Wilfred Owen: Powerful Emotions Need Powerful Language

Authors Avatar

Wilfred Owen:  Powerful Emotions Need Powerful Language

In this essay I will explore how Wilfred Owen expresses powerful emotions through powerful language in his war poetry.  I will focus on the three poems “Dulce et Decorum est”, “Anthem for Doomed Youth” and “Parable of the Old Man and the Young”.

Wilfred Owen grew up in England and moved to France as a young adult where he taught English.  The First World War broke out when he was still in France and, along with thousands of other young men, he joined the army with a feeling of duty towards his country.

It was not long before he found out the terrible realities of war, which inspired him to write his anti war poetry, to communicate his feelings to the governments and “stay at home war enthusiasts”, and to warn “children ardent for some desperate glory” what it is really like to go to war.  

After suffering shell shock, Owen was sent to Craiglockhheart hospital for treatment.  This is where he wrote “Dulce et Decorum est”.

“Dulce et Decorum est” describes a gas attack on a group of tired and wounded soldiers that are making their way back to their post after an exhausting day in the trenches.  One man fails to fit his gas mask in time and dies, “drowning” on his own internal fluids.  

It is an attack on the suggestion that “it is sweet and honourable to die for your country”, directly aimed at Jessie Pope, who wrote war propaganda.  She is addressed sarcastically in the last stanza as "My friend".

The message of this poem is clear; if the people back home saw “in some smothering dream” this scene, they would not think it “sweet and honourable to die for your country”.  Owen’s point is put across strongly in this poem by the sheer horror of the soldier’s death, which is described in gory detail.  The descriptions are generally brought to life with the texture of words and grizzly sensual imagery such as “cursed through sludge”, “the blood come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs” and “floundering like a man in fire or lime”.

The first line uses a simile, comparing the men with “old beggars under sacks”, and continues in the second line, “coughing like hags”.  Along with the sensual imagery, “Bent double”, “knock-kneed” and “we cursed through sludge”, a feeling of the men’s’ fragile agony is conjured.  In line three the flares are personified as “haunting”.  This gives the reader an insight of the dim, ever present fear at the back of the men’s hearts.

Join now!

They now begin to “trudge” towards their “distant rest”, words which fill the reader with the despair felt in the face of the painfully slow journey to base.

The second half of the first stanza further impacts the suffering of the men, “blood shod… drink with fatigue… deaf [emotionally as well as physically] even to the hoots of” comrades that “dropped behind”.  The word comrade is replaced in the poem with “Five-Nines”, showing how people are de-humanised in war.

It feels like it couldn’t get worse, but the grim, sombre atmosphere of the first stanza is dramatically changed in the ...

This is a preview of the whole essay