Opening: Amidst all the poetry written by combatants during World War I, Wilfred Owen’s “Dulce et Decorum est” is certainly a unique testament to the horrors of the time. Written in 1917 while Owen recovered from shell shock, the poem serves as a mordant critique of the pro-war rhetoric used to mislead young men into enlisting in the army. Drawing from his own experience of the war, Owen effectively illustrates the terrible state of the soldiers, their terror upon being caught in a gas attack, and the aftermath of this traumatic event for the soldiers who managed to survive.
Thesis: Through his proficient composition of imagery, syntax, diction, and figurative language, Owen conveys that there…show more content… There are a lot of discrepancies. The poem starts off with an iambic pentameter and stanzas of the proper length-eight lines, but this eventually disintegrates as the true horrors of war begin to surface. -> the structure is flawed, imperfect which serves as a reflection of war which is also flawed, imperfect.
Stanza 1: has a lot of punctuation, which slows the pace of the stanza--- mirrors the slow movements of the exhausted soldiers as they are described in the passage
• “Bent double, like old beggars”/“Knock-kneed, coughing like hags”- Similes- negative connotations of the dehumanizing conditions endured by the soldiers/Soldiers are reduced to hags, the war robs them of their youth and masculinity/ imagery contradicts the stereotypical image of soldiers as fit and…show more content… There is nothing sweet or proper about
