War Poet Wilfred Owen: Poems of Compassion

In his poetry, Wilfred Owen confronted horrific realities of war, while many of his contemporaries chose not to address this issue due to the heroic label attached to soldiers who enlisted. Through an array of literary techniques, Owen explores the raw experience of war and its connection to patriotism and irony. Both Poems ‘Mental Cases’ and ‘Dulce et Decorum est.’ employ very similar literary techniques which convey the vivid and challenging themes of War. Through this, Owen gives the reader a first hand experience of war and highlights the absurd glorification of war and its appalling effect on young men.

Owen uses emotive imagery throughout both poems to expose the gruesome experiences of war. In ‘Dulce et Decorum est.,’ Owen uses war imagery to disclose the raw and undignified experiences of war. He writes of "haunting flares", encouraging his audience to understand the omnipresence of danger from which they are always running. Images of death are also constant. Owen describes soldiers “drowning", in mustard gas and “coughing like hags”; his simile opposing the image of strength the reader normally associates with soldiers and emphasises their weak and powerless state of being. This is continued when Owen states “Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots/ but limped on, blood-shod.” This gives the reader the imagerya distinct image of fatigue, which is emphasized by the alliterated nasal ‘m’ sound that mirrors their exhaustion, causing the reader to pity the soldiers. . Similarly in ‘Mental Cases,’ Owen varies the devices he employs when discussing the experience of war from the perspective of others. Owen adopts a persona that poseswho asks questions about the soldiers in the asylum. Owen uses caesura in the persona’s question, ‘Surely we have perished/ Sleeping, walk hell: but who these hellish?’ to emphasise the speaker’s anguish. Through this, Owen establishes not only a connection with a soldier’s hell during war, but the commonality of