Dead Bodies in WWI War Poetry: Owen, Hardy, Rosenberg & Brooke

Introduction: War Poetry and the Dead Soldier

War is a brutal reality on the face of history. Thousands of lives have been lost in the name of battle, and millions of people have been affected by it. The poet is a particularly sensitive member of society who feels the brutality of war more acutely than the average individual. During World War I, the world endured tremendous devastation, during which millions of lives were shaken. In this era, many poets emerged in response to the suffering society experienced. Some of the most notable among them are Wilfred Owen, Thomas Hardy, Isaac Rosenberg, and Rupert Brooke. These poets differed greatly in personality and writing style; however, one element was strikingly common: they each used the soldier's dead body as a symbol of war's ultimate consequence. Although the way each poet employed this symbol was distinctly his own, the similarity cannot go unnoticed (Means, 1994).

Wilfred Owen and 'Dulce et Decorum Est'

Wilfred Owen was a brave soldier who fought on behalf of Britain in the war trenches of World War I. Before enlisting, he had written several poems, of which "Dulce et Decorum Est" is considered a masterpiece. Owen was born into a comfortable family that was subjected to bankruptcy when he was two years old. This misfortune left his family in a pessimistic state of mind from which they never fully recovered, and it left a lasting mark on Owen's personality, shaping him into a serious yet perceptive young man (Soudah, 1988).

Wrestling with his internal struggles, Owen decided to join the army after visiting several hospitals where wounded war soldiers were being treated (Kirreh, 1986). After enlisting, he confronted the harsh reality that war is brutal and never truly ends — it stays inside those who fought it, forever. While fighting in Beaumont Hamel, on the Somme, he wrote letters home that described the war experience more vividly than many historical accounts.

After being injured in an explosion and returning to England, where he was diagnosed with shell shock, Owen wrote "Dulce et Decorum Est." The poem succeeded in making the general public aware of what life in the trenches was truly like — a reality the British government intended to conceal from the civilian population. The poem depicts the horrendous conditions soldiers faced in World War I and is written in a manner that leaves grotesque images in the reader's mind (Moore, 1919).

Owen structured the poem so that each stanza serves a distinct purpose. The poem centers on the sickening experience of watching a man slowly approached by death after a gas attack, with the war raging around him. In the first stanza, Owen describes the environment surrounding the dying soldiers. He uses powerful words such as "trudge," "marches asleep," "drunk with fatigue," and "old beggars under sacks" to convey that soldiers no longer possessed the zest, health, or energy to fight, and were slowly dying from within — their souls hollowed out by hopelessness, already dead inside with no sign of life.

After establishing the terrible conditions soldiers endured, Owen moves on to describe the fear crawling inside the speaker's mind. He uses the word "ecstasy" to capture the frenzied mental state of a soldier whose life is in immediate danger, a state that ultimately leads to a horrible death. The exhaustive, weary experience of the soldier is suddenly overturned when Owen deploys "ecstasy" as an expression of adrenaline and panic. The word stresses the surge of hormones that soldiers experienced when their lives were threatened and creates a deliberately confused state in the reader. The lines "Flound'ring like a man in fire or lime" and "As under a green sea, I saw him drowning" are particularly effective in explaining how mustard gas overwhelmed the soldiers, creating havoc in their lungs and slowly killing every living cell in their bodies — much like water slowly penetrating and suffocating a drowning man.

The last stanza is the most powerful part of Owen's poem. He employs lines such as "blood-shod" coming from "froth-corrupted lungs" and forces the reader to "watch the white eyes writhing in his face":

"If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;"

These lines illustrate his experience of following a wagon carrying the body of a soldier who died from a gas attack in the trench, blood pouring from his poisoned lungs and his eyes wide open in fear and horror. Owen ultimately argues that war stories may be told as heroic, but the experiences themselves were nothing short of horrifying.

While describing the slow death of a soldier, Owen also attends to the trenches themselves — unsafe grounds where soldiers were exposed to open hazards, enemy attacks, and natural calamities alike. It is his use of similes and metaphors that leaves an indelible impact on readers.

References

Fussell, P. (1981). The Great War and Modern Memory. London: Oxford University Press, pp. 36–43.

Hardy, E. (1954). Thomas Hardy: A Critical Biography. London: Hogarth Press.

Hickman, T. L. (1994). Visceral Imagery in the Poetry of World War I Soldier Poets.

Johnston, J. H. (1964). English Poetry of the First World War: A Study in the Evolution of Lyric and Narrative Form. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.

Kirreh, S. (1986). Poetry Is in the Pity: Wilfred Owen.

Means, R. S. (1994). Unusual Young Men: Similarities in Diverse British Poets of the First World War.

Millgate, M. (1982). Thomas Hardy: A Biography. Oxford University Press.

Moore, T. S. (1919). Some Soldier Poets. London: G. Richards Ltd.

Soudah, H. I. (1988). Wilfred Owen and Truth.

Turner, P. (1998). The Life of Thomas Hardy: A Critical Biography. London: Blackwell.

Zeitlow, P. (1974). Moments of Vision: The Poetry of Thomas Hardy. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.