Comparing Wilfred Owen's Inspection And The Letter

In Inspection and The Letter, Owen clearly articulates a soldier’s voice by depicting their suffering in the maelstrom of war. He distinguishes a soldier’s individuality by differentiating his perceptions to those of higher rank in ‘Inspection’. In comparison, ‘The Letter’ portrays a united front of thoughts and feelings, where the soldier and many others devote their love to those remaining at the Home Front. As a soldier himself, Owen devotes ‘Inspection’ and ‘The Letter’ to the camaraderie of soldiers who despise war due to the endless physical and mental suffering brought onto not only them, but those who they loved as well.

Owen reserves agony to highlight the soldier’s viewpoints. ‘The Letter’ which was written by Owen in 1917 while recuperating

The juxtaposition is a paragon of the soldier’s attempt to seclude the true reality of war from his wife. Quite the contrary to the idiom ‘I’m pink at the present’, in reality he is under-fed with rations slowly depleting even as he writes the letter. This suggests to the reader that soldier is unable to bear with the thought that his wife is probably fretting about his condition, and would rather deceive her in order to keep her optimistic about his return. In addition, syntax of third person pronouns convey the similarity of the soldiers fighting in the trenches. Reference to ‘we’re’ and ‘us’ creates the view that the soldier is not alone in the atrophy of war, but also many others who are well acquainted with pain and agony. The sudden hyperbole of ‘Christ I’m hit!’ accentuates the impact of the bomb. Owen uses blasphemy here to show the reader that the soldier no longer cares about how society would seem him using religion in vain but instead concentrates on how he will tell his wife not to expect his return. Conversely in ‘Inspection’, the soldier is greatly disturbed by the ‘damned spot’ on his uniform. He experience

The extended metaphor is ‘damn your iodine’ shows the reader that the soldier knows he has no chance of survival and hopes that his last letter was able to summarise all that his wife meant to him. The rhyme sequence seen in ‘wife’ and ‘knife’ is almost a cover up for the suffering that he is facing, as it creates a relaxed reading pace for the reader. However in ‘Inspection’ majority of the poem relies on an iambic structure which fully allows the reader to experience the conversational feel of the characters. The pararhymes and different metre illustrate the different characters and how they are coping with the horrors of war. The final long rhymes of ‘objection’ and ‘inspection’ jolt the reader’s relaxed reading pace in order to emphasise the magnanimity of the soldier’s disgust of