Dulce et Decorum Est

Wilfred Owen

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,

Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs,
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots,
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of gas-shells dropping softly behind.

Gas! GAS! Quick, boys!—An ecstasy of fumbling

Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time,
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime.—
Dim through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams before my helpless sight,

He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace

Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,—
My friend, 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.


“Dulce et Decorum Est” Introduction



"Dulce et Decorum Est" is a poem by the English poet Wilfred Owen.

Like most of Owen's work, it was written between August 1917 and
September 1918, while he was fighting in World War 1. Owen is known
 for his wrenching descriptions of suffering in war. In "Dulce et Decorum
Est," he illustrates the brutal everyday struggle of a company of
soldiers, focuses on the story of one soldier's agonizing death, and
discusses the trauma that this event left behind. He uses a quotation
from the Roman poet Horace to highlight the difference between the
glorious image of war (spread by those not actually fighting in it) and
war's horrifying reality.

“Bent double, like old beggars under sacks”

The speaker begins with a description of soldiers, bent under

the weight of their packs like beggars

“Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,”

their knees unsteady, coughing like poor and sick old women,
and struggling miserably through a muddy landscape.

“Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs,”

They turn away from the light flares (a German tactic of briefly
lighting up the area in order to spot and kill British soldiers),

“And towards our distant rest began to trudge.”

and begin to march towards their distant camp.

“Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots,

But limped on, blood-shod.”
The men are so tired that they seem to be sleeping as they
walk. Many have lost their combat boots, yet continue on
despite their bare and bleeding feet.

“All went lame; all blind;”

The soldiers are so worn out they are essentially disabled;

they don't see anything at all.

“Drunk with fatigue;”

They are tired to the point of feeling drunk,

“deaf even to the hoots

Of gas-shells dropping softly behind.”

and don't even notice the sound of the dangerous poison gas-
shells dropping just behind them.

”Gas! GAS! Quick, boys!—An ecstasy of fumbling

Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time,”

Somebody cries out an urgent warning about the poison

gas, and the soldiers fumble with their gas masks, getting
them on just in time.

“But someone still was yelling out and stumbling”

. One man, however, is left yelling and struggling, unable to
get his mask on.

“And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime.—”

The speaker describes this man as looking like someone

caught in fire or lime (an ancient chemical weapon used to
effectively blind opponents)

“Dim through the misty panes and thick green light,

As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.”

The speaker then compares the scene—through the panes of

his gas-mask and with poison gas filling the air — to being
underwater, and imagines the soldier is drowning.

“In all my dreams before my helpless sight,

He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.”

The speaker jumps from the past moment of the gas attack to
a present moment sometime afterward, and describes a
recurring dream that he can't escape, in which the dying
soldier races toward him in agony.

“If in some smothering dreams,”

The speaker directly addresses the audience, suggesting that if
readers could experience their own such suffocating dreams

“ you too could pace

Behind the wagon that we flung him in,”

(marching behind a wagon in which the other men have placed

the dying soldier,

“And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,

His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;”

seeing the writhing of the dying soldier's eyes in an otherwise

slack and wrecked face,

“If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood

Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,—”

and hearing him cough up blood from his ruined lungs at every
bump in the path—a sight the speaker compares to the horror
of cancer and other diseases that ravage even the innocent),

“My friend, you would not tell with such high zes”

they would not so eagerly tell children, hungry for a sense of

heroism
 “The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.”

the old lie that "it is sweet and fitting to die for one's country.


“Dulce et Decorum Est” Themes




The Horror and Trauma of War

Wilfred Owen wrote “Dulce et Decorum Est” while he was fighting as a

soldier during World War I. The poem graphically and bitterly describes
the horrors of that war in particular, although it also implicitly speaks
of the horror of all wars. While it is easy to comment on the “horror of
war” in the abstract, the poem’s depiction of these horrors is
devastating in its specificity, and also in the way that Owen makes
clear that such horror permeates all aspects of war. The banal daily life
of a soldier is excruciating, the brutal reality of death is unimaginable
agony, and even surviving a war after watching others die invites a
future of endless trauma. The way Owen uses language to put readers
inside the experiences of a soldier helps them begin to understand the
horrific experience of all of these awful aspects of war.

In the first stanza of “Dulce et Decorum Est,” the speaker thrusts the
reader into the mundane drudgery and suffering of the wartime
experience, as the speaker’s regiment walks from the front lines back
to an undescribed place of “distant rest.” This is not a portrait of men
driven by purpose or thrilled by battle. Instead, they are miserable:
“coughing like hags,” cursing as they “trudge” through “sludge” with
bloody feet. They march “asleep,” suggesting that these soldiers are
like a kind of living dead. The terror and brutality of war have
deadened them.


 While the speaker is clear that the life of a soldier is painful and
demoralizing, he demonstrates in the second stanza—which moves
from describing the communal “we” of a regiment to a specific dying
man—that death in war is also terrible: barbarous, agonizing, and
meaningless. In the first two lines of the second stanza, the speaker
captures the terror and dumb confusion of facing a gas attack (a
feature of Word War I combat, which had never been used to such a
terrible extent before that war), with the movement from the first cry
of “Gas!” to the urgent amplification of that cry (“GAS!”), which is then
followed by all the men “fumbling” with “clumsy helmets.” The speaker
then describes a particular man unable to get his helmet on time,
“stumbling” and “flound’ring” like a “man in fire” while the speaker
can only watch helplessly from within his own mask. This other
soldier's death is mired in confusion and pain. There isn’t even an
enemy to face; it is a physically agonizing death offering no ideal or
purpose to hold onto.

The poem’s very short third stanza suddenly plunges into the
speaker’s own mind. In doing so, the poem reveals another aspect of
the horror of war: that even surviving war offers ceaseless future
torment. The surviving speaker describes himself as seeing in “all my
dreams” this man dying in agony. The speaker can’t escape this vision,
which means he can't ever achieve the "rest" that was the sole
positive thing mentioned in the first stanza. The speaker's sleep is
permanently haunted by the trauma of the death he has witnessed.


