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English (Wilfred Owen Poetry) - Coggle Diagram

- - - - In the last paragraph, Owen condenses the poem to an almost claustrophobic pace: ‘if in some smothering dreams you too could pace’, and he goes into a very graphic, horrific description of the suffering that victims of mustard gas endured: ‘froth-corrupted lungs’,’ incurable sores’, ‘the white eyes writhing in his face’.
      - Although the pace of the poem has slowed to a crawl, there is much happening in the description of the torment of the mustard gas victim, allowing for a contrast between the stillness of the background, and the animation of the mustard gas victim. This contrast highlights the description, making it far more grotesque.
      - Owen finishes the poem on a personal address to Jessie Pope: ‘My friend, you would not tell with such high zest/ To children ardent for some desperate glory, / The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est / Pro patria mori.’
    - - He writes, ‘In all my dreams,/ before my helpless sight’, showing how these images live on with the soldiers, how these men are tortured by the events of war even after they have been removed from war. There is no evading or escaping war.
    - - The second stanza changes the pace rapidly. It opens with an exclamation – ‘Gas! Gas! Quick, boys!’ – and suddenly the soldiers are in ‘an ecstasy of fumbling’, groping for their helmets to prevent the gas from taking them over. Again, Owen uses language economically here: he uses words that express speed, hurry, and almost frantic demand for their helmets. However, one soldier does not manage to fit his helmet on in time. Owen sees him ‘flound’ring like a man in fire or lime’ through the thick-glassed pane of his gas mask.
    - - one of these voyages that the poem opens. Immediately, it minimizes the war to a few paltry, exhausted soldiers; although it rages in the background (’till on the haunting flares we turned our backs / and towards our distant rest began to trudge’). Owen uses heavy words to describe their movement – words like ‘trudge’, ‘limped’; the first stanza of the poem is a demonstration of pure exhaustion and mind-numbing misery.
  - - - IMAGERY:
      - SYMBOLISM:
        
        Blighty: the soldiers’ slang for England is a symbol in The Dead-Beat for all that is wrong with the Home front. Though it should symbolise hope and home, ironically, for this man it is the very thing which has ‘crazed’ him. His dreams are in fact nightmares of those who are safe at home, the so-called ‘valiant’, ‘brave’ and ‘bold’, compared to whom he has lost his ‘pluck’ (courage)
        
        The ‘uncles’ symbolise the politicians and priests who preach ‘smiling ministerially’ l.11. Owen here cleverly uses the word ‘minister’ as an adverb to describe their complacent smiles, playing on the word which, in its best sense, means to offer help but here refers to ‘ministers’ of state and religion who preach propaganda.
      - SIMILES:
        
        ‘Lay stupid like a cod’ compares the man to a fish that is caught and, out of its natural element, is useless. Although he is not yet dead, he lies like a cod on a fishmonger’s slab, with his eyes glazed and staring
        
