Similarities Between Jessie Pope And Dulce Et Decorum Est

People did not understand the devastating effect the first world war would have on them. Two poems which deal with this issue are Who’s for the game, by Jessie Pope, and Dulce et Decorum est, by Wilfred Owen. These poems have two different purposes but also hold similarities between them.

Jessie Pope describes war as a sort of sporting event. This made me consider how people looked at war at the beginning of the first world war. The first line of the poem, A line which shows this is “who’s for the game, the biggest that’s played,” implies that war is just a game. The quote “The biggest that’s played,” is suggesting that war is not comparable to any other sport. The uses rephrase rhetorical questions helps to influence young men to join the

The first stanza describes the conditions of the soldiers. We can tell that these men are in really bad condition. They are described as looking like “beggars under sacks.” The poem also shows the fatigue soldiers feel by using words such as “trudged” and “limped” to describe the slow, tired movement of the soldiers. These soldiers are too tired to react to gas shells dropping behind them. We can tell this from the line. “deaf even to the hoots of the gas shells dropping softly behind them.” The poem begins to increase in tension and speed in the second stanza. When someone shouts “Gas!” we can feel the tension and panic the soldiers are feeling as they “clumsily” try to put on their helmets before the gas gets them. One man, however, doesn’t get the mask on in time. The poet explains what unfolds in front of his eyes in vivid detail through the use metaphors. The man is described as looking like being on “fire” and “drowning”. The poet describes all this through his eyes watching helplessly as the man dies in front of him: “the man drowning in the green sea of gas.” In the last stanza, Owen describes the deaths of soldiers in great detail by using onomatopoeia. The quote If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs” this gives readers a very gruesome death the poet witnessed. All these descriptions given in the poem have a lot of realism