War Poetry Comparison

             In this essay, I have decided to analyse two poems by the war poet Wilfred Owen, taken from his writings on the First World War and a poem by Jessie Pope. Both of Wilfred Owen's poems ('Dulce et Decorum Est' and 'Anthem for Doomed Youth') portray Owen's bitter feelings towards the war, but do so in different ways. On the other hand, Pope's poem ( 'Who's For the Game?') takes a pro-war stance. As the poems are so fundamentally different in their approach to the topic it is not surprising that the rhyming schemes and language employed are also vastly different.
             Owen developed many of his poetic techniques at Craig Lockhart Military Hospital, where he spent much of the war as an injured soldier, but it was only through the influence of fellow soldier and poet, Siegfried Sassoon, that he began capturing his experiences of the war in the form of poetry. Many would argue that it was while writing his war poems that Owen felt most able to express his ideas on paper, and he certainly was one of the greatest war poets to have ever lived.
             Probably his most famous poem, 'Dulce et Decorum Est', is a fine example of his narrative, first-person poems, written through his own eyes and based on his own experiences and views of the war. Using four clear stanzas, the poem uses standard, alternate rhyming lines. A slow, painstaking rhythm is established at the beginning of the poem through Owen's use of heavy, long words and end-stop lines, in order to illustrate just how slow and painstaking the war was. The pace then quickens during the final stanza (a rhythm achieved by the use of lines with fewer syllables and run-on endings), so that it contrasts with Owen's poignant conclusion given in the last four lines, drawing our attention to this particular point, the whole meaning of the poem as far as the poet is concerned.
             'If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
             Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
             In...

More Essays:

APA     MLA     Chicago
War Poetry Comparison. (1969, December 31). In MegaEssays.com. Retrieved 14:53, March 28, 2024, from https://www.megaessays.com/viewpaper/86000.html