Wilfred+Owen+essay

Wilfred Owen declared in his 1918 preface that his pending “book is not about heroes. English poetry is not yet fit to speak of them. Nor is it about deeds, or lands, nor anything about glory, honour, might, majesty, dominion or power, except war. My subject is war and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the Pity.”Thus we read in the poem “Dulce Et Decorum Est” of the negative experience of Owen himself witnessing a gas attack at the front and its crippling effect on him afterwards, conveyed through possessive adjectives, onomatopoeia and present participles. “Disabled” also deals with the negative experience of a young soldier returning from war as an amputee, and being ignored by those who had encouraged him to join. Owen uses colloquialisms to give us the voice of the character adding to our pity. In “Dulce et Decorum est” Owen is one of the soldiers whom he describes as “bent double, like old beggars under sacks” who are “knocked-kneed” with exhaustion, trudging through “sludge”. In the second stanza, the tempo changes with the “boys…fitting the clumsy helmets just in time”. To his horror, one soldier does not manage his in time and Owen sees him “floundr’ing like a a man in fire or lime.” Owen, from the protection of his gas mask describes him with a simile “As under a green sea drowning.” The negative experience of Owen as a witness, continues in the third stanza when we realize that he is reliving this sight over and over again and indeed cannot escape this nightmare. While it is the man who is dying, it is almost too much for Owen. He conveys the sense of ongoing nightmares, ”In all my dreams, before my helpless sight”. In Owen’s repitition of the possessive adjective “my” in “my dreams” and “my helpless sight” we sense his despair and guilt at not being able to help one of his mean. The possessive adjective almost gives us the idea that he seems to think it is his fault. He describes the man’s agony in detail with three present participles ”He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.” The participles convey an ongoing repeated action as if in replay, that happens again and again in Owen’s sleep. Indeed the negative experience is made more distressing for him with the onomatopoeic quality of the participles. “Guttering” gives the impression of a gutter with rainwater trickling which also takes on gargling, choking connotations as we realize that the soldier is trying to breathe, but the gas has made his lungs spongy and corrupted and the blood is gurgling up his oesophagus. The word “guttering” was also used at the time to describe the last gasp of a candle having used up the wax and just flickering before dying out. So we see for Owen, how pitiable is the sight that he can’t escape. The “choking” adds to the effect as the soldier is making the choking sounds of trying to breathe but only sucking in blood. He is literally “drowning” in his own blood. In what we would now call Post traumatic Stress Disorder, then called shellshock, Owen, we know, lived through the horrors of this experience, to write this famous poem, telling His ironic friend” that she would not tell “the Old Lie: Dulce Et Decorum est/Pro Patria mori”. He stressed instead the tragic waste of war –it was not at all “sweet and fitting to die for your country.” “Disabled” also deals with a negative experience. This time Owen stresses that it is not “sweet and fitting” to be a wounded war veteran either and be discarded by society. Again a soldier is prematurely aged. His focus in on one young man “in a wheeled chair” wearing a “ghastly suit of grey.” He is in the grounds of a rehabilitation hospital at the edge of the park, and while waiting for the staff to bring him inside, thinks of his reasons for joining up and the treatment he has received from society. Again the “poetry is in the pity” as Owen uses colloquialisms and pronouns to again show the waste and folly of war. The poem is narrated in the third person and begins “He sat in a wheeled chair, waiting for dark.”The fact that Owen uses “he” makes the young soldier seem objectified and distant form people. We don’t know his name. he is one of the hundreds of thousands of wounded who have returned to England maimed and sick and seemingly faceless. He could therefore stand for any of these soldiers and the pint is that society cannot come to terms with their disfigurements either so they are ignored. It is interesting that he is described as being in a “wheeled chair” –the past participle shows us he cannot even wheel himself, he is totally dependent on others. Like Owen predicts for the generation of wounded, “he will spend a few sick years in institutes”. Again the use of the third person pronoun universalizes his plight and also seems to add an objective, neutraland almost uncaring tone as we realize that it will be the “rules” who will take the place of people in considering what will be “wise” for him. His helplessness and dependency is also shown in the last two lines when he asks “why don’t they come/and put him to bed? Why don’t they come? “ The nurses or carers or orderlies seem similarly removed and disinterested as if they have forgotten him at the end of the day, just as society has forgotten that just “last year” …”he was drafted out with drums` and cheers.” Owen uses colloquialisms to help us understand his negative experience also. They in effect, are the words if would use so give us a sense of his personality and voice, denied him in the personal pronouns. We realize in the first stanza that he is “legless, sewn short at elbow.” The colloquialism “legless” seems flippant and almost callous. We realize that the same word for being drunk is here used lightly for describing his legs having been amputated. The disaparity or difference between the causal use and the real meaning, makes us take note and we wonder if it is also the ironic, cynical way that the victim may be thinking. Owen refers to his injury ironically “before he threw away his knees” with the colloquialism implying that he did it lightly, that being wounded was something heroes did out of honour without regard to consequences. The reality of his being a double amputee at nineteen, makes the colloquialism shocking. Owen repeats this againin the third stanza with the colloquialism “he lost his colour very far from here” Rather than a light hearted way of describing how someone looks, we realize that he has been wounded so badly by shelling that his colour or blood is literally poring out of him and he was lucky to live. Thus his negative experience, recounted in his own words almost casually, shocks us even more as we think of the reality of life now. “Giddy jilts” is the colloquialism used to describe the girls whom he wanted to impress by joining. Now that “all of them touch him like a queer disease” makes his happy go lucky motivation for joining and their encouragement, seem sinister and an act of betrayal. Thus Owen used the negative experience of the victims of war, through personal pronouns, participles, onomatopoeia and colloquialisms to convey to his readers and to us today, the pity of war.
 * Describe a positive or negative experience that happened to a character or individual in each text **