The two poems I have chosen to analyse are ‘Exposure’ and ‘Dulce Et Decorum Est’. Both of these were written by Wilfred Owen after 1914.
The subject of ‘Dulce Et Decorum Est’ is a gas attack on soldiers. The poem shows the devastating effects of the highly poisonous gas on the soldiers. We are shown the result of one man failing to put on his gas mask quickly enough. We feel the agonising pain that Owen felt when he realises he could not do anything to help this man. We see the nightmares of images of the wagon with the dead and semi-dead bodies loaded onto the back. We see the dying mans eyes, white and writhing in his head, the gargle of the blood flowing from his gas ridden lungs.
The poem ‘Exposure’ tries to point out that it’s the bad weather and bad conditions in the trenches that killed the soldiers as well as the Germans. Throughout the poem there are constant reminders of the poor weather and the endless wait for the Germans to attack. You get the sense that there was no hope, and the suffering shall soon end in death. The overall tone we get from the poem is melancholy. The tone gives us the sense of hopelessness.
The details used by Wilfred Owen turn these poems into pictures, visible to the eye and imagination. Even in the first line of the poem, Owen is trying to leave an impression on the reader. “Bent double, like old beggars” gives us the impression that the soldiers for whatever reason can not physically stand upright. Owen emphasizes that the soldiers are in very bad physical conditions because the way they have to live in the trenches. Constantly wet and cold, food was scares and the of poor quality. And they fought with like sleep. “Knock-kneed, coughing like hags” this again suggests how appalling the health of the soldiers was. They were “coughing like hags” because there would have been a lot of dust from gun fire, also gases lurking in the air. Poets like Owen don’t ever include heroic images not like traditional war poetry. In ‘The Charge Of The Light Brigade’, ‘storm’d at with shot and shell, while horse and hero fell’. The poet is conveying that the soldiers die heroes.
Owen also makes up words as we are shown in line 6. His word “blood-shod” gives us an image of soldiers trudging along with feet encased in blood and bandages. This word is a combination of blood-shot and blood-shed. Owen makes up words like these because he knows that the reader will understand the image he is trying to create, and successfully does.
In ‘Exposure’ the soldiers degrade to hallucinating due to the effects of the cold wet weather. In one line it has the word ‘snow-dazed’ and the next line has a contrast of ‘sun-dozed’. This shows the extremes your mind can wonder when exposed to such brutal weather. They believe they are in a totally different surroundings. They think that they are lying asleep in the sun when really they are lying in the bottom of a cold trench in soaking wet clothes. They are dreaming of typical English summers – of home.
The soldiers turn away from God during the war. They lose their love and trust in him. They no longer feel that God is on their side, they think that he’s producing the frost and mud. Also in ‘Dulce Et Decorum Est’, Owen addresses the reader to drag us in. The quotation, ‘His Frost will fasten on this mud and us’, this sentence proves this as God is referred to as ‘His’ throughout the poem. Whereas in ‘Peace’, ‘Now, God be thanked’, shows that God is standing by them.
Through the poem ‘ Exposure’ the soldiers are referred to as ‘we’, ‘us’ and ‘our’. This makes the reader feel more involved and as if the reader are with the soldiers experiencing it first hand. It also gives the reader the impression of all the soldiers being united as a contemporary family or community that have trust in one another.
In the last stanza Owen has used some effective vocabulary to bring the poem to a close, by leaving the reader to decide what the words means to me. The last line, ‘Pause over half-known faces. All their eyes are ice, But nothing happens.’ This could have many different interpretations. I believe that ‘half-known faces’ represents how changed facially the soldiers are that they don’t recognise each other. ‘All their eyes are ice’ means that because people’s eyes are the gateway to their souls, as their eyes are static their souls are frozen. It could also be seen from a different perspective. Their eyes are no longer moving, nothing is moving, the battle field dead full of motionless frozen bodies.
‘Dulce Et Decorum Est’ begins as a sonnet, an octet then a sestet. There are then two lines that are cut off from the rest of the poem. ‘Dulce Et Decorum Est’ has a regular rhyme scheme: ABABCDCD pattern. This pattern follows through the whole poem. All through the poem, the rhythm reflects what is happening at the time. At the beginning of the poem when the soldiers are trudging through the mud the rhythm is slow. The poet has tightly structured this poem, so to make the rhyme scheme less obvious. The scheme is not predominate, so the reader concentrates more on the words within the poem. In the second stanza, when the gas has been dropped, there is a sense of panic in the poem, ‘Gas! Gas! Quick, boys!’ The rhyme again reflects the horror in the soldiers and Owen uses many shorter words that can be read or said quickly to show the urgency of the situation.
