“Dulce et Decorum Est” As a society we look at our soldiers as brave and strong people, who go and fight while living in awful situations, however that wasn’t always the perception of a soldier. During the First World War people thought that going off to war and dying at war were very romantic things. Mothers and girlfriends loves if their young boy signed up to go to war, some even wished that their son or boyfriend would go fight. During this time the war was such a great thing to everyone at home that many poets would write sonnets and poems encouraging the young men to go off to war. These poets however had no idea what the reality of the war was. In the poem “Dulce et Decorum Est” by Wilfred Owen, by using figurative language, vivid imagery, and a certain diction, he describes the horrific despair that went along with war. …show more content…
Owen was a poet who had been to, and had experienced its horrors first hand, and wanted the world to have a realistic view also. The use of words like “gargling”, “trudged”, and “vile” (Owen 4, 22, 24) describes many of the things that go along with the war. Choosing to use diction like this came from the desire of wanting the war not to be romanticized any longer. There is nothing good about being vile, or about gargling anything. He wanted his readers to get the picture that the war was gross and nasty and just bad all around, and with this word diction eh got the message