 Since the third stanza is written in the present tense, it indicates that
these dreams never fade. The speaker, who has survived—perhaps for
a moment, perhaps the entire war—is permanently scarred by this
trauma for however long his life will last. The poem’s portrayal of the
horror of war, then, is complete and total. It reveals all aspects of war
—living through it, dying in it, and surviving it—as being brutal,
agonizing, and without meaning.





The Enduring Myth that War is Glorious

In its first three stanzas, “Dulce et Decorum Est” presents a vision of

war—and World War I in particular—that is entirely brutal, bitter, and
pessimistic. The fourth and final stanza marks a shift. While the first
stanza focused on the “we” of the regiment, the second focused on the
“he” of the dying soldier, and the third on the “I” of the traumatized
speaker, the fourth stanza focuses on the “you” of the reader. In this
stanza, the speaker directly addresses the reader, trying to make them
understand the brutal reality of war. This is an effort to contradict what
the speaker describes as the “old Lie,” the commonly held belief—
communicated in the lines of Latin from the poet Horace (“it is sweet
and fitting to die for one’s country”)—that war, and dying in war, is
meaningful and full of glory.

It is possible to read this last stanza in a hopeful way by imagining that

the poem could effectively communicate to non-soldiers the brutality
of war. In this view, Owen wrote the poem with the belief that by
highlighting the juxtaposition between a sanitized image of honorable
death (as described by Horace) versus the messy, horrifying truth of
actual war, perhaps the poem’s audience will change its attitude
towards war and cease cheerfully sending young men—mere
"children"—to die in agony.


 To read the poem in a hopeful way, however, requires readers to
believe that empathy is enough to change central beliefs. This is a
plausible reading, but it hinges on the speaker’s descriptions being
disturbing and evocative enough to counter what Owen describes as a
sentimental belief about war that dates back to antiquity—a difficult
task for one short poem, no matter how powerful. In light of this, it’s
perhaps a more careful reading of the poem to interpret the final
stanza with a degree of pessimism. In this reading (while one might
still agree that Owen wrote the poem in hopes of changing minds), the
speaker is ultimately pessimistic about his ability to change the civilian
public’s attitude towards war. As the speaker puts it: If the audience
could experience the trauma the speaker describes (“the white eyes
writhing,” the “gargling from froth-corrupted lungs”), then they
wouldn’t pass their patriotic militarism down to their children. But
they don’t experience it, except through the language of the poem,
and the poem gives a hint of despair that such language isn’t enough.

In the final two lines of "Dulce et Decorum Est," Owen implies this
pessimistic view in two main ways. First, and simply, the speaker
allows Horace to have the final word. The speaker undercuts Horace’s
lines by calling them a lie, but that description comes before the Latin
text. That Horace’s words are allowed to end the poem implies a sense
that Horace’s words and belief in the glory and honor of war will
outweigh the vision of horror described by the poem. Further, by
referring to this false story about the glory of war as “the old Lie,” and
then quoting a Latin line from the Roman poet Horace, the speaker
makes clear that the depiction of war as glorious is not just a
 simple misconception made by those unfamiliar with war. It is, rather,
a lie—a purposefully told falsehood. And it is a lie that has been told for
thousands of years in order to inspire young men to willingly give their
lives to serve the political needs of their countries.

“Dulce et Decorum Est” is not, then, simply trying to reveal the horror
of war to the unknowing public (though it certainly is trying to do that).
The poem is also condemning the historical institutions and
political/social structures that have, for time immemorial, sent young
men to their deaths based on pretty tales of glory. The poem demands
that the reader face the truth and no longer be complicit with that old
Lie, but even as it does so, it seems to bitterly perceive that nothing
will change, because nothing ever has.



Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of
“Dulce et Decorum Est”


Lines 1-4

Owen begins the poem with a description of marching soldiers. His

focus is on the grimness and misery of the situation, which seems to
have rapidly aged the men and zapped them of life. In the first line, the
speaker compares the soldiers to "old beggars" bent under their
burdens. In line 2, he compares their coughing to that of "hags," a
 derogatory term for old women, and emphasizes their physical
weariness as they struggle through mud. In lines 3 and 4 he clarifies
direction, showing the reader that the soldiers are marching away from
enemy territory (marked by the "flares") and towards the place where
they will be able to rest.

The first four lines thus set up a scene, helping the reader understand
the soldiers' fatigue, their frustration (expressed by cursing), and the
constant danger that still surrounds them (represented by the flares).
Owen uses consonance to lend a harshness to the sounds of the
poem. In the first line, the letter "b" appears in three stressed words
("bent," "double," and "beggars"). This gives way to hard "c" and "k"
sounds, with "sacks," "coughing," "cursed," and "backs." Although the
"k" sounds of "knock-kneed" are silent, they contribute visually to the
hard consonants of this section. The sibilance of "distant rest,"
meanwhile, makes it stand out from the rest of the landscape,
sounding like a whisper, perhaps not entirely real.

These lines are basically in iambic pentameter, a meter that consists of

five iambs per line. This sets up the expectation that the rest of the
poem will follow this pattern. Owen does play with stress a little,
though. He crams more stressed syllables into the first two lines than
belong in iambic pentameter.

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,


 Knock-kneed, coughing like hags

This decision sets the rhythm of the poem rocking. It's over-stressed,
unstable, reflecting the instability and roughness of the scene the
speaker is describing.

deAsk LitChartsNew

“Dulce et Decorum Est” Introduction



"Dulce et Decorum Est" is a poem by the English poet Wilfred Owen.

