Good Essay About Short Text War Poetry

Good essay about Short Text War Poetry

Analyse how language techniques were used in EACH text to help you imagine the situation.

Wilfred Owen and Alec Waugh were two World War One poets who used a range of language techniques to create vivid imagery to help the reader imagine the situation. Both of these poets served in the war long enough to see the horror it became. Therefore their poems feature strong anti-war themes of the pointless destruction, pain and violence of war. The language techniques that they used conveyed the situation of the senseless carnage that was the First World War. This experience of war through the poetic expression of Owen and Waugh leads readers to understand the suffering of the First World War soldier.

In ‘Dulce Et Decorum Est” Wilfred Owen opens the poem with the lines: “Bent double like old beggars under sacks, knock-kneed coughing like hags.” The author plunges straight into a gruesome image of the country’s once proud, healthy soldiers. He uses rhythm in these lines which feature heavy stresses and pauses to recreate the soldiers’ fatigue. The author also uses similes “Bent double like old beggars” and “coughing like hags” to compare the soldiers to old, filthy, sick people. This is a shocking image as it shatters the reader’s idea of a proud, noble soldier-hero. Both the rhythm and the similes work together to form life-like images in readers’ minds so that we can accurately imagine and experience the situation as the soldiers drag their wounded bodies through the mud.

In the second verse, Owen writes: “Gas! Gas! Quick boys! An ecstasy of fumbling. Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time. But still someone is yelling out and stumbling. Floud’ring like a man in fire or lime.” This passage begins with short sentences in order to develop the clipped pace needed to convey the urgency of a sergeant shouting warnings to his men. The alliteration of the consonant F emphasises the clumsiness of the soldiers as they reached for their gas masks. We can see them in this life or death situation, fumbling and floundering around in thick mud with heavy, sodden greatcoats on. Trying to take cover and protect themselves from the burning gas at the same time. Owens recreates the panicky movements of the soldiers. Owen also uses the simile “floud’ring like a man in fire or lime” to compare the situation that the gas created to something the reader is more familiar with. He compares mustard gas to fire as most are unfamiliar with the action and effect of mustard gas on human eyes, chest and throat. Using simile like this we understand that the soldiers face a situation where their eyes and lining of the throat and lungs will be burned unless they get their masks on in time.

In “Cannon Fodder” by Alec Waugh, the author uses the technique of using plain conversational diction when he asks a dead man the rhetorical question: “Is it seven days you’ve been lying there. Out in the cold. Feeling the damp, chill, circlet of flesh, Loosen its hold, On muscles and sinews and bones. Feeling them slip, One from the other to hand limp on the stones?” Owens chooses this blunt style and does not dress the scene up in fancy romantic language. He chooses to shock the reader by opening with a grotesque image just as Owen did for us in “Dulce Et Decorum Est.” Using these blunt words with sibilance created through the repetition of the ‘s’ helps the reader to experience the sound and feel of this flesh slipping from the dead friends

1 bones; we are doubly shocked. The reader can experience the writer’s pain at the situation he finds himself in: watching his friend decay slowing into the mud. The rhyme of “cold” and “hold” and “bones and “stones” forces the reader to pause and consider the gruesome visual and sound imagery that they have just been given. The scene that Waugh recreates for us is so powerful that we feel as if we are there with him, seeing, smelling and hearing the horrific effects of being “Cannon Fodder” in the First World War.

Alec Waugh also uses contrast in his poem.”O mother sewing by candlelight, Put away that stuff. The clammy fingers of earth are about his neck. He is warm enough.” This verse depicts the dead soldier’s cosy home and loving family then slams the reader with blunt diction again to remind us caustically that their son is dead. The personification of the “clammy fingers of earth” about the soldiers neck gruesomely shows the reader that the soldier’s death and decay are irreversible: He won’t be needing that warm clothing because the earth has him “sewn up” in the cold, damp stinking mud of the battle-field. We see this through the ugly metaphor of the earth strangling him to bury the soldier in her flesh. Finally there is rhyme in this stanza as well in “stuff” and “enough” , again forcing the reader to pause and digest this grotesque moment. All of these language techniques work together to create a situation that we can’t help imagine through the stimulation of our senses in our imaginations: There is no escape.

Both “Dulce Et Decorum Est” and “Cannon Fodder” portrayed the generalised horror of war. The authors have used techniques such as rhyme, similes, metaphor, sibilance and plain forthright diction to recreate a war that we can not only imagine, but experience as well. These poems tell a story that is universal and timeless. There is always war, always violence. Through these poems we can experience the shocking situations that war creates. We come some distance towards “living” the effects of a battle-field situation in World War One.