Pro patria mori.”
If we look at this it says that Sweet and Honourable is to die for your country. This is ironic because if we look at the horrors of the war then we can see that it is not sweet or honourable. This is why he says it is the old lie.
The next thing that I will pick up on this poem is that he is talking from the first person perspective. We can see this when he says in the second verse about someone dieing. He says “Dim through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.”
The way he describes this in the first line of the extract it is like we are in the middle of the battle field looking through his eyes at the war. The entire second verse is looking at the horrors of the battle field from the first person which allows us to see what the war was like first hand.
The final thing I will look at before I move on to the next poem is the graphic detail that Wilfred Owen put in to this poem. We can see some of this detail when we he says “Come Gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,”
What this is trying to do is to show people that war is horrible and having to watch some one die in the face of battle is a sickening and sad thing to happen. He is also trying to warn people away from war because of the horrors that it represents.
Now that I have looked at Dulce et Decorum est I will look at Disabled and see what he is trying to say in this poem. I will look at the same things as I did in the other poem like how it is written and what the message is behind it. I will also look at the similarities and differences there are in Disabled compared with Dulce et Decorum est.
The first thing that I can see and is a very noticeable difference between the two poems is how they are written where as Dulce et Decorum est was written in the first person this one is written in the third person. We can see this in this poem when Wilfred Owen says “He sat in a wheeled chair, waiting for dark,
And shivered in his ghastly suit of grey.”
This is showing that he is talking about some war person. This war person has obviously been injured and as we look at the rest of the poem it talks about how no one actually cares about him any more.
The next thing that I can pick up on is that this poem is written as a view on how the war has affected the home place. I think he has done this to show how the war has affected everyone weather they are at the frontline or not. I can see this clearly when he says, “About this time Town used to swing so gay
When glow-lamps budded in the light blue trees”
What he is saying here is that the war has changed the world and it will never be the same. He comments on how the town used to be before the war to show that the horrors of war will never go away.
The final thing that I will pick up on and this links in to the last poem I looked at and that is that he shows in the last paragraph that that war is not a good thing and if you fight in the war you will not get any respect and you will have to suffer. This is most noticeable when he says, “Some cheered him home, but not as crowds cheer goal.
Only a solemn man who brought him fruits
Thanked him; and then inquired about his soul.”
As I said this is showing that war does not make you a hero because all the people will be looking at the tragedies not the fact that someone made it home alive.
In conclusion I can say that both of the poems are very pessimistic and show all the bad points of the war. This is good because it will warn people away from war. Unfortunately this does not work given the current state of affairs. I think that if Mr Blair and Mr Bush had read these poems then maybe they would have stayed away from the war.
I also think that linked to that the poems serve as a warning of what could happen. I think that the poems achieve there goal and this is good. I think that Wilfred Owen is a good but controversial writer and has shown that war is not all it is cracked up to be and is not as easy as the propaganda makes out.