WW1 Poetry Coursework

Peace by Robert Brooke is a chivalric poem that uses the idea of death as the eternal rest that everyone is searching for, and how gallant it would be to die for your country. Also the idea that death may be painful but a soldiers death will be courageous and lead straight to heaven like a saint, '...the worst friend and enemy is but Death.' There is also a great feeling that a soldier's life has been building up to death and death would be the climax of his life and that dieing for your country would make you pure, 'To turn, as swimmers into cleanliness leaping,' Also the idea that life is a struggle, and when you fight for a just cause and eventually pass on you are only then free and are at 'Peace' , 'But only agony, and that has ending;'

God! How I hate you by Arthur Graeme West was written in direct response to a heroic sonnet by Hugh Freston which obviously angered West by glamorising the aspect of war, there is also a direct quote from Freston's poem quite obviously used sarcastically, 'Oh happy to have lived these epic days'. West uses quite a colloquial tone when writing this poem which makes it more accessible to readers from all backgrounds or level of vocabulary. The poet also uses a succession of ghastly adjectives when describing the conditions in the trenches as 'muddy brown monotony'. There is also a great feeling expressed by West that Freston has really not expressed the bad images of war at all, 'Perhaps/ Had seen a man killed, a sentry shot at night,' and the disturbing images that West believes to be common to most soldiers involved in the war, '...his head/Smashed like an eggshell and the warm grey brain/Splattered all bloody on the parados'. This shows that West has a great feeling towards expressing the reality of trench warfare.

Anthem for Doomed Youth by Wilfred Owen has a very pessimistic message even in the title, as anthems are considered to be things of praise and goodness, in direct comparison with a doomed youth, which is almost certainly reference to the fact that the army was sending all of the young members of the population off like 'lambs to the slaughter'. There is an actual reference to the soldiers being slain like 'cattle' in the first stanza. There is also use of onomatopoeic words, 'the stuttering rifles' adding the sound of battle into the part of the war we are shown in this poem. There is also use of reference to well-known sights like 'bells' and 'prayers' to show explicitly that this is not happening that far from home. In the last stanza Owen uses quite pleasant vocabulary to describe the death, 'Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds', yet again a contrast between the sweet and the sour experiences of life and death in the trenches.

The different forms of poems are all very different in meaning, purpose and context. They are all effective in many different ways many emotive as there was great feeling of high emotions running for or against the war. The so-called 'propaganda poems' were much more common at the start of the war, however as the war progressed and it was evident that England was in it for 'the long haul' the anti-war or realistic poems became much more common as soldiers in the trenches who were actually experiencing these things began to write poetry as a form of clearing there mind or expressing the events that disturb or are quite memorable, normally bad.