‘The Send Off’ is a thought-provoking poem which describes the scene at a railway station. The men who are recruited to join the army to fight for their country are moving to the siding-shed. The troops have just come off from a sending off ceremony- cheering crowds, bells, drums and flowers have been given by strangers- and now they are packed into trains to an unknown destination.
In ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’, Owen describes the soldiers who are fighting in the battlefield. There is nothing romantic about Owen’s soldiers. They are ‘Bent-double…through sludge.’ In the poem ‘The Send Off’ soldiers are considered as heroes, smart and proud, but in the poem ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’ Owen describes them as ‘old beggars…hags.’ The war has destroyed them from fit young men to exhausted, diseased men.
The soldiers described in the poem ‘The Send Off’ are not enthusiastic. They feel sad and hush up all their tears. Their fates are written for their country. They are described as ‘grimly gay’, an oxymoron. They are happy as it is patriotic to die for one’s country. But their happiness is shadowed by the fact that they are going to war and may not come back. The phrase ‘grimly gay’ describes the uncertainty as well as the desperate attempts made by the soldiers to be brave.
In both the poems the atmosphere seems sinister. In the poem’ The Send Off’ the lanes are described as ‘darkening’ adding to the sad and gloomy atmosphere of the soldiers leaving. Whereas ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’ describes the war front with the whole atmosphere green in color because of the mustard-gas attack, ‘The misty panes and thick green light’.
In the poem’ The Send Off’ Wilfred Owen portrays the feelings of the troops, whereas in ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’ describes the soldiers especially a particular soldier who is a victim of the mustard-gas attack.
‘Dulce et Decorum Est’ uses similes to describe the physical condition of the soldiers. They are compared to beggars and hags. The soldier who is a victim of the mustard gas attack is compared to ‘a man on fire or lime’. His hanging face, ‘like a devil sick of sin’. The poem ‘The Send Off’ also gives examples of similes. The soldiers’ departure is secret, ‘like wrongs hushed up’, because the true nature of what is happening to them is being concealed.
In the poem ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’, Wilfred Owen gives an account of his own feelings towards the fate of the dying soldiers. The atmosphere, especially the non-living things are given little notice. ‘The Send Off’ on the other hand describes the feelings of the people, women, porters, and tramp as well as of non-living things like signals and lamps. The ‘casual tramp’ is described to be moved to pity. ‘He stood staring,’ an example of alliteration stressing the idea how sorry he is to miss these people. It adds to the strength of the feelings and reflects the uncertainty of the situation. The signals seemed ‘unmoved’, it ‘nodded’ and the ‘lamp winked’ as if approving the departure of the soldiers. These are examples of personification. Owen has even used the verbs to describe the feelings of various men and things to the soldiers ‘sad fate’.
‘Dulce et Decorum Est’ is purely his own personal experience. In this poem, helmets are described as clumsy. But it is actually the soldiers who are too fatigued to fit them properly. The phrase ‘clumsy helmets’ is an example of a metaphor as well as an example of personification.
Most of the verbs in the poem ‘The Send-off’ are written in past tense while the verbs in ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’ are in the continuous form. The poem ‘The Send-Off’ is dominated by plural pronouns ‘We’ and ‘They’ while ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’ mainly uses ‘First Person Singular’. In line 2, the poet mentions ‘we’ and this implies that he is writing from his personal experience. This is both his view and view of his men as he says ‘we’. The poem has a quality of speech. It is a direct address as it mentions ‘you’ in it. The repetition and capitalization of the word ‘Gas’ drives home the idea of panic. He uses pauses in several places so that the reader will stop and his message sinks in their hearts.
The slow and steady movement of time felt while reading the beginning of the poem ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’ is due to the subdued and disheartening attitude of the soldiers. The words directly reflect the fatigue of the weary boys. The image of them marching slowly, bloody and drunk evokes the similar feelings of tiredness in the reader.
The second stanza of Dulce is an action one. It is fast and breaks the slow rhythm of the first stanza, just as the mustard gas breaks up the men’s marching. The third stanza is a powerful and haunting one. The poem The Send Off keeps up the same slow pace all through out the poem.
Graphic imagery is also effectively employed in the poem .They evoke such emotions so as to cause people to become sick as in line 22: ‘Come gargling from the forth corrupted lungs.’ In the beginning of the poem the troops are portrayed as ‘drunk with fatigue.’ With this graphic image the reader can imagine large numbers of people dragging their books through the mud, tripping over their own shadow. Later, when the gas shell is dropped, it paints a psychological image that would disturb the mind.
The poem ‘The Send-Off’ uses rhetorical questions ‘shall they…train loads’ to create an effect, whereas ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’ gives a direct address to the reader to create a rapport.
The poem ‘The Send-Off’ is written in six stanzas while ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’ is written in four. In both the poems, number of lines in each stanza differs. The poem Send Off has a definite rhyme scheme, while in the poem Dulce the poet purposely rhymes some line endings to create an effect.
(Last paragraph The poem you liked more and why?)
