One poem we have looked at this year which conveys sense of anger and loss is "Dulce et Decorum est" by Wilfred Owen. The poem is about the trench warfare that went on during world war one. Owen shows the horror that the soldiers faced as they fought the war.
The poem describes one particular experience, a gas attack where Owen sees a soldier die horribly, the poem shows that "Dulce et Decorum est pro patria mori" is a lie. The poem conveys the anger and emotion that Owen felt about the war.
In the first stanza Owen opens the poem with an image of weariness, he writes about the soldiers being like beggars and hags. Owen creates a real sense of the pain and misery of the men, these images are at odds with poems title which means it is fitting to die for your country. He says that the "men marched asleep" and that many were bloodshod, lame and blind, these give the reader an extremely unpleasant and vivid image of the setting for Owen's experience.
In the next stanza of the poem the pace becomes faster as Owen describes the sudden activity as the gas shells drop. Her writes about the ecstasy of fumbling as the men put on their gas masks. Owen writes about seeing the soldier drowning in the gas, he uses this metaphor to show that the gas enveloped the man, he couldn't breath and was dying. Owen's use of the present particible is appropriate at this point because it shows us that Owen keeps on reliving this moment in his dreams and that he can't get rid of his memories. In this stanza there are images of frenzied activity, Owen uses exclamation marks and words that describe an action like "floundering and drowning". Owen structured the stanza like this to show that this was a sudden and unprepared for event.
When Owen addresses you directly he tells you that if you could have been there and seen the horror, darkness and death of the war then you wouldn't be able t tell people that it is a good and desireable thing to die for your country.
