War_Poetry_-_Dulce_Et_Decorum_Est_Pro_Patria_Mori

Robert E. Lee said, “It is well that war is so terrible - we would grow too fond of it.” Many different poets express the ‘terrible’ nature of war in many different ways. In the poem Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori, written by Wilfred Owen, he expresses his view on the ‘terrible’ nature of war from a first hand account because Wilfred Owen fought in the front line and suffered from shell shock. Many poems written around the same time as ‘Dulce et’ were written by people who weren’t in the front lines and didn’t know what war was really like and they were written to glorify and glamorise war. Wilfred Owen wrote this poem and focused on the harsh reality of war on young soldiers. He included many disturbing references to war and it’s consequences. In the poem ‘Dulce et’ Wilfred Owen uses disturbing images such as the young soldiers are bent double, knock - kneed. This gives the impression that they are feeling physical pain or they are scared. He describes the soldiers ‘like old beggars’ and ‘coughing like hags’, the soldiers have been degraded to beggars and are as disrespected as beggars. They are described as being old even though these soldiers are only young men. The war doesn’t just effect the soldiers physically, it also effects them mentally. The ‘haunting flares’ remind them of the deaths of fellow soldiers and even friends. ‘distant rest began to trudge’ they were walking but they were physically tired. ‘Men marched asleep’ the soldiers are still marching because they are soldiers and are proud to be soldiers but they are so tired they are practically asleep. ‘but limped on, blood - shod’ this gives a physical description of what the soldiers were like, it describes the pain and anguish they are feeling. ‘all went lame, all blind’ this is a metaphor that the poet uses to describe the soldiers condition, they are blind to the things going on around them and they are physically broken. ‘drunk with fatigue’ how they are walking, they are walking as if they are drunk but they are not actually drunk, they are just overwhelmingly tired. It is all consuming and effecting their sight, ability to walk, speech and even their mind. They are deaf to the sights, physicality and noises of war. It is interesting , in the last sentence of the first stanza the poet uses soft vowels like hoots, dropping, softly. He uses these words to describe the devastating impacts of war. The soldiers are immune and can’t really hear the noises anymore. They are maybe just so tired that they don’t even hear the noise of the bombs. They are maybe thinking about other things that they don’t hear the bombs dropping. There was a gas attack and the poet writes that one of the soldiers managed to get his mask on and he is watching another person drown on the gas. Ecstasy of fumbling - they get a rush of adrenalin for survival. It is an unusual way to use the word ecstasy because it is usually associated with extreme happiness or for pleasure. When the poet is describing the person who is drowning he says ‘but someone still yelling out and stumbling’ he uses the word ‘someone’ because he may not know who the person is or because the casualties of war have become just numbers, not actually names. Yelling, stumbling, floundering, desperate and panic stricken. The soldier was being burnt alive. Lime gas suffocating him. Dim through the misty panes of his gas mask and think green light he sees the person drowning in the gas. The soldier is completely helpless and he plunges at the solder who is watching him, he lunges at him in desperation. Guttering, chocking, drowning, hard consonants and it is an example of onomatopoeia. ‘In all my dreams’ the soldier is writing after the event and he still has a recurring nightmare of this event and combines past and present and admits this image will not leave him, it is in all my dreams. In the third stanza the poet doesn’t just describe what is happening, he asks ‘if you’ he asks the reader to empathise with the soldiers. He describes the image of the soldiers walking behind the wagon the they ‘flung’ the bodies into. They have no time to put the dead bodies into the wagon carefully. There are too many people have died so they don’t care. The poet talks about the soldier being able to hear the blood come gargling from the forth - corrupted lungs with every jolt of the wagon. The poet doesn’t want people to let their children who want to go to war think that is it sweet and right to die for your country. That actually the old lie is not true. In the poem War Photographer the poet describes the ‘terrible’ nature of war through pictures and what the photographer has seen over the years of taking these photos. The photographer keeps his spools of film in ‘ordered rows’ maybe because this is how the photographer tries to bring order to what he records, to interpret or make sense of it. The simile which compares him to the priest shows how he takes his job seriously, and how he stands up for those who cannot help themselves. His darkroom resembles a church in which his red light is like a coloured lantern. The image is also appropriate because, like a priest, he teaches how fragile we are and how short life is. Belfast. Beirut. Phnom Penh. ’All flesh is grass’ It is from the Old Testament book of Isaiah. It concerns the contrast of human life with eternal life. About the fragility of human life and how it is not everlasting unlike a christian life. It is playing on the term that life is like grass, grows and dies. Significantly this quote follows the list of places where lives have been cut shorter than normal, physical examples of lives ended. The second stanza contrast the photographer’s calmness when taking pictures with his attitude as he develops them. If his hand shakes when he takes pictures, they won’t be any good, but in the dark room he can allow his hands to tremble. ‘Solutions’ refers literally to the developing liquid in the trays, but also suggest the idea of solving the political problems which cause war - ‘solutions’ which he does not have, of course. Duffy contrasts the fields in England with those abroad - as if the photographer thinks English unusual for not being minefields. The image is shocking, because he thinks of land mines as exploding not under soldiers but under ‘the feet of running children’. What ‘is happening’ in the third stanza is that an image is gradually appearing as a photo develops. ‘Ghost’ is ambiguous. It suggest the faint emerging image, but also that the man in the photo is dead. The photographer recalls both the reaction of the wife on seeing her husband die. He is not able to ask for permission to take the picture but he seeks ‘approval without words’. it is as if the wife needs to approve of his recording the event while the blood stains ‘into foreign dust’. ‘In black and white’ is ambiguous: it suggests the monochrome photographs but also the ideas of telling the truth and of the simple contrast of good and evil. The photographer has recorded some hundred images which are only a small sample of what has happened, yet only a handful will ever appear in print. Although the reader may be moved, to tears even, this sympathy is short - lived, between bathing and a drink before lunch. Duffy imagines the photographer finally looking down, from an aeroplane, on England. This is the country which pay his wages but where people ‘do not care’ about the events he records.