Poetry Essay

"Dulce et decorum est" and "A Message From Tony Blair To The People of Iraq" - poetry essay

"Dulce Et Decorum Est" and "A Message From Tony Blair to the People of Iraq" are two poems about war which have similar themes. "Dulce Et Decorum Est" was written by Wilfred Owen, a soldier in The Great War. "A Message from Tony Blair" was written by David Roberts whilst he was on tour in Iraq. The two poems are very good for comparing and contrasting as they have similar themes and messages, but are different in style.

"Dulce Et Decorum Est" tells us of the horrors of war. Sick and wounded soldiers, gas attacks and the lie that dying in battle is glorious and heroic. "A Message from Tony Blair" has a similar theme, the death and destruction caused by war. Both poems cover similar topics but they are both written in very different ways.

The first similarity prominent between the two poems are the images the poets create of war and how they are both negative. In "Dulce Et Decorum Est", Owen describes one particular scene, the death of a soldier, as "If you could hear at every jolt, the blood come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs". He focuses on small-scale, detailed destruction of one man. The gruesome description is fantastic as it uses at lot of negative words, like "gargling" and "froth-corrupted". This creates an appaling picture that nobody would ever want to see. In "A Message from Tony Blair" David Roberts describes the methods used by the troops to destroy a town by saying "We destroyed your TV station, we cut your phones". This is referring to the Brittish soldiers in Iraq and what they did in an attempt to win the war. They destroyed the TV stations and phone lines so the Iraqis had no effective means of long-distance communication, which would almost certainly cause unrest. Both poets describe scenes of destruction, and this similarity is prominent throughout the poems.

The most obvious difference between the poems is the way in which each poet...