The Next War Analysis

From another perspective, the simile in the line further indicates that the soldiers had also lost their human rights, not to mention their basic funeral rights. The soldiers had been brutally slaughtered like cows. This hints at the extreme brutality and savagery of the war. Pointing out this fact, Owen reveals his dismay about the reality of war. In conclusion, using the rhetorical question and simile, he portrays the war as a place, where innocent youths are being wasted and discarded. He implies his negative and skeptical perspective on this aspect of

In Owen’s poem ‘The Next War’ he presents the inner conflict of the war because the poem is based on the idea of not being afraid of death but getting used to the fact that death comes everyday to them. In the beginning of the poem Owen has written a quote from Siegfried Sassoon “war’s a joke for me and you, while we know such dreams are true” – this is an unusual sonnet because sonnets are usually on love and romance, but this one is on war. Owen uses personification like “out there we’ve walked quite friendly up to Death; sat down and eaten with him, cool and bland” to emphasise that mostly all the soldiers are used to seeing people die and when death comes its normal for them. Also Owen describes death as ‘cool’ and ‘bland’ – these are oxymorons because they have an unusual perspective of war. “He’s spat at us with bullets and he’s coughed” – Owen uses personification to show how death has tortured the soldiers. Owen

Owen uses Imagery as another method to convey the brutality of war and also as a means of contrast to show his life before and after. In the third stanza he creates a picture of blood being poured away; “poured it down shell-holes till the veins ran dry” and he uses metaphorical language to emphasis the point that he nearly bled to death as you cannot literally pour the blood out of your veins.

The purpose of war is again in question through the ironic titles evidenced in most of Owen’s poems. In ‘Dulce Et Decorum Est’, the sweet and fitting death is contrasted against the bitter and

Soon, this worry turns into horror as Owen describes the man as “guttering, choking, and drowning” (Owen 494) on the the air surrounding him. Owen explains to the audience that he wishes they could have been there to “watch the white eyes writhing” and “hear, at every jolt, the blood / Come gargling from fourth-corrupted lungs” (Owen 494), as the man is taken away. Also, by using such vivid words, Owen helps his audience to truly understand the casualties of war by creating an oppressed and fearful but accusatory tone.

War is a dangerous game, many people would likely agree to this, however, very few have ever seen a battlefront. The truth is that war, no matter how awful we can imagine it, is always exponentially worse. In Timothy Findley’s The Wars, Robert Ross, the protagonist,­ faces a situation that he finds difficult to come to terms with, and when faced with a similar situation later on in the novel, he must take drastic measures to reconcile the uncertainties of the past situation. Timothy Findley suggests, through the life of Robert Ross, that one’s need to reconcile the uncertainties of past experiences dominate our actions when such situations come up again in our lives. In the words of Hiram Johnson, a US Senator during the First World War,

Not only do Owen's and Tennyson's depictions of war differ immensely, their views on a soldier's deaths hold opposing views as well. Owen describes the unsightly view of the soldier's death with a variety of metaphors and similes while Tennyson portrays a soldier's death as a glorifying and honourable event that would be perpetually celebrated. Owen's poem conveys the distress of witnessing a soldier's death with tremendous details, "And watch the white eyes writhing in his eyes, His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin; If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs, Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues." (Owen, 19-24) Once again Owen successfully created an emotional and meticulous imagery of the soldier's death by illustrating a strong mental image of the soldier squirming in agonizing pain. The metaphors "obscene as cancer" and "bitter as cud" instinctively connects the dreadful

Owen similarly guides the tone of his writing very carefully, choosing the perfect words and punctuation to emphasize or stress certain aspects that he had in mind to be expressed. Owen also tries to give the poem a serious tone to it by exclaiming, Gas! Gas! Quick boys! But someone still was yelling out and stumbling As under a green sea, I saw him drowning (Gioia 782). He wants the reader to understand what serious obstacles the soldiers had to suffer through. War really was a time of pain and grief, not of glory. This idea is seen in Owens overall style of writing. He is rather honest and blunt about wartime. Basically, he wants his audience to feel the pain of what soldiers of any war had to go through. His final words are, The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est/ Pro patria mori. (Gioia 783). The translation of those words says, It is sweet and fitting to die for ones country. He just wants everyone to know that it is in deed a lie to believe that war and dying for ones country should be rewarded and glorified.

War is a terrible, but dark truth of the world we live in today and throughout most of history. After the 9/11 attacks, America declared war and soon after started to deploy soldiers to attack. To cover the war in a new aspect, many reports were sent to war zones to get a story for the people of America. One of these reporters was Dexter Filkins. After his horrendous time in the war zone, Filkins made a book titled “The Forever War”. In one of the chapters, it discusses suicide bombings during the war. Filkins, was an inside eye to the war, was not a soldier, but just a citizen trying to get a story for the rest of America. I believe Filkins wrote this chapter to show America about the continuous fear the soldiers and the civilians in the war zone.

First, Owen uses logos to explain the horrible experience in WWI. The tile of this poem “Dulce et Decorum Est” means, it is honorable and sweet to die for own country, (Poetry Foundation), but the experience was too depressing. Owen uses the stanza like "But someone still was yelling…… man in fire or lime”, the ones who weren’t able to rich out their mask were choking and stumbling from toxic gas. Plus, a gas was all they needed to wipe out the field. (line 11,12) In line 5 and 6 he says, “Men marched asleep”, right before the gas blew off, some solders were men were sleep, as other limped their bloody feet as they lost their boots in battle

Owen explores battlefield experience through the gas attacks and mass slaughter that occurred in the World War 1. In “Dulce et Decorum Est” the soldier dies horribly because he doesn’t get his gas mask on in time. Owen uses similes to describe the drowning and onomatopoeia to convey the sound. ‘As under a green sea, I saw him drowning’, Owen uses the simile to compare the soldier to a man burning and drowning to show the panic and awkward movement of a soldier in the green gas. Onomatopoeia creates sounds that are terrible and memorable through the words guttering, choking and drowning as the soldier is unable to breathe.

In Kenneth Slessor’s Beach Burial and Wilfred Owen’s Exposure both poets create pathos for the soldiers not in gunfire to highlight the most harmful pat of war is in fact not direct violence. Slessor personifies “words [to be] chok[ing]” and the seasons to have “breath” in order to dehumanise the soldiers, making them less than objects. This consequently, creates pathos for the soldiers as the natural world damages them more than violence. Similarly, Owen depicts the soldiers “cring[ing] in holes” to disempower the soldiers and create

Owen manifests the soldiers’ ferocious emotions through their guns to demonstrate the dehumanization they experienced when killing someone. When Wilfred says “What passing-bells for these who die as cattle? / - Only the monstrous anger of the guns,” it strips the soldiers of their identity and humanity just as killing someone in war did to them (1-2). By taking away the soldiers’ identities and channeling their emotions through their weaponry and deeming them “monstrous” it makes it more difficult for the audience to develop a personal connection to the soldiers and their feelings, which is exactly what Owen wants. People back home during the war could not possibly relate or put themselves in the shoes of these soldiers, which Owen highlights to the reader through this method. To be able to kill someone, they had

Doherty, Thomas Patrick. Projections of war: Hollywood, American culture, and World War II. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999.

In majority of Owen’s poem, he demonstrates the true image of war and the impact it has on the soldiers rather than masking it with the lies of pride