Wilfred Owen

Concept:
Owen challenges public perception of war and evokes moral outrage. He portrays the horrors, mistreatment of
the soldiers and brutality felt throughout war. Owen wanted to inform, awaken and enlighten his reader about
what war was really like. Owen shows us both his experiences throughout war and the soldiers as he attempts to
show it from their perspective. He wanted to highlight the sacrifices, ugliness and barbarity of war as a way of
arousing awareness.
Owens use of similes, metaphors, images, personification, hyperbole, paradox, irony and didactic sense are used
to link and develop his ideas throughout his poems.

Dulce et Decorum est (it is both sweet and fitting to die for your country):
This poem is graphic and confronting for it recounts the shocking details of the horrific sights, sounds and
feelings a group of exhausted soldiers experience once under gas attack on the front line.
began to trudge eternal struggle.
sludge alternate rhyme emphasises eternal struggle further.
all went lame, all blind hyperbole used to emphasises pain and suffering. The repetition of all
furthermore emphasises the extent of injury and death.
flung him in shows dehumanisation to emphasise miss-treatment of soldiers
watch the white eyes writhing his face the alliteration elongates the line which emphasises the extended pain
in which the soldiers experienced. It also encourages the audience to imagine the sound and taste of suffering.
come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs metaphoric description creates an image in the audiences mind
of how helpless one is while watching this man die. The onomatopoeic word gargling startles the reader.

Anthem for Doomed Youth:

This poem was written in 1917 while Owen was in a war hospital suffering from shell shock.
This poem describes death, violence and the sacrifice of the youth within war. As men become beasts,
slaughtered on the battle field being robbed of both their dignity and pride, Owen presents this. An anthem is a
short musical composition, usually sun on ceremonial occasions. Owen satirically challenges this anthem within
his poem as he gives it to the doomed youth. Owen deliberately distorts the context by depicting an entirely
different type of funeral to that normally associated with churches and is marked by ritual and ceremony.
what passing bells for those who die as cattle? rhetorical question encourages the audience to think of how
the soldiers are killed. cattle encourages that the soldiers dies similarly to cattle, through mass slaughtering.
This dehumanises the soldiers.
shrill demented choirs of wailing shells representation of the bombs within war. Sound imagery is evoked as
the word wailing encourages a unbearable sound. shrill and demented = visual and descriptive image.
Structure: the poem is written in a sonnet structure, which we associate with love. This is a clear parody to the
idea in which is being conveyed within this poem. This contrasts the mistreatment of the soldiers.