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Dulce Et Decorum Est And The Next War

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Poetry is the telling of stories from the creative and sometimes hauntingly realistic words of a poet. The world of poetry can be wonderful. It can also be saddening, exhilarating or wonderfully exciting and the most eloquent poems can leave anybody rewinding over the story of the poem for a time afterwards. Wilfred Owen was a poet who became a well renowned poet after World War I where he unfortunately died. Continuous themes in all of his poems were the horrors of war, death as a part of war and emotion and feeling during wartime of the men who go to fight, willingly or not, and his poems The Next War (Next War) and Dulce Et Decorum Est (Dulce) are both brilliant examples of these themes.
Both Futility and Strange Meeting explore the theme …show more content…

In the Bible the sun is mentioned as being the “greater light” and in Malach 4:2 “the sun of righteousness will rise with healing on its wings” and the soldier saddened over his friends death asks the Sun why ‘he’ cannot bring him back, going so far as to insult ‘him’ with calling the sunbeams “fatuous”. The Sun in Futility could be perceived as a symbol of God the ‘Father’ and ‘life giver’ of the world. The description of the Sun as “kind” and “old”, brings about the image of an old man, much like what the Christian God is generally pictured as. The “clay” mentioned in the poem is a metaphor for the young man’s body because people in the Bible are said by Isaiah 64:8 to be made from clay “But now, O Lord, You are our Father, We are the clay, and You are our potter, And all of us are the work of Your hand”. The friends increased exacerbation towards the end of the poem are almost a questioning of his God’s power and good, as he basically asks if it’s too much to ask of his God to bring this still warm soldier back to life. Strange Meeting has Christian echoes, as the ‘enemy’ soldier killed “lift(s) distressful hands, as if to bless” the soldier who killed him. The irony of the situation is palpable because of where the pair stands, in

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