Compare And Contrast The Soldier And Dulce Et Decorum Est

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When Britain declared war on the Axis powers in 1914, many young English men saw this as an opportunity for bravery, glory, and chivalry. As the war escalated many people started to change their view as they saw the brutalities of the fighting. This war had a big influence on poetry in future decades. The main difference between the attitude towards the war sparked from the poet's tone. The tone varies from seeing the war as glorious, to it being a dreadful experience. The Soldier by Brooke exemplifies an opinion where they saw the war as glorious and honorable, while Owen’s poem Dulce et Decorum Est conveys a completely opposite view, where he sees the war as a dreadful experience. Both poems manage to express the war as two different experience …show more content…
Unlike The Soldier, Owen’s poem tells the horrifying experiences that a soldier is going through, the inhumane and unthinkable images that happen during the war. The poem has an anti-war approach and explains it with shocking imagery. The poem follows a theme of war, patriotism, and propaganda. The poem follows an iambic pentameter with 28 lines and starts out as a double sonnet. The poems have a rhyme scheme of an octave (AB, AB, CD, CD) during the first stanza, but drops this structure and goes solo.
The opening stanza jumps right into the action. The description used in the opening stanza has a different approach than The Soldier with the first 2 lines describing the soldier crippleness, both mental and physical. It shows horrifying imagery of the experience the soldier must have gone through and sparks a traumatic mood in the reader's mind right away. The lines “Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots” (line 7) shows the intense tiredness of the soldiers, where Owen has used the verb ‘drunk’ to give an image for the reader of how tired the soldiers are. During the poem, Owen has used fear as imagery for the horrors of his experience as a soldier. This is quite different from The Soldier where Brooke describes beauty, nature and sets off a holy feeling as one
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Pro patria mori.” Serious imagery is used in lines 19 - 25 with lines like “And watch the white eyes writhing in his face” (line 19), this line gives the reader an imagery of the dead man’s lifeless body, he describes “white eyes” like they have lived on their own. This has a completely opposite view of The Soldier where Brooke is supportive of the war and believes in Horace’s old saying, and arguably has some sort of desire to die in

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