"Dulce et Decorum Est"--Wilfred Owen
- Paraphrase: A poem written during World War I; it describes the horrible conditions that British soldiers had to endure (losing their boots and having to walk long, arduous marches while bloody and exhausted); it then describes chemical attacks on the soldiers and one mangled soldier in particular: his face is practically melting and he is choking in the gas attack, stumbling around blindly...It ends with a line from Horace: Dulce et decorum est/Pro patria mori (it is sweet and fitting to die for one's country)
- Purpose: Owen's own opinion on the atrocities of war
- Structure: I read in one place that it is two sonnets that are linked together by a couplet, but it doesn't quite fit the exact requirements for a sonnet...it has three stanzas and a couplet dividing the first two from the last
- Shift: The shift might be at the very end, when he mentions the Latin line (which is when he turns it into a lesson), but the actual might also come at the second stanza, as Owen shifts away from just a description of the soldiers' conditions to the panic of chemical warfare
- Speaker: A (WWI) soldier
- Spelling/Grammar/Diction: Owen includes the Latin line from Horace; he uses very powerful, nightmarish language in the third stanza, and his diction/syntax in the second stanza conveys a sense of terror and confusion
- Tone: It begins (first stanza) miserable and melancholy; the rest is nightmarish
- Theme: The horror of warfare
- Paraphrase: "Prufrock is insecure" (poetsforum.com); he is getting older, questioning himself and fretting about little things; it begins with him taking the reader for a walk
- Purpose: I read one man's analysis on this poem, and he claims that Prufrock is actually Eliot's "neurotic alter ego"; perhaps his purpose is personal introspection and a release of his own thoughts and ideas without admitting that it is really himself
- Structure: Begins with an epigraph from Dante's Inferno,
- Shift: there is a shift in tense on...oh, I believe it is line 87 or 88...
- Speaker: J Alfred Prufrock
- Spelling/Grammar/Diction: the shift is a shift in grammar/tense; proper diction,
- Tone: pessimistic
- Theme: Inability to act/paralysis/perhaps pessimism (when I did my analysis on it about a month ago, I had settled on the first two themes; now I'm coming across some other people's ideas that I quite like, such as 'pessimism')
- Paraphrase: it seems that Thomas feels that people should fight against death, they should "rage against the dying of the light" (the ending of their lives); they should resist and "die fighting"; wild, good, and wise men fight against death in their final hours
- Purpose: goes over the ways you can live your life (the ways that the wise, good, and wild men did) but mostly revolves around telling the reader (towards the end he actually addresses his father) that he should go down swinging, inevitable as death is
- Structure: three-line stanzas, ABAB pattern (it's funny, I just realized that in these past 12 years, almost all of my teachers have passed off patterns saying "we won't spend long on this, you'll learn it next year." Or at least it seems that way.)
- Shift: at the last stanza, when it becomes personal (his father, I read that his father went to war and some take the poem to be about dying fighting in a war)
- Speaker: he writes "my father", so I'm assuming that this time, the author is narrating
- Spelling/Grammar/Diction: metaphors, aggressive diction
- Tone: melancholy, but aggressive (the choice of words such as rage)
- Theme: death/mortality, I suppose
- Paraphrase: The speaker is describing his father's morning routine and looking back on memories of his father; he'd wake up very early, start a fire, and do all of his work and duties without thanks; the narrator laments that he did not recognize what he had done when he was younger
- Purpose: expressing his thoughts on not realizing or understanding all of the things that are done for and sacrificed for us when we are younger
- Structure: three stanzas, non-rhyming
- Shift: line thirteen, where he acknowledges the ignorance of youth in this particular area
- Speaker: unknown--perhaps the author
- Spelling/Grammar/Diction: imagery
- Tone: lamenting/regretful, nostalgic
- Theme: unspoken love (between father and son),
- Paraphrase: the speaker is going out for a walk on Bristol Street, where he hears a person singing a song; the song starts sweet and 'lovey', but morphs into a darker, more cynical song, often speaking of time's harsh effects on life/love
- Purpose: writing about time's ravaging of love and relationships...
- Structure: 15 four-line stanzas;
- Shift: Line eight switches to a song the narrator hears a person singing; I believe it is line 56 when he goes back to his narration/line 21 marks a shift in tone/mood
- Speaker: unknown (unless it is the author), also the lover singing under the railway
- Spelling/Grammar/Diction: nature imagery, proper; the diction makes time into a character
- Tone: the first 20 lines have a love-like tone, the rest of the poem is more cynical
- Theme: (generally) love, time, so on...
Hello, I really enjoyed reading your post and I am looking forward to seeing more. When can you post the AP Prep Post 1? I look forward to reading it when you get the chance to publish it.
ReplyDeleteKelli could you please follow my blog?
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