Alliteration In Wilfred Owen's Anthem For Doomed Youth

Both Ted Hughes and Wilfred Owen present war in their poems “Bayonet Charge” and “Exposure”, respectively, as terrifying experiences, repeatedly mentioning the honest pointlessness of the entire ordeal to enhance the futility of the soldiers' deaths. Hughes’ “Bayonet Charge” focuses on one person's emotional struggle with their actions, displaying the disorientating and dehumanising qualities of war. Owen’s “Exposure”, on the other hand, depicts the impacts of war on the protagonists' nation, displaying the monotonous and unending futility of the situation by depicting the fate of soldiers who perished from hypothermia, exposed to the horrific conditions of open trench warfare before dawn.

During World War One dying for your country was often viewed as a beautiful sacrifice. Wilfred Owen wrote a poem he titled “Dulce et Decorum Est” that translated means “Sweet and Beautiful”. However, the poem proves not to be about things sweet and beautiful. Owen wrote about the obscene pains of war.

The second stanza introduces the reader to the memories that the young men must suffer time and time, every day. Through the use of personification in “memory fingers in their hair of murders”, Owen communicates on a personal level to the reader, painting the visual image of an old man anxiously pushing his fingers through his hair. The soldiers are being tormented by their memories of the death they had witnessed and are resulting in pulling their own hair out to distract their minds from their memories. They cannot be still. They cannot be calm. It is as though their brains had been turned to mush. Owen then uses the descriptive language of “Treading blood from lungs that once loved laughter” to stir an emotional response from the reader.

This disheartening conceit, that eternally battles time for relevance, illuminates lack of importance people place on living beings, and on life in general. Humankind has lost sight of the original divinity of existence a

In “The Song of the Mud,” Borden describes the major role mud plays in war and reveals the huge impact it has as it covers the soldier, corpses, clogs the machinery, and restricts the soldiers from their value.“of vile, incurable sores and innocent tongues,” "a devil's sick of sin,” the blood coming from “bitter as the cud,” and “obscene as cancer” are all examples of imagery that help readers perceive the agony of war and fully express the repugnancy to war. Moreover, Mary specifically uses evocative words such as “invincible,” “inexhaustible,” “intrusive” and “impertinent” to illustrate the dreadful state of the fighters due to the mud and to generate a powerful tone. Similarly, Owen used words such as “guttering” and “froth-corrupted” to create that same tone as he described the gas attack he experienced and the resentment he has of war in this last stanza. On top of that, both poems contain irony to signify the opposite of what is said, set an ironic tone and to bring forth the authors’ aversion to war indirectly. For example,“The Song of the Mud” contains the line “covers the hills like satin” which is pleasing and makes you feel at ease which contradicts the fact that war is destructive and horrifying. Also, the word “song” in the title gives readers a feeling of enjoyment when in fact, the poem emits gloom. Owen’s main purpose of writing his poem was to expose “the old lie” which is “Dulce Et Decorum est.” This lie says that it is sweet and honorable to die for one’s country; the truth is that it is a waste of human life. Owen had first-hand experience of the tragedies of World War I and wanted to destroy the misinterpretation of it by portraying the reality of war. Yet this reality was long kept from the knowledge of the civilians at home, who continued to write about the noble pursuit of

In this essay I have been asked to choose one of the twelve sections from ‘Staying Alive ‘and discuss why I believe it to be the most effective. It is clear that section 9 ‘War and Peace’ is the most effective. War poetry is harsh and to the point. It is filled with gruesome images and vivid descriptions of war time. The poems in this section will resonate with you for a lifetime. .Most poetry of this genre is based around the topic of World War One and World War Two. But also around other famous wars in history such as the American Civil War and Troubles in Northern Ireland. This poetry contains messages of hatred towards war and towards the idea of war. This section includes poetry of very famous poets who not only were alive during the war but some of whom also

Within the context of recent history, Wilfred Owen is often considered the greatest writer of modern British war poetry. Composing the vast majority of his poems in a one-year time span, Owen found inspiration from his personal experiences fighting in World War I and fellow poets joining in the fight around him. Born in 1893, Owen grew up the oldest of four children, enjoying a particularly close relationship with his mother while his father remained distant. Owen graduated from Shrewsbury Technical School at age eighteen. Afterwards, Owen took numerous odd jobs throughout Europe, seemingly at a loss for his purpose in life. Owen returned to England in September 1915, a year after the Great War began, and enlisted in England’s Artists’ Rifles

