Monday, July 19, 2010
Smile, Smile, Smile - Wilfred Owen
I think the message of this poem is a bit harder to decipher tan the rest. At the beginning it’s easy, since the speaker is criticizing the newspapers and how they influence the readers by emphasizing the good side of war, like propaganda, and in the other hand barely even mentioning all the deaths and awful things that happen. And the speaker even says what the paper says, and shows how they use phrases such as: “Peace would do wrong to our undying dead…” and “We must be solidly indemnified” (9&12). Strong statements like these would create nationalistic feeling in people and support the war. However once the quote is over I get a bit confused. What do you think the end of the poem means?
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Mica, I think the end of the poem refers to the soldiers who smile because they know they are leaving. They smile since they are planning to flee from England to France where they believe they will be safe. However the papers do not know this. They do not know the reason the soldiers smile is because they know they will be safe and they know they are leaving soon. It is interesting how Owen talks about the soldiers as being the ones who kept the nation (England) in integrity when this is really contradicting since they were really kind of traders. They are traders since they are leaving their nation for their own safety. What do you think?
ReplyDeleteWell looking back at it, I think it is ironic that they “keep this nation in integrity” since they are leaving, so therefore they are not and cannot keep the nation together, they are actually dividing it (17). However, I do not really think they see France as safety, since after all they are going to fight in the front. Maybe what the speaker is referring to is how the soldiers smile as if they are happy to be fighting when actually they are most probably going to die a gruesome death, or see many at least. Not only that but the media only chooses to show the photographs of soldiers happy and smiling rather than the reality of war which would be pictures of pain and misery.
ReplyDeleteMica, I think you have a point when you say that the media chooses to show a misleading side of war, like the smiles and the photographs of happy soldiers, while playing down the the reality of war which is pain and misery. I think that Owen makes this same point at the beginning of the poem as well. He says, "Yesterday's mail; the causalities (typed small)/ And (large) Vast Booty from out latest Haul" (lines 2, 3). This line also shows that they media is literally making the bad news smaller and the small amount of good news they have bigger. They are trying to make the public forget about all the pain and misery, shown by the small lettering of the dead soldiers' names, by making the riches they get from war seem more important. Do you agree?
ReplyDeleteYes, I agree. After all, that was a strategy they used to persuade most of the population to join the war cause. However, the real question that thie poem brings up is: is it right to do so?
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