Like most of Owen's work, it was written between August 1917 and
September 1918, while he was fighting in World War 1. Owen is known
for his wrenching descriptions of suffering in war. In "Dulce et Decorum
Est," he illustrates the brutal everyday struggle of a company of
soldiers, focuses on the story of one soldier's agonizing death, and
discusses the trauma that this event left behind. He uses a quotation
from the Roman poet Horace to highlight the difference between the
glorious image of war (spread by those not actually fighting in it) and
war's horrifying reality.



“Dulce et Decorum Est” Summary


The speaker begins with a description of soldiers, bent under the

weight of their packs like beggars, their knees unsteady, coughing like
 poor and sick old women, and struggling miserably through a muddy
landscape. They turn away from the light flares (a German tactic of
briefly lighting up the area in order to spot and kill British soldiers), and
begin to march towards their distant camp. The men are so tired that
they seem to be sleeping as they walk. Many have lost their combat
boots, yet continue on despite their bare and bleeding feet. The
soldiers are so worn out they are essentially disabled; they don't see
anything at all. They are tired to the point of feeling drunk, and don't
even notice the sound of the dangerous poison gas-shells dropping just
behind them.

Somebody cries out an urgent warning about the poison gas, and the
soldiers fumble with their gas masks, getting them on just in time. One
man, however, is left yelling and struggling, unable to get his mask
on. The speaker describes this man as looking like someone caught in
fire or lime (an ancient chemical weapon used to effectively blind
opponents). The speaker then compares the scene—through the panes
of his gas-mask and with poison gas filling the air — to being
underwater, and imagines the soldier is drowning.

The speaker jumps from the past moment of the gas attack to a
present moment sometime afterward, and describes a recurring dream
that he can't escape, in which the dying soldier races toward him in
agony.


 The speaker directly addresses the audience, suggesting that if
readers could experience their own such suffocating dreams (marching
behind a wagon in which the other men have placed the dying
soldier, seeing the writhing of the dying soldier's eyes in an otherwise
slack and wrecked face, and hearing him cough up blood from his
ruined lungs at every bump in the path—a sight the speaker compares
to the horror of cancer and other diseases that ravage even the
innocent), they would not so eagerly tell children, hungry for a sense of
heroism, the old lie that "it is sweet and fitting to die for one's
country."


“Dulce et Decorum Est” Themes





The Horror and Trauma of War

Wilfred Owen wrote “Dulce et Decorum Est” while he was fighting as a

soldier during World War I. The poem graphically and bitterly describes
the horrors of that war in particular, although it also implicitly speaks
of the horror of all wars. While it is easy to comment on the “horror of
 war” in the abstract, the poem’s depiction of these horrors is
devastating in its specificity, and also in the way that Owen makes
clear that such horror permeates all aspects of war. The banal daily life
of a soldier is excruciating, the brutal reality of death is unimaginable
agony, and even surviving a war after watching others die invites a
future of endless trauma. The way Owen uses language to put readers
inside the experiences of a soldier helps them begin to understand the
horrific experience of all of these awful aspects of war.

In the first stanza of “Dulce et Decorum Est,” the speaker thrusts the
reader into the mundane drudgery and suffering of the wartime
experience, as the speaker’s regiment walks from the front lines back
to an undescribed place of “distant rest.” This is not a portrait of men
driven by purpose or thrilled by battle. Instead, they are miserable:
“coughing like hags,” cursing as they “trudge” through “sludge” with
bloody feet. They march “asleep,” suggesting that these soldiers are
like a kind of living dead. The terror and brutality of war have
deadened them.

While the speaker is clear that the life of a soldier is painful and
demoralizing, he demonstrates in the second stanza—which moves
from describing the communal “we” of a regiment to a specific dying
man—that death in war is also terrible: barbarous, agonizing, and
meaningless. In the first two lines of the second stanza, the speaker
captures the terror and dumb confusion of facing a gas attack (a
feature of Word War I combat, which had never been used to such a
terrible extent before that war), with the movement from the first cry
 of “Gas!” to the urgent amplification of that cry (“GAS!”), which is then
followed by all the men “fumbling” with “clumsy helmets.” The speaker
then describes a particular man unable to get his helmet on time,
“stumbling” and “flound’ring” like a “man in fire” while the speaker
can only watch helplessly from within his own mask. This other
soldier's death is mired in confusion and pain. There isn’t even an
enemy to face; it is a physically agonizing death offering no ideal or
purpose to hold onto.

The poem’s very short third stanza suddenly plunges into the
speaker’s own mind. In doing so, the poem reveals another aspect of
the horror of war: that even surviving war offers ceaseless future
torment. The surviving speaker describes himself as seeing in “all my
dreams” this man dying in agony. The speaker can’t escape this vision,
which means he can't ever achieve the "rest" that was the sole
positive thing mentioned in the first stanza. The speaker's sleep is
permanently haunted by the trauma of the death he has witnessed.

Since the third stanza is written in the present tense, it indicates that
these dreams never fade. The speaker, who has survived—perhaps for
a moment, perhaps the entire war—is permanently scarred by this
trauma for however long his life will last. The poem’s portrayal of the
horror of war, then, is complete and total. It reveals all aspects of war
—living through it, dying in it, and surviving it—as being brutal,
agonizing, and without meaning.





The Enduring Myth that War is Glorious

In its first three stanzas, “Dulce et Decorum Est” presents a vision of

war—and World War I in particular—that is entirely brutal, bitter, and
pessimistic. The fourth and final stanza marks a shift. While the first
stanza focused on the “we” of the regiment, the second focused on the
 “he” of the dying soldier, and the third on the “I” of the traumatized
speaker, the fourth stanza focuses on the “you” of the reader. In this
stanza, the speaker directly addresses the reader, trying to make them
understand the brutal reality of war. This is an effort to contradict what
the speaker describes as the “old Lie,” the commonly held belief—
communicated in the lines of Latin from the poet Horace (“it is sweet
and fitting to die for one’s country”)—that war, and dying in war, is
meaningful and full of glory.

