War Poetry

Wilfred Owens Dulce et decorum est takes its title from a Latin phrase mean Sweet and fitting it is to die for genius and only(a)s country, and the purpose of the poesy is obviously to show this up for the lie which the writer understandably qualitys it to be. Owen genuinely effectively portrays the general unpleasantness of the battlefield, concentrating on this especially in the first rime.

        Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed by dint of sludge. Owen is very keen to put across the conception of what a horrible, dire slog this is for the men on the battlefield, and great importance is laid on their fatigue. So more so, in fact, that a choke offbone initiate of the poetry, the explosion of accelerator-shells behind the party of men, is almost mazed in the exist two greenbacks of the meter.

         After this, the pace of the verse form steps up, and the exhaustion of the first verse is forgotten in the urgent scramble for gas masks. Owen describes this sudden flurry of natural process as an ecstasy of fumbling, possibly communicating that this fervency comes as some kind of a relief later on the long march. He then relates how one of his comrades is caught by the gas, and starts to choke. At this point, there is a break in the, previously plumb regular, structure of the poem.

        In all my dreams before my helpless visual modality         He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning          These two lines stand indep discontinueent of the eternal sleep of the poem, emphasising the effect that this episode has had upon the narrator. The end of the guerrilla line is as well as made more effective by the echoing sounds of the digest three words, which puts across the idea of Owen being haunted by this image.

         The final verse uses particularly horrible descriptions of the effect that the gas has had upon the soldier. His face is described as hanging like A devils sick of sin. Owen, as a pacifist and a soldier experiencing the harsh realities of trench warf ar, clearly does not find out that war in honourable, or that anyone should glory in it. He plays up the idea of the honor of the soldiers dying in war, an innocence that runs nicely parallel to that of the minorren who ar being told that it is honourable to do the same. This point is particularly effectively emphasised in the depart four lines of the poem, in which Owen shows his contempt for The old lie from which the poem takes its name.

In At a martyrdom near the Ancre, Owen launches an an contrary(prenominal)(prenominal) attack on those who try to encourage war as an honourable thing to do. In this case, his main target wait onms to be the church. A calvary is a religious statue, found at a crossroads, normally depicting a Madonna with child or, as seems to be the case here, a crucifix with the participate of Christ on it.

         cardinal ever hangs where shelled roads part In this war He too lost a limb The capital letters used in this verse for words like He and Him show us that Owen is referring to Christ, and so the shelling of the argona must have damaged the statue. One idea used throughout the whole poem is that Christianity, although it may preach the virtues of dying in battle, is strangely absent when it comes vanquish to the horrors of war. In the next lines, for example, Owen says that Christs disciples hide apart, as if they are keeping out of the way now that there is fighting to do.

The poem has a very regular rhyme project and line length pattern, giving the impression of simplicity to what is, in content, a sanely difficult and complex poem. Unlike Dulce et decorousness est, At a Calvary does not go into lucubrate approximately the horrors of war itself, the focus of the poem definitely seems to be upon those who encourage the great unwashed into war, particularly Christianity, and Owen plays with a lot of imagery from the New Testament to bring the haveers worry to this fact. Soldiers, Priests and Scribes all swash strongly in the story of Jesus Christ. The non-Christian priests appear in the second verse.

        Near Golgotha strolls many a priest Golgotha was the hill of Calvary, where Jesus was crucified, and the idea of priests strolling, a fairly casual mode of transport, near so solemn and fundamental a religious site, shows how naughtily Owen notions these priests very take their religion, and how gravely he takes them. He speaks of them deriving some kind of self-respect from their wounds, an attitude which he obviously has no time for whatsoever.

The Scribes mentioned in the in the last verse of the poem represent the press, rattling the public up into the kind of fierce nationalism that notwithstanding makes wars worse. He uses words such as shove and scream to describe the way in which they try to influence the public, scathe that are more often used to describe the behaviour of spoilt children. He then, in the last two lines, speaks of the soldiers very fighting the war.

        But they who love the greater love          displace down their intent, they do not hate. This greater love is credibly intended to mean a love for all humanity. As in Dulce et Decorum est these soldiers on the battlefields are the only people whom Owen seems to have a real respect and admiration for. In these last two lines he is saying that the actions of the soldiers are not done in hatred for the men on the other side, they are fighting this war because they see it as something that they feel they have to do for the good of their people, even though they live they may very well not survive.

war photographer by Carole Ann Duffy, uses a different technique to bring the readers attention to the horrors of war. Through the eyes of a bystander to the war, the photographer who takes pictures of the aftermath. Now back in England, the photographer goes to his darkroom to develop his photos, and as the pictures slowly appear, he remembers the atrocities that he has witnessed.

