With Reference To All of His Major Poems, Evaluate, Compare and Contrast the Ways In Which Wilfred Owen Uses Language and Technique To Illustrate the Harsh Realities of the War

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With Reference to all of his major poems, Evaluate, compare and contrast the ways in which Wilfred Owen uses language and technique to illustrate the harsh realities of the war

By Paul Jannece

Wilfred Owen, one of the greatest of the war poets, filled every poem he wrote with blood, fire, pain, suffering and agony. Living only until the age of 25, he had little time to develop his abilities, yet he wrote with a masterful variety of images. He easily found parallels between his own experience and that of the great Romantics. As he was a war poet, our immediate assumption is that his poems are protests, but this is not the case. The war was a human catastrophe and he himself was part of it.

In "At a cavalry near the ancre" he adapts biblical images to describe the war. The Church sends priests to the trenches to watch the soldiers die, and they also get wounded ("flesh-marked") and take pride ("faces there is pride") .The Beast represents Germany who is denied by Christ, as is the Devil in the Bible. The word "Golgotha" means death, being a dramatic and yet deeply spiritual reference to the site of the Crucifixion. The poem "Dulce et Decorum...." sounds like a nightmare, as the completely exhausted soldiers march toward a "distant rest", and no one knows where that will be. Owen's use of words, such as "under", "sludge" and "trudge", and the constant use of the "o" letter makes the march sound as if it was a funeral. In the second verse, the gas attack suddenly wakes up everybody, and the line "in all my dreams" is symbolical of the fact that he has a recurring nightmare about the soldier who dies in the attack in his arms. He vividly describes his face, tongue, eyes and lips "like a devil's sick of sin". In the last lines the poet warns us not to believe in the lie of "desperate glory", because it can only be tragic (The actual meaning of the last line is: "how sweet and grand it is to die for one's country"). Owen uses very similar images to describe the horrors of war in "Mental Cases". Darkness is the twilight of hell, an image of the loneliness of the poet or of the desolation of war. In this poem he refers to the disabled and of the vision of the damned in hell. He sees men who have witnessed "multitudinous" murders and who are condemned always to see the horrors they once saw, as they suffer torment and nightmares. The sounds of "c" and "s" are dominating, suggesting the movement of the madmen.

The most common subjects in the poems are faces and laughter. Faces, especially eyes and lips, are mentioned again and again, and often they are laughing with hilarity-"set smiling corpses" .The war poems contain many images more commonly found in love poetry-roses, music, lips and eyes, voices. In the poem Dulce Et Decorum Est, Owen talks about how weak the soldiers really are. "Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge," and "Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots" are two important lines in the poem that help illustrate this point. You can see by these two lines that the soldiers in this poem are in bad shape. The whole poem in general is about the soldiers suffering at war. It is about what they have to endure to be considered honorable. However, at the same time they are not looking very honorable. They are barley staying alive, let alone standing up, fighting, and being very brave. Anthem for Doomed Youth is another of Owen's war poems. This poem makes war look even more depressing then the first. The first line of the poem is really powerful: "WHAT passing-bells for these who die as cattle?". War is supposed to be about fighting for your country and dying honorably. This poem makes it sound like humans are being taken to the slaughterhouse. No one can think of this as an honorable death of heroic fighting.
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There is a lot going on in the poem "The Send-Off". I think that what this poem is trying to say is that when we go into battle we want to do out best, be our bravest, be our best. However, when we are in battle the whole scenario changes. Arguably his most famous poem, "Dulce et Decorum Est", is a fine example of his narrative, first-person poems, written through his own eyes and based on his own experiences and views of the war. Using four clear stanzas, the poem uses standard, alternate rhyming lines. A slow, painstaking ...

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