Owen, having been a soldier of high rank, and having had a troop under his hands often brings out the feeling of guilt and shame in his poems: the guilt of having led his men towards death; men who “didn’t appear to know a war was on” and never realised the cruelty they were committing themselves to, until they were right up to the neck into it. In the poem Inspection, Wilfred Owen describes how a common soldier is maltreated simply because he had been injured and his uniform was blood-stained. This injustice towards the soldier’s suffering is evident in this poem where blood is described as “dirt”. This shows how the soldiers’ agony is not appreciated, neither by the Officer, Owen himself…
Owen recalls several incidents such as in the poem Conscious where he analyses the suffering of a soldier who is in bed. The poet describes as “sudden evening blurs and fogs the air” and the soldier becomes unconscious. In Dulce et Decorum est Wilfred Owen describes the agony an unidentified soldier passes through as he dies of mustard gas; the agony he passed through as he was “guttering, choking, drowning”, and while “the blood / Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs, / Obscene as cancer”. But Owen doesn’t only describe the physical suffering of the soldiers, the visible pain. No, Owen gives detailed description of the psychological torture the soldiers go through. This is clearly evident in the poem The Dead Beat where the poet picks out an incident where a soldier collapses, “more sullenly than wearily” out of mental exhaustion which “crazed him”. The mental anguish also comes from the burden of guilt the soldiers have to carry. The guilt of having killed someone; the guilt of having committed murder. This guilt is also felt by Wilfred Owen, since he, too, was on the battlefield killing. This mental pain is shown in poem Strange Meeting where he says that “foreheads of men have bled where no wounds were.” The torment was there “not through wounds; not on the cess of war”, but due to the guilt. In this poem Wilfred Owen realises he had killed a fellow poet who could have helped to stop the war by opening the eyes of those in favour of war. Owen continues to describe how a common, unknown soldier can die during war in his poem Asleep. The British poet recalls an event when a soldier passes on from a kind of sleep to another. The soldier was shot in his sleep by “the intruding lead”. However, death brings serenity, rest, peace: for now “He sleeps less tremulous, less cold”. Now that he is dead, he has no more sufferings to pass through – no more mental pain, no more torture. This is how a soldier can be liberated of his suffering… through death.
Owen uses the technique of recalling an incident and describing in detail the agony a soldier goes through, a particular event which makes Owen’s poetry more believable, more realistic. The plight of a common soldier is described through various imagery, strong crude details and other techniques such as irony.
Wilfred Owen’s intentions are to make the reader feel pity towards these anonymous soldiers who suffer for their country, sometimes against their will, but still, continue to do so only because they are forced to. They cannot retreat from this war. They are destined to suffer. They are destined to die.
