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What Is The Purpose Of Dulce Et Decorum Est

Decent Essays

Wilfred Owen

Welcome back your listening to 92.2 I am Oscar Rogers and if you have just tuned in this is our brand new segment ‘Burning Poetry’, where we strip down only the best poems of our era and take a deeper look at them.

War poetry has a massive capability of evoking strong emotions and images for everyday people reminding them what life was like fighting in war. Many poets have written on this topic including Isaac Rosenberg and Siegfried Sassoon but the poem I will be talking about today, Dulce Et Decorum Est by Wilfred Owen, captures the reader and transports them back to a time of war and hardship, reminding them of our history and how society’s attitudes all those years ago were so naive to the horrors of war.

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The poem vividly depicts a snapshot in time and the reader can see, hear and almost smell the environment leaving them in a state of sadness and shock. Through the use of similes, metaphors and oxymorons Owen is able to evoke a realistic experience immersing the reader into the soldier’s terrors and distress during warfare and gassing in the trenches. ‘Bent double, like old beggars under sacks, Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge’. These similes clearly depict soldiers struggling in the atrocious conditions and likens them to beggars and hags. ‘His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin’ Expresses the idea that the dying soldier can take no more and has given up. Owens use of metaphors such as ‘Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots, of tired, outstripped Five-Nines that dropped behind’ impress upon the reader the shell shocked state of the soldiers and struggle of survival. ‘As under a green sea, I saw him drowning. In all my dreams, before my helpless sight, He plungers at me, guttering, choking, drowning.’ This soldier is helpless to save his mate and watches on as he dies. The use of oxymorons emphasise the soldiers plight- ‘Men marched asleep.’ Gas! Gas! Quick, boys!- An ecstasy of fumbling’ Dulce et Decorum Est is an emotionally wrenching tale confronting the reader. Through the use of expressive language, the poem is constructed into a work of art that successfully transports the reader to experience the emotional pain of the

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