Good essay about Short Text War Poetry
Analyse how language techniques were used in EACH text to help you imagine
the situation.
Wilfred Owen and Alec Waugh were two World War One poets who used a range of
language techniques to create vivid imagery to help the reader imagine the situation.
Both of these poets served in the war long enough to see the horror it became.
Therefore their poems feature strong anti-war themes of the pointless destruction, pain
and violence of war. The language techniques that they used conveyed the situation of
the senseless carnage that was the First World War. This experience of war through
the poetic expression of Owen and Waugh leads readers to understand the suffering of
the First World War soldier.
In ‘Dulce Et Decorum Est” Wilfred Owen opens the poem with the lines: “Bent
double like old beggars under sacks, knock-kneed coughing like hags.” The author
plunges straight into a gruesome image of the country’s once proud, healthy soldiers.
He uses rhythm in these lines which feature heavy stresses and pauses to recreate the
soldiers’ fatigue. The author also uses similes “Bent double like old beggars” and
“coughing like hags” to compare the soldiers to old, filthy, sick people. This is a
shocking image as it shatters the reader’s idea of a proud, noble soldier-hero. Both the
rhythm and the similes work together to form life-like images in readers’ minds so
that we can accurately imagine and experience the situation as the soldiers drag their
wounded bodies through the mud.
In the second verse, Owen writes: “Gas! Gas! Quick boys! An ecstasy of fumbling.
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time. But still someone is yelling out and stumbling.
Floud’ring like a man in fire or lime.” This passage begins with short sentences in
order to develop the clipped pace needed to convey the urgency of a sergeant shouting
warnings to his men. The alliteration of the consonant F emphasises the clumsiness of
the soldiers as they reached for their gas masks. We can see them in this life or death
situation, fumbling and floundering around in thick mud with heavy, sodden
greatcoats on. Trying to take cover and protect themselves from the burning gas at the
same time. Owens recreates the panicky movements of the soldiers. Owen also uses
the simile “floud’ring like a man in fire or lime” to compare the situation that the gas
created to something the reader is more familiar with. He compares mustard gas to
fire as most are unfamiliar with the action and effect of mustard gas on human eyes,
chest and throat. Using simile like this we understand that the soldiers face a situation
where their eyes and lining of the throat and lungs will be burned unless they get their
masks on in time.
In “Cannon Fodder” by Alec Waugh, the author uses the technique of using plain
conversational diction when he asks a dead man the rhetorical question: “Is it seven
days you’ve been lying there. Out in the cold. Feeling the damp, chill, circlet of flesh,
Loosen its hold, On muscles and sinews and bones. Feeling them slip, One from the
other to hand limp on the stones?” Owens chooses this blunt style and does not dress
the scene up in fancy romantic language. He chooses to shock the reader by opening
with a grotesque image just as Owen did for us in “Dulce Et Decorum Est.” Using
these blunt words with sibilance created through the repetition of the ‘s’ helps the
reader to experience the sound and feel of this flesh slipping from the dead friends
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bones; we are doubly shocked. The reader can experience the writer’s pain at the
situation he finds himself in: watching his friend decay slowing into the mud. The
rhyme of “cold” and “hold” and “bones and “stones” forces the reader to pause and
consider the gruesome visual and sound imagery that they have just been given. The
scene that Waugh recreates for us is so powerful that we feel as if we are there with
him, seeing, smelling and hearing the horrific effects of being “Cannon Fodder” in the
First World War.
Alec Waugh also uses contrast in his poem.”O mother sewing by candlelight, Put
away that stuff. The clammy fingers of earth are about his neck. He is warm enough.”
This verse depicts the dead soldier’s cosy home and loving family then slams the
reader with blunt diction again to remind us caustically that their son is dead. The
personification of the “clammy fingers of earth” about the soldiers neck gruesomely
shows the reader that the soldier’s death and decay are irreversible: He won’t be
needing that warm clothing because the earth has him “sewn up” in the cold, damp
stinking mud of the battle-field. We see this through the ugly metaphor of the earth
strangling him to bury the soldier in her flesh. Finally there is rhyme in this stanza as
well in “stuff” and “enough” , again forcing the reader to pause and digest this
grotesque moment. All of these language techniques work together to create a
situation that we can’t help imagine through the stimulation of our senses in our
imaginations: There is no escape.
Both “Dulce Et Decorum Est” and “Cannon Fodder” portrayed the generalised horror
of war. The authors have used techniques such as rhyme, similes, metaphor, sibilance
and plain forthright diction to recreate a war that we can not only imagine, but
experience as well. These poems tell a story that is universal and timeless. There is
always war, always violence. Through these poems we can experience the shocking
situations that war creates. We come some distance towards “living” the effects of a
battle-field situation in World War One.
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