Discuss how Owen’s perspective on human conflict is conveyed in his poetry.
Wilfred Owen’s personal experience at war is reflected in his poetry, depicting the brutality of war and conflict. He portrays his perspective about human conflicts in his poetry and effectively conveys the truth about the agony of war in his war poems, ‘Dulce Et Decorum Est’ (Dulce) and ‘Mental Cases’. To portray his attitudes towards war, Owen uses a diversity of poetic devices to shock and emotionally stir his readers.
As a semi-autobiographical recount, Owen criticises the suffering and psychological scarring of soldiers in ‘Mental Cases’. He depicts the aftermath and trauma experienced by soldiers through anecdotal experience. He begins the poem with a bombardment of rhetorical questions, ‘Who are these? Why sit they here in twilight?’ to create an interrogative tone which demand an explanation regarding why the soldiers have been so tortured with misery. He further portrays their dehumanised state through religious diction, ‘Wherefore rock they, purgatorial shadows’ to create a visual of soldiers rocking back and forth, trying to shake off their mental torment. This image is enhanced in the metaphorical hellish existence, ‘purgatory shadows’ to exemplify their eternal suffering. He portrays the soldiers losing their bodily functions and resembling animals in the rhetorical simile ‘baring teeth that leers like skulls wicked?’ This allows Owen to effectively show the audience the agony of war. He portrays the living hell of war that these soldiers relive day after day through personification,’ – these are men whose minds the dead have ravished. Their torment is reinforced in the juxtaposition, ‘treading blood from lungs that had once loved laughter’ to convey an image of these soldiers walking over decapitated corpses to emphasise the horror while humanising the dead men that ‘loved laughter’. Owen successfully shows his perspective of war by communicating the shattered minds and bodies of his fellow patients and portrays the agony and torture that soldiers take with them after the war.
In the same way, Owen conveys the destitute conditions of the war experience and suffering of soldiers in ‘Dulce’. Owen adapts a conventional sonnet to engage the audience. Through grotesque imagery, he depicts the forfeiture of lives of young soldiers on the battlefield. He convey the soldier’s suffering in the trenches as they are exasperated by fatigue and exhaustion using cacophony, ‘Bent double’ and ‘Knock-kneed’. In the opening stanza, the once young and strong men are compared to “old beggars under sacks” conveying their physical and mental exhaustion. The onomatopoeia of “sludge” and “trudge” implies their crude fighting conditions and hasten the unfolding of actions. He creates an immediate feeling of urgency and also shifts to present tense forcing the reader to participate in the immediate ordeal by using a volta in the exclamatory words, ‘Gas! Gas! Quick boys!’ His witness of the soldier’s sacrifice and suffering as he suffocates is shown in the personal pronoun; ‘I saw him drowning’ shattering any illusion that war is glorious and allows the audience to understand the atrocity of war. This is reinforced by the evocative imagery in the simile, ‘as under a green sea’. The comparison of the gas bomb and the green sea intensifies the image of the youth dying and forces the audience to empathise with his plight. He enables the reader to experience the actions and sounds of the war first-hand which further help to demystify its glory by using descriptive verbs such as “stumbling”, “yelling”, “fumbling” and “drowning”. This modified sonnet structure creates irony as it subverts the conventional romantic themes of sonnets. The irony enhances Owen’s depiction of war as he uses it to mock those who believe that war is glorious.
Owen also uses his experience to expose the ghastly truth of war that is kept from society in ‘MC’. He conveys this by revealing the harsh psychological ramifications of the post-war existence as he writes from first-hand experience after witnessing a fifty-hour artillery barrage. He conveys the devastating effects of war on soldiers to stress the everlasting horror the soldiers will perpetually be tormented by through word inversion, ‘always they must see these things and hear them’. This is reinforced by internal rhyme, ‘batter of guns and shatter of flying muscles’, where the cacophony allows the audience to imagine the soldiers being haunted and empathise with their plight. Furthermore, the imagery, ‘their eyeballs shrink tormented back into their brain’ shows the soldiers were desperately trying to escape from their memory as they retreat into parts of their mind where maybe they will forget. He portrays how everything reminds them of blood in the simile, ‘dawn breaks open like a wound that bleeds afresh’, reinforcing the indelible nature of their war experiences. He concludes with repetition, ‘snatching after us... pawing us’ to convey that society is to blame by making reference to ‘us’. Owen uses experiences of his own four-month stay at Craiglockhart as a result of shellshock to reveal the truth in the horrific aftermath of war and to show that war is not sentimental and nostalgic but filled with hopelessness and despair.
Similarly, Owen reflects that society maintains a deluded belief about war in ‘Dulce’. He confirms that war is inglorious by revealing its miserable reality. Owen depicts how he is still psychologically scarred by the experiences of war as he recounts the trauma in witnessing his fellow soldier die through vivid imagery, ‘in all my dreams… he plunges at me’ to create a sombre atmosphere. The isolated couplet conveys his spontaneous recollection of the event as he is still shell-shocked from the traumatic experience. The repetition of verbs ‘guttering, choking, drowning’ creating a horrific visual of the soldiers dying as it intensifies the action that is unfolding by using onomatopoeia to symbolise the extinguishing of life and dispels any glamorised portrayal of war. The barbarity of war is further portrayed in the diction ‘we flung him in’ to convey the impersonal treatment of fallen comrades and expresses that there is no pride or dignity in war. He then uses a sarcastic and mocking tone, ‘My friends’ to provoke the audience into questioning the government and military bureaucracy’s lack of morality through their expedient use of propaganda which encourages young men to participate under the pretence that it is honourable and noble. Finally, Owen refers to Horace’s pronouncement, ‘Dulce Et Decorum Est. Pro Patria Mori’ to convey the irony of the statement and revealing the truth about war to shock the audience, particularly individuals that are deluded into believing that war noble and glorious. He successfully conveys his intended meaning by using a statement often quoted by supporters of war and diminishes any illusion that war is glorious and honourable.
Owen successfully uses his firsthand experience on the battlefield to expose the myths of war and focus on the miserable reality. Owen shows the devastating effects of war on young soldiers and the horrific suffering of the men in the field in his war poems. He uses a diversity of poetic devices to portray his attitude towards war and emotionally affect the reader.