AP Essay on Poetry

The Architect uses Techniques in the Text to create the Effect.

The Poet uses Poetic Devices in the Poem to create certain Effects.

Alike but Different Open-Ended Essay Poetry Essay Architect, technique, text effect Regards a broad theme or aspect of literature Don’t have the major work in front of you Requires broad understanding Rarely use direct quotation Architect, technique, text effect Regards a theme or technique particular to the poem Have direct access to the poem Requires close reading Uses abundant direct quotation

Keys to Poetry Essay Success Close reading Stick to the prompt focus Develop a central insight, significant meaning Abundant key word and phrase quotation Weave quoted material into your own statements Organize as needed: Devices, Development or Movement, Shifts

AP Style Prompt “Duclce et Decorum Est” Read the following poem carefully. Then discuss how the poet uses various poetic devices (such as irony, diction, imagery, narrative detail, point of view) to convey the speaker’s strongly stated attitude toward certain people’s mistaken, naïve notions concerning war. (Beneath would appear the entire poem reprinted for your close reading.).

In his poem "Dulce Et Decorum Est," Wilfred Owen captures the ironic distance between his title, a romanticized notion of war that declares "it is sweet and becoming to die for one's country" and his poem's depiction of war's ugly, "vile" reality. The first-person voice in the poem, a soldier tortured by gruesome dreams of the battlefield and its horrors, presents the dehumanizing effects of war in mixed tones of sadness, defeat, and horror. The poem starts in the past with the soldier's vivid recollections of his fellow soldiers trudging "blood shod," like "hags" and "beggars" and finishes in the present, where the emotionally scarred soldier is haunted by a young soldier's death he himself witnessed. Owen's speaker finally denounces war in the harshest and most sarcastic of terms, criticizing those supporters of war who tell patriotic lies to "children," who will eventually die on battlefields, suffering and "sick of sin."

Owen's first stanza opens with an immediate ironic contrast to the poem's cheery Latin title. In somber and depressing tones, the first-person narrator (a soldier) speaks of his fellow soldiers not with pride but with pity. These are defeated men, who "limp,"" lame,"" blind," and "deaf" toward a "distant rest" without purpose or strength. They are barely aware, barely alive, as they "trudge," marching "asleep" through the "sludge" of a devastated landscape. This is a portrait of men staggered by war's power, certainly not the idealistic, heroic view embodied in the Latin assertion that serves as the poem's title.

Owen then abruptly changes the tone and direction of the poem to continue his ironic attack on war as beautiful heroics. In the second stanza the calm devastation of the first stanza is destroyed with intense panic. "GAS! Gas!" announces a shift in the men's mood, from torpor to urgent action. The verbs reflect their terror as they are "fumbling," "stumbling," "floundering" to fit on their gas helmets to prevent their imminent deaths. These terrified, frightened soldiers are not gallant warriors racing against the enemy in noble action. The gas shell is emblematic of their lack of power, coming out of nowhere, falling from the sky, drowning them in a "green sea" like a force of nature they cannot defeat. They are hapless victims of forces beyond their control, pawns in a dehumanizing game that is anything but glorious.

The gas attack is the entry into a more personal point of view, one that moves from the collective "we" to the far more intimate singular "he" and "I." This movement also brings us closer to the intense feelings of the speaker as well as the grotesque suffering of the "helpless" man who dies an inglorious death, "drowning" in the fluid of his own lungs. Before he is done, Owen's speaker has presented this death in the most graphic diction, as the man is "guttering, choking, drowning" again and again, haunting the dreams of the traumatized speaker.

Owen's final stanza drives home the ironic comment most forcefully Owen's final stanza drives home the ironic comment most forcefully. His images become increasingly graphic as his language turns to a moral condemnation of the "comfortable patriot." He excoriates those who never saw battle yet send their youth to war. Focusing on the incident of the comrade's poisoning by mustard gas, the speaker challenges his audience with sarcasm-laced direct address, fairly spitting out his wrath as he states, "If you, could hear at every jolt, the blood/ come from the froth-corrupted lungs…My friend," you would not tell the "old Lie" that dying for one's country is "sweet and becoming." War, the battle-tested soldier knows, transforms the faces of innocents into "devil's sick of sin." War is a "cancer." It is a "sin," and supporting war lightly is a crime on par with the "obscene" actions of war itself.