Jenae Long

Essay 3

VanLaningham

5/13/16

In Wilfred Owens poem Dulce Et Decorum Est, and William Yeats poem Easter

1916, the poets articulate the different traumas that people experience in war, civilians and

soldiers alike. Through the traumas, the ability to transform is shown.

Owen relies heavily on simile in the very first stanza of the poem to articulate the traumas

of war, Bent double like old beggars under sacks, / Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed

through sludge, (1,2). Owen begins the poem comparing soldiers in the British Army to

beggars, this reduces the importance of the lives of the soldiers. He also says they were

coughing like hags which reduces them to ugly old women, which somehow seems worse than

being a beggar. The soldiers have been transformed to these ugly old women, and beggars,

which does not give a positive light toward war.

Wilfred Owen also uses simile in line 12, And floundring like a man in fire or lime

Owen uses this simile to show how the soldiers would react to the gas, fumbling as if they were

on fire or in lime, which would be incredibly painful and would cause a lot of damage, whereas

gas does not seem like it would as harmful as fire. This shows that war should not be glorified, it

is traumatic for the people experiencing war.

 Line 20 uses a particularly insightful simile, His hanging face, like a devils sick of sin;

Owen compares the soldiers expression to that of the devil, who is a figure known for sin, yet it

says he is sick of it, which means that the soldier must be extremely unhappy with where he is,

even though it is his job to be in the midst of war.

In his article, By Degrees Regain[ing] Cool Peaceful Air in Wonder": Wilfred

Owen's War Poetry as Psychological Therapy, Daniel Hipp has to say about

Owen and Dulce Et Decorum Est,

Perhaps this photographic quality makes Owen, at first glance, resemble other

contemporary poets of protest. Yet these qualities of violence, detail, and anger in

many ways date this poem as an expression of his early dealings with his

psychologi- cal affliction. As John Johnston has written, "The negative, cynical

atti- tude . . . , together with its emphasis on shockingly realistic details, rep-

resents an element in Owen's verse that is not really natural to it. He is sincere, of

course, but neither cynicism nor purposive realism is a major factor in his true

poetic vision" (174). (34)

As Hipp states, there are some qualities of violence, detail, and anger within Dulce Et Decorum

Est, which is seen when Owen was comparing the soldiers expression to that of the devil. It

shows that the soldier was transformed by the trauma of war.

Wilfred Owen also relies on metaphor in his poem Dulce Et Decorum Est. In line 7,

the poem says, Drunk with fatigue; deaf to the hoots / Of tired, outstripped Five-Nines that

dropped behind. (8). Owen explains that the soldiers were so exhausted that they were basically

drunk.
 Owen goes back to using simile later in the poem, Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud,

(23). Owen is talking about the blood that is in the soldiers lungs, which is as deadly to the

soldier as cancer or cud would be. He is making it seem like choking is an extremely dangerous,

yet common way to die for soldiers.

Wilfred Owen uses powerful images in this poem, Fitting the clumsy helmets just in

time; (10). The reader can imagine exactly what the soldier is doing, rushing to put on a helmet

before they are subjected to gas, which would be done in a quick, exasperating manner. Another

powerful image Owen uses is in lines 15 and 16, In all my dreams, before my helpless sight, /

He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning. In these lines, Owen describes vividly a

soldier that has been affected by the gas. It is not hard to imagine the soldiers doing these

actions. Janice Cavarello says in Poetry, Myths, and Aesthetics in The English Journal, We

experience the weariness of men who marched asleep, the anxiety at the moment of attack, an

ecstacy of fumbling, the distorted vision through the thick gas mask (28). Cavarello points

out through the imagery of what the soldiers are doing that they are living through trauma.

Cavarello goes on,

Our freedom is still restricted; our interpretation must follow that something

good is secretly destroyed by something evil, not that something evil dies or that

something good lasts eternally. The boundaries or limits of Dulce Et Decorum

Est are narrow. We cannot interpret this theme as the ugliness of city life or the

pains of growing up. The theme deals with one subject on the interpretive level-

war is an unforgettable hell. Owen leaves no room for interpretation. (28)

With war being an unforgettable hell, there is no way for a soldier to not experience trauma. The

trauma changes the soldiers, and even civilians.

