The Senttry Wilfred Owen Analysis

According to the author Margaret B. McDowell, Wilfred Edward Salter Owen was born on the 18th of March, 1893. He was the oldest of four other siblings, and both his mother and father had talent in the way of art and music. Although they had little in the way of money, his parents tried to make life enjoyable for Owen and his brothers and sisters. As he became older, he attended the Birkenhead Institute, a technical school that he attended for over a decade. After graduating, Owen began a pursuit of a more religious lifestyle, in which he served under Reverend Herbert Wigan and had little to no salary. With a small allowance and an open mind, he began to see the world in a different light, opening his eyes to the truth and gaining a deeper meaning from his studies. Although he had little religion himself, Owen did appreciate the passion of those who were connected to a God. In return for his apprenticeship, Owen would take care of the ill at Dunsden, where he would learn about life and the social issues at the time. During this period he also began to write and learn of his aptitude for creating

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.

Writers use horrendous imagery to protest the gruesome details of war.In Wilfred Owen’s “Dulce et Decorum Est”, Owens states that “before my helpless sight,/He plunges at me, guttering,choking,drowning”(15-16). Owens recalls the moment his fellow comrade started to die due to a gas attack.Owens uses descriptive imagery of how his friend suffered to strike trepidation into the hearts of readers. Owens even expresses “If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood /Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs”(21-22). Owens uses continuous imagery of his friend’s suffering to make the reader feel gut-wrenching emotions of fear and anxiety. In Kevin Powers The Yellow Birds, narrator John Bartle recalls “the...guts… and everything stinking like metal and burning garbage...You walk around and the smell is deep down into you”. Power’s uses gored images and putrid smells to invoke the reader to imagine the battlefield as a terribly malevolent place.

Owen uses shocking diction to convey the horror of war. He uses diction such as “trudge”,”writing”,”guttering”,”choking”, and “drowning” to express the horrific struggle of fighting death when the soldiers are choking on mustard gas. He uses these words to express that there is nothing beautiful about dying for your country.

Words like, “choking, drowning, obscene as cancer, forth-corrupted lungs, and incurable sores”, are all dark meaning words that show the reader what terrible events happened during the time of the war. “In all my dreams, before my helpless sight, He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.” As you can see the soldiers went through horrific events that were deadly or life altering at the least. This shows the audience what people went through and validates that war is not at all what citizens believed it to be. The problems such as mustard gas were a major event that occurred and was a terrible way for young men to die. The harsh words that Owen uses shows the audience how bad the events the soldiers went through were and the realities of these

In “Dulce et decorum Est”, Owen demonstrates the effect of battle as confusion and exhaustion through the use of simile: “Bent double, like old beggars under sacks”. He characterizes the soldiers are extremely fatigued and anemic like “old beggars”. The word “double” exaggerates the soldiers’ movement to help indicate the physical effects of a clash. The phrase “bent double” has connotation of tiredness because the soldiers are exhausted while they “trudge” with their legs “bent

Firstly, in Dulce et Decorum Est, the narrator illustrates the reality of the unexpected atrocities of the war that young, innocent soldiers must face. Soldiers enlisted into the war because they were blinded by the idea that it is an honour to die for one’s country. As a result of wanting to fulfill deceiving notions, they are forced to

As a society we look at our soldiers as brave and strong people, who go and fight while living in awful situations, however that wasn’t always the perception of a soldier. During the First World War people thought that going off to war and dying at war were very romantic things. Mothers and girlfriends loves if their young boy signed up to go to war, some even wished that their son or boyfriend would go fight. During this time the war was such a great thing to everyone at home that many poets would write sonnets and poems encouraging the young men to go off to war. These poets however had no idea what the reality of the war was. In the poem “Dulce et Decorum Est” by Wilfred Owen, by using figurative language, vivid imagery, and a certain diction, he describes the horrific despair that went along with war.

In Dulce Et Decorum Est, the main idea is that it should be lovely and honorable to die for one’s country but actually it is not. Throughout the whole poem, imagery and searing tone were

“All Quiet on the Western Front” by Erich Remarque, “In the Field” by Tim O’Brien, and “Dulce Et Decorum Est” by Wilfred Owen are all war stories that all share a similar theme. They all illustrate the terrible and gruesome imagery of modern war. The authors clearly have no intention of romanticizing the idea of war and only want to write the truth as they have experienced it. Literary devices such as similes and imagery is used throughout all of these works to depict the harrowing and appaling images of war in the reader’s mind.

