Tone to Convey Meaning? What

¶ … tone to convey meaning? What makes this author's use of tone so much better than the other authors' use of tone?

The ironic tone of Wilfred Owen's "Dulce et Decorum Est" is both sad and bitter. The poem describes the death of a young man on the front of World War I, and combines harsh humor with pathos when chronicling the death of the solder. The poem begins with a deliberately unglamorous portrait of warfare, where the soldiers are portrayed as sick, old beggar-women: "Bent double, like old beggars under sacks, / Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge." The soldiers are sick and bleeding, not just from combat but from lack of proper supplies: "Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots / but limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind." Blind to their future fate, Owen implies, as well as blind with fatigue. The phrases of the poem are short and halting in this section, like a slow march.

The clipped, almost professorial tone of the commanding officer wakes the soldiers from their slumber, but not quickly enough: "Gas! Gas! Quick, boys!" This interjection shifts the rhythm of the poem, and also creates a sense of realism for the reader. The poem's short, trudging lines and the shout of the officer then shifts to a slower pace as Owen describes the death of the man he saw, choking and drowning on the gas. Then the poet uses the cultivated Latin of the title, which he presumably learned in school to truly cut deep into the reader's false sensibility of war: "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."