In the poem ‘Refugee Blues’, a Jewish man is talking to his wife about the injustices and they are experiencing. This is the view that the poet is trying to impose on the reader. The people are being excluded in a country where they are unwanted. The man says to his wife:
Say this city has ten million souls
Some are living in mansions, some are living in holes
Yet there is no place for us, my dear, there is no place for us
The man is telling his feelings on injustice, by explaining to his wife that they are a very small minority, enemy of a huge majority. Another quote which represents feelings of being part of a minority is: ‘Dreamed I saw a building with a thousand floors… Not one of them was ours…’ The poet is repeating his feeling of being part of a minority and because he repeated this view, it was easy to notice and shows the reader exactly what to understand.
The poems both have attitude to clearly express their views. In ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’, the poet uses a morbid, pessimistic and grim attitude throughout the poem. He puts a piece of disturbing and effective imagery in a stanza alone. ‘In all my dreams before my helpless sight, He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.’ The poet puts this into a separate stanza because it is very effective. The reason it is read effectively is because the adjectives have been used very deliberately. The adjectives, ‘guttering, choking, drowning’ all have very similar meaning. The effect created by this is similar to that of repetition because it exaggerated the meaning of the image it portrays. The poet who wrote ‘Refugee Blues’ created an attitude showing sadness and despair. This is shown by adjectives, imagery and repetition. Auden writes using a large amount of simple vocabulary to clearly explain his despair about the situation of a refugee being unwelcome somewhere, but not being able to escape from it.
The poets in both poems offer a place for the reader, a guide to how they should portray the poem. This is another way of gaining the attention of the reader in ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’. The writer describes his views of how war is wrongly understood by the people indirectly involved- the people at home. He then addresses the reader in a slightly threatening manner:
My friend, you would not tell to children ardent for some desperate glory
The old lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori
This way of imposing his own views on the reader is very personal, it is not subtle or diplomatic, but it grabs the attention of the reader. In the poem ‘Refugee Blues’, the poet includes the reader by subtler means. He is talking to his wife throughout the whole poem and the reader is able to put himself into her position because she never talks. An example of this is, ‘He was talking of you and me dear, he was talking of you and me’.