It is possible to read this last stanza in a hopeful way by imagining that

the poem could effectively communicate to non-soldiers the brutality
of war. In this view, Owen wrote the poem with the belief that by
highlighting the juxtaposition between a sanitized image of honorable
death (as described by Horace) versus the messy, horrifying truth of
actual war, perhaps the poem’s audience will change its attitude
towards war and cease cheerfully sending young men—mere
"children"—to die in agony.

To read the poem in a hopeful way, however, requires readers to

believe that empathy is enough to change central beliefs. This is a
plausible reading, but it hinges on the speaker’s descriptions being
disturbing and evocative enough to counter what Owen describes as a
sentimental belief about war that dates back to antiquity—a difficult
task for one short poem, no matter how powerful. In light of this, it’s
perhaps a more careful reading of the poem to interpret the final
stanza with a degree of pessimism. In this reading (while one might
still agree that Owen wrote the poem in hopes of changing minds), the
 speaker is ultimately pessimistic about his ability to change the civilian
public’s attitude towards war. As the speaker puts it: If the audience
could experience the trauma the speaker describes (“the white eyes
writhing,” the “gargling from froth-corrupted lungs”), then they
wouldn’t pass their patriotic militarism down to their children. But
they don’t experience it, except through the language of the poem,
and the poem gives a hint of despair that such language isn’t enough.

In the final two lines of "Dulce et Decorum Est," Owen implies this
pessimistic view in two main ways. First, and simply, the speaker
allows Horace to have the final word. The speaker undercuts Horace’s
lines by calling them a lie, but that description comes before the Latin
text. That Horace’s words are allowed to end the poem implies a sense
that Horace’s words and belief in the glory and honor of war will
outweigh the vision of horror described by the poem. Further, by
referring to this false story about the glory of war as “the old Lie,” and
then quoting a Latin line from the Roman poet Horace, the speaker
makes clear that the depiction of war as glorious is not just a
simple misconception made by those unfamiliar with war. It is, rather,
a lie—a purposefully told falsehood. And it is a lie that has been told for
thousands of years in order to inspire young men to willingly give their
lives to serve the political needs of their countries.

“Dulce et Decorum Est” is not, then, simply trying to reveal the horror
of war to the unknowing public (though it certainly is trying to do that).
The poem is also condemning the historical institutions and
political/social structures that have, for time immemorial, sent young
 men to their deaths based on pretty tales of glory. The poem demands
that the reader face the truth and no longer be complicit with that old
Lie, but even as it does so, it seems to bitterly perceive that nothing
will change, because nothing ever has.


Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of
“Dulce et Decorum Est”


Lines 1-4

Owen begins the poem with a description of marching soldiers. His

focus is on the grimness and misery of the situation, which seems to
have rapidly aged the men and zapped them of life. In the first line, the
speaker compares the soldiers to "old beggars" bent under their
burdens. In line 2, he compares their coughing to that of "hags," a
derogatory term for old women, and emphasizes their physical
weariness as they struggle through mud. In lines 3 and 4 he clarifies
direction, showing the reader that the soldiers are marching away from
enemy territory (marked by the "flares") and towards the place where
they will be able to rest.

The first four lines thus set up a scene, helping the reader understand
the soldiers' fatigue, their frustration (expressed by cursing), and the
 constant danger that still surrounds them (represented by the flares).
Owen uses consonance to lend a harshness to the sounds of the
poem. In the first line, the letter "b" appears in three stressed words
("bent," "double," and "beggars"). This gives way to hard "c" and "k"
sounds, with "sacks," "coughing," "cursed," and "backs." Although the
"k" sounds of "knock-kneed" are silent, they contribute visually to the
hard consonants of this section. The sibilance of "distant rest,"
meanwhile, makes it stand out from the rest of the landscape,
sounding like a whisper, perhaps not entirely real.

These lines are basically in iambic pentameter, a meter that consists of

five iambs per line. This sets up the expectation that the rest of the
poem will follow this pattern. Owen does play with stress a little,
though. He crams more stressed syllables into the first two lines than
belong in iambic pentameter.

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,

Knock-kneed, coughing like hags

This decision sets the rhythm of the poem rocking. It's over-stressed,
unstable, reflecting the instability and roughness of the scene the
speaker is describing.




“Dulce et Decorum Est” Symbols



The Dying Soldier


 Although the dying soldier in "Dulce et Decorum Est" is an individual
character within the narrative, he also stands in for a generation of
young men exposed to the brutality of WWI. The speaker's argument
rests on the implicit truth that the dying soldier's experience isn't
isolated, and that to the contrary there were many, many deaths like
this one. That the soldier is associated with the word "innocent" in line
24 emphasizes the injustice and horror of his death and that of others
like him.

As an innocent, the poem also connects the soldier to the "children" of

line 26, who are also, by virtue of being children, "innocent." The dying
soldier, and the generation he represents, cannot be saved. Their lives
have already been forfeited to war. But the poem makes clear that the
next generation—the children—are doomed to repeat the pattern,
unless the "old Lie" is finally seen as being the lie it is.



“Dulce et Decorum Est” Poetic Devices &
Figurative Language


Allusion

In the title and the final two lines of this "Dulce et Decorum Est,"
Owen alludes to an ode by the Roman poet Horace. Horace's ode
encouraged young men to find fulfillment and discipline in military
 service. The poem criticizes cowardice and weakness, pointing out that
everyone dies in the end, whether gloriously or not. Given this, Horace
argues that it is best to strive for courage and a steely temperament.
The quotation—which in English reads "It is sweet and fitting to die for
one's country"—might have been familiar to Owen's original readers, if
they were Englishmen with a similar education background. Horace's
Odes were a common text in Latin lessons of the era before World War
1, and Horace's ideas of what is and isn't virtuous and honorable were
commonly accepted as being correct. In fact, this exact quotation was
carved into the wall of a prestigious military academy in England in
1913. The kind of "wisdom" that Horace represents is ingrained,
respected, even taken for granted.

