Dulce Decorum Est By Wilfred Owen

Wilfred Owen’s poems aim to represent the futility and waste of war through depiction of the feelings, sights and sounds of the time. This was done as part of Owen's attempt to overturn the ideas of the time, that war was a great honour and a good thing. After his experience on the front in the first years of the war, Owen was injured and hospitalised. During this time, he turned his back on his life as a priest and started to write poetry. Owen’s personal experiences with the war, as well as poetic skill and clever use of imagery and other devices, allows him to accurately represent the experiences of soldiers on the Western front. In this presentation, I will analyse the effectiveness of Owen's poems Dulce Decorum Est (Publish Posthumously

Owen then depicts the death of a soldier in a gas attack, and then goes on to address the audience and challenge the idea that war is a great honour. Throughout the poem, Owen uses several poetic techniques to effectively convey the experiences of soldiers. In line 5 of Dulce Decorum Est Owen uses an oxymoron to convey the fatigue and tiredness felt by the soldiers. Through the contrast of the words “marched”, which implies alertness and awake, and the word asleep, which implies tiredness and fatigue, Owen is able to add extra emphasis to the great fatigue felt by the soldiers, and more effectively convey their experience. In the same poem, Owen depicts a gas attack on the group of weary soldiers. Owen uses visual imagery depicting “mist panes and thick green light”. This depiction aligns well with primary sources of gas attacks. In J Brooman’s “The Great War” (1985), a British officer describes the effects of a gas attack. The officer describes the cloud of gas a “strange green cloud of death” he furthers this through his depiction of the soldiers “running blindly in the gas cloud, and dropping with chests in heaving agony”. This and Owens' depictions align nicely, and this accuracy helps him further communicate the horrible experiences of the youth in WWI. The realisticness and depth of Owen's depictions, as well as the fact that the depictions align with primary sources, helps Owen to effectively convey the experiences of the doomed