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Comparing 'The Soldier And Dulce Et Decorum Est'

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Contrasting War Poems Essay
The Soldier, by Rupert Brooke, and Dulce et Decorum Est, written by Wilfred Owen three years later, are both war poems, written by officers that fought on the trenches. However, the poems have very different attitudes to war: The Soldier supports the war and glorifies it, while Dulce et Decorum Est is anti-war. In this essay I intend to explore the differences between the poems – I will commence by talking about the religious ideas, which leads me on to the representation of death. After that I will talk about the naivety of the poet, and the poem’s views on enlisting. Finally, I will talk about the structure of the poem, which gives a message about the author’s views on the war.
The two poems each present a very …show more content…

The exception to this is ‘His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin’, however, this bit of religious imagery is used in a different way to the religious imagery in The Soldier – It is used to describe a negative thing, as opposed to describing a peaceful and good afterlife
The following difference is the date that the poems were written. The Soldier was written at the start of the war, in 1914, before the ‘gas shells’ that were ‘dropping softly behind’ in Dulce et Decorum Est were first used in the Great War. The author, Rupert Brook, had not fought for very long in the trenches, and had not experienced shell-shock, unlike Wilfred Owen; hence the poem is very naïve. Wilfred Owen, on the other hand, had experienced the horrific things that his poem (Dulce et Decorum Est) describes, in real life. He also experienced shell shock, as well as …show more content…

This reinforces the fact that Wilfred Owen was not naïve, because he knew what he was talking about, unlike Rupert Brook, who had no personal experience of dying as of when the poem was written.
The next difference between the two poems is the encouragement of enlisting. Dulce et Decorum Est presents war as not a glorious thing, by dehumanising the soldiers, and calling them ‘old beggars under sacks’ and ‘hags’. At the end of the poem, the poet goes on to say:
…My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory…
Here, the poem clearly presents its anti-enlistment views, which makes it not patriotic, because the poem is not supporting the country. He goes further, quoting the first line of a famous poem written by the Roman poet Horace, ‘Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori’ (which was well known and often quoted by supporters of the war), and calling it a ‘lie’; this is emphasised by the use of a capital L. Rupert Brooke’s poem, however, paints an extremely idealistic view of war, which is very patriotic; the poem mentions the word England or a derivative of it six times in the 14-line poem, and it is referred to constantly throughout the poem. Therefore The Soldier is pro-enlistment, due to the amount patriotism in the poem, which encourages people to also be patriotic and do their duty to the

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