War Poetry Analysis Essay examples

Submitted By InfinityBl4de
Words: 704
Pages: 3

It pertains to the subject at hand because it is captures post traumatic stress disorder so well. While at war, the soldier becomes overwhelmed to the extent that everything reminds him of the image of the warfront. The narrator of this poem looks at trees and he sees barbed wire. He hears thunder and he thinks of "pounding mortar." He writes, "she is burned behind my eyes." He creates the image of a burning girl which we see through his eyes and then he uses the word "burned" to describe the irreversible effect it had on his mind.

Owen’s poem Anthem For Doomed Youth describes a typical scene from one of the many battles which occurred during the First World War. The “monstrous anger of the guns” and the “rifles’ rapid rattle” can quickly establish an image in which we can envisage a lot of death and destruction. This type of description was extremely typical of much of the literature created during this period. The creators wished that those at home would have a better image of the true conditions of the war. Just as Owen also gives descriptions of the events during the dangerous setting, we also see it is not a very pleasant place. In The Last Laugh Owen also uses the intense and blunt sound of the “bullets” chirping. Owen uses an onomatopoeic word to allow us to believe that the bullets flew gracefully through the air similarly to a bird soaring through the breeze. These all add together to fill our mind with an empty field filled with machine gun fire. Though there is more to the war than just this, as we can see in Owen’s Dulce Et Decorum Est “we cursed through sludge” and Sassoon’s Suicide In The Trenches “In winter trenches, cowed and glum”. These poems show those “smug-faced crowds” that the conditions are much more hideous and horrifying than they could even begin to imagine. “While you are knitting socks to send your son”, taken from Glory of Women, presents an interesting dichotomy of a warm and cosy lifestyle in comparison with the desolation and destruction which is created on the front lines of the war. Sassoon uses the soft alliterative sound of “s” to show the gentle and almost luxurious atmosphere of those who remained at home. The comparisons between the home front and the war front are major themes covered in many of the texts created while the war was on, as we can also see from poet Everard Owen who describes in Three Hills, “a hill in England, Green fields and a school I know” which is compared with “a hill in Flanders, Heaped with a thousand slain”. Almost all of the poets who used