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How Does Bruce Dawe Use Repetition In War Poetry

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There is a split in all countries when talking about war being wasteful as half of the people believe war was an amazing experience for the soldiers and the other half believe war was a complete waste of time and should never had happened. The author of Dulce Et Decorum, Wilfred Owen and the author of Homecoming, Bruce Dawe use similar poetic devices throughout their poems to give the audience a strong visualization what it was like in the trenches for the soldiers and the impact war had on the soldiers, their families and their community. The main theme within both poems, ‘war is waste’, is presented through the various techniques Dawe and Owen used. Dulce Et Decorum and Homecoming both use the poetic device, repetition throughout their …show more content…

In addition, his use of participle ‘ing’ words, which he uses to repeat, endorses the loss of identity of the soldiers who died fighting for their country. This is shown in the words repeated such as; “picking, bringing, zipping, tagging, giving” which are used to describe the dead soldiers who are coming home. The phrase used a lot throughout the poem, they’re bringing them home is not to represent a happy home coming, but to represent the harsh welcoming the dead soldiers are receiving. Similar to Homecoming, Dulce Et Decorum uses repetition through the use of ‘ing’ words. The ones that stood out most was; He plunges at me, guttering, chocking, drowning. The word guttering was used to describe the tears streaming down the face of the unfortunate man, a symptom of inhaling toxic gas. This phrase pulled on a lot of emotions as it allows you to see what it was the author saw. Repetition was a way to let the audience know just how important their messages were and how desperately they wanted people to know what the war was like, personally and …show more content…

The phrase coughing like hags compared the soldiers, who had just been fighting for their country, to hags. That presents a meaning of war being wasteful in that there was no respect for those soldiers. Homecoming shows the thematic simile in the 16th line, “in their sterile housing they tilt towards these like skiers” to indicate the soldiers in their coffins on the plane coming home to their families. Both Homecoming and Dulce Et Decorum use a lot of imagery throughout the two which is used to give the audience a real visualisation of the main theme, ‘war is waste’. The authors use descriptive language and comparison to get the effect of war being wasteful across to the audience, which both Owen and Dawe have done well. Dawe’s imagery gruesomely portrays the gathering of the dead and differentiating them into categories. He separates the civilization of the dead by their hair; “curly, crew-cuts and balding”. The purpose for this was to enhance the central theme, ‘war is waste’. A major example of the imagery shown in Homecoming is in the first nine

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