Bruce Dawe Poem Essay

Good break of the day/afternoon everyone. I am accepted that many of you allow agree with me, after studying and discussing in class fight poetry, that war is destructive it destroys professional personperties and stretch forths. It is as well the implication if non de worldizing as Owen in his Dulce et decorousness Est has pointed place. The violence and destructiveness of war reduces men in the battlefield into something less(prenominal) than human they ar stripped of their dignity. Ultimately as Owen points out in his poem, war is brainless or futile. Whatever the reason for going to war, its not justification enough for the senseless trouncing of young lives.Owen, as you know, has great power in challenging the responders senses, to experience the repugnance of war. He allows us to see, to hear, to feel, to smell, even to try out the ug business organisationss of war. Thus we see a group of soldiers trudging the muddy tracks blindly to safety. They atomic number 18 drunk with fatigue and Owen captures their dehumanisation by a series of similes. They atomic number 18 bent double, alike old beggars, coughing like hags and deaf to the rifle and fury of guns and gas shells dropping near them.I still can jut out and hear their panic reaction to the centiliter gas and those who are not lively enough to put on their mask, literally drown in what Owen calls the green sea and our auditory sense is challenged by the guttering, the choking and the convulsed sobs. You will agree with me for sure, that the grasp that Owen conjures up of the dupe of the chlorine gas is no less than grotesquely horrible. We see the white eyeball writhing in his agony and the convulsions that are followed by the blood that comes gargling out of the victims froth vitiated lungs. Again a simile is employ bitter as the cud of vile, resultantively giving us the awful taste of the situation. I know of one other poet who also condemns war and who can effectively a dvance the horror of war and the idiocy of it, solely by challenging our senses. Kenneth Slessor, like Wilfred Owen, has a strong indictment of war, if Owens tone in his poem is angry because, for him, Dulce et decorum est, pro patria mori which since the time of Horace was used by government to entice men to fight for their area it is a big ie. From the images that he conjures in this poem, there is nothing glorious close to dying in such(prenominal) an indignified, barbarous and senseless way. In contrast, Kenneth Slessors tone in his coast Burial is elegiac he laments the destructiveness, the dehumanizing effect and the futility of war like Owen, although his anger is normalize and what we get is a tone of frustration, he communicates just as powerfully an antiwar message.His Beach Burial presents a dramatic situation in which a group of dead(a) sailors floats towards the edge at El Alamein in the core atomic number 99. The dehumanization motif comes almost strikingly because the sailors is at the mercy of the sea, no long-range in control of their lives, but keep down to the ebb and the flow of the sea. The fact that they are unknown seamen, a mixture of assort and axis soldiers probably highlights the senselessness of war.A man who takes pity on the dead snatched them from the water system and bury them in burrows along the beach. Clearly, the image portrayed here is one of dehumanization and responders feel great pity for them in realizing that these sailors ultimate protection is to be fix within the earth as animals pay off comfort in the safety of their burrows. Slessors derision is obvious in the way he describes the situation Between the sob and club of the gunfire, Someone, it seems, has time for this,To pluck them from the shallows and bury them in burrows And tread the sand upon their nakedness Our auditory sense is challenged by the newsworthinesss sob and clubbing in this line so that we can hear the demolition of war. When Slessor uses the word pluck to describe the mans action of removing the bodies from the water to be buried, I am reminded of the soldier smothered in gas in Owens poem being flung behind a wagon. Both poets certainly capture the unceremonious brutality of war.The futility of war is further highlighted by the mans bewilderment, not knowing what name to preserve on the crudely made tidewood crosses that he used for each grave. Unknown seaman is the entirely thing he can look to write. And, at this point the voice of the poet is understandably mournful, as suggested by the repetition of the word such and the tone Written with such perplexity, with such bewildered pity, The words choke as they begin Certainly there is no doughnut in either their last or their burial for their memorial, only stresses their anonymity.The ultimate senselessness of it all is captured in the last stanza loose seamen, gone in search of the identical landfall, Whether as enemies they fought, Or fought with us, or neither, the sand joins them together, Enlisted on the other front In emotional state these sailor soldiers where able to live together without enmity, but now in death they are peacefully united they acquit come from so many lands and kibosh up in the same landfall somewhere on the beach of El Alamein.I believe we should take the message of both Owen and Slessor seriously that war destroys, that it robs us of our human dignity, and that it is ultimately senseless. Both poets have experience the horror of war, Owen as a lieutenant in the British army in WWI and Slessor as an Australian Official fight Correspondent in the Middle East during WWII. If belligerent or war-like world leadership of today study these poems, I am sure the world will be a better place to live in.