Describe several language techniques used in each text. Explain why they are important.

Essay by saphire_gurlHigh School, 11th gradeA+, July 2005

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From the perspective of soldiers we experience what men suffered during World War I. Through the vivid imagery and the dramatic language in the poems 'Attack' and 'Exposure', Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen share their views on war. That all war is- is fear, misery and death.

Sasson descibes a battlefield where men are on the attack. They follow behind a tank, fighting their way up a "scarred slope", clambering over barbed wire, right into the hands of death. The use of alliteration and rhythym (eg. "Smouldering through spouts of drifting smoke that shroud") conveys the sense of urgency and excitement. Personification plays a major role in 'Attack', eg. "glow'ring" and "barrage roars" gives the poem a tone of anger/rage. The use of onomatapoiea helps the readers experience what the battlefield was like for the soldiers. Lines such as "bristling fire", makes the readers imagine the sound of machine guns firing and "Tanks creep and topple forward to the wire", creates a powerful image of tanks slowly making their way upto the barbed wire.

His climax is a perfect example of the kind of emotive sentences he uses, "O Jesus, make it stop!" fills the readers with the despair, anger, fear and helplessness that the soldiers feel. Yet, Sassoon also gives the poem an unemotional tone (eg. "They leave their trenches, going over top.") to emphasize the fact that the fear, panic and death happened everyday.

But none of these things were what war was conveyed to the people not involved with the fighting as back then. Men who went off to war thought that it was a way to prove their masculinity and that to die for your country was a glorious thing. None of these men knew of the fear that would strike their hearts, or of the...