Reading Poetry
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This essay will analyse two poems by the English poet Wilfred Owen (1893-1918), Dulce et Decorum est and Anthem for Doomed Youth. Both poems are on the subject of war, which Owen had great experience of as he was active on the front lines in France in 1915. Suffering from shell shock he was returned back to England where he wrote poems. Both poems depict Owens anger towards the war but in different ways.
Owen re-joined the troops out in France and was killed on 4th November 1918, just seven days before the end of World War I. The reason I chose these poems is that my own Great-Grandfather was killed in World War I in France in 1915, aged just 23. Owens poems help to paint a truer picture of what it was really like for the brave men who gave their lives for their country. This affects the way that I read the poems. It stirs within me immense emotion, as instead of the glorification of war, the true horror of what these men went through emerges through every line. They put me, if only for a little while, in the shoes of my Great-Grandfather and helped me to realise what he must have gone through at such a tender age. Anthem for Doomed Youth affects me more, as my Great-Grandfather never had the traditional funeral, his body was never recovered. All we have to mourn him is a cross with his name on it in France alongside thousands of others. The Gestalt theory of reader-response reception suggests that for every reader the understanding of the poem will be unique to them according to their own lives and experiences.
Dulce est Decorum est is arguably one of Owens most famous poems. Its title refers to a quotation from the Roman poet Horace. The full quote is ÐDulce et decorum est pro patria mori which means ÐIt is sweet and appropriate to die for ones country. At the time when Owen wrote this poem it was thought it was a direct response to the poetry that Jesse Pope wrote. It was felt that he thought she trivialised the war in rousing and propagandist poems such as The Call. Pope encouraged readers to believe the war a just cause worth dying for, with stirring rhymes such as:
Wholl earn the Empires thanks –
Will you, my laddie?
Wholl swell the victors ranks –
Will you, my laddie?
By contrast, Owen argued that Dulce est Decorum est pro patria mori is in fact “The old Lie.”
Owen uses his poem to kick back against patriotic ideals and through the use of figurative language and vivid imagery shows the true reality of war as something altogether less than glorious.
The tone is created in the first stanza by describing how the soldiers are weary and tired. In contrast to Jessie Popes image of soldiers:
Whos for the khaki suit –
Are you, my laddie?
Who longs to charge and shoot –
Do you, my laddie?
“Keen on getting fit” and demonstrating “grit” in proud and pristine khaki suits, Owen uses “Bent double” to describe soldiers who cannot even stand up straight because they are so tired and in agony. The simile that follows does not portray them as proud soldiers fighting for their country but:
like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
This gives the impression that they are not the proud, forceful and clean men on the posters called up for duty, but dirty, disgusting and sick men, cursing the situation they are in (images.google.co.uk). The clever use of simile portrays soldiers not as heroic fighting machines hungry for war, but as decrepit old men monotonously marching on and on to nowhere in particular, without really caring to where they are marching to as some “Men marched asleep.” Maybe this is how Owen wanted the poem to be read, conveying that war is dirty, disgusting and sick and, more significantly, ultimately pointless. The referral to “we”, initially in past tense, suggests that the speaker of the poem is someone who was there. Whether his own experiences, or from something he had heard report of, the use of “we” gives the poetic voice a kind of weary authority. The speaker is someone who was there, and is retaliating against the Ðold lie with genuine experience.
The first stanza ends with the men plodding on, limping and deaf to the sounds of shells exploding behind them because they are “Drunk with fatigue”. This metaphor suggests that they cannot think straight as they are so exhausted, that even the shells being dropped behind them do not make them turn their heads as they march on. This portrays how the men have become accustomed to war as they have been in it for so long, that they are now oblivious to their surroundings.
The tone of the poem changes in the second stanza. In the first stanza the mood is slow, dull and monotonous, with stumbling but ever-present metre. The second stanza, by contrast, is fast and frenzied as it tells of a gas attack:
“Gas! Gas! Quick, boys! Ð- An ecstasy of fumbling,”
“Ecstasy” is an odd word to choose when writing poetry about war as it is synonymous with intense joy or delight, but this time it refers to how the soldiers go into a mad frenzy, as they fumble to put their helmets on, knowing its a matter of life or death. The next line tells of a particular soldier who panics to put his helmet on. This draws the reader in, provoking anxiety as the word “floundring” conjures up an image of the man desperately fighting for his life. Here the tense of the poem changes to the present with “I saw him drowning”. There follows a series of words which associate the experience of gas with drowning and suffocation: “helpless”, “guttering”, “choking”, “drowning”. Such language enables the reader to envisage a man struggling, suffering and eventually losing the battle to escape the “thick green light” surrounding him.
The final two lines of the stanza signal yet another development in the tense of the poem. The sixth line signifies a change into present tense, the seventh removes the speaker from the action, which changes from a very immediate reality in the first line of the stanza, to a dream.
In the final stanza, the speaker distances himself yet further from the