This elegy is ultimately written for all soldiers of war and sends the ironic message that the soilders who have fought against each other and could have killed each other are now all floating on the same coastline receiving equal treatment and being buried with their enemy. The theme of anonymity is extensively portrayed throughout this piece as Slessor constantly refers to ‘unknown’ soldiers or ‘someone’. Slessor uses personification and dehumanization to depict the loss of identity within each of the soldiers and the obscured effects of war to show the continuous movement forward of the world despite losses and victories. Personification is shown in the second stanza, 'Between the sob and clubbing of the gunfire '; the use of this technique ironically emphasises that the guns seem to mourn the loss more than humanity does. This leaves the audience feeling distraught and pity for the soldiers as it gives them a sense of the emotions linked to war. Personification of the rain in the fourth stanza, ‘The breath of the wet season has washed their inscriptions’ indicates that the world will continue advancing, regardless of the scale of their sacrifices. Slessor also dehumanizes these sailors by the use of language such as ‘dead seamen’, to exemplify his statement about the number of losses that the enemy

(The analysis of three different types of violence that occurs in Homer’s Iliad translated by Robert Fagles)

The fact that war is a life destroying machine and not patriotic nor loyal thing. The war has left him with being crippled. The use of “ threw away his knee” contradicts the idea that war is honourable. Instead his loss was a waste and no praised was given to him. “ Now, he is old; his back will never brace; He’s lost his colour very far from here.” Now his face has become withered with experience and sorrow. He looks old and his back will never be upright like how it was before. This can be a comparison to his life that by losing his legs, his life will never be like before. Now, he can’t support himself both literally and figuratively. Half of his lifetime has already becomes a failure,“ And half of his lifetime lapsed in the hot race. ” Finishing on the third stanza, Owen has used colour once again. “ purple spurted from his thigh”, it illustrates the bruises he had gotten from war and the deep impact on him, a colour signifying life and languor.

The poem “Dulce Et Decorum Est” by Wilfred Owen gives insight into how a soldier is beaten to the state of exhaustion in war which defeats the perception of how society has seen war as lighthearted for generations. The poem “Epitaph on a Soldier” by Cyril Tourneur depicts a soldier at a time of death, defeating the common thought of how death is seen as a negative thing and portrays the soldier as he is ready to die, welcoming his death. The critical and bitter tone in “Dulce Et Decorum Est” conveys the brutality of war to emphasize the disillusioned way society perceives war; whereas, the admiring and comforting tone in “Epitaph on a Soldier” conveys the contentment of an honorable death.

    The first stanza clearly expresses the author’s fatigued tone. Describing the state of the British army, Owen says:  “ Men marched asleep, Many had lost their boots/But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;/Drunk with fatigue; deaf even

Dylan Thomas’s famous elegy “Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night” is perhaps the greatest example of villanelle in modern poetry, using death as its focus. Death is a unifier in the sense that no man, big or small can resist their eventual end. However, the author recognizes the solemnness of the concept and connects it to the audience’s fear of losing a loved one. By doing so, the poem taps into the raw emotion of the will to live. This paper will describe how Thomas uses a series of brilliant poetic strategies such as diction, structure and rhythm to suggest that all men, while different in character, should passionately resist the inevitability of death.

Firstly within the poems, both Owen and Harrison present the horrific images of war through use of visual imagery.“And leaped of purple spurted his thigh” is stated. Owen describes the immediate action of presenting the truth of war as horrific and terrifying . The phrase “purple spurted” represents the odd color of the blood which was shedded as the boulder from the bomb smashed his leg in a matter of seconds. The readers

There are many similar themes that pervade both Wilfred Owen’s Anthem, for Doomed Youth, and George Herbert’s Prayer, such as war, and prayer. Strong emotions regarding both of those themes are conveyed through the juxtaposition of imagery, the personification of weaponry, and the use of metaphor to explain the conceptual. Language is also a critical element in both sonnets, shown through the use of alliteration in Anthem, and flowing lyricism in Prayer, demonstrating it is approached in strikingly different ways to achieve the desired effect. The prominence of religion and religious symbolism is an important factor of both poems, which reflects the importance of religion in matters such as war, and more obviously, prayer.