Wilfred Owens View on War

Wilfred Owen was a soldier and is known today not only as a man who sacrificed his life and wrote about the suffering in WW1, but as one of the greatest war poets of today. So today, fellow students, we are here to recognize the anniversary of Wilfred Owens death and what war really meant to him and the best way to honor his death is to try and understand the reality of war that he shows us through his poems.
In many of Owens poems the themes of youth, age, lies, both emotional and physical injuries and death are entwined with strong emotive language to show a reality of war that is quite distressing. He describes horrible scenes from the war front, but also what happens to those that survive but are no longer whole mentally or physically. His poems “Disabled” and “Dulce et Decorum est” both convey Owens main view on war. That it is not right and honorable to die the way men were on the war front for one’s country especially when they were just young men and children that had not lived yet and knew little of what war was really like.
Lies are mentioned in both “Disable” and “Dulce et Decorum est” and convey Owen aversion to having children or young men ignorantly joining the army and going to war because of the government’s positive propaganda and advertisement towards it. In “Disabled” the persona is of a crippled soldier that had lied about his age to join the army because of his vanity and wanting to impress the girls. The quote ‘Smiling they wrote his lie: aged nineteen years’ states his lie and how they felt no remorse for sending him to war. Owen has used contrasts throughout the poem to add emphasis on the dramatic change of soldiers before going to war and after; he shows us the server emotional and physical impact that war has on those that survive. An example of this is in the change of image from being a happy, colourful, good looking, prideful, healthy, athletic and a popular young man or adolescent to being a cripple not ‘whole’, to having ‘lost his colour and being treated ‘like some queer disease’. The shows isolation and the irregular rhythm and melancholy tone of the poem creates’ a sense of disjointedness and despair that relates to brokenness of the soldier.
In “Dulce et decorum est” emotive, descriptive words and similes conjure horrific and grotesque images of gas warfare that Owen and many soldiers in WW1 faced. He uses irony in the tittle that contrasts with the horrors he describes. He states that if one were to see firsthand the reality of war, one might not repeat untruthful and overused sayings like Horace's about the nature of war that it is honorable and right to die for one’s country to ‘children’. ‘The old Lie: Dulce et Decorum est Pro patria mori’. At the beginning he describes with similes how war doesn’t look honorable “Bent over, like old beggars under sacks”, “coughing like hags” and then uses alliteration and imagery ‘He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning’ in the third stanza to add emphasis on what he is witnessing and haunted by in his dreams. He completely goes against the government’s image of soldiers on the war front and shows the reality. The statement ‘before my helpless sight’, shows vulnerability and that he didn’t want to be there and have seen what he has.
From this I hope you understand and appreciate what Owen and many others have sacrificed and the pain that they had to endure. Owen poem will always be a reminder of this and we will always remember Wilfred Owen. Thank you for listening.