In the first stanza of ‘Exposure’ Owen uses pararhyme,
‘Our brains ache, in the merciless iced east wind that knive us…
Wearied we keep awake because the nigh is silent…
Low, drooping flares confuse our memories of the salient…
Worried by silence, sentries whisper, curious, nervous,
But nothing happened.’
‘Knive us’ and ‘nervous’, and ‘silent’ and ‘salient’ nearly rhyme. And they are called pararhyme.
Owen also uses similes and metaphors very well. In ‘Dulce Et Decorum Est’ he compares the gas that was dropped on the soldiers to the sea, ‘Dim, though the misty panes and thick green light, As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.’ This is for several reasons. The first being that like the sea, the gas was probably green. The gas would also have swirled around in the air resembling the tides and currents In the sea. Finally, the gas drowned the man. He wanted to get out but could not. The sea is usually responsible for drowning people.
We hear of the soldiers as “drunk with fatigue”. This is very emotive as the reader can imagine them very clearly staggering along as if drunk, not being able to concentrate or stay awake because they are so tired. They are so tired; they are not totally in control of themselves and their actions.
‘Dulce Et Decorum Est’ is full of images. Some are made using similes; others using metaphors and other using personification. An example of a simile is “Bent double, like old beggars under sacks”. This is effective because the soldiers were huddled under blankets, trying desperately to keep out the cold.
Likewise In ‘Exposure’, there are many effective similes, ‘we hear the mad gusts tugging on the wire, like twitching agonies of men among its brambles’, meaning that the wind blowing the barbed wire is like men getting caught up in the wire. This gives a disturbing picture of men twitching in pain. The choice of words that Owen has chosen is extremely effective.
Another example of a metaphor is “bitter as the cud of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues.” This is effective because it compares the gas to a poison that causes sores on the tongues of the innocent soldiers; soldiers who went to the front lines to fight for their country and help win the war. It emphasises Owen’s disgust with the war and that the soldiers are blameless. But its very different with traditional war poems, like in pieces by Rupert Brooke, ‘With hand made sure, clear eye, and sharpened power, To turn, as swimmers into cleanness leaping’. Which gives you an attractive appearance of driving into a clean refreshing pool.
From ‘Exposure’ the line ‘mad gusts’ is personification, saying the wind is mad, erratic. Also in the first line the use of ‘ss’ sounds produces a shadow of the whistling wind through the trenches Alliteration like this through the poem really gives the reader the feeling of experiencing the conditions first hand.
Compared to other post 1914 war poems, Wilfred Owens’s ‘Dulce Et Decorum Est’ and ‘Exposure’ transform personal experiences into poetry for the majority to read. Other poets from that era like Rupert Brooke, Jessie Pope and Mackintosh had varied views of the war.
Jessie Pope’s poems were considered controversial by Wilfred Owen. Her work was mainly propaganda. She was telling young men to go to fight for their country. She compared the war to a game. When Owen mentions “ my friend” in ‘Dolce et Decorum est’, this anonymous person in Jessie Pope. Owen was outraged that Pope had compared the war to a game. In his poem he made sure the public, poets and soldiers knew the full terrors of the war.
Mackintosh’s poem ‘Recruiting’ tells a tale of propaganda, willing young men to come and fight, but with the hint of reality telling them that they will die.
Compared to ‘Dolce et Decorum est’ and ‘Exposure’ the poems written by Pope, Brooke and Mackintosh do not tell of the horrors in the war. Owen’s poems are based on personal experience. Although Siegfried Sassoon helped Owen with ‘Dulce Et Decorum Est’ the poem turned out as a mixture of their personal, first hand experiences of the war. Owen met Sassoon at Craiglockhart War Hospital near Edinburgh. The two men worked together to write ‘Dulce Et Decorum Est’, this partnership worked particularly well as both men had experiences of war and could express themselves in their poems.
Although ‘Dulce Et Decorum Est’ and ‘Exposure’ are different poems, they have their similarities. They are both written by a man who was awarded the Military Cross for bravery at Amiens, they both have the same theme (war and the effects, both short term and long term) and both are superbly written. Wilfred Owen experienced the terrors of war first hand and filtered his experiences into his work. That is why ‘Dulce Et Decorum Est’ and ‘Exposure’ are such wonderful, emotive and interesting poems. Their writer had first hand experience of the horrors of warfare.