‘Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day;’
At the beginning of this line he has already used alliteration by saying ‘sights and sounds’. The‘s’ has been used and also ‘dreams happy as her day’ the‘d’ has been used. Also the repition of ‘her’ has also been used. At the end of the poem Rupert Brooke finishes off showing off England in all its glory this shows a more peaceful tone and creates an effect on how the death of the soldier will bring purification.
‘And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness,
In hearts at peace, under an English heaven’
Rupert Brooke now has finished symbolically making these two lines sound very close and peaceful, showing that dying in the Great War for the great country called England will bring purification. The souls will always be England home and England abroad.
As war progressed the feeling of patriotism diminished and this happened as the number of deaths increased. Soldiers would return and speak from experience and therefore the reality of war and poetry was written to explain war and how it was. One of the soldiers who became a poet was Wilfred Owen. “Dulce Et Decorum Est” was written by Wilfred Owen who fought in the First World War. This poem is like an account of the things, which Wilfred Owen saw and went through. Wilfred Owen talks about how harsh and hard the war was. This is shown in the opening lines:
‘Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge’
In the war there were more horrible cases of trench foot and other diseases. Wilfred Owen describes the soldier’s horrible predicament in the war. The men were committed to the war so much that they had too limp on broken legs, how men were walking asleep and how they became deafened by the sounds of bomb shells.
‘Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of gas-shells dropping softly behind’
The soldiers were so wounded and helpless it seemed that war was an ecstasy; they didn’t know what they were doing. Wilfred Owen writes that a man was unable to put on his helmet and started floundering and this word is usually used to describe fish when they are out of water. He describes a man drowning under a green sea he describes the sea as being green because it was full of gas. When you read this the images you get are striking as well as being ghastly.
‘Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light
As under a green sea. I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, and drowning’
This describes how he saw the man choking and drowning in the sea of gas. He uses lots of emotive words like guttering and choking to describe what horror he saw in front of him. These four lines describe the man who had just died. He uses words such as devil’s sick of sin to say that the mans face was worse than the devil himself. He also says that blood came gargling this means that the blood came pouring out of his face. Wilfred Owen uses an incurable disease like cancer to describe the situation and I think that Wilfred Owen is trying to say that war is incurable and nothing can be bitter as cud and therefore war is also the worst thing you can ever do.
‘His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Came gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene a cancer, bitter as the cud’
Wilfred Owen has a certain style in his poem ‘Dulce et decorum est’. In his first stanza he uses a slow pace to emphasize how long the war was to them and how exhausted they were from the war. He uses words like ‘cursed through the sludge’ to make it sound longer and to slow the pace of the first stanza down. However in the second stanza to his third stanza his pace quickens. At the beginning of his second stanza he immediately starts with a direct speech.
“Gas! Gas! Quick, boys!”
These quick slow to fast alterations makes you feel like you were in the war and know how the felt it creates an effect that they experienced the full effects of the actual poem. In his first stanza the rhyme scheme isn’t noticed as much as in the second stanza because the pacer quickens in the second stanza. In the first stanza the rhyme scheme is every two lines and so is the same in the second stanza. There are shorter lines and has much more of a quicker pace. In the second stanza Wilfred Owen uses a lot of descriptive words and uses his words in a metaphor.
The last four lines of Wilfred Owens poem is addressed to poets who portrayed the war as glorious and a patriotic way to the die for the country. He feels that war is not glorious at all; it is a very vile and disgusting experience to have. What Wilfred Owen is saying that don’t tell children the old lie that war is a glorious thing. In those days women used to tell their husbands that if they don’t fight in the war, the children will look up to the father as a man who wasn’t patriotic to his country, this effect makes men fight in the war because of guilt and shame they do not want to bring into the family. What Wilfred Owen is saying that don’t tell your children it is your duty to fight and die for your country, neither is it glorious. Wilfred Owen is also saying in his poems that the war is not a good place to be in and it is not all happy and colourful to fight in the war and how the other poets portrayed the war is very different to what other poets have said as they have experienced the whole four years of the war.
‘My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori’
Another poem which dealt with the reality of the war was written by Wilfred Owen and is called ‘Disabled’. In this poem he writes about the thoughts of a very young and severely wounded soldier. He has lost all of his limbs and now sits helplessly in a wheelchair, thinking sadly and bitterly of the past. I think this poem shows how injuries in the war can affect your happiness and your life. In the first sentence the man is immediately described as a ghost.
‘He sat in a wheeled chair, waiting for dark,
And shivered in his ghastly suit of grey’
This tells you that the war had played a big effect on his life and he sacrificed a lot of his life just to fight in the ‘great’ war. From the first section and the second section there is a sudden time shift and it shows you the time when he was young and fit and he had no worries. However it shows you in some lines that he made a very big mistake.
‘In the old times, before he threw away his knees
Now he will never feel again how slim Girl’s waists are’
The first line in that quotation, Wilfred Owen uses an active verb shows you that the person in ‘Disabled’ threw his freedom away and now he won’t be able to do live to those precious moments again. Wilfred Owen also describes him to be like this in the third section.
