The sentry

This image is definitely not the glamorous picture of glory that, say army recruitment presents; worse, the soldiers are doing worse than civilians. As soon as the next stanza “[m]en marched asleep. Many had lost their boots” (5). They have lost their usual awareness and move mechanically; that doesn’t sound appealing! It gets worse: “[b]ut limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind” (6). So now they’re limping, apparently wounded, covered in blood, and can’t even see? It worsens further, “[d]runk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots/ Of tired, outstripped Five-Nines that dropped behind” (7-8). The soldiers are so exhausted it incapacitates them, and they can no longer hear the bullets being fired. This poem sounds like a distorted nightmare, except the speaker is living it, and even reliving the torment of the soldier’s death while he is unconscious. Owen’s wording expresses that the soldiers are merely men, deteriorating and inconceivably overwhelmed the opposite of positive war poetry containing glory and honor.

Introduction: Futility, Anthem for Doomed Youth and Dulce Et Decorum Est are all war poems written during war about the perspective of being in the first front. Owen’s selection of language techniques and Imagery is astounding, replicating noises, actions and real life scenes that are used to challenge and tamper the readers’ feelings about war, through Owen’s poetry. Three main themes I will be discussing and analysing are horror, anti-heroic idealism and the pity of war.

Thematically, the poem paints the acute reality of the battlefield where the soldiers are helpless to die for their country. It vividly projects the soldiers who are victims of chemical gas. The boys are bent over like old baggers carrying sacks and they curse and cough through the mud until the “haunting flares” tell them it is time to limp with bloody feet as they had lost their boots. All are lame and blind, extremely tired and deaf to the shells landing behind them. Suddenly the poem focuses on the gas and the consequence of the death of the soldiers. The principle target of Owen is to send message to the war mongers not to tell any glorious words about

“The poem’s opening lines drop readers into the middle of battle, using a quick, densely delivered series of images that pile onto each other like the burdens of the soldiers” (Jackson 170). We get images right away in the poem that we are experiencing heavy events that have happened in history, and Owen successfully takes us there. The first two lines of the poem start off with a simile, “bent double, like old beggars under sacks” (Owen l.1). There is a comparison between the soldiers that are in the war and old beggars under sacks, suggesting that the soldiers are weak and poor. With the whole first stanza, we can get a visual interpretation of soldiers that are viewed as “beggars,” “coughing hags,” “blind,” and “drunk with fatigue” (Owen l.1-7). “Drunk with fatigue” (Owen l.7), “exists on the boundary of conscious and unconscious” (Jackson 170) mind state. Giving us, as readers, a sense of how these soldiers were living and what they were going through by this gruesome description of this war. Later on in the poem, we see that “someone still was yelling out and stumbling, and flound’ring like a man in fire” (Owen l.11-12). The use of the simile in that line, gives us the image of how this man was stumbling, he was stumbling like someone trying to get out of a fire. We can see that in our minds as someone struggling, someone very

Wilfred Owen poems ‘The Sentry’ and ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’ contain a myriad of both shocking and realistic war experiences on a microscopic level. Wilfred Owen a company officer talks about his egregious exposure to war and how war contaminates life and existence of humans. In both poems the 1st stanza implies the threats and life in war, which then springboards us to the physical effect of one specific soldier and the thirds stanza he relives the inescapable experience and ends the poem with a bleak, ironic statement. ‘The Sentry’ and ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’ have many similarities; they highlight the price paid by soldiers and relentlessly unveil the full scale of war 's horrors. There are two types of prices paid by soldiers due to war; one deprives humans of their sanity whereas one consumes the breath which makes us human.

The first poem I am going The second stanza describes the aftermath of a gas shell bombardment that hit Owen’s trench and it conveys an image of one of Owen’s men drowning in the depths of the gas. He used the simile “As under green sea, I saw him drown,” he also used direct speech such as “Gas! Gas! Quick, Boys!” The simile Owen used is very powerful because it is a very good description of what actually happened to the man and that Owen could not help him. This causes despair amongst the comrades of the soldier because they want to save him but they cannot. The second quote is poignant because it transports the reader to the horrors of the trenches, thus making it an authentic experience.

The essay initially focuses on ‘The Dead Beat’. It gives an overview of the poem but quickly picks up matters of the use of speech and colloquial language, with quotations used to support the points. There is some consideration of interpretations before the essay goes on to discuss Owen’s use of voices of other soldiers,

Owen uses the contrast of the soldiers’ state pre-war and post-war to highlight just how much the soldier has lost through going to war. Physically, pre-war, the soldier is described as ‘younger than his youth,’ and has an ‘artist silly for his face.’ Suggesting that his beauty is worth capturing permanently in paint. The words ‘younger ‘and ‘youth’ emphasise this man’s innocence and boyishness, the tautology places emphasis on how young he is thus outlining his immaturity before the war and making his loss at war even more tragic. The contrast once he has returned where Owen

Wilfred Owen employs sensory imagery to capture the horrifying nature of the soldiers’ deaths, making the poetry

Poetic devices - the Sentry Owen tells us of the horrific experiences soldiers endured through the war, focusing specifically on a memory of when a sentry was blasted from his post and consequently blinded. Owens strong uses of imagery makes the event more gruesome, and clear, making us understand the terrible event.

Having established in the readers mind how impossible the soldiers situation was, Owen abruptly changes his style of writing to descriptive to active in the second stanza, which is used to describe a deadly gas attack. This alteration in style jerks the readers mind to attention, drawing them into the poem and emphasizing how at anytime a soldiers situation could become fatal/ The first technique used in this stanza is the repetition of the word ‘gas’. It is used in a short, quick sentience to convey the urgency that is present during the gas attack. The exhaustion and weariness of the first stanza is discarded by the use of the word ‘ecstasy’. This word, when describing the franticness, is unusual, but because the word is normally associated with the heightening of emotions, albeit usually positive ones, it is quite suitable to describe a life or death situation. It also stresses the adrenalin that the soldiers feel when their

“Compare and contrast “The Soldier” by Rupert Brooke with “Dulce et Decorum Est” by Wilfred Owen with regard to theme, tone, imagery, diction, metre, etc” The Soldier by Rupert Brooke, and Dulce et Decorum Est by Wilfred Owen are two poems which were written during the First World War, and

War is painful. Soldiers are put in a lot physical and mental extremities. Owen and Yeats were mentally suffering from all the commotion. In verse 15-17, Owen describes his feelings as if it were a painful dream. The use of diction helps to more clearly define what the he is saying. Words like "guttering", "choking", and "drowning" not only show how he is suffering, but a terrible pain that no human being should bear. Yeats felt the same as Owen. Though they were fighting in two different scenarios, they shared a common outlook. In verse 9-12, the law, his civil duty, nor cheering crowds of supporters was no motive for Yeats to be in war. All Yeats felt was “a lonely impulse of delight.” Yeats uses the only

Wilfred Owen is today recognised as the greatest poet of the first World War, his poetry at the time was considered to be controversial as it revealed the truths behind trench warfare and contradicted popular attitudes at the time. The works of Wilfred Owen, and specifically, the poems of ‘Anthem

In the poem ‘Disabled’, poet Wilfred Owen portrays the horrors of war and the brutal aftermath by using powerful imagery, dramatic contrasts of pace and time, overwhelming irony and by creating a strong sense of sympathy for the soldier of this poem. The contrasts between health and illness, life and