Topic > A Savage Image of War in Dulce Et Decorum Est

Wilfred Owen uses poetic techniques to create vivid images, expressing the trepidation and squandering of war. This is especially noticeable in the poems "Dulce et Decorum Est" and "Insensibility". The breakdown of the ode's form and the violent imagery of "Dulce et Decorum Est" reveal the inhuman waste and horror of war. The free verse and irregular meter of insensibility are contrasted by its pararhyme, those 'out of tune tendencies', prevalent in Owen's poetry. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay "Dulce et Decorum Est" The length of the stanza is irregular, the first two quatrains of traditional iambic pentameter, which is then discarded as the blind patriotism of the innocents in the horror of war. The visual image of the soldiers "bent double, like old beggars under sacks" graphically generates images of unrecognizable suffering for the young soldiers who "have their knees bent, coughing like witches" and "cursed" replaces a simpler verb for create the image of the unworldly. The soldiers who ironically limp away from the 'eerie rockets' of the front line towards a 'distant rest' are so metaphorically 'drunk with fatigue' that they are insensitive to the danger of the 'Five-Nine left behind'. As they limp away from the battlefield, alliteration and emotional language are used to mimic the soldiers' agonizing journey. They reveal themselves as men only after the visual image of a reduced humanity has been transmitted, "lame, blind, drunk, "deaf" even to the bombs. The image of the “eerie rockets” foreshadows the human infestation in the couplet which is given visual emphasis in the form. Evidently, Owen's use of poetic form and linguistic techniques expresses the ideas of horror and devastation of war. In the sextet, in an explosion that discards the traditional convention of iambic pentameter, the reader is now a participant in the repetitive cry and command that leads to a panicky 'ecstasy of groping' that reconnects the innocent ignorance of the soldiers now reduced to 'boys '. The soldier's death is seen "darkly through the misty glass and thick green light" and, as the metaphorical image suggests, Owen sees it in his dreams in a couplet that alters the pace and tone. The sonnet's broken form and irregularity reinforce the feeling of a sad otherworldliness and in the couplet comes the nightmare conveyed through the present participles 'drip, suffocate, drown', prefigured by those of an unarmed innocent, for the 'groping,' the sextet's stumbling' and 'struggling' suggests the wild dance of a child as he learns to walk. This scene haunts the narrator's sleep thereafter indefinitely. Evidently, through poetic form, Wilfred Owen creates vivid images that express the horror and waste of war, manifested through the broken form of the sonnet, the nara. In the first sonnet, Owen refers to the action in the present, placing himself in the same position as fellow soldiers as they toil in the mud of the battlefield, while in the second he recounts the scene almost dazed and contemplative. Owen's third stanza confronts the spectators, with the anaphoric 'If', the transition to the second person, declarative which directly urges the reader to contemplate the images and the simile which graphically conveys in a biblical allusion also the disgust of devil in horror, "his face hanging, like that of a devil sick with sin." The reader is driven into madness with the onomatopoeic 'gargle from frothy lungs' and in an image from Futility written a month earlier, soldiers are compared to cattle, embittered by.