How Does Wilfred Owen Use Language and Poetic Devices to Create Impact on the Reader

How does Wilfred Owen use language and poetic devices to create impact on the reader? Wilfred Owen was a British poet and soldier during the First World War and was born in 1893. Unfortunately Owen died just before the war ended on the 4th of November 1918 at the young age of 25. He was killed in action at the Battle of the Sambre just one week before the war had ended.

A telegram from the War Office announcing his death was delivered to his mother's home as her town's church bells were ringing in celebration of the end of the war. He wrote the poem dulce et decorum est in 1917.This poem has a strict a,b,a,b,c,d,c,d pattern. It has roughly 10 syllables per line in iambic pentameter. It has a very strict rhyming pattern and amount of syllables.

The strictness is probably related to the strictness that they have in the army, when marching or likewise. Wilfred Owen uses a varied amount of diction to describe war and its effects on people. In the first stanza he uses a good choice if diction to fully describe the condition of the soldiers, for example ‘bent double’, ‘drunk with fatigue; and ‘coughing like hags’.In the third stanza Owen chooses even stronger, more violent language, to portray the horrors of war.

He uses words like ‘smothering dreams’, ‘withering’, ‘gargling’, ‘hanging’ and ‘incurable sores’. Wilfred Owen uses lots of great imagery such as this simile; ‘Obscene as cancer’. Owen is referring the lime gas to cancer. This suggests that because cancer is an incurable illness, in some respects so is the gas, because it won’t go away.

It is a very strong word which fits in well with what the gas was like. The word obscene is a very descriptive word and can put an unpleasant picture in the readers head. As under a green sea’ is the metaphor I have chosen to describe. This also refers to the gas attack. In this metaphor the gas attack is referred to as a sea of green.

The green colour can also be related to an actual sea but also because the gas was slightly coloured green although it was only faint. This would make you actually have to think what it would be like under a sea of gas. Alliteration, such as ‘Knock-kneed’ works well for description in this poem. ‘Knock-kneed describes what the soldiers would have been like in times of complete terror.

Knocking their knees together could also be a sign of it being cold. The phrase also involves onomatopoeia which gives a real picture, so that the reader can really imagine shear fright that the soldiers would be feeling. Onomatopoeia helps put pictures and sounds into the readers mind so that they can relate to what the writing is saying. The word ‘gargling’ really shows what the people who have to witness someone with lime gas in them hears. It says ‘gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs’, which really gets into your head.

You can gargle with water, and so this relates back to drowning in a sea of green gas. ‘Gas! GAS! ’ is a good example of repetition. The repetition of the word gas, gives emphasis to the word, making that word very powerful. The second time round of saying gas is in capitals as if someone is shouting the word at them and making sure that everyone has heard the alert, to minimise the risk of deaths of soldiers. This word would now be drummed into the readers head so that they are constantly thinking about it throughout the rest of the poem.

The mood and tone drops throughout the poem.The start is fairly sombre, using phrases such as ‘cursed through sludge’, ‘marched asleep’ and ‘limped on’. The mood darkens in the second stanza. Owen uses words such as ‘flound'ring’, ‘guttering’, ‘chocking’ and ‘drowning’.

This shows the human suffering caused by war. The third stanza (excluding the last four lines) is very depressing and creates a dark mood. Wilfred Owen uses many devices to help the reader of the poem to understand more clearly the futility of war: its impact on individual soldiers, the suffering they withstand and therefore war should not be glorified.Owen, in this poem, is trying to bring home to the reader that war is harsh. The last two lines in the poem are the lines that the reader will remember.

It says ‘The old lie: dulce et decorum est Pro patria mori. I think that Owen has written this in Latin for a reason. There were wars hundreds and thousands of years ago, when people spoke Latin and believed in the same lie that the soldiers in World War 1 did. Therefore whatever war, past or present this old lie still lives on.