Jackson Carnes
Mr. Cohen
ENG2D
December 2nd, 2020
To what extent was World War One a tragic event? consider the methods used in two poems.
The first poem that I have chosen is Suicide in the trenches. Within I the tragedy is presented by Sassoon becausethe horror of a boy killing himself in the trench. In the text it says “ He put a bullet through his brain,” these quotations explain what the boy did to commit suicide. As it says “Bullet through his brain” these words are the most important because they fully explain what the man did to himself while he was in the trench. As you can see the author used direct address because in the third stanza he mentions “you” which is referring to the reader who didn’t go to war so the author is bitter towards them. I think that if the soldiers back then had an opportunity to choose whether they wanted to go to war or not a lot of them would choose not to go and that’s why war is such a tragedy because people don’t want to fight but they half to because they don’t want to be looked at as a coward.
The second paragraph that I have chosen is Dulce Et Decorum Est. In Dulce Et Decorum Est tragedy is presented in the poem because it talks about people dying and the state of the soldiers. In the text it says “the blood Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,” These quotations describe the state some of the soldiers were in and what others had to walk by. The words “blood from lungs” just describes how grucom and how much of a tragedy the war was, it explains what happened. The author from this text also used direct address to get the reader's attention because in stanza three it mentions “you” so it is referring to the reader and trying to get them to think about what they could have done if they went to war back then. The soldiers would experienced this tragedy in real life because soldiers needed to walk past dead bodies and see the look on their faces and see all the blood on their bodies.
Both poems are similar in a way because they talk about people dying, also they talk about how people are sitting in their homes while people are fighting for them. These texts are similar because In the first text it mentions this “You smug-faced crowds with kindling eye, cheer when soldiers march by, Home and pray you’ll never know, The hell where youth and laughter go.” The evidence from the first supports the thesis because it explains that there are people at home while others are fighting, keeping them safe and while they are at home doing nothing. In the second text it mentions this “If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs”. This explains that there were soldiers that brutally got killed and people couldn't help them. It also mentions “you” which means that he is talking about the people that weren’t there because they weren’t fighting for their country. both poems pretty much approached the same because the language features are kinda the same because they both use direct address.
In conclusion both texts are similar because they both talk about how tragic and gruesome the war was and how serious it was to go to war for your country. They also both follow the same structure so they talk about how tragic it was and then in the end they both come at you with direct address trying to get you to imagine what it would have been like if you fought in the war for your country.
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