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The Views of Rupert Brooke and Wilfred Owen on War Essay

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The Views of Rupert Brooke and Wil

My selected poems are 'The Soldier' by Rupert Brooke and 'Dulce et
Decorum est' by Wilfred Owen. Both war poems but conveying their different feelings and presenting their views of war in radically different ways.

The poets have polarized views of war with Rupert Brooke writing his poem in a romanticized and patriotic way referring to the possibility of death as a noble cause, for England the land that gave him life.
This is at odds to how Wilfred Owen views the reality and horror of war. The poets choice of title 'Dulce et Decorum est' which translated means 'It is lovely and honourable to die for your country' which in its self is irony, misleads you to think that the poem is going to …show more content…

The rest of the stanza continues to describe the men and the things they saw and sounds they heard:

' Drunk with fatigue, deaf even to the hoots
Of Gas-shells dropping softly behind'

The use of the word 'Drunk' is trying to emphasise that the soldier's were acting oblivious to the happenings around them as if they weren't conscious and even deaf to the sounds of bombs.

In the second stanza the poet portrays 'an ecstasy of fumbling' meaning he creates a huge panic of all the men trying to apply their gas masks in time and illustrates the image of one soldier who didn't get his mask on in time.

'Gas! Gas! Quick boys - An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets'

This is the only quote of one of the men saying something and adds to the image of the rush they were in. The adjective 'clumsy' is used trying to describe how awkward the helmets were to put on, and how much of a hassle they were to put on.

One of the men in this poem didn't get his mask on in time and was left by the rest in pain, screaming and becoming weak:
'But someone was still yelling out and stumbling'

The word someone is used there because Owen is trying to show the man as being 'just' another soldier. He was nothing special in that he died for his country but no one remembers him as a hero, just one of the thousands of men who died.

Owen then says how the 'someone' was yelling out for help, for a soldier to come and rescue him and help him

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