Essay Of Dulce Et Decorum Est And Wilfred Owen

It is "Dulce et Decorum Est" which provides a very dramatic and memorable description of the psychological and physical horrors that war brings about.

From the first stanza Owen uses strong metaphors and similes to convey a strong warning.

The third stanza is where the “sense of the innermost horror of the poem can be detected” (Hughes 166).

Owen outlines the terror in the war when he wrote, “he plung[ed] at me, guttering, choking, drowning” (line 16).

Thomas Hardy and Wilfred Owen have distinct views on the effects of war on the people involved.

They also came from different backgrounds, values, beliefs, and life experiences that shaped their views on war.In the first stanza, “we should have sat us down to wet/ Right many a nipperkin!” (line 3-4), the speaker thinks that he and his enemy could have been friends."Coughing like hags" suggests that these young He goes on to say, "As under a green sea, I saw him drowning", this shows how the man is gasping for clean air and not this air that is poisoning him.In the following stanza, Owen goes on to further demonstrate his gift for visualisation, with the use of strong emotive words such as 'Guttering', 'Choking' and 'Drowning', not only shows how the man is dying but also that the use of onomatopoeia suggests the sound is of the soldier dying in a very painful and frightening way that no human being should ever endure and could ever imagine in their wildest nightmares.As if half-way through an incomplete event that has already started.The soldiers are trying to escape the enemy’s fire but their terrible health conditions dismiss them from strong and immediate actions.In Thomas Hardy’s “The Man He Killed”, Hardy does not use any literary elements to demonstrate what soldiers psychological go through in war, unlike Owen, instead he makes the poetry seem personal to the reader.Hardy’s language is not full of metaphors, similes, and symbolism, so it is criticized for “ignorance and clumsiness not ‘cunning irregularity’“ (Richards 117).Reading this poem, made me realize my own luck and circumstance: I have been fortunate to have avoided the brutalities brought by world war one.The appalling conditions the soldiers were left to face made me appreciate that my own life has not been disturbed.