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“Dulce et Decorum Est” Looking back now, we can all recognise that The Great War was nothing but an “ecstasy of fumbling”, from the drawing board to the battlefield, but nearly a century on has anything changed? Is asymmetric warfare as sanitised as we may be lead to believe, or is it all a cover up for a more sinister truth, like that which is depicted in Wilfred Owen’s poem: “Dulce Et Decorum Est”? With every line Owen puts me further into the role of the foot soldier on the battlefield, describing his very own experiences, to potent effect. He depicts the horror when a platoon is gassed, in a surprise attack. The structure of the poem goes a long way to create this realism, which is responsible for incurring such vivid images. The poem is set into four verses, each structured to encapsulate an image of the exact moment in your mind. From the first verse, it’s slow pace, as the soldiers “limp on ..with fatigue.” To the sudden change of pace as, in “an ecstasy of fumbling” the “outstripped five-nines” drop down on the unsuspecting soldiers, in verse two.
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