The Norton Anthology of English Literature says, “…but also that people were wholly unprepared for the horrors of modern trench warfare. World War I broke out on a largely innocent world, a world that still associated warfare with glorious cavalry charges and the noble pursuit of heroic ideals”. Owen, along with his fellow soldiers had their naïve innocence ripped from them by the unreasoned and amoral reality of war and he wanted the world to understand this truth that had been forced upon him.
It seems clear that Owen’s desire to communicate the truth of the sheer horror of war was the reason he wrote it. Owen uses many techniques to show his feelings, some of which I shall be exploring.
A technique Owen uses significantly is his cleverly woven irony, which he planted into every piece he has written. Often on a first and casual reading, Owens poetry may appear similar to other patriotic rhyme of his day, but a closer study reveals a man who is angry with the words of veneration with which war was glorified. His choice of title with the use of language that others might employ to portray romantic heroism is like bait carefully laid to draw the reader into the horrible truth of war.
The first stanza is lethargic and expresses the atmosphere for the soldiers; near death and on the edge of life. Owen uses figurative language to draw on the tone and atmosphere of the poem. In the metaphor “Men marched asleep” Owen explains that the men look and feel unconscious and are always run down. Moreover Owen entwines the use of assonance and alliteration to draw upon the impression of sleepiness. Throughout this poem the reader can tell Owen has had enough of the war, he pleads with the reader to truly understand the grim reality of war. Owen cleverly structures his poems so it is not regularly structured, varying the sentence and the stanza lengths. Choosing to do this it draws upon the atmosphere of life in the trench and his confusion of his belonging.
By contrast, Rupert Brooke, using a style was reminiscent of the romantic period, wrote war sonnets during the first flush of patriotism and enthusiasm as a generation unused to war rushed to defend King and country. Brooke's "War Sonnets" are not unusual; in fact, patriotic poetry, songs, editorials and the like far outweighed the hard, realistic poems written later in the war by Owen and Sorely. Even though we no longer read this style of poetry, finding it jingoistic and simplistic does not mean that it was not extremely popular during the years of the Great War when readers sought ways to justify the loss of their loved ones and their great sacrifices at home and on the front.
“The Sonnet” by Charles Hamilton Sorely was found in the author's kit sent home from France after his death. The mood of the poem is very sombre, almost depressing and lacking in any tone of sarcasm or irony. The first two lines predict the feeling when you witness millions dead. The entire poem is a single image of "mouthless" dead, and a warning to the reader. ‘mouthless’ implies that the dead cannot speak which implies a loss, and the passing of something, perhaps tradition. Where Sorely’s poem says, “. . . you’ll remember. For you need not so.", the word ‘remember’ juxtaposed with "need not so" implies that it is useless, in this new world, to remember the past. The poem did not have a setting, only feelings of the dead and the details used are chilling, he uses words like "blind" and "deaf" to make the image clearer. He goes further by using "love" and "honour" which his readers would surely have had heaped on them by now to ease their sense of loss.
Sorely uses contrasts to expand his point for a more piercing image. The word "tears" offsets "blind eyes" and "honour" offsets "It is easy to be dead". Nobody could have known what horrors they would see, and Sorely actually demonstrates great insight before the war by writing about death as a horrible thing. His contrasting images allow recognition of what the dead can and cannot do. They cannot see, they cannot hear, and in the end, they cannot even live.
Sorely could see clearly what others missed before the war, and he could see even more clearly what everybody would discover after the war. In this, he was a visionary, and this let him write consistently and realistically about the war as it happened to him.
Owen’s and Sorely’s writing seems to be the begging of our contemporary view of war as it is rare to see writing today in a style after Brooke. Owen and Sorely were not fully aligned in their view as Owen was primarily opposed to the romanticising of war, whilst Sorely seemed more opposed to the concept of war. Without Owens irony the message Owen is trying to portray will not be fully for filled, this is because people would have been less willing to read his work and therefore understand his message given the level of patriotism that was existent when he was alive.
