Jessie pope poetry

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Charly Wood 10A

Write a comparison of Jessie Pope’s “who’s for the game?” and Wilfred Owen’s “Dulce et De Corum Est”

Studying war poetry from around the 1914 period has given me an insight into the variety of feeling and emotion going on during the war, from writing strictly in propaganda to obscenely crude it seems incredible what the soldiers were tricked into, and went through.

Both poems, ‘Who’s for the game?’ and ‘Dulce et Decorum est’ were written during the First World War, which began in 1914. ‘Who’s for the game?’  Is a war poem based on a rugby game, written as if war is simply something to pass the time. The poet, Jesse Pope, has a crude way of writing: as she hasn’t herself experienced war, she simplifies it. In comparison, ‘Dulce et Decorum est’ was written by Wilfred Owen who had been to war and writes about a tragic gas attack that he personally did experience.

The tone in ‘Who’s for the game?’ is persistent and rhetorical; repeating the word ‘who’ bullies the young boys into making a radical decision about going to war and if they don’t want to go, ‘who thinks he’d rather sit tight?’ creates pressure, suggesting not going to war is cowardly. The tone carries on insistently and repetitively putting stress on the question, and on the last word of each line – ‘hand?’, ’stand?’, ‘gun?’, ‘run?’. The insistence seems impossible to resist, like a constant drum beat inside the soldiers minds making the soldiers feel like they have no alternative but to go to war.

‘Dulce et Decorum est’ has an accusatory tone; this tone is directed mockingly at “my friend”, particularly in the last stanza. The poet’s anger builds and the use of the direct and accusatory tone excels. The poet gives his description impact by speaking in the present tense – ‘guttering, choking, drowning’, this gives a sense of immediacy and desperate warning to the soldiers to believe the happy stories of war.

The language in ‘Who’s for the game?’ is crude as the poet has never before experienced war:  she creates a false image to young, naïve boys of what war might be like. The poet has a target audience of young men similar to Wilfred Owen’s poem though he tries to put across to true image of war. Wilfred Owen uses powerful imagery to describe the horror of the war, ‘guttering,’ giving images of a candle about to flicker out. He uses the image of a devil ‘like a devil’s sick of sin’; the soldiers are sick of sin but ironically devils should never be sick of sin. Similes used near the beginning of the poem such as ‘bent double like old beggars under sacks’ suggest that the soldiers are now on the fringes of society. In theory the soldiers should be young and brave, but Owen reduces them to old, forgotten about “hags”.

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In ‘Who’s for the game?’ Pope uses an enthralling rugby game to describe the war, to her readers. This quite contradicts Owen’s views that war has made the soldiers old like ‘hags’.

The two poems have quite different messages. ‘Who’s for the game?’ has a clear propaganda message as it tricks young, naïve men into thinking war is something its not, whereas Wilfred Owen has a definite anti-war message, conveying the truth to men and soldiers that have been in, or are considering going to war.

The town poems are very different in their form. Jesse ...

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