Check out the way Wilfred Owen shows the war and the existence of troops within in it in “Dulce Et Decorum Est” The poem “Dulce Ou Decorum Est” by Wilfred Owen was written sometime after the Struggle of Ypres in 1915, where gas was first employed as a weapon.
By using numerous techniques, Owen is able to format the scary of such an attack and thus, try and disprove the extensively held belief of it being sweet and honourable to die for one’s region. This composition is a direct attack on the politicians and writers who encouraged people to sign up for the war, a war which in turn Owen believed was taking lives of so many young men for not any justifiable trigger. Firstly, from your very outset, Owen describes the soldiers as ‘bent double’ and ‘knock-kneed’. This is shocking, seeing that many people’s perception of your soldier was an erect man in fine standard on horse back.
Therefore , in this way, Owen is able to rectify some of the views placed by the United kingdom public and shows that in reality, fine and upstanding teenagers have been converted to beggars and tramps as a immediate result of the war. Furthermore, the language found in the 1st stanza is again used to describe the pitiful condition of the soldiers. By using spiritual and hellish imagery just like ‘cursed’ and ‘haunting’, Owen is able to assess the conditions of war to hell to be able to try and give an idea showing how bad things really had been in the battle.
In the midst of this sort of despair, Owen hints at loss of life by talking about that the troops were trudging towards a ‘distant rest’. Although this looks to suggest a literal rest, it might also be a play on words, with Owen in fact referring to the simple fact that all they may be doing is trudging to death. This kind of again displays how risky the battle is. Owen is also emphatically against the remedying of the wounded and deceased; ‘…we flung him in’.
This is discussing the man who may have been maimed by the gas attack and is in his previous moments. Owen shows that rather than treating him with dignity and properly laying him down, he can ‘flung’ in the wagon without regard intended for his traumas or feelings. By doing this, Owen is again able to shock the reader and also to add fat to his argument that such a war ought to be discontinued.
The suddenness and unpredictability of actions inside the war is explored by simply Owen by utilizing rhythm. At the beginning of the composition, in the first stanza, there is a very slow tempo which makes the reader peruse the poem slowly and gradually. Owen performs this to mirror the slow ‘cursed’ trudge with the men as they make their way for the ‘distant rest’.
However , the arrival from the second stanza brings with it an explosion of pace which can be accomplished by applying exclamation signifies and very brief sentences; ‘GAS! Gas! Quick, boys! ‘ This drastically increases the velocity of the poem and hence permits the reader to empathise with all the feeling of the soldiers and shows how fast they have to react in order to save themselves from a good and painful death. This is certainly further emphasised by Owen when he alterations the tense to the present in the second stanza.
The effect on this is to enhance the feeling of immediacy felt by the soldiers and to further describe how close they are to death. In this manner, Owen can seamlessly show the reader the real unpredictability with the war; a minute or so it is uninteresting and typical, the next, life is in danger. The use of present participles by Owen is also incredibly pronounced; ‘guttering, choking, drowning’. By using these kinds of sporadically and in a routine of 3, Owen can highlight the urgency and immediacy in the situation, and just how people was required to hurry pertaining to dear lifestyle. The importance with the past participles can be seen if the structure plus the rhyme plan of ABAB is split up between stanzas two and three.
In this way, Owen can place even more emphasis on yesteryear participles so the urgency with the situation becomes more noticeable. This is additional echoed when the word ‘ecstasy’ is used the moment referring to gas masks getting put on; it is not necessarily ecstasy just as happiness, rather Owen can be referring to the almost hysterical feeling the moment one knows that the quickness of their actions will identify whether they will be alive following the next few minutes. This is once again used to display the horrors soldiers were required to go through time in outing in the battle.
The changes of pronouns also add to the general effect of the poem. In stanza three, Owen uses the pronoun ‘my’. As a result, Owen has the capacity to tell you that having been actually there at the time of the incident plus the events he could be describing were actually experienced by him, so the celebration seems more personal and therefore the reader will be able to look at it even more closely and read it more attentively.
In conclusion, the extreme imagery of war and its horrors can be portrayed throughout the poem. Therefore, it is obvious that Owen considers the war to be a terrible means of ending the lives of so many teenagers who are led to believe that the old rest of ‘Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori’. He believes that the ends the conflict is being struggled for are unjust and thus people really should not be ‘conned’ into thinking they are doing a ‘sweet and honourable’ duty by simply serving in the war hard work.
Crucially, it ought to be noted that Owen is definitely not against war; almost all he says is usually that the type of warfare being struggled is not really the right one and also to get this way, he uses emotive and explicit language to let the politicians and pro-war copy writers, such as Jessie Pope, back again at home have at least some inkling of what their ‘boys’ were encountering on the entrance.
