Wilfred Owen's subject was the pity of war. Using three of his poems describe how he achieved this.

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ENGLISH LITERATURE

Poetry- Post 1914 War Poetry Coursework

Wilfred Owen’s subject was the pity of war.  Using three of his poems

Describe how he achieved this.

If Wilfred Owen’s war poetry had one main aim, it would be to expose “the old lie”: that war is always a good and justified thing and that it is a good thing to die for one’s country.  Owen had experienced first hand the horrors and tragedies of the First World War, so he inevitably wanted to break open the false façade and let the world know the truth.  I am going to explore what I find to be three of his best poems and show how he achieved this aim.

Owen was born on the 18th of March 1893 in Shropshire, England.  He received a good education as a child and in 1915 he enlisted in the army when he was 22 years old.  He was injured in a shell explosion in France and transferred to a war hospital back in England, where he was given the chance to stay for the rest of the war.  But due to his loyalty to his troops, he returned to the frontline.  He was killed in action attempting to lead his men across a canal on November 4th 1918.  His death was particularly tragic as it came just a week before Armistice Day and the end of the war.

A common misconception is that all war poets of the First World War were against war.  Usually on their way to war, some famous poets such as Rupert Brooke wrote some very famous war poems.  Poems such as “The Soldier” and “The Volunteer” give very positive and romanticised views of war and words such as “lance”, “chivalry” and “legion” came up very regularly. These poets were not stupid or attempting to get people to enlist, they just didn’t know any better due to the classic public school education and the fact that there was no media, such as films to, inform the public of how terrible war is.  Even Wilfred Owen himself wrote a very famous pro war line: “O meek it is and passing sweet to die in war for others”.  Propaganda from the likes of Jessie Pope and Prime-Minister Herbert Asquith was believed by most people and many signed up because of Pope’s poem “Who’s for the game?”: which compared war to merely a fun game that everyone will enjoy even if they “come back with a crutch”.  Herbert Asquith wrote “The Volunteer” which was one of the most romanticised war poems of all time.  It was about a young boy in a “city grey” with “no lance broken”, who goes to join the army.  He dies but “lies content” and euphemistically goes to join the “Men of Agincourt”.  These poems are incredibly full of euphemisms of war and mention no words like “pain” or “death”.  But when poets who thought they could find “glory and honour” in war actually arrived at the battlefields everything changed and the anti-war poems begun.

“Dulce Et Decorum Est” is arguably Wilfred Owen’s most famous poem.  It uses very figurative language in order to describe the horrors of a gas attack on a few men while they are “marching towards their distant rest”.  It is split up into three parts.  The first part describes the “men marching asleep” “towards their distant rest”.  The second part describes the gas attack.  Most of them manage to get their gas masks on, but one man “fumbles” and “drowns”.  In the third part Owen describes the horror of walking behind the wagon they “flung” him into and watching him slowly and painfully dying.  He then addresses Jessie Pope as “my friend” and tells her that of she had seen what he saw; she would not tell the “old lie” with such “high zest”.

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As mentioned earlier, Owen uses very figurative language in “Dulce Et Decorum Est”.  The poem uses similes and metaphors very commonly.  It opens with an effective simile. The men are “bent double like old beggars under sacks”.  The word “old” is effective because most of the soldiers were only 20-30 years old, so they are not old, but made old by their disabilities that they have received through the war.  When Owen writes “distant rest” that the soldiers are marching towards, he could mean their certain death, as that is what they probably believed they were marching towards.

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