In Golosina et Decorum Est, Wilfred Owen works on the variety of fictional devices to highlight the gigantic disjuncture between the gruesome reality of the battlefield and the romanticised image of war that circulated through beautifully constructed wording, newspapers, and magazines at the start of the World Warfare I. Owens manipulation of traditional rhyming forms and metre, combined with his utilization of irony, radical language and vivid physical description assistance to establish the piece as being a powerful anti-recruitment poem. The poem is likewise representative of a collective switch in principles, as a era shocked by the horrors from the First Universe War started to be disenchanted with pro-war romanticism.
Owen creates a solid sense of dissonance by contrasting the proper execution of the poem with its articles. Though this individual makes subtle alterations for the poetic tendency, Owen makes use of traditional rhyming patterns and conforms to a loose iambic pentameter, responsive the form of the French Klammeri. As the imagery turns into increasingly repulsive the stanzas deviate by these events, highlighting the gruesome reality of war. For example , to explain the guttering, choking, drowning soldier falling towards him, Owen isolates the event through the preceding sentirse, creating a new stanza that consists of just two lines. The shift in focus and tense (from yesteryear to the present) suggests that this kind of horrific image is of particular significance to Owen and is permanently placed onto his consciousness. This technique also suggests that only by altering the shape is Owen able to adequately communicate the scene ahead of him, recognizable poetic varieties, like the France Ballade, are no longer an appropriate way to convey the horror of any reality that may be no longer familiar to Owen and his many other soldiers- any kind of attempts for this are now jarring and parodic. Like the name of the part, the conventional graceful form features becomes a method to obtain ironic anxiety. By subverting the conferences used by pro-war poets just like Rupert Brooke and Jessie Pope (to whom the poem is usually addressed to in an previously draft), Owen condemns the rhetoric of pro-war romanticists and their promulgation of self-sacrifice as the greatest heroic act.
Owens feeling of discouragement towards pro-recruitment propaganda is a pervading theme throughout the poem, and is particularly apparent in your first stanza. Using onomatopoeia and dingdong, he makes a blunt, lumbering rhythm that mirrors the actions in the tired soldiers trudging through sludge. The repetition of the hard to sound in the line Till on the haunting flares all of us turned our backs provides action a mechanical top quality, and emphasises the boredom and purposeless of their effort. The result is nearly soporific- they are really at an threatening lull- and makes the break in the iambic rhythm over the following stanza even more arresting. The line opens with GAS! Gas! Quick, boys!, violently disrupting the metre with the use of affirmation marks and dashes. This gives the part a surge of one’s that parallels the adrenaline-fuelled panic of the soldiers fumbling for their awkward helmets only in time- an image of war diametrically opposed to the main one in Popes poetry, whose enthusiastic passage paints issue as a form of pseudo-recreation.
To fully express this disparity between pro-war sentiment as well as the hellish fact of war- a battle that, for most, shattered an entire world-view- Owen skilfully uses figurative vocabulary and vivid sensory description. The attribution of dissatisfaction to a missile- a paragon of destructionis especially powerful, and can be viewed in two ways: the bombs are disappointed because they may have failed to satisfy their goal (to kill), or as the apparent failure of the discord renders their purpose meaningless. The latter interpretation creates a good sense of pathos, since it is a internal projection in the soldiers mental states on to the issue itself. The use of simile in the poem is another effective technique, particularly the comparison of the face of the soldier in agony to a devils tired of sin. Owen highlights the absurdity of war by suggesting that even the satan is tired of the regular onslaught of human battling. Like the disappointed bomb, the devils fougue to ruin is the reason for its existence, and the nonsensical idea that war provides disillusioned bad itself demonstrates the incongruity of the the world Owen wonderful fellow soldiers find themselves in. The archetypes will be subverted to increase the pervading theme that war can be an an unnatural transgression- one that violates even the devils standards of morality.
Owen additional contributes to the relentless stream of horrific imagery in the third stanza by likening the extented death from the soldier to the obscenity of cancer. Perishing for ones country is certainly not portrayed since honourable- instead, like cancers, it is mindless and a great affront to human pride. The pasional immediacy from the word cancer is especially effective, evoking the thought of something that gets rid of indiscriminately, is definitely malignant and universally despised. In addition , Owens corruption from the word fervor to imply a state of panic rather than intense pleasure is paradoxical, yet effectively conveys the psychological impact of a gas attack. The thought of ecstasy existing in a battlefield where joy can not be conceptualised means the word is reduced to their worst factors, and can only always be experienced by the soldiers being a state of diminished recognition. Owen discards the concept of aestheticism and selects to show war in an entirely bad light. This kind of divorce between popular symbole of pro-war romanticism (the Old Lay, that Owen presumably once believed) and the gruesome truth of the battlefield is a sign of the switch in world-view that he, and many others, skilled during 4 years of conflict between 1914- 1918. Actually in a latest article Nicole Smith (2011) interprets the poem since the work of any man not merely completely frustrated with pro-recruitment propaganda and literature, although by the entirety of European culture: -2- [ Dulce Decorum Est is] the grotesque and twisted phrases of a war-ravaged poet who finally understands that all of the materials, art, and knowledge throughout Western history was a scam “that it absolutely was an elaborate farce and that don’t ever should young men be directed in the concept that it is genuinely “decorous” awesome one’s region.
Golosina et Decorum est vehemently rejects the jingoistic, pro-recruitment rhetoric that was well-known in magazines and newspapers at the start of the Initial World one particular, and the glorification of selfsacrifice that forwent it. Wilfred Owens graphic depiction in the horrors of warfare is not just a incendiary response against this sentiment, but a rendering of the shift in social values and conventions in the romanticism of war to anti-war protest.
Jones, C. c2011. Poetry Evaluation of “Dolce et Decorum Est” by simply Wilfred Owen [Online]. [no pagination]. [Accessed 15 February 2015]. Available by: http://www. articlemyriad. com/analysis-dolce-decorum/
