Analysis of World War I War Poets and Their Works

These three poems are all war poems written by war poets that lived in first person the World War I.

What is Rupert Brooke's love for England?

“The soldier” was written in 1914 by Rupert Brooke who went to the front as a volunteer, actually in this poem he explains his love for his country, he also wants to express how his experience in war was and to prompt young men to fight for their mother country. So he’s pro-war. He talks about the superiority of England thanks to its value and its nobility, repeating 6 times “England” and “English” and when he refers to France he says “foreign field” and “somewhere” (line 2 and 11).

This poet is very different from the other two, indeed they’re against war. They both lived the experience of the World War I, for example Sassoon wrote his war poetry at the front and he was one of the first poets to complain about the generals, the politicians and the horror of the trenches, and so Owen that describes his experience of trench warfare with harshness. The latter didn’t survive (he died in 1918), while the other one was one of the few poets to survive the war (he died in 1967).

Sassoon and the Disillusionment of War

“They” was written in 1917 by Siegfried Sassoon. It’s divided in two stanzas characterized by two different registers of speech: in the first stanza the Bishop in his speech uses abstract high-flown terms referring to the idealization of war (“just cause” line 3, “Anti-Christ” referring to Germany line 4) and the courage of the soldiers (“they have challenged the Death” line 6); in the second one the soldiers reply using concrete down-to-earth terms that highlight the horror of the war and what really happens to the soldiers. The aim is to disenchant all the boys that were pressed to be volunteers by the politician that promised them glory and fame.

Wilfred Owen and the Horror of War

“Dulce et Decorum Est” was written by Wilfred Owen in 1917. The poet describes his experience with harsher and stronger words than the ones used by Sassoon. He talks about a group of soldiers that are trying to escape from the trench and they see all the horrors of the conflict: the corps of other soldiers, described as tired devils (“like a devil’s sick of sin” line 20, because they’re living in hell as devils); the hoots of the flares (“As under a green sea” line 14); the wounded soldiers that are dying (“the blood come gargling from the forth-corrupted lungs” lines 21-22). He ends with an admonition to parents: they can’t teach their children to go and serve the mother land and have a possibility of glory because sacrifice has often horrible consequences not only to the ones who die, but also to the survivors that can’t live happily having nightmares and losing their minds. Actually he says that Horace’s sentence at lines 27-28 “Dulce et Decorum est pro patria mori” (It’s sweet and fitting to die for one’s fatherland) is “The old Lie” (line 27).