Often, poets include allusions as a way to connect a poem to a

traditional event, myth, or idea—to place their own poem into that
tradition. But Owen includes the allusion to Horace for exactly the
opposite reason. Owen's poem—which is full of brutal, awful death that
is marked by only confusion and agony, and to which glory and
courage could not even begin to apply—seeks to expose the entire
traditional belief in the glory and honor of war as being a lie. That he
includes the original lines from Horace, and not a paraphrase or
English translation, makes clear that it is the entire tradition, from
Roman antiquity to the time of World War I, that he sees as fraudulent
and destructive. Put another way: Owen seeks to undermine and refute
what he is alluding to.


 Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “Dulce
et Decorum Est”



Form

This poem doesn't follow a specific traditional form. It consists of four

stanzas. The first is 8 lines long, the second 6, the third 2, and
the fourth 12. There might be a hidden reference to the sonnet in this
structure. A sonnet is a poem of 14 lines in iambic pentameter and
this poem has 28 lines—exactly twice as many. The first 14 lines of the
poem (stanza 1 and 2) tell a story, while the second 14 (stanza 3 and
4) analyze that story from the present tense. These two parts of the
poem could be read as a pair of broken sonnets, though their rhyme
scheme does not align with the traditional sonnet format.

The poem as a potential pair of sonnets is not its only interesting

structural aspect. Another interesting thing to note is that the second
and third stanzas seem like they should be one stanza, since they are
linked by their end rhymes (the third stanza finishes the pattern that
the second has set up). The break between these two stanzas
highlights that the setting of the poem has moved from the past in
stanza 2 to the present in stanza 3. At the same time, its unexpected
appearance links that present to the past, which makes sense since
the third stanza is actually talking about how the speaker can't escape
 from the trauma of the past (seeing the other soldier die in the gas
attack).




Meter

The overarching meter of "Dulce et Decorum Est"

is iambic pentameter, a line consisting of five "feet," each of which
contains an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed one (da-dum).
Owen regularly diverges from this meter in many subtle ways,
however. Some of the lines fall perfectly within the meter:

In all my dreams before my helpless sight

But most of the lines in the poem are metrically imperfect, and even
the variations that Owen makes to the meter are inconsistent. Take,
for instance, this line:

Knock-kneed, coughing
like hags, we cursed through sludge


 This line contains two trochees (a stressed syllable followed by an
unstressed) before falling back into the iambic pattern. But line 7
seems to break out of the meter entirely:

Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots

With these variations, Owen keeps the music of the poem from falling
into anticipated patterns. This has the effect of keeping readers on
their toes, and echoing the unpredictability of the soldiers' situation.




Rhyme Scheme

In contrast to its complexity of meter, this poem follows a very simple

rhyme scheme. Sequences of four lines are end-rhymed alternately.
The full rhyme scheme is:

ABABCDCD EFEFGH GH IJIJKLKLMNMN

Owen does not use any end rhyme sounds more than twice. He also
chooses very simple words for his rhymes. All of them are perfect
rhymes, meaning that their stressed syllables (and any following
 syllables) share identical sounds. Most of them are no more than one
syllable, with a couple of exceptions.

The most remarkable use of rhyme in the poem is the rhyming of

"drowning" with itself in lines 14 and 16. Sometimes called "identical
rhyme," rhyming a word with itself is unusual in poetry. In this poem, it
has a deadening effect on the rhythm, dragging readers back to what's
already been said as they attempt to move forward. This, in turn,
echoes the way that the image of the dying soldier endlessly repeats in
the speaker's dreams.



“Dulce et Decorum Est” Speaker


The speaker of this poem is a soldier, traumatized by an experience he

has had in war. He is educated, as shown by his familiarity with Latin
poetry. What he wants, within the poem, is to communicate to his
readers the horror of his experience and make them question their
attitude towards war.

Over the course of the poem, the speaker develops from someone
within a group (the marching "we" of the soldiers in his story) to
an individual who witnesses a fellow soldier's death. In the third
stanza, the reader then moves with the speaker out of his story and
into his present life, in which he is haunted by nightmares. In the final
 stanza, the speaker becomes a rhetorician, using the images from his
experience to make an argument.

Wilfred Owen was an educated young Englishman who fought and died
in World War 1, and who was outspoken about his anti-war feelings.
Given these facts, one can read the poet and the speaker of the poem
as being closely related, if not the same person. In fact, one of Owen's
letters to his mother in January of 1917 tells a similar story to that of
this poem. Because the speaker's visible aim is to make a point to his
audience, it makes sense that Owen would write the poem for
publication with the same intent.


“Dulce et Decorum Est” Setting


While the setting of the poem is not explicitly named, it likely takes
place in France during the winter of 1917. This connection can be
made by using the context of Wilfred Owen's actual war experience,
and the match between his personal letters and the story of the dying
soldier. Even without those, the poem offers clues as to time and
place.

 The use of "flares" and "gas-shells" are specific to World War I,

since they had not been used in combat before this time.
  The majority of British troops in WWI were deployed to France.
(This is certainly true in Owen's case.)
 Chlorine gas, with its distinctive green color, was first deployed
by the German army in Belgium in 1915.
 The "clumsy helmets," or gas masks, were developed in response
to the introduction of gas. By January 1917, the time of Owen's
letter to his mother in which this story appears, gas masks had
become standard issue.
One can also think of the setting in terms of the speaker's past and
present. The first two stanzas describe an experience from the
speaker's past. The third stanza, though, shifts into the speaker's
present, some indeterminate time after that war experience. In this
way, the poem can both show the horror of directly experiencing the
war, and also shows how those traumas continued to haunt those who
survived.

