August 1918 and won the Military Cross in September. He was sadly killed on the 4th of November 1918, one week before the war ended. On the 11th of November when the war ended at eleven am, news of his death reached his family.

   Siegfried Sassoon also won the Military Cross for courage and fought at several battles. He came from a wealthy, banking family, a very different background from Wilfred Owen.

   Owen and Sassoon met when they were both receiving treatment at Craiglockhart Hospital, Edinburgh. Both had experiences of the World War One and this inspired them to write poetry. The poetry was to be about the horrors of the war – the needless suffering, the false definition of ‘glorious war’ and the lack of understanding from the civilians at home.

   The poems I have chosen to compare are ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’ by Wilfred Owen and ‘Memorial Tablet’ by Siegfried Sassoon. This is because these two poems interested me the most out of the four we discussed as a group.

   The first poem I am going to look at is ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’. This poem is the best-known poem of the First World War and was written to his mother from Craiglockhart. The title ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’ are the first words of a Latin saying. It means ‘ It is sweet and right’. This saying was widely understood and used on soldier’s graves. The title is ironic and was meant to shock the civilians at home who truly believed that war was wonderful and dignified.

   The structure of the poem falls into four sections and are not regular stanzas. The first two are in sonnet form and alternate lines rhyme – ‘sacks, backs and sludge, trudge’.

   The first stanza sets the scene of the soldiers limping back from the Front. The similes ‘ like old beggars under sacks’ and ‘ coughing like hags’ create a vivid image of the conditions the men were in and how they felt. There is a contrast between age in the second simile – ‘hags’. This is referring to old women yet the soldiers were young.

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  On the second line ‘we cursed through sludge’ shows that the thick mud is causing their journey to take longer. The word ‘sludge’ is a form of onomatopoeia. This is effective as it emphasises the great difficulty the men had trying to walk. They were weary and were no longer focused – ‘men marched asleep’. They cannot walk straight as they have lost their boots and were ‘ blood-shod’. Physically and mentally they are worn. They are tired, deaf and used to the sound of the shells that they do not respond to what is around them – ‘outstripped ...

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