In Dulce et Decorum est. the first paragraph shows that the soldiers are in a bad state. As we know that they don’t look like soldiers portrayed in stories such as charge of the light brigade by L. Tennyson. The soldiers marched asleep by continued to fight bootless and blood-shod that shows determination. Using graphic terms such as "blood-shod", Owen is not merely telling us of the hell of war, he is showing us. As a poet, this is the task. Certainly Owen is retelling a specific event to us, but the context of that event is important. It is important for many reasons. I have never seen war of any kind. Most will not have seen the war of Owen's experience. But through his vivid words, his gruesome portrayal, I think we all can know that we do not want to see war. But how does this apply to us, the poets of today's cities, today's decadence and today's love of violence. Some soldiers were drunk with fatigue which proves they were going all out and war draining them.
The send off says ‘Their breasts were stuck all white with wreath and spray as mans are dead’. It is saying that there wasn’t a possibility that you would return and if you did you would with wreaths and sprays around you “dead”. You were sent to an upland camp in England by sent to France from there you would be sent off to war with no-one you loved to wave your goodbye, In this case all you had was a dull porter watching you and a casual tramp missing them because they probably gave the tramp leftovers and now that they have gone he’s has no food.
It was like the young lads were forced to join the army by their wife’s, mothers ect. I can see it in the send off when it says ‘So secretly, like wrong hushed-up, they went they were not ours.’ ‘The boys were never theirs to be sent off but they still went. Also I feel there was a since of guilt to send husbands, brothers off to war. Women were there to give them flowers. It’s kind of dawning that they might not return its kind of a symbol for the flowers that will be placed on their coffin. I can not read this from the line ‘Nor there if they yet mock what women meant who gave them flowers’.
In the last paragraph of the send off it says ‘Shall they return to beatings of great bells in wild train-loads? A few, a few, too few for drums and yells, may creep back, silent, to village wells up half-known roads’. Pictures of death are also painted in the poem “The send-off” and I think that Wilfred Owen is trying to put forward the idea that when you are “sent off” you never come back. The end of the war is when people to get back into the swing of things. The soldiers came back cowardly. They are ashamed of something either they had lost a limb or severely deformed but you came back alive to some soldiers they might as well returned dead. I think that Wilfred Owen is trying to bring the horrors of war to the reader in the last verse of each poem. In Dulce et decorum est he asks the reader if they could follow the wagon with the injured solider in and in the send off he relates the solders return to the village and asks how many are going to come home. Dulce et Decorum est in the second paragraph carries on nicely from the end of the sendoff because it tells you what had deformed the soldiers in the first place. In Dolce it says ‘Gas! Gas! Quick, boys!- An ecstasy of fumbling fitting the clumsy helmets just in time, but someone still was yelling out and stumbling and floundering like a man in fire or lime. Dim through the misty panes and thick green light, as under a green sea, I saw him drowning.’ Some of the fighters didn’t fit the helmets in time. It was like a mad frenzy, a dash to put the helmets on so that the lime doesn’t burn the inside of your body. But alas one unlucky man doesn’t make it and starts screaming and yelling. His lungs are filling with gas which turns into liquid and burns you and you eventually die. "Gas! GAS!…" Owen did not write those words simply to catch the reader. His purpose was to tell us that maybe the first cry was an instant reaction, almost a lazy reaction to something he'd seen a hundred times before. But, that second time is a blow, a true warning. Wilfred Owen starts having a recurring nightmare “In all my dreams before my helpless sight he plunges at me, guttering, choking, and drowning”. Some thing that unsightly would give anyone bad dreams. Things like this I don’t think goes it eats away at you and keeps tearing at you like a disease. In the final 12 lines it changes the direction and context, but we are still left with a truthful and disturbing image of war. If in some smothering dreams you too could pace Behind the wagon that we flung him in, And watch the white eyes writhing in his face, His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin; And watch the white eyes writhing in his face, His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin; If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs, Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues, -- My friend, you would not tell with such high zest To children ardent for some desperate glory, The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est Pro patria mori. All Wilfred Owens’s poems seem to rhyme. The ends of the alternate lines rhyme in most all of his poems for example in “The send off” The 1st line ends in way and the 3rd in gay. This is repeated with other rhyming words all through the poem. On the 7th and 9th lines the rhyme is tramp and camp. In “Dulce et decorum est” we can see the same format of rhyming. The end of each alternate line rhymes i.e. the ends of the 1st and 3rd lines in this case sacks and backs, and the end of the 9th and 10th lines fumbling and stumbling.
Do what Owen did. The pain of this piece of writing is its truth. This is something we believe the poet saw and actually experienced. Your experiences can be just as vital.
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