Literary and Historical Context of “Dulce
et Decorum Est”


Literary Context

Wilfred Owen's early literary influences included John Keats and Percy
Bysse Shelley, whose poems Owen read as an adolescent in the early
1900s. By the time he began to write poetry seriously, his reading
background included William Butler Yeats, A.E. Housman, and Rupert
Brooke. Owen wrote nearly all of his mature poems between August
1917 and September 1918. During this time, he was hospitalized in
Edinburgh, suffering from shell-shock following his participation in
World War I. While hospitalized, Owen formed a friendship with the
established poet Siegfried Sassoon.

Sassoon's first published book, The Old Huntsman (1917), had been
widely read at the time. He had also courted controversy with public
anti-war acts. Initially, Owen was shy to approach the older poet. Some
of his earlier poems imitate Sassoon's satirical, epigrammatic style.
However, as Sassoon would later point out, Owen quickly developed
his own innovative style. Sassoon considered his encouragement of
Owen as simply coming at the right time to stimulate a talent already
present.

Sassoon gave Owen Henri Barbusse's Le Feu, a war novel notable for
its intense realism concerning death and the conditions soldiers lived
in. This kind of brutal honesty appealed to both poets. It certainly
affected the way Owen talks about the details of war in "Dulce et
Decorum Est."

As Owen and Sassoon worked on and talked about pacifist literature,

they put themselves up against a canon of pro-war poetry. Rupert
Brooke, who had died in combat in 1915, was acclaimed for his
idealistic sonnets about war. In the poem "The Soldier," he writes:

If I should die, think only this of me,

That there's some corner of a foreign field
That is forever England.
This glorified vision of war echoes the earlier treatment of the theme
by poets like A.E. Housman, whose poems often uphold the beauty of
dying young and for a cause. It also chimes with popular verse like that
of Jessie Pope, who wrote prolifically to encourage young men to enlist.
Her 1915 poem "The Call" includes these lines:
 Who’ll earn the Empire’s thanks—
Will you, my laddie?
Who’ll swell the victor’s ranks—
Will you, my laddie?
Pope's work clearly struck a chord with Owen, whose original draft of
"Dulce et Decorum Est" bears an ironic dedication to her (he later
revised this to read "To a certain Poetess," and later dropped the
dedication entirely).

Sassoon arranged for Owen to meet the literary editor Robert Ross, an
old friend and agent of Oscar Wilde. In turn, Ross introduced Owen to
several important writers, including Edith Sitwell, Thomas Hardy, and
Robert Graves. Owen began to feel himself part of the wider English
literary conversation. In the spring of 1918, he began working to
publish his first book, which would not be released until after he had
returned to the front and died in November of that year.

In terms both of political content and literary style, Owen's poems

influence the work of W.H. Auden, Christopher Isherwood, Stephen
Spender, Dylan Thomas, and many others. His work speaks to the
disillusionment and questioning evident in the Modernist movement in
literature, as well as an interest in playing with the structure of
traditional forms.

Historical Context

"Dulce et Decorum Est" was written during the course of World War I,
as part of a longer series of poems that address war and specifically
the lives of soldiers. Wilfred Owen was hospitalized while writing these
poems, recovering from shell-shock. "Dulce et Decorum Est" frankly
discusses the brutality of war, focusing on the introduction of poison
gas, which was relatively new to military use (the first effective use of
chlorine gas came in 1915).

Owen and his associates were convinced that the war must be ended,
since it was taking a massive toll on the lives of soldiers. This was a
controversial stance. Conscientious objectors were reviled and even
imprisoned. In 1918, the same year "Dulce et Decorum Est" was
written, the philosopher Bertrand Russell was jailed for pacifist
agitation. Social pressure was intense. Young men who failed to enlist
were frequently confronted by women and given white feathers, a
mark of cowardice. For Owen as a poet, it was paramount to
counteract this kind of pro-war sentiment in two ways: by giving
honest, detailed accounts of the kind of horror it condoned, and by
making clear that he himself lacked no bravery.

Shortly after writing the bulk of his poems, Owen returned to combat
in
"Dulce et Decorum Est" is a poem written by Wilfred
Owen during World War I, and published posthumously in 1920. Its
Latin title is from a verse written by the Roman poet Horace: Dulce et
decorum est pro patria mori.[3] In English, this means "it is sweet and
right to die for one's country".[4] The poem is one of Owen's most
renowned works; it is known for its horrific imagery and its
condemnation of war. It was drafted at Craiglockhart in the first half of
October 1917 and later revised, probably at Scarborough, but possibly
at Ripon, between January and March 1918. The earliest known
manuscript is dated 8 October 1917 and is addressed to the poet's
mother, Susan Owen, with the note "Here is a gas poem done
yesterday (which is not private, but not final)."

Summary
[edit]
The text presents a vignette from the front lines of World War I: A
group of British soldiers on the march are attacked with chlorine gas.
Poison-gas artillery shells explode, and one soldier takes too long to
put on his gas mask. The speaker of the poem describes the gruesome
effects of the gas on the man, and concludes that anyone who sees the
reality of war at first hand would not repeat mendacious platitudes
such as dulce et decorum est pro patria mori: "How sweet and
honourable it is to die for one's country". Owen himself was a soldier
who served on the front line during World War I, and his poem is a
statement about a type of war atrocity that the poet had personally
experienced.[5]

Dedication
[edit]
Throughout the poem, and particularly strong in the last stanza, there
is a running commentary, a letter to Jessie Pope, a civilian
propagandist of World War I, who encouraged—"with such high zest"—
young men to join the battle, through her poetry, e.g. "Who's for the
game?"

The first draft of the poem, indeed, was dedicated to Pope. [6] A later
revision amended this to "a certain Poetess",[6] though this did not
make it into the final publication, either, as Owen apparently decided
to address his poem to the larger audience of war supporters in
general such as the women who handed out white feathers during the
conflict to men whom they regarded as cowards for not being at the
front. In the last stanza, however, the original intention can still be
seen in Owen's address.

