Since times immemorial, military conflicts have been wiping whole generations off the face of the earth. The topic of war has been one of the most popular to render in works of art and literature. On the one hand, war has been proclaimed the business of ‘real men’ and glorified as the way to prove one’s loyalty to motherland. On the other hand, the horrors of war have brought enormous pain and suffering to people both directly and indirectly involved in it. The two poems, “Dulce Et Decorum Est” by Wilfred Owen (1917–18) and “Facing It” by Yusef Komunyakaa (2001), reflect on the theme of bitterness and cruelty of war, developing this theme through the various handling of setting, characters, structure and rhyme, and language. Although both concerning the subject of war, the settings of the two poems are quite different. “Dulce Et Decorum Est” is set in a trench of the First World War and dedicated to description of a gas attack and its ruinous consequences. The environment is described as a most unfriendly terrain that exhausts the soldiers: the sticky “sludge” clings to the soldiers’ boots and makes walking even more difficult (Owen, 1917–18). The sounds and sights of war are vividly shown in Owen’s (1917–18) poem through “the hoots / Of tired, outstripped Five-Nines”, “someone still […] yelling out”, and the repulsive vision of a soldier suffocating from a gas attack. In contrast to this reality of war action, Komunyakaa (2001) sets his poem in a place that has not experienced the Vietnam war directly on its territory and at a time when the war is already over. It is “the Vietnam Veterans Memorial”, with its “black granite” walls covered with the endless row of “58,022 names” commemorating the ones who perished in the war (Komunyakaa, 2001). There is not much sound involved in the poem, and the most expressive element of the setting is light. The narrator attempts to realize his attitude to the Vietnam war, “depending on the light / to make a difference” (Komunyakaa, 2001). The ‘life’ of the names on the granite wall also depend on the play of light, “shimmer[ing] on a woman’s blouse” (Komunyakaa, 2001). The sense of immense space is created through referring to a “red bird” and “A plane in the sky” — the only objects present at the scene apart from the monument itself and a couple of visitors (Komunyakaa, 2001). The point of view of the two poems differs not only due to the setting but also due to the narrators describing the events. “Dulce Et Decorum Est” is told by a narrator who is a soldier himself and directly takes part in the military action: this can be traced in using first person plural “we” in referring to the events (Owen 1917–18). In “Facing It”, the relation of the narrator to the Vietnam war remains unclear. The only information that links the narrator to the war itself is concluded in the lines “I go down the 58,022 names, / half-expecting to find / my own in letters like smoke” (Komunyakaa, 2001). This expectation of seeing own name in the list of Vietnam veterans suggests that the narrator was somehow involved in the military action but not necessarily as a soldier. Thus, the contrast between the narration of the poems lies in the fact that “Dulce Et Decorum Est” reports