Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori

1. In “For Esme with Love and Squalor”, the first half of the story is just the meeting of our narrator and Esme. It sets up the second half of the story, which is really the core of story, chock full of literary themes, such as isolation, death, ignorance, friendship and recovery. The second half of our story our narrator who is a soldier in WW II, just like most soldier in wars, is greatly effected in a negative way by the horrors that he witnesses. The threat of death creeping over his…

War is brutal; it brings death, sadness, and destruction. In Henry Reed’s poem “Naming of Parts” and John A McCrae’s poem “In Flanders Fields”. The authors convey a soldier’s reaction of war. Although the stories contain obvious difference, it is the similarities that are significant. Both poems are differ in setting and tone. In “Naming of Parts”, the setting is in a classroom where a military instructor is giving a lecture on “parts” of a rifle and showing the new recruits the firing…

Evaluating the importance of individuality and human dignity within the context of war, captures the destruction and loss of humanity within futile warfare. The intimate focus on a single moment separates ‘Futility’ from the rest of Owen’s poems, presenting a different side of war and importance of a single moment. The loss of individuality through war is explored as death consumes the soldiers, stripping them of their individuality. Futility presents the audience with a dying soldier whose…

example of “inarticulate expression”. The combination of short sentences, imperatives and exclamation marks create a sense of frantic urgency as Owen describes how the soldiers rush to save their own lives and their comrades’. Owen wrote “Dulce et Decorum est” in response to Jessie Pope’s poem “Who’s for the Game” that uses an upbeat rhythm, mimicking a sporting chant, to encourage soldiers to enlist. Surrounded with eloquence, Owen’s “inarticulate expression” reminds us of the individual…

Both the authors, William Golding and William Shakespeare highlight severe human weakness in the novel Lord of the Flies and the play Macbeth respectively. This was deliberately done in response to their profound yet interesting lives that they had experienced as a human. This is evident as; Lord of the Flies was portrayed as an allegorical microcosm of the world Golding was involved in, which included real-life violence and brutality of the World War II. Perhaps, it was intended by the author…

“One does not use poetry for its major purposes, as a means to organize oneself and the world, until one’s world somehow gets out of hand.” This was Richard Wilbur’s response when someone asked him about fighting in World War II and how it changed him. Richard Wilbur is a famous modern day poet who won two Pulitzer Prizes for two of his collections of poems. He was the second poet laureate of the United States. Richard Wilbur fought as a combat soldier in World War II which changed his outlook…

Throughout Storm of Steel, his memoir recollecting his experiences during World War I, Ernst Jünger employs the use of simplistic language to express the immediacy of the war. Instead of using a more stylistic and grandiose approach to his writing, the former soldier conveys his feelings through short and plain-spoken statements. Jünger’s style reflects the aloof mindset that fighting in war can produce. Jünger keeps his sentences simple and short. Grammatically, these sentences are proper…

The implications of Yeats’ inner perspective on World War I resonates with an air of prophecy regarding the negative undertones of future humankind on both a local and universal scale. The ramifications of conflict emerge as concepts in poems such as An Irish Airman Foresees His Death, which examines destiny and the meaning of giving our life to a greater cause. Furthermore, The Second Coming highlights Yeats’s opinion on the apocalyptic cycle of nature while The Wild Swans at Coole delves into…

Ian McEwan’s Atonement explores the highly enthralling themes of war and the subsequent horrors, corruption, and the power of language and story-telling, a theme prevalent internationally or otherwise in every piece of literature. McEwan utilises and vast plethora of techniques and literary conventions in order to allow a deeper insight into these predominant themes. McEwan uses techniques including imagery and pathos to powerfully illustrate his Realist view of war. Within part II and III,…

Using Irony, authors can show a reader the opposite of what they would expect. One example would be “Dulce et Decorum Est”, or “It is sweet and right in Latin. Owens uses this title to make the reader believe that the poem is about something “sweet and right”, but instead the poem is mainly about the gruesome death of a soldier dying during World War 1. This impacts…