Literary Stylistic Analysis of Arms and the Boy

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摘 要：本文从语音和修辞的角度出发，分析英国诗人欧文的诗歌《武器和男孩》的文体特征以及欧文如何运用语音和修辞的方法表达出战争的残酷和无情。

关键词：文体特征；语音；修辞

中图分类号：H05 文献标识码：Ａ

文章编号：1005-5312（2012）26-0204-01

1. Phonetic features

Though sounds in themselves have no meaning, they may acquire it through arbitrary and conventional associations in a language. Certain sounds may be appropriate to suggest certain meanings. Owen is very good at this. His poems often employ onomatopoeia to achieve particular meanings or effects. Owen uses lots of blunt stops, such as/b/, /k/, /d/ and /t/, to highlight the tense and horrible battle. In the first two lines of the open verse, /b/ appearing four times (boy, bayonet-blade and blood) just likes the chill-shining bayonets is in front of soldiers whose bodies are horribly mangled. Another example is the first line of second verse, the poet also chooses the “blind, blunt, bullet” containing /b/, / d/, /t/ stops. It seems the berserk bullets shooting soldiers from everywhere, guns bombs exploding, and gunfire forming a net surround soldiers. This prominence of a few lines of the sounds combines the sensory experience and scenarios together, thus, presenting a vivid mental picture of cold and cruel war to readers. In addition, the prominence lies on the / f /, / ∫ /, / θ /, / z / consonants. For example, the fourth line in the first verse, three words “famishing for flesh” all begin with fricative /f/, make us image that the vicious bayonets slash wildly at soldiers, like hungry tigers violently attack their victims.?Again, in the fourth line of the second verse contains “sharp, sharpness and death” three words, in the effect of that it likes the sound of sharp metal teeth harshly chewing soldiers’ bodies. In addition, the pronunciation of /∫/, /θ/ and /z/ is tense and harsh to indicate the unnatural auditor experience, and make readers understand the author’s averseness toward cruel war, his disillusionment, his suffering, and the horrors that he witnessed.

2. Rhetoric features

From the title of the poem, we can see the poet put “arms” and “the boy” abreast intentionally. Arms are cold weapons, which are made to destroy people. Owen personalizes arms. He describes the bayonets “Blue with all malice, like a madman’s flash”, the bullets “blind”, “Which long to nuzzle in the hearts of lads”, and “fine zinc teeth”, etc. Arms like evil demons try to destroy and kill people. The poem''s personifications of weapons of war simultaneously emphasize human and mechanical traits, pointing out that they are both unnatural and frighteningly human in their origin. The "cold steel" of a bayonet is emphasized alongside an image of the blade "keen with hunger of blood." Similarly, "blind, blunt bullet-heads" are "cartridges of fine zinc teeth." The frightening "famishing for flesh" felt by inanimate weapons reveals the hideous brutality of war and violence, which is so often concealed by euphemism and propaganda, like that expressed at the opening of each of the poem''s first two stanzas. Juxtaposed imagery of the mechanical and animate is combined with distinctly human emotion: the blade is "blue with all malice, like a madman''s flash;" imbued with insane feeling that cannot but be human. War is insane, war is hateful. Bullets are "sharp with the sharpness of grief and death"-tools that serve only to cause pain that radiates out, not just into the wounded body, but that diffuses into the lives of every person in the world. The poem''s negative imagery is all human: weapons, insane and "longing" hunger, and painful emotion.

3. Conclusion

From the above analysis we can see that Owen describes the cruel modern war in a vivid and pictorial detail by taking full advantage of the foregrounding of poetic language, from phonetic and rhetorical aspects, which reveals the insignificance and helpless of people in the modern war. Basically speaking, all the phonetic and rhetorical aspects service for the theme “misery and cruelty of war”. Owen describes the characteristics of modern war not only to express his disillusionment, his suffering, and the horrors that he witnessed, but also to let people reflect the war. In another way, his words also indicated that after the initial subsiding of patriotism many citizens began to wonder why the war was fought at all.

References：

[1]Leech G N. A Linguistic Guide to English Poetry [M]. Beijing: Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press, 2001:237, 24.