Raw War: The Reality Of War In Poetry

5 Pages 1243 Words

After the events of September 11, 2001, the United States experienced a surge of patriotism. American flags went up on every front porch, people all over the country held candlelight vigils, they cried, they had nightmares, and then the people of America sent their brothers, their sons, and their husbands off to fight. Oftentimes, people get so caught up in what they perceive to be the glory of war, they forget that the men who go pay for our sense of accomplishment with their lives. Poetry serves to remind us of that. Poetry can show us through the art of words the aspects of war that we could never begin to imagine ourselves. It does so through imagery, satire, irony, patterns of rhythm, and even sounds. War is denigrated and made more realistic through poetry.
One poem in particular captures the images of war with raw, unapologetic verses filled with snapshots of war at its very worst. This poem is entitled “Dulce et Decorum Est,” and was written during World War I by Wilfred Owen. Owen would later go on to die, ironically, fighting for the British in the same war about which he wrote the poem. In it, he describes a group of exhausted soldiers who find themselves surrounded by a poisonous gas. All but one of them manage to get their gas masks on, and in closing the author declares that,
If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
……………………………….................
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs
………………………………..............................
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
to children ardent for some desperate glory,
the old lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.”
The phrase used in the last two lines is Latin and can be translated to, “It is sweet and right to die for your country....