This speech is Shakespeare’s interpretation of what Henry V would have said to his men at the Battle of Agincourt.
In this speech Henry V tries to engender a feeling of pride and he mentions what these men will do on future St. Crispin days. He says how these men will look forward to future St. Crispin days as they will be able to roll up their sleeves and be proud of their scars that they gained at the Battle Of Agincourt. They will be able to show them to their family. The men will show their scars because they will be a kind of remembrance of the Battle of Agincourt and the feats in which occurred that day on that battlefield. Henry V also tells them that they will become famous ‘what feats he did that day. Then shall our names, Familiar in his mouth as household words.’
He is telling these men that if they do the heroic thing of fighting for their country then they will be as famous as household words; people will be talking about them all the time and that on future St.Crispin days they will be the topic of conversation, about how these brave men fought for England against the French at the Battle of Agincourt.
He then goes on to say how the men who don’t fight will not feel the same person as they would if they could stand up and fight for their country, as fighting for your country changes the way you feel and your stature in the country ‘And gentleman in England, now abed.
Shall think themselves accurs’d they were not here. And hold their manhood’s cheap, while Andy speaks’
He’s trying to make these men feel bad about not fighting for their country and he is saying things that aren’t true but they will change the minds of many men.
In this, Shakespeare is getting across the message that ‘Henry V’ promoted the idea that fighting for your country is a great honour. He was a classic example of the type of person that told these young men, that they should fight for their country.
Both these two poems, ‘The Volunteer’ and ‘Henry V’, promote the idea of dieing for your country is a great honour and that it should be every mans dream to die for their country, the poem that promotes a totally different outlook on dieing for your country is Wilfred Owens, ‘Dulce Et Decorum Est.’
This poem is about a young soldier, eighteen years of age. He has been fighting in World War One, in the trenches. He has just had a long and horrific day in the front line and is marching back from there, when they are caught in a gas attack. Wilfred Owen has to watch one of his friend’s die of choking, as he couldn’t get his gas mask on quick enough, which brings him to the conclusion that it isn’t sweet and fitting to die for your country (Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori)
If the writer is to be successful in getting the message across that war is so horrific, then he must use very strong and effective language. He has to make it vivid to the reader. In the first stanza he describes how the men are feeling and what they look like, he describes them as ‘hags.’ These soldiers are eighteen years old, and are meant to be at the peak of their fitness having a great time, yet they march asleep, and are drunk with fatigue, which is an example of de-humanisation because these men are not meant to be injured and tired, they are meant to be fit and raring to go, and enjoying their life. Instead they are out in the battlefield, in the cold and wet, watching friends die, and risking their own lives to fight for their country and this is all because they have been told that it is valiant to die for your country.
In the second stanza there is a quickening of speed and tempo. The writer does this by using spoken words ‘Gas! Gas! Quick, boys!’ The tempo then slows dramatically. The writer describes, putting their gas masks on as ‘an ecstasy of fumbling.’ This means that they were overjoyed when they had put their masks on, this is because if they hadn’t of got it on in time then they would have died. But there was still someone ‘yelling and stumbling.’ The writer then uses a simile, in, he was ‘floundering like a man in fire or lime.’ This is telling us that when the lime coloured gas hit his face, it burnt like a fire or actual lime, as when your face comes into contact with lime it burns. He then describes what he saw as his fellow colleague choked on the green gas. He compares it to being under a green sea and seeing someone choking, as the green sea is the battlefield with the green coloured gas surrounding him.
In the third stanza it describes what Owen saw, as a young man died of choking. It is a very short paragraph, only two lines long, but it goes into great detail what Wilfred Owen saw. Wilfred Owen uses water imagery to describe what he saw; he describes how the man was choking ‘guttering, choking and drowning’ as he plunged at him. When you drown in water, you choke and gutter, the same as this soldier was doing when he was choking on the green coloured mustard gas. The use of the present tense in ‘plunges’ shows that this is a frequently recurring nightmare.
In the final stanza, it goes into great detail on how the victim was treated after he had died of mustard gas. Thus final verse is trying and in all cases succeeding in getting the message across, that it isn’t fitting to die for your country. The writer tries to get you to imagine what he was seeing as his fellow soldier was flung onto a wagon, most probably just a four-wheeled wooden trolley. He describes his face ‘like a devils sick of sin’, describing him as a devil, which means that his face couldn’t have been looking too good. As the roads in those days were cobbled, a wooden cart, would jolt all over the place, and he describes what happened to the body when this happened ‘If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood, Come gargling from the froth- corrupted lungs.’ He describes what he saw as being ‘Obscene as cancer’, cancer is the worst disease ever known to man, and he is comparing what he saw to that very disease. He then draws up the conclusion that you would be telling a lie if you told your children, that it was valiant to die for your country ‘Dulce et decorum est, Pro patria mori.’
This poem is getting across the message, how bad war is and that when these soldiers were told that it was the right thing to do, dieing for their country, the people that told them were lying and that it really isn’t valiant to die for your country.
The most effective poem in my view is the ‘Dulce et decorum est’ as this gets across the message that, fighting for your country is bad, it also gets across this message in a very vivid way.
