‘voices of the great war’ Geoff Barton – war and language
Examples
Jessie Pope – who’s in for the game and Wilfred Owen- ‘Dulce Et Decorum Est’
Question:
How and why do the text differ and how would they be interpreted by different readers?
Focus of the Text
The focus of this written task was to show understanding of war language and how this language works. For example there are a couple of things that often recur in war language such as metaphors and simile. However, these two stylistic devices can be used in both a positive (Jessie Pope) and a negative (Wilfred Owen) way. This causes the perception the audience gets from the poem to be different.
Intro
Message
Tone
Audience
Conclusion
Comparing ‘Who’s in for the game’ with ‘Dulce Et Decorum Est’
In the time of the first world war there were several writers and …show more content…
When you read the poem of Jessie Pope you almost get excited until you realize that she is talking about war and that it is crazy to get enthusiastic about something like that! This is partly because she uses sport as a metaphor for war but mostly because she uses such optimistic and happy words like ‘play the game’ and ‘fun’. She also uses rhetorical questions that make you feel like you are a bad and cowardly person if you wouldn’t join the army and fight in the war. So, this makes the reader believe that it is a good thing to fight and that everybody should battle for their country and help in the war. With Wilfred Owens’ poem you get an entirely different feeling. He shows the truth about war and describes the horrible things that happen. His tone is very dark and depressed. Because Owen describes the terrors of war so clearly you start to think about what the people in the field have to go through and how much damage war does to them physically as well as