In “Dulce Et Decorum Est” Owen uses gruesome imagery like “gargling” to expand the bitter tone and to depict the image that soldiers are suffering in efforts to criticize those who think war is all fun and games (22). In contrast, in “Epitaph on a Soldier” Tourneur uses abstract imagery like “died in peace” to evoke emotion instead of gory details to reassure the reader that the soldier is content with dying because he has obtained a lot of knowledge throughout the war (10). Illustrating the image of “froth-corrupted lungs” in “Dulce Et Decorum Est” serves to makes the reader feel uncomfortable (22). Owen does this on purpose to stimulate some sort of reaction in order to indicate a more critical tone to prove his stance on war and how it is not a cheerful environment.. Depicting the image of “strength of youth” in “Epitaph on a Soldier” serves to show how since the soldier was young in age, he should have been stronger and more likely to live because of his physicality (3). Tourneur does this to point out how war can take any life at any time and that one is never safe from war. Even though the author paints such a depressing image, he does this in order to support the comforting tone by reassuring in the next line that the soldier “welcomed” death and was ready to die

In the passage, Henry David Thoreau uses the literary device of a metaphor to contrast the morning’s dawn with the awakening of the reader’s intrinsic knowledge. To drive his metaphor, Thoreau uses vivid language, which paints an ideal scene for the reader. The sentence, “Then there is least somnolence in us; and for an hour, at least, some part of us awakes which slumbers all the rest of the day and night,” characterizes a persistently hazy state of being from which an individual rouses to find clarity. By juxtaposing the natural and spiritual, Thoreau alludes to a transcendental ideology rooted in self-enlightenment. The phrase, “Little is to be expected of that day, if it can be called a day, to which we are not awakened by our Genius,”

Our first explorative activity was to walk around using the objects in an iconic fashion for example when I came to a bed sheet I wrapped it around me as if I were cold. Once we had finished that exploration we re-did it but this time instead of using the objects in an iconic way; we used them symbolically for example when I revisited the bed sheet I wrapped it around me and acted as if it were trapping me and I couldn’t get out. These two explorations showed me the diversity of the uses an object can have when dramatically exploring something. We then chose objects (in pairs) and displayed them in an area, in a certain way to create an installation (see photo). In our teams we then mind-mapped the different ways one could interpret the stimulus. We chose to interpret the binoculars as parents looking over their child; the log and binocular case and block of wood symbolised childhood and the helmet, keys and bed sheet symbolised his profession. Because we used the stimulus to explore the man’s past we thought we could explore the man’s present and future. First we created the characters through some brainstorming and decided their basic history; we decided to have four characters, mum, dad, and two sides of the man’s schizophrenic mind. Once we finished that we explored the characters by using the explorative strategy of hot seating. This allowed us to pinpoint the exact parts of information we wanted for example his time in war and what things he experienced. Then we used improvisational role play to further explore the character’s feelings and really let loose both of the man’s schizophrenic sides; we did this through setting up to arguments between the mother and the father about sending the man to a ‘mental institute’ this helped explore the torment which the parents endured when sending their child to war,

The poem features a soldier, presumably Owen, speaking to fellow soldiers and the public regarding those atrocities. Correspondingly, drawing on the themes of innocent death and the barbaric practices of warfare, Owen expresses his remorse towards his fallen comrades and an antagonistic attitude towards the war effort through a solemn tone and specific stylistic devices. The poem is structured as free verse, contributing towards the disorganized and chaotic impression Owen experienced while witnessing these deaths firsthand, enabling the audience to understand the emotional circumstances of demise in the trenches as well. Throughout the poem, Owen routinely personifies the destructive weapons of war, characterizing them as the true instruments of death rather than the soldiers who stand behind them. Owen describes how, “Bullets chirped…Machine-guns chuckled…Gas hissed…” (Owen 3,4,15). Personifying the weapons demonstrates how pure soldiers have their innocence stolen from them through forced and blind usage of such deadly instruments. Accordingly, it is the weapons who truly receive the last laugh in the war as they kill both physically and spiritually, while soldiers are forever wounded in ways that can and cannot be seen.

The purpose of ‘Dulce et Decorum est’ is to not embellish the truth of war, but to show how tragic and useless it is. ‘Dulce et Decorum est’ hints that it is “sweet and honourable” to be at war, encouraging soldiers to go, however, as the reader begins to read they find out that Owen is truly against war. Owen shows that the soldiers are ruined, both mentally and physically.