War is full of tragedy. No soldier is left untouched by its unkind hands; if tragedy doesn 't mangle the body, it plagues the mind. Those are the sentiments of Owen, Komunyakaa and Jarrel; three men whose lives were forever changed by witnessing the tragedies of war. Their poems recall on the horrors of their pasts to show the grim reality of war. It is not glorious, it’s haunting.
Wilfred Owens died in battle just one week before the Armistice (“Wilfred...”). But before he passed, he wrote three of the most significant poems about World War I: “Dulce Et Decorum Est,” “Anthem for Doomed Youth” and “Strange Meeting.” In “Dulce Et Decorum Est,” he () on a mustard gas ambush. Most of the soldiers got their masks on in time, but one man was not so lucky. Owen wrote: “I saw him drowning. / In all my dreams, before my helpless sight, / He plunges at me, guttering, choking, …show more content…
/ [None, there 's only] the monstrous anger of the guns.” (1-2) It troubled him that death receives no recognition on the battlefield, that a soldier’s service is better acknowledged in death than life. That honor is given to the headstone, not the man. That soldiers are treated like cogs in the system, individually unimportant until their death can be used a piece of enlistment propaganda. Where 's the honor? Only in the pamphlet not in the reality of service. Like honor, Owen also struggled with the mortality of war. In his most famous poem, “Strange Meeting,” he fantasized a meeting between two enemy soldiers in the depths of hell. Both dead, one questions the purpose of their fight. They both have the same dreams, desires; why did they kill each other? They are not enemies by choice, but by nationality. Owen had such progressive thoughts for his time, it was not ‘til the Vietnam War that soldiers began to question to the mortality of their orders and of war
Wilfred Owens died in battle just one week before the Armistice (“Wilfred...”). But before he passed, he wrote three of the most significant poems about World War I: “Dulce Et Decorum Est,” “Anthem for Doomed Youth” and “Strange Meeting.” In “Dulce Et Decorum Est,” he () on a mustard gas ambush. Most of the soldiers got their masks on in time, but one man was not so lucky. Owen wrote: “I saw him drowning. / In all my dreams, before my helpless sight, / He plunges at me, guttering, choking, …show more content…
/ [None, there 's only] the monstrous anger of the guns.” (1-2) It troubled him that death receives no recognition on the battlefield, that a soldier’s service is better acknowledged in death than life. That honor is given to the headstone, not the man. That soldiers are treated like cogs in the system, individually unimportant until their death can be used a piece of enlistment propaganda. Where 's the honor? Only in the pamphlet not in the reality of service. Like honor, Owen also struggled with the mortality of war. In his most famous poem, “Strange Meeting,” he fantasized a meeting between two enemy soldiers in the depths of hell. Both dead, one questions the purpose of their fight. They both have the same dreams, desires; why did they kill each other? They are not enemies by choice, but by nationality. Owen had such progressive thoughts for his time, it was not ‘til the Vietnam War that soldiers began to question to the mortality of their orders and of war