In the early twentieth century, people who were in the war would describe their experiences during the war through poems …show more content…
One of them was Ivor Gurney, a poet and composer of songs. In his poem, “The Silent One”, he describes the heroism of soldiers and injects a powerful sense of realism. He also uses sound in his poem to make it alive, like “hearing bullets whizzing – And thought of music –” (14-15). Through these lines, the speaker is trying to show that the soldier listened to his officer even in the darkness caked with the noise of gunshots. The acuteness of hearing and implementing accurately what has been suggested, is the base of this poem. Similarly, Wilfred Owen also described the pain one soldier had to go through in the battlefield. He highlights that there was nobody to mourn for those dead soldiers except “The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells;” (7). The speaker uses these uncharacteristic adjectives to draw the huge difference of what death is really like on the front. The reader gets to know the reality of death through these connecting words. Thus, sound create feelings from the bottom of the heart, which can be either good or bad or …show more content…
In “All the hills and vales along”, Charles Sorley describes the enthusiasm in soldiers, who are marching off to battle along with singing, but at the same time he also put light on their fate. The poem is not straightforwardly patriotic, but has the elements of celebratory tone which gets subtly subverted by the death phase of the soldiers. “All the music of their going” (35) is an ironic statement made by the speaker as ‘their going’ declares the beginning of the soldier’s march, but also of their coming death. He showed how soldiers were full of passion and power to fight and die for their country, which would not affect the earth as “Earth will echo still, when foot Lies numb and voice mute” (37-38). Compared to Owen’s Dulce et Decorum Est, which portrays a horrified scene of war, Sorley kept his poem less violent. Owen depicted the poor physical conditions of soldiers in the war, “Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,” (1). The simile highlights how the soldiers who are usually seen to be young, were aged prematurely by their experiences. On the other hand, Sorley showed the mental conditions of the soldiers who were full of passion to die for their country. This is how, sound can have different effects on reader’s