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Dulce et decorum est and the soldier

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Comparison between Wilfred Owen’s ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’ and Rupert Brooke’s ‘The Soldier’ ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’ by Wilfred Owen and ‘The Soldier’ by Rupert Brooke are poems about war which treat their subjects differently. Both poems are examples of the authors’ perceptions of war; Owen’s being about its bitter reality and Brooke’s about the glory of dying for one’s country. The poets express their sentiments on the subject matter in terms of language, tone, rhyme, rhythm and structure. ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’ has very effective language by using diverse methods such as alliteration, onomatopoeia and diction. The tone is unyielding and vivid imagery is used to reinforce it, primarily by means of compelling metaphors and enduring …show more content…

Enter the second stanza, and Owen has recreated the start of a gas attack “Gas! GAS! Quick boys!”(direct speech). The tone dramatically shifts to a completely chaotic nature, with the use of exclamation marks and short words that up the tempo. Notice that “Gas” was called out twice, but Owen did not write those words simply for the visual impact on the page. He shows that the man has to shout “Gas” louder a second time, not only because his fellow soldiers are too tired to hear, his main purpose was to tell us that maybe the first cry was the instant, almost lethargic reaction to something he had seen a dozen times. But that second calling is a bellow, a true warning. He did not mean for the two words to be read in the same way. The frantic scene is established by the very little pauses represented in the words such as ‘ecstasy’, ‘stumbling’ and ‘fumbling’, all of which embody movement in a state of panic and confusion, which perfectly encapsulates the fluctuating nature of war, caught between the first and second stanzas. The word ‘ecstasy’ could really be referring to the soldiers’ inconceivable emotions, the terror, the most heightened of sensations. The ‘fumbling’ truly signifies the soldiers state of panic, while conjuring up an image of the desperation amid the soldiers in reaching for their masks. Owen then writes about

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