Comparing and Contrasting War Poems

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                                           Comparing and Contrasting War Poems

In this essay, I have decided to analyse two poems by the war poet Wilfred Owen, taken from his writings on the First World War. Both of these poems ('Dulce et Decorum Est' and ‘Exposure’) portray Owen's bitter angst towards the war, but do so in very different ways and ‘Vitai Lampada’ by Henry Newbolt and comparing it to ‘A Soldier’ by Rupert Brook.

First of all I will be comparing the 2 war poems by Owen. His most famous poem, 'Dulce et Decorum Est', is a fine example of his narrative, first-person poems, written through his own eyes and based on his own experiences and views of the war. Using four clear stanzas, the poem uses standard, alternate rhyming lines. A slow, painstaking rhythm is established at the beginning of the poem through Owen's use of heavy, long words and end-stop lines, in order to illustrate just how slow and painful the war was:

"Bent double like old beggars under sacks,

Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through the sludge,"

The way Owen captures the appearance of the soldiers as cripples, hags or tramps because the soldiers are so tired, agonised and annoyed. They are compared to this because they have been dragged down to that level. It just makes them seem even more alienated and strange to our minds. The alliterative 'knock-kneed' phrase slows and dulls down the tempo greatly, also telling us about the grim war:

"Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots,

But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame, all blind"

And this is just the first stanza of ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’. In contrast, the second of Owen's poems ‘Exposure’ it talks about the same thing except the soldiers are in winter ice freezing temperatures, and they have to fight for their country in weather, which is unlivable. While the army of soldiers wait in this ‘iced wind’ the weather gets to them:

“Our brains ache, in the merciless iced east winds that knive us...”

Owen goes on saying that the soldiers are so weary, tired, confused that the flashes of the mortar bombs confuse them also. Owen describes it, as everything is quiet but so much is happening, he describes that the soldiers are fighting but they do not know what they are fighting for. And that they are just ducks waiting around to get killed:

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“Wearied we keep awake because the night is silent...

Low, drooping flares confuse our memory of the salient...

Worried by silence, sentries whisper, curious, nervous,
But nothing happens.”

In the second stanza of ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’, Owen here showed the gas attack very vivid and realistic into words. The 'guttering, choking, drowning,' phrase showing the repetitive pain and their emotions dragging on of the soldier as he 'plunges' towards his death. In fact throughout 'Dulce et Decorum Est', a surreal feel to the poem is made by Owen's continual use of metaphors when describing the bloody scenes.

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