Who's For The Game Jessie Pope Analysis

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.

In this day and age war is a terrible act and is quite gruesome and not favored by anyone. War is not something that people are begging to get into, not is it something parents are begging their children to do. During the time of the First World War, many people that were living in the United Sates were led to believe that if you sent your children to die in the war, you were considered to be a great person that deserved much praise and dignity. The citizens that were never in the war had no idea what it was really like and did not understand that war was terrible and is not loving whatsoever. War was a terrible act of violence, which it still is today, and was not at all something someone should think of as romantic. In the poem, “Dulce et Decorum Est”, the author, Wilfred Owen tell about the truths of war and what it is really like. Owen uses high levels of diction, imagery and figurative language in order to convey the tone of the story.

In this poem “Dulce et decorum Est”, Owen portrays the deadly effects of conflict through the use of metaphor: “as under a green sea, I saw him drowning”. Here, he describes the pain of the gas attack. The word “drowning” has connotation of death as it implies that Owen was “helpless” when he “saw” his friend ‘drowning’ in the “green sea”. Perhaps, it suggests that how dangerous and deadly the “green sea” could cause and the horrific nature of war. The word “sea” has connotation of vast as it states the range of the gas attack is broad. Also, it might suggest that the gas attack is perilous and unpredictable. Owen uses this gruesome and grisly image to emphasize it is not sweet and honorable to die for one’s country.

Explore the ways in which war is represented in Shakespeare’s Henry V and a selection of World War One Poetry.

This essay will compare and contrast the way the poets Jessie Pope and Wilfred Owen present war in their poems. Who’s for the game? Was written by Jessie Pope in 1916 during the heart of the First World War. The poem is pro war and is a piece of propaganda that was used to recruit men into the British army. In contrast Dulce et decorum est is an anti war poem and shows the true aspects of war. The dates of the two poem do not differ a lot, this emphasises the time period does not influence they way that the two poets wrote their poems.

The poem “Dulce et Decorum Est” by Wilfred Owen and the novel The Wars by Timothy Findley share several similarities when it comes to the theme being portrayed. Both literary texts illustrate that although one may suggest war is an honourable act of patriotism for one’s country, the detrimental effects of reality result in one’s loss of innocence.

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.

Good Morning/Afternoon Mr Bain and fellow classmates, today I will be speaking about a man who wrote some of the most powerful British poetry during World War 1, Wilfred Owen. Significantly only five of Owens poems were published in his lifespan, from August 1917 to September 1918. In November 1918 he was killed in action at the age of twenty-five, one week before the Armistice. Through his poetry, he depicted the reality and horrors of the First World War. This era was the First World War, the Great War, or the War to End All Wars.

The poems, “To Lucasta, on Going to the Wars” by Richard Lovelace, “The Charge of the Light Brigade” by Alfred Tennyson, “Dulce et Decorum Est” by Wilfred Owen, and “The Song of the Mud” by Mary Borden, are all concerned with war. However, each poem has a distinct representation of it. While the two authors, Tennyson and Lovelace, glorify war by portraying it as honorable and worthwhile, Borden and Owen view war as a destruction of mankind and show their indignation and censure of war by depicting it as vile and gruesome in their poems. This essay will examine and compare the diction and tone of each poem to understand how they influence each poem’s underlying theme on war.

“Every war is ironic because every war is worse than expected,” Paul Fussell wrote in “The Great War and Modern Memory,” his classic study of the English literature of the First World War. “But the Great War was more ironic than any before or since.” The ancient verities of honor and glory were still standing in 1914 when England’s soldier-poets marched off to fight in France. Those young men became modern through the experience of trench warfare, if not in the forms they used to describe it. It was Yeats, Pound, Eliot, Joyce, and Lawrence who invented literary modernism while sitting out the war. Robert Graves, Siegfried Sassoon, Edmund Blunden, Isaac Rosenberg, and Wilfred Owen—who all fought in the trenches and, in the last two cases, died

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.

    In the poem “Dulce Et Decorum Est”, the author, Wilfred Owen exposes his bitter life while   concurrently illustrating the arduous life of a soldier in general. Owen utilizes various unpalatable  tones such as fatigue, strain, and bitter to help elucidate his  message that does not support the public opinion: “Dulce Et Decorum Est”(27). Instead, he expresses his own dissatisfied and  monotonous life through applying these tones in his poem.

During this session our stimulus was the poem by Wilfred Owen “Dulce et Decorum Est,” this showed us a version of conflict which is externalised: war. Our group took on the middle two stanzas of the poem and explored them:

A heroic couplet structure within the poem provides a degree of clarity while still asserting the chaos and cruelness of war. Once again, it can be inferred that Owen himself serves as the speaker. However, this time his audience is more focused on young soldiers and families rather than plainly the public in general. In contrast to the previous work, this poem is set primarily in a World War I training camp, signifying the process young soldiers go through prior to deployment to the front line. The tone of this poem is more foreboding and condemnatory, not only describing the training soldiers but outright degrading their forced involvement as morally wrong. With themes rooted in the brutality of warfare and loss of innocence, both “The Last Laugh” and “Arms and the Boy” express similar messages but in different contexts. Just as before, Owen continues to personify weapons to emphasize their true role as the war mongers rather than the soldiers themselves. Owen states, “this bayonet-blade…keen with hunger of blood” (Owen 1-2). Uniquely when compared to other instances, this use of personification explicitly defines a blade as having a hunger for blood and a desire to kill, which is implemented upon the soldier who wields it. Therefore, not only

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.