"Who's for the game?": compare and contrast the representation of war in Jessie Pope's 'Who's for the Game?' and Wilfred Owen's 'Dulce et Decorum Est'.

[Introduction]Published in 1916 and 1917 respectively, both Jessie Pope's 'Who's for the Game?' and Wilfred Owen's 'Dulce et Decorum Est' are English poems that directly react to the catastrophic outbreak of World War One in 1914. However, whereas Pope urges the men of England to enlist and fight for their country in a blatant display of jingoism, Owen criticises the nation's naivety about war by showing that it is not a heroic adventure or 'game' - as Pope and others have led them to believe - but a horrific nightmare. Indeed, this conflict between the romanticisation of war as an adventure and its terrifying reality is a theme that is similarly dealt with in other war-related texts, such as R. C. Sherriff's 'Journey's End', where the young and naive recruits repeatedly compare war to a university rugby game.
Pope's 'Who's for the Game?' exudes a spirited energy: littered with verbs such as 'crashing', 'grip', 'tackle', it is a dynamic poem that plays on a sense of youthful eagerness. This rousing energy is further suggested by the constant and relentless use of rhetorical questions: 'who'll toe the line for the signal to "go!"?/ who'll give his country a hand?'. The tone of excitement suggests that the speaker is addressing a youthful audience, exploiting their romanticised idea of war as a heroic game of chivalry and adventure and, thus, galvanising them to enlist. Compared to the dynamism of Pope's poem, 'Dulce et Decorum est' conveys the soldiers' fatigue and exhaustion as it uses verbs such as 'sludge' and 'trudge', which draws out the syllables and slows the pace of the poem down to a monotonous droll. The other verbs are nightmarish: a 'flound'ring' man caught in a gas attack ends up 'guttering, choking, drowning'. 'Dulce et Decorum Est' similarly constructs the soldiers as children, but to criticise the nation's encouragement of young men to enlist. Indeed, as the speaker states, 'you would not tell with such high zest/ To children ardent for some desperate glory/ The old lie: Dulce et Decorum est/ Pro patria mori' ('how sweet and honourable it is to die for one's country').