In the second stanza of Exposure Owen once again starts off with an element of personification then uses a very vivid gruesome description, ‘Like twitching agonies of men among its brambles.’ In this stanza I think that Owen is making the reader imagine what it is really like as he ends this stanza with a rhetorical question. ‘What are we doing here?’
In the third stanza Owen writes how pointless war is and how miserable it makes the soldiers feel. ‘War lasts, rain soaks, and clouds sag stormy.’ He also re-emphasises how the weather is the enemy. Owen then ends the stanza with some repetition from the first stanza. But nothing happens.’
In the fourth stanza Owen states that the weather is more dangerous than the enemy and how that the soldiers have lost all care about the never-ending renewal process of troops going over the trenches. In this stanza it is becoming clear that the soldiers are loosing all things that make someone human.
In the fifth stanza Owen refers to the soldiers as de-humanised as the soldiers are cringing in holes uncertain of when their time is up. He also mentions that the weather is sneaky and that what they are going through cannot be reality. ‘We cringe in holes, back on forgotten dreams, and stare, snow-dazed.’
In the sixth stanza the soldiers go into a dream state where their life-less bodies go back home. ‘Slowly our ghosts drag home.’ Owen also mentions warm homely images like ‘sunk fires, glozed.’ Then it appears that they are coming out of the dream state and return to the trenches. ‘We turn back to out dying.’
In the next stanza Owen writes how the lives have been taken away from the soldiers. If you look back to the first stanza when the soldiers were suffering from paranoia and tiredness, now in this stanza Owen is claiming that the soldiers have lost their souls. In this stanza Owen also questions God and how he can let them go through this. ‘For love of God seems dying.’
In the final stanza Owen writes how they are unknown, ‘half-known faces,’ and how there is no life left in them. And Owen finishes off this poem with a final bit of repetition. ‘But nothing happens.’
If I compare this realistic war poem to the propaganda of Vitai Lampada then there is a clear difference. Vitai Lampada does not include and gruesome descriptions and avoids mentioning the actual battle. In Exposure Owen describes the un-heroic reality of warfare.
Now I will write about another one of Owens realistic war poems, ‘Dulce et Decorum est.’ the title ‘Dulce et Decorum est’ translates to; it is sweet and meet to die for ones country. Sweet! And decorous! I think that this is very important to the poem because it puts across the main message of the whole poem in the title.
In the first stanza Owen writes about how tired the soldiers are and how slow moving the war is, ‘men marched asleep.’ ‘Deaf even to the hoots,’ this indicates that the soldiers are so brainless that that they are oblivious to the shells that could drop on them at any time.
In the second stanza Owen starts with ‘GAS! GAS!’ this onomatopoeia can tell us that there has been an attack on the soldiers. Later on in the stanza some one has been exposed to the gas and the soldiers are aware but do not seem to react much. ‘As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.’
This next stanza is the shortest one but to me the most dramatic. Owen writes about how the soldiers can’t do anything, then he uses some very well chosen and effective language which portrait how the soldiers are feeling. ‘He plunges at me, guttering, choking, and drowning.’
The forth and final stanza of this poem Owen contradicts Jessie Pope’s (who wrote recruiting poems) version of events when a soldier dies. ‘Behind the wagon we flung him in,’ this extract is very degrading and undignified. Later on in the stanza Owen writes how the war is tragic and pointless, ‘Obscene as cancer.’
In this poem I feel that it starts off with a sombre tone in the first stanza, goes in to a panic in the second stanza and in the fourth stanza Owen uses very careful diction.
The final poem that I will be writing about is Icarus Allsorts (Roger McGough). In this poem I feel that the main message McGough is trying to put across is that nuclear bombs will one day be flying everywhere and we will all die. He also wants to put across that the bombs will be indiscriminate and kill the Queen, the rich, the poor and the civil defence volunteers. McGough ends the poem with a complete change of tone, where he goes from a form of a nursery rhyme to a very serious tone. On these last two lines McGough lists the death count ‘Three thousand million, seven hundred, and sixty-eight.’ And he very effectively ends with a rhetorical question where he asks if anything would bring all those people back.
After I have reviewed all of these poems I feel that the changes it attitudes to war has not changed much, in the sense that people still have the same opinions about warfare as in the realistic war poems, but it has changed in the sense of nobody has the disillusions of war that is portrayed in the recruitment poems.
