Toiling through endless mud and blood, rat-infested trenches, desolation as far as the eye can see. This was the fate of many young men during the First World War. However, those beyond the inescapable confines of the battlefield knew little of the truth, as the government manipulated the media in its attempts to use the war for political purposes during this era. Wilfred Owen, a young poet who fought in the war, wrote in opposition to pro-war propaganda poems intended to inspire young men to join the fight for their country, using various linguistic features throughout his poem “Dulce et Decorum Est”. to create a vivid setting that reveals the true horrors that were occurring on the battlefield and that death in war is not as glorious or heroic as we have been led to believe. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get the original essay Owen immediately immerses the reader in the intensity of war, simultaneously confronting us with images of weakness and defeat through the use of similes. In the opening stanza, he refers to the soldiers as "old beggars under sackcloth" who "coughed like witches." In doing so, Owen establishes the fragility and lack of heroic valor of these soldiers, causing the reader to feel a sense of shock and conflict at the apparent discord between what they think the soldiers are and what is revealed to them in this front line. . By calling these soldiers "beggars" and "witches", he not only suggests that these once heroic men have now been stripped of their physical integrity, but he also reduces them to rejected elements of society, and in doing so, he makes the reader understand these soldiers as inferior beings. The diction of the first few sentences contains words such as “obsessing” and “painfully”. It is a language of deprivation and impending struggle, ill-suited to the glory of the battlefield, reinforcing the reader's disbelief in the harsh atmosphere in which the soldiers are placed, while revealing adversity and the effort that men face. The descriptive language creates a graphic setting in the reader's mind as Owen describes how the "men walked sleepily" and "limped, shod with blood." Soldiers wade through a sea of ​​blood and corpses, drawing the reader straight into the thick trenches of war. This appalls the reader, as no one should have to experience something as horrible and distressing as this, leading us to reflect on this horror and outrage as we sympathize with the troops as they march to the search for their “distant rest”. the environment continues to intensify in the second stanza as the soldiers come face to face with a gas attack. However, one soldier doesn't get to his gas mask in time and finds himself trapped in "an ecstasy of groping." The use of the word "ecstasy" creates a feeling of trance-like frenzy as the men struggle to put on their helmets. Here the poem becomes personal and metaphorical, as we now see things through the eyes of Wilfred Owen himself. He sees the man consumed by the gas as a man “drowning,” almost as if he were underwater. "Fog Glasses" adds an unsettling element to this traumatic scene, as it makes the reader feel like they are trapped as a window, unable to help this poor soldier, as if he too were, like this dying soldier, imprisoned in this world of bloodshed and no.