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Dulce Et Decorum Est By Wilfred Owen Analysis

Decent Essays

Wilfred Owen’s condemnation of war and its cruel ability to dehumanise individuals displays to readers the brutal nature of war, portrayed through the perspective of a soldier’s own experience. This true insidious nature of war is explored throughout his poems ‘Dulce Et Decorum Est’ and ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’. Owen’s use of poetic devices as well as the representation of the soldier’s perspective allows him to challenge the political ideologies of the time and reveal the true atrocities of war, exposing the lies of the government’s propaganda.
Throughout the poem ‘Dulce Et Decorum Est’, Owen exposes the true horrors of the war, with the opening of the poem beginning with a disturbing and confronting description of soldiers that are under attack; challenging the idea of the nobility of men fighting honourably for their country from the first lines. As the men struggle through the “sludge”, Owens has compared their condition to that of ‘Knock-kneed old hags’ through the use of alliteration and a simile when he writes “Knock-kneed, coughing like hags”. This displays to readers that the men were physically exhausted and their bodies unable to cope with the conditions that they have to deal with, exposing to the public the real situation the soldiers were in as well as challenging the political propaganda that glamourized war. Continuing on from this Owens writes “And towards our distant rest began to trudge”. This use of a metaphor provides a double meaning, displaying both

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