Wilfred Owen has numerous poems that have to do with showing the dark and dismal times soldiers have on the battlefield. Unlike poets that glorify war and make it seem like a heroic endeavor, Owen puts his real experiences into a poem and shows how unsavory war can really be. Before being in the military, he had attempted to get scholarships to further his education only to fail twice and join the Artist’s rifles, later to be commissioned into the Manchester Regiment as a lieutenant. Owen is seen as one of the great World War I poets because of his detailed poems and vivid imagery throughout them.
In “Dulce et Decorum Est,” Owen gives life to a soldier who is marching back to camp with his platoon to get some rest after a battle. The title …show more content…
He begins to probe at the bodies that are lying around him until one springs up and smiles, it is explained that it is a dead smile revealed to him that they were standing in Hell. He tries to comfort the man in front of him by saying there is no cause to mourn, but speaker 2 starts responding by telling speaker 1 that whatever hopes he may have were his hopes as well when he was alive, and that he had been robbed of all the years he had yet to live and many other things. The second speaker eventually gets to telling speaker 1 “And of my weeping something has been left, /Which must die now. I mean the truth untold, /The pity of war, the pity war distilled.” (23-25) These lines are some of the more meaningful lines put in this work, they show that the second speaker died never getting to tell the truth, he never got to explain that war is meaningless and only amplifies pity rather than fixing things and getting peace. After he finishes explaining that war is never really a good thing he goes on to say “I am the enemy you killed, my friend.” (40) This is the line where he calls him both enemy and friend, showing that while they were enemies he has forgiven him for doing what he had to do in times of war. He goes on to say that he recognized him because he frowned through him like he did when he was stabbing him on the
In “Dulce et Decorum Est,” Owen gives life to a soldier who is marching back to camp with his platoon to get some rest after a battle. The title …show more content…
He begins to probe at the bodies that are lying around him until one springs up and smiles, it is explained that it is a dead smile revealed to him that they were standing in Hell. He tries to comfort the man in front of him by saying there is no cause to mourn, but speaker 2 starts responding by telling speaker 1 that whatever hopes he may have were his hopes as well when he was alive, and that he had been robbed of all the years he had yet to live and many other things. The second speaker eventually gets to telling speaker 1 “And of my weeping something has been left, /Which must die now. I mean the truth untold, /The pity of war, the pity war distilled.” (23-25) These lines are some of the more meaningful lines put in this work, they show that the second speaker died never getting to tell the truth, he never got to explain that war is meaningless and only amplifies pity rather than fixing things and getting peace. After he finishes explaining that war is never really a good thing he goes on to say “I am the enemy you killed, my friend.” (40) This is the line where he calls him both enemy and friend, showing that while they were enemies he has forgiven him for doing what he had to do in times of war. He goes on to say that he recognized him because he frowned through him like he did when he was stabbing him on the