Title
[edit]
The title of this poem means "It is sweet and fitting". The title and
the Latin exhortation of the final two lines are drawn from the phrase
"Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori" written by
the Roman poet Horace (Quintus Horatius Flaccus):

Dulce et decorum est pro It is sweet and fitting to die for

patria mori: one's country:
mors et fugacem persequitur Death [also] catches the man who
virum flees,
nec parcit inbellis iuventae nor spares the hamstrings and
poplitibus timidoque tergo. cowardly back
Of battle-shy youth.

—Ode III.2.13[3]
These words were well known and often quoted by supporters of the
war near its inception and were, therefore, of particular relevance to
soldiers of the era. In 1913, the line Dulce et decorum est pro patria
mori was inscribed on the wall of the chapel of the Royal Military
College, Sandhurst.[7] In the final stanza of his poem, Owen refers to
this as "The old Lie".[6]

Some uncertainty arises around how to pronounce the Latin phrase

when the poem is read aloud. There are essentially three choices:
[citation needed]

1. The traditional English pronunciation of Latin, current until the early

twentieth century (“dull-se't decorum'st, pro pay-triaa mor-eye”).

2. The Italianate or Ecclesiastical Latin pronunciation, used in Owen’s

day in both the Roman Catholic and Anglican churches, and in
continued use today in the Catholic Church (“dool-chay't decorum'st,
pro patriaa mor-ee”).

3. The Classical Latin pronunciation reconstructed by scholars in the

nineteenth century and generally taught in schools since the early
1900s (“dool-k’et decoroom’st, pro patriaa mo-ree”).

Owen’s own schooling took place at a time when the teaching of Latin
pronunciation was in transition and therefore – without knowing how
he himself would have pronounced the phrase – any of the three
versions can be considered acceptable. Based on the rhyme scheme,
the first version is the least likely.

Structure
[edit]

Detail of the inscription over the rear

entrance to the Arlington Memorial Amphitheater. The inscription
reads: "Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori", written by
the Roman poet Horace.
The style of "Dulce et Decorum Est" is similar to the French
ballade poetic form.[8] By referencing this formal poetic form and then
breaking the conventions of pattern and rhyming, Owen accentuates
the disruptive and chaotic events being told. Each of the stanzas has a
traditional rhyming scheme, using two quatrains of rhymed iambic
pentameter with several spondaic substitutions. These make the
poem's reading experience seem close to a casual talking speed and
clarity.

The poem is in two parts, each of 14 lines. The first part of the poem
(the first 8 line and the second 6 line stanzas) is written in the present
as the action happens and everyone is reacting to the events around
them. In the second part (the third 2 line and the last 12 line stanzas),
the narrator writes as though at a distance from the horror: he refers
to what is happening twice as if in a "dream", as though standing back
watching the events or even recalling them. Another interpretation is
to read the lines literally. "In all my dreams" may mean this sufferer of
shell shock is haunted by a friend drowning in his own blood, and
cannot sleep without revisiting the horror nightly. The second part
looks back to draw a lesson from what happened at the start. The two
14 line parts of the poem echo a formal poetic style, the sonnet, but a
broken and unsettling version of this form. [8] This poem is considered
by many as one of the best war poems ever written. [citation needed]

Studying the two parts of the poem reveals a change in the use of
language from visual impressions outside the body, to sounds
produced by the body – or a movement from the visual to the visceral.
[9] In the opening lines, the scene is set with visual phrases such as
"haunting flares", but after the gas attack the poem has sounds
produced by the victim – "guttering", "choking", "gargling". In this way,
Owen evokes the terrible effects of chlorine gas corroding the body
from inside.[9]

Composition
[edit]
In May 1917 Owen was diagnosed with neurasthenia (shell-shock) and
sent to Craiglockhart hospital near Edinburgh to recover. Whilst
receiving treatment at the hospital, Owen became the editor of the
hospital magazine, The Hydra, and met the poet Siegfried Sassoon,
who was to have a major impact upon his life and work and to play a
crucial role in the dissemination of Owen’s poetry following his
untimely death in 1918, aged 25. Owen wrote a number of his most
famous poems at Craiglockhart, including several drafts of "Dulce et
Decorum Est", "Soldier's Dream", and "Anthem for Doomed Youth".
Sassoon advised and encouraged Owen, and this is evident in a
number of drafts which include Sassoon’s annotations. [10]

Only five of Owen's poems were published in his lifetime. However,

after his death, his heavily-worked manuscript drafts were brought
together and published in two different editions by Siegfried Sassoon
with the assistance of Edith Sitwell (in 1920) and Edmund Blunden (in
1931).[10]
By the end of this poem, a shift has taken place from the descriptive opening stanzas and
the final stanza where the speaker reflects on the events he has just recounted. The subject
of the poem is no mystery, and its intention is succinctly communicated in the final lines. It is
a weighty poem known and memorized by many. And it is musical: aided by the poem’s
meter in iambic pentamenter, the alliteration and assonance throughout, onomatopoeic
sounds, speech, and rhyme scheme (ABABCDCD) is meant to make us feel as though we
were on the ground with the speaker.

It is a poem to read aloud. It is also an unsettling poem.

One of the most difficult subjects to reconcile with when contemplating the nature of politics
—which regards, to a significant extent, the nature of conflict—is the subject of war. War
represents the culmination, the most violent form, of conflict. Whether foreign or domestic,
this subject has never evaded the concern of political theorists. After all, the phenomenon
has not ceased since the ages of Saint Augustine, Thucydides, Grotius, Hobbes, Machiavelli,
or Clausewitz. But has it changed?

