How does Wilfred Owen present the horror and reality of war in his poems?

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                        English Literature Coursework assignment

                          Wilfred Owen war poetry

How does Wilfred Owen present the horror and reality of war in his poems?

Introduction

‘Shivering in his ghastly suit of grey, legless sewn short at elbow.’ This is just one quotation from one of Wilfred Owens poems Disabled that really brings the horror and reality of war to life. Wilfred Owen was born on the 18th of March 1893 and was killed in action on the 4th of November 1918 five days before the end of the war. I am going to concentrate on 4 of his poems: Exposure-Is a poem about his experience of war in wintertime, Anthem for Doomed Youth- In sonnet form, Anthem for Doomed Youth is an elegy, a lament for the dead, Disabled-Is a poem about a wounded soldier who has lost all of his limbs it is a sympathetic and sad poem, Dulce-is his personal account of a gas attack he concentrates on one of his fellow comrades that he had to watch choke/drown to death.  

        This poem was written in 1917 by Wilfred Owen, it is a poem about war in wintertime and is written from his personal experience. 'Exposure' gives a worm's-eye view of the front line, based on Owen's experiences in the winter of 1917, and passive suffering is what it is all about. 'Nothing happens', as he says four times - nothing except tiny changes in the time of day, the weather and the progress of the war. The men appear trapped in a No Man's Land between life and death, and the poem's movement is circular. 

To start the poem Wilfred Owen describes the reality of the terrible weather conditions the soldiers had to live in, he compares war and weather ‘our brains ache, in the merciless iced east that knive us’. The soldiers worried by the silence ‘wearied we keep awake because the night is silent’. ‘Worried by silence, sentries whisper, curious, nervous, but nothing happens’ this quotation suggests that they are waiting on an attack and they are scared and nervous because of it ‘ but nothing happens’ associates war with action, but the reality is that they are just waiting.

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        In stanza 2 Wilfred Owen uses a simile to describe the gusts of wind ‘watching, we hear the mad gusts tugging on the wire, like twitching agonies of men among its brambles’ this reminds the men of the dead or dieing that got court amongst the barbed wire. In these two stanzas there isn’t a lot happening, which was the general reality of WWI because most of the time the soldiers were just waiting for something to happen. Wilfred Owen links war and weather together as though they were both the enemy for example ‘Iced east winds…knive us’ ‘mad gusts…like ...

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