As in At a Calvary, there are references to the church in the first verse, the last line containing a biblical quote all design is grass, to show the idea of there being bodies over in these war zones. There is a lot of telephone circuit throughout the poem between the places where the War Photographer has been and the home, folksy England to which he returns.

Home again, to ordinary pain which simple brave out undersurface dispel In this statement Duffy is commenting on how ineffectual our worries are in this country compared to the kinds of things that people in other part of the world have to put up with, something as simple as the sun coming out kitty cheer us up. There are further contrasts through Duffys description of:         Fields which dont explode beneath the feet         of runnel children in a nightmare heat Here she is talking about minefields, and the terrible toll which they can take during, and after battle. especially effective is the fact that she does not mention soldiers being killed mines, alone children. Once again, the idea of the loss of the lives of innocents during times of war is used.

War Photographer is written in four regular verses, with a fairly regular ABBCDD rhyme scheme, these repetitions help to put across the idea of the repetition within the photographers life, the poem starts with him returning from one job and ends with him about to leave for another. It is written in a fairly plain style with very little parable or simile, and Duffy uses a lot of simple, stark statements to add to this commonplace tone. This lasts well in the context of the poem because it parallels one of the main messages of the piece, that we have become desensitised to this kind of human suffering, and are able to look at it in a cold, degage way, just like the Editor in the last verse who will look at the many photographs taken from the war zone and         Pick out five or sise         For Sundays supplement.



While Duffy concedes later in the last verse that visual perception the photographs in the newspaper may cause the reader a small amount of short-term distress, she obviously does not feel that we really care where these wars are taking place, or who is touched because we arent, and we do nothing about it.

Naming of Parts, by Henry reed, is easily the most light-hearted of the four poems. It deals with the everyday life of soldiers in training for war. The poem is much easier to make good sense of if you think of each verse as being communicate in two different voices. The first three-and-a-half lines of each verse is the drilling that some sergeant-major type is giving the group of call forths on the names of the different parts of their guns.

        Today we have date of parts. Yesterday,         We had daily cleaning. And tomorrow morning,         We shall have what to do after firing. The second part of the verses give us the impression that in culture the poem we are reading the thoughts of one of the recruits, who manages to listen diligently to the lesson for a while, and then starts to drift off into a envisage of the spring in the outside world.

Japonica glistens like chromatic in all of the neighbouring gardens, and today we have naming of parts In the first part of each verse, simple, direct wrangle has been used to show the instruction of the sergeant, the second parts are all far more descriptive, using both simile and metaphor to give a far more dreamy quality. Like in Dulce et Decorum est, The poem gives us an idea of the weariness of war. Through the list of the lessons that the recruits have done, and will do, we can see how scheduled their lives have become in breeding for battle. The men in the training room are audition to the words of their sergeant and wishing that they were somewhere else. Like in Wilfred Owens poetry, the writer is sympathising with these ordinary young men who, because of circumstances entirely outside their control, have been placed in an extraordinary situation.

        cursorily backwards and forwards         The early bees are assaulting and fumbling the flowers accentuate again through the undertones in this particular verse, we can see that this group of red-blooded young males would really rather be somewhere else.

There is a great deal of enjambement in the poem, one line running into another much as one day must be running into another for these bored recruits. The whole poem is in save verse, with no regular patterns of rhyme or syllables. The last line of each verse ties in with its beginning, suggesting that the wandering mind of the recruit is drifting back to the lesson in hand. The last verse picks up lines from the whole of the rest of the poem, and pulls them together in what seems to be a kind of summation of all of the thoughts going through the pointedness of the recruit. The poem ends, I feel, on rather a pathetic note, as the thoughts of the young man come full circle, and he wearily returns to the days lesson, the Naming of Parts.

Although the poems are written in different styles, by three different writers, and deal with different wars, there are a number of similarities between them. whole three writers are trying to tell it like it really is. The overriding aim of the poems being to make the people who read them think harder about the realities of war for those involved. In both the work of Owen and Duffy there seems to be a certain element of remonstrate the reader for perhaps not taking war seriously enough. However, Duffy seems to be principally concerned with holding a mirror up to our own reactions to the suffering of others in war, while Owen and Reed empathise with the men who are dragged into conflict, and, in many cases, end up as little more than cannon fodder.

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