intro poem commentary

Why would someone run over a hill, if they knew they’ll get killed at the top? The poem by Wilfred Owen “Spring Offensive” and the poem “Attack” by Siegfried Sassoon both cope with scenarios such as this one. While both poems speak of war in different ways and through the use of different devices, the two lyric poems have many similarities. Despite the fact that both were written during WWI, Sassoon’s “Attack” is an elegy, while Owens “Spring Offensive” has elegaic elements to it. The main idea portrayed in “Spring Offensive” speaks of man and the destruction he causes through war to nature and the earth, but also himself. “Attack” also speaks of the horrors of the war, and partly mentions how the individual is affected by it. Therefore, the two poems are very alike in content, since both are set during an attack on the front against the enemy, and the horrors this attack and the state of war brings with it. These main ideas are portrayed and displayed in the pieces through mainly imagery, both sensory and figurative, as well as tone, rhetoric, persona, structure and language. Although one may be more present in one of the poems than in the other, both use imagery as their main device to emphasize the horrors of the war, and criticize those that initiate the fighting in the first place.