 In William Yeats Easter 1916, the civilians, or spectators are experiencing the traumas

of war. This other man I had dreamed / A drunken, vainglorious lout. / He had done most bitter

wrong / Yet I number him in the song; / He, too, has resigned his part / In the casual comedy; /

He, too, has been changed in his turn, / Transformed utterly: / A terrible beauty is born, (369).

This section of the poem shows that the narrator recognizes that the war has transformed people

on both sides of the war, and he cannot hate this man that he is talking about because he, too was

transformed through the trauma of war.

In his article, Violence and the Body: Somatic Expressions of Trauma and Vulnerability

during War, Doug Henry says,

Although civilians and social institutions were targeted, the immediate point of

contact was always the body. Bodies became loci of contested control between

rebels, soldiers, and civilians, as each attempted to replace personal selfhood and

humanity with inscribed social, political, and gender ideology... Severed hands,

ears, and limbs became testaments to attempts to remove the self from self-

conceptions, separating people from their previous experiences of living in their

bodies. (386)

This helps to reiterate that everyone was being traumatized in war. The soldiers, and the

civilians. However, it seems that the narrator in Easter 1916 was able to remove himself and

see that the man he is talking about has also been changed because of the war. This also shows a

transformation within the narrator, because before he experienced the trauma of war, he would

not have seen this other man as having been in trauma, he would have just been the enemy. The

last stanza of Easter 1916 also shows that the war caused a great deal of transformation.
 In the last stanza of Easter 1916, Yeats expresses the transformation of war due to

trauma,

For England may keep faith / For all that is done and said, / We know

their dream; enough / To know they dreamed and are dead; / And what if

excess of love / Bewildered them till they died? / I write it out in a verse--

/ MacDonagh and MacBride / and Connolly and Pease / Now and in time

to be, / Wherever green is worn, / Are changed, changed utterly: / A

terrible beauty is born. (370)

Through this stanza, Yeats is able to discuss the outcomes of the war. The trauma of the war

has changed everything.

In his article, Combat Gnosticism: The Ideology of First World War Poetry Criticism,

James Campbell says,

Perhaps the single most important defining element of the genre is this emphasis

on personal experience. The trench lyric is written from the point of view of a

direct observer, and its legitimacy depends upon the putative accuracy of its

representation of its writer's experience in the trench. Therein lies its realism, the

hallmark of the trench lyric and its criticism. Yeats famously referred to Wilfred

Owen's poetry as "all blood, dirt, & sucked sugar stick. 6 The ideal of realism

covers the first two-thirds of this formulation. The trench lyric rejects the

Romantic praise of beauty in favor of an emphasis on the sheer ugliness of front

line conditions in order to destroy the complacence of a sheltered civilian

readership. (205)
Campbell points out that Yeats is saying that war is ugly, and is transformative. This is also what

the last stanza of Yeats Easter 1916 is saying. Through war, a terrible beauty is born it is

saying that war cannot be glorified any longer.

In Wilfred Owens poem Dulce Et Decorum Est, and William Yeats poem Easter

1916, the poets articulate the different traumas that people experience in war, civilians and

soldiers alike. Through the traumas, the ability to transform is shown.

 Bibliography

Campbell, James. Combat Gnosticism: The Ideology of First World War Poetry

Criticism. New Literary History 30.1 (1999): 203215. Web...

Cavallaro, Janice D. Poetry, Myths, and Aesthetics. The English Journal 72.2 (1983): 2729.

Web. 2016.

Henry, Doug. Violence and the Body: Somatic Expressions of Trauma and Vulnerability During

War.Medical Anthropology Quarterly 20.3 (2006): 379398. Web.

Hipp, Daniel. "by Degrees Regain[ing] Cool Peaceful Air in Wonder": Wilfred Owen's War

Poetry as Psychological Therapy. The Journal of the Midwest Modern Language

Association 35.1 (2002): 2549. Web..

Owen, Wilfred. "Dulce Et Decorum Est." Poems. Ed. Joseph Kelly. New York: The Seagull

Reader, 2015. 237-238. Print.

Yeats, William. "Easter 1916." Poems. Ed. Joseph Kelly. New York: The Seagull Reader, 2015.

368-370. Print.