        Describing the man as being ‘heavy like meat’ reminds us of ‘those who die as cattle’ in Anthem for Doomed Youth. Although still alive, Owen describes the man as being ‘heavy like meat’, an image of butchery and the slaughter-house. The similes are startling and brutal.
    - - Owen uses this poem to show us the pity of war, even in the fact that only the ‘low voice’ shows any compassion to the dead-beat man, despite the presence of other ‘caring professions; Owen invites the reader to sympathise with the 'dead-beat'
      - Owen’s other theme is the horror of war. The officer threatening the man with his revolver, the kicks the other men give him and the ‘blasted trench’ all show what conditions were like on the front line. Owen communicates the horrors of the home front in the insensitivity of the bold uncles and the unfaithful wife. The cynicism of the stretcher-bearers and man’s inhumanity to man as expressed in the Doc’s ‘well -whiskied laugh’ all contribute to the themes of darkness and death.
  - - - He speaks about the futility of mourning the dead who have been lost so carelessly, and by making the mourners youthful, he draws further attention to the youthfulness of the soldiers themselves. Note the clever use of words like pallor most often associated with death or dying.
      - Owen also frames this second stanza in the dusk. This is to signify the end, which of course for many of the soldiers it was their end. The second stanza is also considerably shorter than the first. It contains only six lines compared to the first which contains nine. The meter is far more even in the second stanza as well. This is only subtly different but the net effect is while the first stanza creates a frenetic, disjointed feel the second is more reflective of a solemnity.
      - ‘And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds‘ – highlights the inevitability and the quiet of the second stanza, the almost pattern-like manner of mourning that has now become a way of life. It normalizes the funeral and hints at the idea that this is not the last time that such mourning will be carried out.
    - - Anthem for Doomed Youth’ opens, as do many of Owen’s poems, with a note of righteous anger: what passing-bells for those who die as cattle? The use of the word ‘cattle’ in the opening line sets the tone and the mood for the rest of it – it dehumanizes the soldiers much in the same way that Owen sees the war dehumanizing the soldiers, bringing up imagery of violence and unnecessary slaughter
      - Owen notes the ‘monstrous anger’ of the guns, the ‘stuttering rifles’, and the ‘shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells’. It’s a horrible world that Owen creates in those few lines, bringing forward the idea of complete chaos and madness, of an almost animalistic loss of control – but in the same paragraph, he also points out the near-reluctance of the soldiers fighting.
  - - - The last stanza of ‘Arms and the Boy’ changes the direction of the poem. The poet juxtaposes the terrible armaments of the last two stanzas to the true nature of this young man. He should not be dealing with the bayonet or bullets. Rather, his teeth should be “laughing round an apple”. He is not a beast or a monster. There are no claws on his hands or “talons at his heels”. The boy should not, but likely will, be made into a creature of destruction.
    - - The second stanza begins in much the same way as the first. This time though the poet is describing the bullets and the cartridges. They too are personified. Each element of war seems to have life of its own. It’s created for no purpose other than to kill the person it is directed towards. One of the best images of the poem is in the last line of this stanza where the speaker says the cartridges “of fine zinc teeth” are “Sharp with the sharpness of grief and death”.
    - - In the first four lines of ‘Arms and the Boy,’ the speaker begins by referring to the young man, someone who is soon to learn the ways of war. He suggests that this boy learn about and become accustomed to the feel and experience of the bayonet-blade. The poet uses personification to describe this blade as bloodthirsty. He paints a terrible image of its intent and its history. This alludes to the wider destructive nature of war and what is in store for the “boy” if he picks it up. In the last line of this stanza, there is a good example of alliteration with the phrase “famishing for flesh”
    - - ALLITERATION: alliteration, occurs when words are used in succession, or at least appear close together, and begin with the same sound. For example, “Blind, blunt bullet-leads” at the end of line one of the second stanza
      - ENJAMBMENT: It occurs when a line is cut off before its natural stopping point. Enjambment forces a reader down to the next line, and the next, quickly. One has to move forward in order to comfortably resolve a phrase or sentence. For example, the transition between lines three and four of the second stanza
      - PERSONIFICATION: Personification occurs when a poet imbues a non-human creature or object with human characteristics. For example, in the second line of the poem when the poet describes the bayonet-blade as “keen with hunger of blood” and “Blue with all malice”. This leads into a great simile: “like a madman’s flesh”.
    - - Warfare
      - Innocence/Youth
      - They are seen through the contrasting stanzas that set the nature of the weapons against that of the boy who will soon have to pick them up. One is made from beginning to end to create death while the other, the young man, is not. His innocence makes the terror of the weapons all the more offensive and as Owen puts it, “unnatural”.
  - - - Nature, here, seems to be an attacking force itself – the bullets are ‘less deadly than the air that shudders black with snow’, the wind is nonchalant at their suffering
      - Owen gives the impression that the soldiers have been lost in a drifting, desolate land, where everything at their beck and call is going to attack them, where everything strives to see them hurt
    - - The soldiers have been beaten – not by the Germans, but by the weather, the awful, crushing weather that has left them unable to fight, that has dazed their minds to days of brighter futures, that has left them in a shell-hole of misery
      - They have reached the point that the despair they feel feels almost like death, and there is no way out of it, not for these soldiers
    - - Dawn masses her melancholy army, ‘attacks once more in ranks on shivering ranks of grey / but nothing happens’. Again, the use of ‘but nothing happens’ works twofold: to heighten the atmosphere of ‘Exposure,’ and also to show the terror of living, day in, day out, waiting for death.
      - The awful continuation of war seems to be a cycle – ‘we only know war lasts, rain soaks, and clouds sag stormy’, an inevitable fact of life, a piece of nature that the soldiers have now taken to be as accurate as possible. Everything is war.
    - - soldiers cannot envisage, anymore, a state of peace. They are at war, and thus their lives have been completely swallowed up by the presence of war.
      - Even in peace, there is exhaustion – ‘slowly our ghosts drag home’. And there is the sense, here, that peace is not really for them.
    - - Owen introduces the war: always present, even when it is not visible. The phrase ‘twitching agonies’, although simple, helps to nudge the reader into the poem. Also, note the distant prevalence of war; although not immediately there, the presence of it is felt in the simplest of words – ‘the flickering gunnery rumble’, ‘the dull rumour of some other war’.
    - - the final ‘but nothing happens’ seems to serve as an idea that these things cannot be changed now. This is the way that life is. There is no way out of this life but through death.
      - The despair reaches a point in the final two stanzas of ‘Exposure.’ This is where action, should it happen, must happen – however, nothing does. The soldiers die alone, in a field, frozen, and are found by the members of the army that bury the dead
    - - The opening stanza delivers us to the bleak French landscape without delay, and Owen brings the surroundings alive by using action verbs. For example, ‘our brains ache, in the merciless iced east winds that knive us’
      - the use of his language shows that the soldiers are truly alone in a hostile environment. Even nature has turned against them. Even nature is angry at them.
        They exist in their own world, and yet, as we can see from the stanza, they seem to scarcely exist at all. Tired and aching, they trudge onwards – the silence offering them enough threat to stay awake, and thus, through Owen’s description, we, as well, are afraid of the silence.
      - There is so much in the first stanza that is building, the atmosphere pushing up to an almost tangible point by the end line ‘but nothing happens’, and while the phrase helps to entrench the idea of immovability, of soldiers, stuck, it seems to hint that something is on its way to happening.