War is Hell for Lack of a More Apt Metaphor: The Personae and Atmosphere of Modern

War Poetry

Who can convey the true implications of war? War and conflict have always been a

definitive factor of the human condition; however, The Great War, or World War One, was such

a drastic deviation from previously accepted norms and conventions of warfare that it caused a

profound impact in all aspects of life, from the political to the artistic. Poetry was not exempt

from the effects of World War I, and the poetry of this era, the early 20th Century, reflected the

seismic shifts that were occurring not only in the personal psyche, but also in the conception of

the phenomena that encompassed existence. Such a paradigm shift was evident in the World

War I poets in general, and in the poems of Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen in particular.

In Sassoon’s poem, “Repression of War Experience,” and Wilfred Owen’s poem, “Dulce et

Decorum est,” the psychological impact of the war and its lingering effects upon the soldier, the

active participant of such a traumatic event, forms the basis of the poems; through the speakers’

narration, atmosphere and meaning are conveyed.

Both “Repression of War Experience” and “Dulce et Decorum est” feature speakers who

are directly affected by the war; both poems, moreover, feature speakers who are unable to

escape the trauma they experienced during this momentous event, and both poets use an explicit

and unvarnished style of language to convey the speakers’ unsettling psychological landscapes.

In Sassoon’s poem, the speaker is far removed from the front and the trenches, yet is unable to

escape the lingering, malignant realities of the battlefield. While convalescing, the speaker

attempts to enjoy the respite he is afforded; the guns that “never cease,” however, make this an

exercise of futility. The onomatopoeic repetition of the guns’, “Thud, thud, thud,” though “quite

soft,” is incessant, insinuating itself into the mind of the patient. It is evident, furthermore, that

action of the front has permeated the speaker’s psyche permanently, for he declares: “O Christ, I

want to go out/ And screech at them to stop – I’m going crazy; I’m going stark, staring mad

because of the guns.” There is no escape from the haunting nightmares, from the nagging guilt

of survival. And, it is ironic that Sassoon’s speaker is not haunted by the soldiers who died, but

rather by the ones who survived, like himself, for the “ghosts among the trees” are the “old men

who died/ Slow, natural deaths, - old men with ugly souls,/ Who wore their bodies out with nasty

sins”; the speaker feels that he should have perished along with the myriad of young souls who

lost their lives in this conflict. The speaker implies that he as well is guilty of the “nasty sins” of

murder, a guilt he cannot eradicate; this overwhelming sense of guilt is a reflection of the

murderous nature of the battlefield.

Similarly, the speaker in Owen’s poem is haunted by a particular experience where a

fellow soldier fails to get his gas mask on and perishes right before the whole company. The

whole scene is reported in flashback, in vivid detail, but only in the third stanza is it revealed that

the action described in the previous stanzas has occurred in the past. The extremely graphic and

explicit language used to describe a soldier’s agonizing death is indicative of the searing effect

this scene has upon the speaker’s mind: “In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,/ He plunges

at me, guttering, chocking, drowning.” Unlike Sassoon’s speaker, however, Owen’s speaker is

not racked with survivor’s guilt, but rather, haunted by this unfortunate soldier’s untimely

demise. Owen’s figurative language in describing this gas attack, moreover, matches the

gruesome tragedy that was an everyday occurrence during this conflict; the death throes of the

soldier is described in uncompromising similes: “Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud/ Of vile,

incurable sore on innocent tongues.”

Undoubtedly, the unprecedented and modern nature of The Great War played a

significant influence on the direction that modern poetry would take. World War One ushered in

the era of modern warfare, and it witnessed the use of technologies hitherto unused: airplanes,

tanks, and chemical warfare in the form of gas attacks, the subject of Owen’s poem. The reality

of an unbeknownst modern form of warfare is reflected in the structure of both Owen’s and

Sassoon’s poems. Owen chooses an alteration of the traditional sonnet in which to frame his

poem, reflecting and paralleling the paradoxical irony in which humanity found itself; there was

the traditional notion of warfare and chivalry to which Europe clung entering World War One,

but was soon confronted by an emerging, modern, and unfamiliar method of waging war.

Owen’s poem, for the most part adheres to the traditional sonnet’s rhyme and rhythm scheme if

two sonnets were fused into one; the poem is essentially two sonnets with only minor variations.

The rhyme and rhythm of the first half of the poem is particularly effective in conveying the

weariness of the soldiers in their march, with their almost mechanical and instinctive progress

towards a distant respite dangled like a carrot on a stick before them: “Bent double, like old

beggars under sacks, - / Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,/ Till on the

haunting flares we turned our backs/ And towards our distant rest began to trudge.” The similes,

“like old beggars” and “like hags,” indicate the extent of the soldiers’ degradation as well, and

the mood and atmosphere is served well with the structure of the poem. The shift in the third

stanza, however, marks a deviation from the structure of a traditional 14 line sonnet, a shift that

is indicative of a break from the official state sponsored stance on the war and the glories

involved in the sacrifices for one’s homeland. In an ironic twist on the Horace allusion of

“Dulce et decorum est/ Pro patria mori,” Owen shatters the myth that caused so many young

people to enlist and sacrifice their lives in a gruesome and horrific manner, in a war

characterized by unimaginable tragedy.

