blog




  • Essay / A Wild Image of War in Dulce Et Decorum Est

    Wilfred Owen uses poetic techniques to create vivid images, expressing the anxiety and waste of war. This is particularly visible in the poems “Dulce et Decorum Est” as well as “Insensitivity”. The disruption of the ode form and violent imagery of “Dulce et Decorum Est” reveal the inhuman waste and horror of war. The "insensitivity" of free verse and irregular meter are countered by his parhymes, those "tendencies without agreement", which predominate in Owen's poetry. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”?Get the original essay The length of the stanza “Dulce et Decorum Est” is irregular, the first two quatrains of traditional iambic pentameter, which are then dismissed as the blind patriotism of the innocent in the horror of war. The visual imagery of soldiers "bent double, like old beggars under sacks" graphically generates images of unrecognizable suffering as the young soldiers are "on their knees, coughing like witches" and "cursed" replaces a more verb simple to create the image. of the unworldly. The soldiers who, ironically, have moved away from the "flares" of the front line to a "distant rest" are so metaphorically "drunk with fatigue" that they are insensible to the peril of the "Five-Nine who are remained behind.” As they limp away from the battlefield, alliteration and emotional language are used to imitate the soldiers' arduous journey. They only reveal themselves as men after the visual image of a reduced humanity is conveyed, “lame, blind, drunk, “deaf” even to bombs. The image of “haunting rockets” foreshadows human haunting in the verse, the form of which provides visual emphasis. Clearly, Owen's use of poetic form and linguistic techniques expresses ideas of the horror and waste of war. In the sestet, in an explosion that rejects the traditional convention of iambic pentameter, the reader now participates in the repetitive shout and command that leads to a panicked "ecstasy of groping" that reconnects the innocent ignorance of the soldiers now reduced to "boys ". The soldier's death is seen "dark through the misty panes and the thick green light", and as the metaphorical imagery suggests, Owen sees this in his dreams in a rotating verse that shifts the rhythm and tone. The broken form of the sonnet and the irregularity reinforce the feeling of a supernatural bleakness and in the verse comes the nightmare conveyed by the present participles "choke, suffocate, drown", announced by those of an unarmed innocent , for the “groping, the “stumbling” and the “floundering” of the seset. suggests the wild dance of a toddler learning to walk. This scene haunts the narrator's sleep indefinitely thereafter. Clearly, through poetic form, Wilfred Owen creates vivid images that express the horror and waste of war, manifested through the form of the broken sonnet, the nara. In the first sonnet, Owen refers to the action in the present, placing himself in the same position as his fellow soldiers as they work in the mud of the battlefield, while in the second he narrates the scene almost dazed and contemplative. Owen's third stanza confronts the spectators, with the anaphoric "If", the passage to the second person, declarative which directly incites the reader to contemplate the imagery and simile which graphically express in a biblical allusion even the disgust of devil in the face of horror, “his face hanging, like a devil sick with sin”. The reader is plunged into madness.