Poems and Songs about War-Commentary.

Essay by laccaUniversity, Bachelor'sA, April 2003

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Poems and Songs about War

I would like to discuss four poets in particular who had very strong feelings about the subject at hand. Those four poets are Robert Browning, Bob Dylan, Stephen Crane, and Wilfred Owen. We will discuss and interpret the different viewpoints of certain poems written by these poets.

"Dulce et Decorum Est" written by Wilfred Owen is the first poem I came across. The title is Latin and means, "It is Sweet and Fitting". Owen starts the poem with a description of the soldiers weary and hurt from battle returning to their base. The second stanza explicates the boys quickly fitting their gas masks over their heads before the smoke gets to them; however, one of the boys doesn't get his mask on his head on time and you feel the boy's pain throughout the rest of the poem. The author does an amazing job of depicting the young boy's suffering.

...He plunges at me, guttering, choking drowning...His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin; if you could hear, at every jolt, the blood come gargling from the froth- corrupted lungs...

This boy is in an agony not imaginable to any person that has not been through it. And all the other soldiers can do nothing but watch.

The author writes an invective poem. He writes this poem with feelings of utmost disgust for war and the pride taken in by people who are for war. This interpretation is found in the last verse of the poem where the author states,

My friend, you would not tell with such high zest to children ardent for some desperate glory, the old lie: It is sweet and fitting to die for one's country.

The author is saying that if you've been in the war and...