Comparing Wilfred Owens Poem, Dulce et Decorum Est and Stings Song, C

Comparing Wilfred Owen's Poem, Dulce et Decorum Est and Sting's Song, Children's Crusade Is it really sweet and fitting to die for one's country? This may seem glorious to some, but to those who have studied World War I and its terrible consequences, this seems a lie. The poet Wilfred Owen was a participant in this war, and wrote the poem "Dulce et Decorum Est" ("It is sweet and fitting [to die for one's country]") to his poet friends about the voracity, hopelessness, and futility of war, and the desperate plight of the soldiers involved. Almost seventy-five years later, the popular artist Sting worried about the world in which his son was growing up, a world in which older, experienced adults took advantage of innocent children to increase their own power. Using World War I as a comparison to his own time, he wrote the song "Children's Crusade" about these scheming, power-hungry people. Both these poets describe a war in which children were abused, controlled by other's selfish wants. Although Sting mainly uses strong allusions to describe the soldiers' loss of innocenc e, Owen's poem uses jarring, tangible images of reality that are emotionally more universal. As in other effective poetry, Sting uses strong language to convey the world's cruelty toward the innocent. He describes the soldiers in the war using the phrases "Virgins with rifles" (3), "Pawns in a game" (5), "Marching through countries they've never seen" (2). These phrases appeal to parental nature and sense of decency. "Virgins" suggests not only a feeling of inno-cence, but a feeling of virtue about to be lost. Sting uses the phrase "the flower of England, face down in the mud" (11), giving us a beautiful, fresh image to symbolize these young soldiers. He t... ...s a general anti-war feeling, which is only one of the points that form his argument, instead of a feeling for the plight of the children of his day. The theme of heroin addiction remains unknown to most. Sting does wield effective images, as does Owen, but as Sting's allusions remain unknown, Owen's tailoring to basic human emotions makes us regret the soldiers' loss of innocence. Works Cited Primary Sources Owen W 'Dulce et Decorum Est' [online] accessed at http://www.illyria.com/owenpro.html; (2002) Sting, Children's Crusade http://www.elyrics.net/go/s/sting-lyrics/children_s-crusade-lyrics/ Secondary Sources Beasley. C (2002) Wilfred Owen The Literature Network [online] accessed at http://www.online-literature.com/owen/ Roberts E V, Jacobs H.E (2000) Literature: An Introduction to Reading and Writing (6th Edition) Prentice Hall College Div