‘He’s lost his colour very far from here,
Poured it down shell-holes till the veins ran dry’
He has lost a lot of blood and what is even more significant was that he lost his hope and his life. In the fourth section there is the moment where he signs up for the war and also irony is displayed in that section.
‘One time he liked a blood-smear down his leg
After the matches, carried shoulder high’
In the football match he was carried shoulder high because of him scoring a goal but now he is shoulder high in his hospital and in his wheelchair. Also in this section it shows how he was brainwashed by the media and posters in Britain.
‘Someone had said he’d look good in kilts,
That’s why; and maybe, too, to please his Meg’
As the wife’s of men would tell their husbands to fight in the war or else what would the children think of them and what stories would you tell them, this is what exactly what he did to show off to his girlfriend. At the end of the war he didn’t get the praise he wanted instead of people cheering for scoring a goal he was cheered for going into the war and coming back; as a sign of patriotism. It is a different sort of cheer when he was in his youth and celebrating.
‘Some cheered him home, but not as much as the crowds cheer Goal
Only a solemn man who brought him fruits
Thanked him; and then inquired about his soul’
Not only did he not get the praise he wanted, the last line is religious and shows that he realized that his long life was over. In the last section his life is dark and dull again. In the first section and the second section you can tell between the colour changes because in the first section it shows descriptions of ‘grey’ and ‘dark’ features. However in the second section he uses colours like ‘light blue’ and uses descriptions like ‘glow-lamps budded’ and ‘when the town used to swing so gay’. The rhyme also is clear in this poem it is also alternate lines but the rhyme also brings in a sense of unity and can give a sense of regularity. In the last section there is a sense of pity and hopelessness.
‘Now he will spend a few sick years in Institutes,
And do what things the rules consider wise,
And take whatever pity they may dole’
The last two lines show that his life is at an end but is still going.
‘How cold and late it is! Why don’t they come
And put him into bed? Why don’t they come?’
This is a question showing that death is not here yet so he has to suffer longer and be disabled and think about all of the painful memories again and again.
The last poem that is dealing with the reality of war is “Futility” by Wilfred Owen. In the beginning of the first few lines it shows how the sun can’t bring back the life of this dead soldier.
‘Move him into the sun
Gently its touch awoke him once’
It then also starts to talk about how the feature of death and how his, the soldier’s, life has not been yet. The last line of these three lines shows a sad time of day, showing that war is a pointless and there is no reason of participating in it.
‘At home, whispering of fields unsown
Always it woke him, even in France,
Until this morning and this snow’
In the first stanza he is very peaceful and is talking about the ‘kind old sun’ but closing in to the second stanza it is more uncertain. In the second stanza there is the mention of life but not of to the soldier. If the creation of life earth is brought together how come the creation of one soldier cannot be brought back life.
‘Think how it wakes the seeds-
Woke, once, the clays of a cold star’
Furthermore he uses a lot of dashes in his poem to show disjointed sentences a sign of uncertainty. The poem has a half rhyme scheme, words like ‘once and France’ and ‘sun and unsown’. This whole poem has a lot of natural imagery like ‘kind old sun’ and ‘clays of a cold star’. This whole poem is mainly to do with pointlessness of war and how it doesn’t justify with the creation of life, why it can’t bring back one person where as it creates life to Earth. In the first stanza it talks about the life and the bringing back of life by the sun and generally shows a peaceful view and the sense of belief from death. In the second stanza the poem becomes uncertain, uses dashes to show this and turns the disbelief into anger. The last two lines show this anger and also show that it signifies the sleep before life was created. It shows why bother at all to wake someone up when he will just go back to sleep after all that work and effort.
‘O what made fatuous sunbeams toil
To break earth’s sleep at all?’
Wilfred Owen is writing about something he has witnessed in life, he has witnessed this death. He is expressing the message of a waste of human life by words such as ‘disbelief’. He is also expressing questions like ‘Why has man been created? In ‘The Soldier’ the rhyme scheme is full and gives a sense of completion however in the half rhyme it stresses disbelief.
‘O what made fatuous sunbeams toil
To break earth’s sleep at all?’
In conclusion this essay has enlightened me on many of the things which took place before and after the war. It has shown me how this exploitation of patriotism counted for so many people joining up to fight in the war. Being patriotic became the ‘trend’ in the 20th century and everyone seemed to follow it. Patriotism is a feeling you get from having love for your country not through seeing posters and reading poems about war. Feelings such as patriotism and duty were roused through mass propaganda; however poets like Rupert Brooke did not experience the war so he just used his honourable and patriotic way of explaining life in the war and joining up to it. He died in the war so he did not have a chance to write his true experiences rather than his other experiences. When men such as Wilfred Owen came back and described their experiences of war the feeling of patriotism was diminished and destroyed because they had heard the full truth of the war. The aspects of both Wilfred Owen and Rupert Brooke were based on what time they were at the war. Rupert Brooke was writing about his own feelings as a soldier up to his death whereas Wilfred Owen was writing about his experiences throughout the whole war and how it changed so much from the ‘English Heaven’ to being ‘Disabled’.