Comparing Dulce et Decorem Est with Charge of the Light Brigade Essay

Comparing Dulce et Decorem Est with Charge of the lightly BrigadeAlthough both Dulce et Decorum Est and The Charge of the LightBrigade are around battle and the death of soldiers, they portray theexperience of war in different ways. The main difference between thepoems is the message they express. They seem to be writing approximatelycompletely different wars. Wilfred Owens poem Dulce et Decorum Est,was written from his point of view as a soldier in the war. It is muchmore personalized and affective than Charge of the Light Brigade.Tennysons poem, on the other hand was written as one of his duties asthe Poet Laureate at the time. It lacks the detail and also thepersonal experience that Owenss poem has, and gives the impressionthat Tennyson does not actually care well-nigh the war very much and doesnot know much about it. Charge of the Light Brigade was written tomemorialise a suicidal charge by light cavalry over open terrain byBritish forces in the Battle of Balaclava in the Cr imean War. 247 menof the 637 in the charge were killed or wounded.Tennyson wrote Light Brigade in a few minutes after yarn thedescription in The Times of the Battle of Balaclava in 1854. His poemincreased the morale of the British soldiers fighting in the CrimeanWar and of the people at home, but Tennyson had not been an eyewitnessto the battle he describes.I think Tennysons motive for writing this poem was to glorify the actof war, I notion he wanted to celebrate the bravery of the six hundredBritish troops who went to battle knowing that they were going to die.I think this because from my own acquaintance I know Lord Tennyson wasthe poet Laureate at the time of the Crimean war, but did not witnessany fight... ...atin is used. This contrastswith the rest of the poem and makes it more dramatic. The readerlingers on the last phrase to work out what it means and it makes moreof an impact on them in Latin than it would in English. The last lineof Charge of the Light Brigade is also very dramatic. As I havealready mentioned, it refers to the soldiers all the way through thepoem as the six hundred and and then at the end refers to them as thenoble six hundred as if the war is over and the soldiers arevictorious at the end of the poem.Overall I prefer Dulce et Decorum Est as it much more powerful toread. It is well structures and uses a lot of alliteration, assonance,such as white eyes writhing and repeating all the way through. Itmakes the reader feel guilty, angry and understand the pain andsuffering that the soldiers went through in a subtle way.