Irony In Dulce Et Decorum Est

Its estimated that 150 million to 1 billion people have died because of war. Many writers use their experience of war and influence of writing to protest the gore and destruction that we call war. There are many ways writers protest war like using imagery, irony, and structure.

Writers use imagery to express war in a way that triggers our senses. The writer wants us to see and feel the effects of war through their words. In “Dulce et Decorum Est” By Wilfred Owen, the author vividly protest war with imagery. For example, He describes a moment in the war where his group is surrounded by toxic gas and his friend “Plunges at [him], guttering, choking, drowning”(16). He goes on to describe the horrific moment and says, “[i]f you could hear, at every jolt ,the blood [c]ome gargling from froth-corrupted lungs”( 21-22). He included imagery to let the reader imagine the horrific sight the same way that he experienced it.

In “War Is Kind”, Stephen Crane includes irony throughout the whole poem. The title itself is ironic because war is far from kind. The writer depicts someone's father who “tumbles in the yellow trenches [r]aged at his breast, gulped and died”(line 13-14). He then proceeds to tell the fathers child “[d]o not weep. War is kind”(15-16). The irony is shown in their quote by calling the father's killer kind. Another example of irony is in “The Yellow Birds” by Kevin Powers. In this excerpt, Powers is rambling on in his head about war and you can see that it has affected his mental health in a terrible way. He then he says, “cowardice got you into this mess because you wanted to be a man”(document D). This is ironic because he explains wanting to be a man as cowardly but his point in saying this is to show that war doesn't make you a man. Instead, war messes you up and makes life harder to deal