Life As A Soldier In Ww1

How does Owen’s language help you to understand what life as a soldier in WW1 was like?
10GN ChaeEun Her

Wilfred Owen, the british poet born in 1893, wrote several poems during the first world war. Owen was an anti-war poet and also, he had join the army, suffering from the traumas from the war. His poem clearly portrays the real horror of the battlefield during World War 1, that the soldiers were physically and mentally languished. However he enhance the life as a soldier in the war by using several strong literary techniques through his poem.

First of all, one of his famous poems ‘The Mental Case’ shows the worst environment in the battlefield by using a powerful caesura(the effect?). This poem opens up with a rhetorical question with

The personification emphasizes the harsh weather faced to the soldiers. From the title of this poem, the readers can imply that soldiers would have been exposed to various hardships in terms of their environment and condition. The first line of this poem, Owen describes the condition of the battle field; ‘our brain’s ache in the merciless iced east winds that knives us’. Owen starts this poem with the expression ‘our brain’s ache’, by talking in soldier’s perspective. It brings closer towards the readers so that they can feel sympathy for soldiers. The word ‘merciless’ and ‘knives’ portrays the cold condition in the trench. When the winds blow extremely strong, it feels like stabbing with knives.The harsh weather was another burden and enemy for young soldiers. Also, there is a simile in this poem on the third line of second stanza; ‘incessantly, the flickering gunnery rumbles, far off, like a dull rumour of some other war’. As a trauma of war, soldiers were suffered from shellshock during and after the war. The phrase ‘flickering gunnery rumbles’ means relentless gun shot sounds flashes in their mind. The rumble of distant gun sound rises tension among soldiers; although it is “far off”, the reader could feel the impression of it. Also, Owen had experienced shellshock so that he could portray the exact emotion. Exposed to intensively harsh condition is well

The passing bell is funeral bell to mark the death of someone, shows innocent death of young soldiers. Owen describes the soldiers as cattle. The phrase ‘die as cattle’ means the government are herding all men with improper propagandas. But they are actually herded to the battle field to be killed. When animals die as cattle, they are herded into one place inevitably. So this simile clearly portrays the innocent death of young soldiers. In the poem ‘Mental cases’, the quote ‘sunlight seems a blood smear; night come blood black’, gives a clear blood imagery of sunlight on the third line of last stanza. This blood imagery is effectively developed through two words ‘blood-smear’ and ‘blood-black’. The ‘b’ alliteration emphasizes the strong words; blood, and black. Usually, sunlight symbolizes bright, cheerful, and hopeful images, but Owen used sunlight to symbolize blood. It shows that as the day passes, the pain gets bigger as an instant blood spread. So that both day and night are symbolized by