The structure of Sassoon’s poem, likewise, reflects the modern consequences of a modern

war on an individual’s psychological well-being. The speaker of “Repression of War

Experience” is evidently suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), which ironically,

is a rather contemporary diagnosis; more ironic is the fact that the disorder, while only recently

named, was a psychological reality in the past as well. PTSD was called shell shock, and the

methods of dealing with it in the past was very primitive, as evidenced by the speaker in

Sassoon’s poem who is overwhelmed and unable to deal with his war experiences. The poem,

while having a relatively, not perfectly, iambic pentameter metre, is unrhymed. The structured

metre suggests a stubborn clinging to the methods of dealing with shell shock, where “soldiers

don’t go mad/ Unless they lose control of ugly thoughts.” The speaker erroneously believes that

he has the capacity to almost will away his psychological disorders, but it is soon apparent such a

method is futile. The lack of a rhyming scheme, furthermore, works well with the point-of-view

of stream of consciousness, for the speaker’s ramblings are uninhibited by structural necessity.

Sassoon’s poem, because of its narrative structure, possesses an unsettling, disjointed,

and claustrophobic atmosphere. The constant shift in points-of-view, from the second-person

point-of-view to the first-person is indicative of the speaker’s intense internal conflict, and it

becomes unsettling because it is evident that the speaker is having a conversation with himself

rather than addressing the reader. The speaker commands himself to “Now light your pipe,” and

implores pleadingly to “Come on; O do read something” in order to escape his haunting

memories of the war. The speaker’s efforts at forgetfulness are a losing battle, however, for

everything in the room is a reminder of his life as a soldier; the speaker manages to connect even

the most harmless objects in the room to his wartime experiences, and because of this, a

claustrophobic atmosphere is created. The poem begins with the speaker lighting a candle and

noticing a moth, noting its self-destructive propensity of being drawn to flames, who “scorch

their wings with glory, liquid flame.” The speaker then draws a metaphor comparing the moth to

the self-destructive soldier who throws his life away in battle in the pursuit of glory and honour,

only to have to remind himself not to make such destructive mental connections, for “it’s bad to

think of war.” Even the books begin to press in on the speaker, and he is unable to prevent

himself from personifying them as soldiers; he calls them “a jolly company,” obviously seeing

them as a company of soldiers, “Dressed in…every kind of colour,” representing the various

nations gathered on the front. The speaker’s paranoia intensifies the claustrophobic atmosphere,

for in an attempt to escape the reminders of war that are contained in the room, he gazes

outward, into the garden. Unfortunately, even the garden presses in on him, cutting off any

means of escape from his claustrophobic and paranoid mind; in the garden there are “crowds of

ghosts among the trees” and “horrible shapes in shrouds.” Contributing to this ghoulish imagery,

is the incessant audial imagery, an undertone from which there is no escape, the constant

imagining of the sounds of shells. For the speaker, far removed from the front, and long after the

war, the war will never be over, for “why, [he] can hear the guns,” and he will never be able to

silence them.

The atmosphere in Owen’s poem is also created by the speaker’s reliving a war

experience; a surreal and ghastly atmosphere dominates the poem. The juxtaposition of the first

and second stanza, however, only highlights the horror of the gas attack. In the first stanza, an

overwhelming weariness is conveyed only to be shattered by the second stanza’s flurry of action

and activity: “Gas! Gas! Quick, boys!” Then, all the soldiers, having dispelled their lethargic

fatigue, put on their gas mask, except for one unfortunate soul. And, it is through the warping

vision of the speaker’s gas mask, “through the misty panes,” and the ghoulish fog of gas, the

“thick green light,” that the surreal atmosphere is created. The speaker is haunted by this

dreamlike sequence of events, and it is difficult to imagine that his nightmares could be more

terrifying than this scene. In fact, the whole poem could be a description of the speaker’s

nightmare, for he states that it is in “all [his] dreams,” the dying soldier “plunges at [him],

guttering, choking, drowning.” The switch to the present continuous tense in the second stanza,

moreover, while contributing to the immediacy of the flurried action, contributes to the surreal

atmosphere, for it indicates that the episode is revisited repeatedly in the speaker’s mind and

dreams, and it will remain forever occurring. The speaker will forever relive the “ecstasy of

fumbling,/ Fitting the clumsy helmets,” and the dying soldier will forever be “yelling out and

stumbling,/ And flound’ring,” and the speaker will forever see the soldier “drowning.”

“Repression of War Experience” and “Dulce et Decorum est” by Sassoon and Owen,

respectively, unflinchingly and explicitly, convey and depict their experiences of war; the poets

attempt to recreate the atmosphere they experienced, and in doing so deliver their antiwar

messages quite directly. These two war poems relinquish the quaint poetic movements of the

past, for there is nothing romantic or metaphysical in their depiction of their experiences. The

unprecedented tragedy and horror of World War One demanded an unvarnished artistic

treatment; undoubtedly, this momentous 20th Century event contributed in ushering the modern

age. The people who experienced World War One, and in fact the whole world, would forever

be altered by this horrific event. War is hell for lack of a more apt metaphor.