The War Works Hard Essay

“The War Works Hard” by Dunya Mikhail and “Exposure” by Wilfred Owen are two antiwar poems. The poems were written in different styles, and yet they have the same approach to the polemic topic of “War”, in which both poets seeks to expose the realities of relentless wars and condemn the futility of armed conflicts. Meanwhile they all strive to enlighten the public the horrible outcomes that the wars bring casualties from both sides with brutal honesty. Although Mikhail was a civilian from a war-torn country and Owen was a British soldier in World War One, both poets have experienced war firsthand and faced similar emotional trauma. The literary devices like sound, imagery, and typography all used to shape their ideas and correspond to the

However, Mikhail was able to

Mikhail’s choices of emotive languages such as “dislodging” and “throbbing” are effective in eliciting the emotions as a victim herself and the crucial truth of those people suffering tremendous physical and psychological conflicts. Besides, the lack of breaks and punctuations in “the War Works hard” forces the readers to absorb and process the senseless lost of human life at once, which raises the readers’ awareness and their indignant emotions towards ongoing wars that they never experienced personally.

These two poems have the same cynical approach to wars as both Mikhail and Owen portray their emotions strongly with the use of imageries. The imagery throughout “Exposure” evokes the actual situation of battlefield and the trenches on the frontline, whereas Mikhail focuses on the home front and normal citizens life. Mikhail uses the visual images and sounds to describe death, as it can be seen here: “it wakes up the sirens/ and dispatches ambulances/ swings corpses through the air/ rolls stretchers to the wounded”. These lines represents visually that the ambulances rushes out, corpses litters the city, and stretches carry the wounded as the warning sirens