With the advent of modern warfare in the twentieth century exemplified by the First World
War came a new scale of destruction, and with it a new form of war poetry that distinguished
itself from its literary predecessors. The classical tradition (such as Homer’s Iliad) and
medieval tradition (such as the Song of Roland) incorporated myth and fantasy into the
imaginative retelling of historical battles, which were themselves subjected to the
interpretation of their poets. These epics shared as a common theme their emphasis on the
idea of glory in battle. Even verses as memorable as the St Crispin’s Day Speech of
Shakespeare’s Henry V, where Henry V galvanizes his men before the Battle of Agincourt by
telling them to envision their glory and immortality, echoed this longstanding account of what
war poetry traditionally conveyed: Glory. Victory. Honor.

Perhaps no poet frustrated this account in war poetry as notably as Wilfred Owen. His “Dulce
et Decorum Est” (1920) has repeatedly been included in the list of the U.K.’s favorite poems,
among other poems by Owen.[1] A lieutenant in the British Army, ultimately killed in France
one week before Armistice Day, Owen’s poetry contributed to a social awakening in the
history of war poetry that introduced the experiences of foot soldiers into its myriad
narratives. To be sure, Owen was just one of many soldiers who wrote poetry during the
Great War, including his mentor and friend Siegfried Sassoon, such that the term “war
poetry” is commonly understood today to refer to the poetry written during World War I. This
genre of poetry provides a glimpse into the horrors that many of these men, combatant or
non-combatant, experienced. “Dulce et Decorum Est” is the paradigm poem of this tradition.

And so we call Owen a “war poet.” Yet, I believe that this label does not do complete justice
to the role that poetry played in Owen’s life. Worse yet, it detracts from the broader
significance of his verses. To call Owen a war poet places him within a historical period and
limits his experience, and therefore his thoughts, to this moment. Yes, Owen’s poetry has an
unquestionably important role as a piece of social history during WWI. His poems
demonstrate his awareness of the scale of human suffering, which was exacerbated by the
technological advancements of the twentieth century. In this respect, his poetry has
contributed to studies about modernity and the changing nature of warfare and its scope of
destruction.

But let us not conflate history with art. Literature, after all, sits comfortably established
between the two. The subjects of poetry, historical or otherwise, should not constrain their
meaning or significance. For poetry to be poetry, it must speak to something broader that
resonates with readers decades and even centuries after the historical event has passed. It
should resonate, moreover, even if the reader had no familiarity with the historical event the
poem is describing. Such is the case with Owen. War is the context—the unfortunate
circumstance—that shaped Owen’s thoughts. His poetry, nevertheless, engages with death,
violence, guilt, religion, life-after-death, and, within these, even beauty in nature and in
friendship. None of these are restricted to the war experience, but they certainly are
intensified by it.

The literary medium through which Owen conveyed his thoughts and experiences provides
us today with an alternative form of expression to better understand the subject of war, but
we should also remember that the act of writing poetry provides the author with their own
form of catharsis. Poetry and literature, unlike a political treatise or philosophical essay,
offers respite for the writer. Through this process of creating, poetry and literature can
transcend their respective histories and become art, unveiling the aesthetic qualities of the
human mind. Now, aesthetic does not necessarily imply beauty (this is one understanding of
aesthetic, albeit narrow). There are a number of WWI poets who wrote about the beauty of
nature amid the violence of war—Francis Ledwidge’s “A Soldier’s Grave” is a good example
—to communicate a cycle of renewal.

But Owen’s poetry, to be sure, resists the idea that poetry must be tied to some idea of the
beautiful. Instead, what is aesthetic about Owen’s poetry pertains to his ability to take his
thoughts and experiences and from them create something sensorial, emotional, lasting.
This effect is also aided by the form of his poetry that communicates such thoughts and
experiences through the various literary devices (mentioned above) that heighten our senses
and emotions.

Consider as an example Owen’s poetic form—the composition style of his poem—in “Dulce
et Decorum Est,” which betrays his own intention to interrogate (if not subvert) the traditional
elegies to honor the dead. It is a double sonnet (a sonnet is a fourteen-line poem). Owen’s
rhyme scheme immediately strikes similar to that of an English sonnet (ABAB CDCD EFEF
GG), in which the final two lines (GG) are supposed to harmoniously ‘conclude’ the poem by
pairing their rhyme. When we get to the final two lines (the couplet) of the first sonnet,
however, there is no paired rhyme:

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks, (A)

Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge, (B)
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs, (A)
And towards our distant rest began to trudge. (B)
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots, (C)
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind; (D)
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots (C)
Of gas-shells dropping softly behind. (D)

Gas! GAS! Quick, boys!—An ecstasy of fumbling (E)

Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time, (F)
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling (E)
And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime.— (F)
Dim through the misty panes and thick green light, (G…)
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning. (X)

Owen creates a sense of confusion, discomfort even, by refusing to close the rhyme scheme
of this frightening scene. He creates his own rhyme scheme, instead, by rhyming the last two
lines of the first sonnet with the first two lines of the second sonnet:

In all my dreams before my helpless sight, (G)

He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning. (X)

Notice that Owen does not find a rhyme to substitute the word ‘drowning.’ Instead, by
repeating the word twice, he heightens the sense of disquiet that this vision has on him. The
word, and therefore the image, of drowning stays with us, emphasized and suspended
between two sonnets. As the second sonnet continues, Owen again refuses to conclude the
sonnet with a rhyming couplet. Thus, just by the choices that Owen makes in his rhyme
scheme, even if we had no idea what the poem is about, we are able to perceive that
something is incomplete and out of harmony.

Then there is the most obvious interpretative question about “Dulce et Decorum Est,” but no
less profound: is it a protestpoem? In other words, is it a political poem insofar as it presents
an apparent criticism about war? After such heavy verses and macabre imagery above,
which are echoed throughout many of his poems, we might assume the response to this
question is yes. Owen asked in his despondently-titled “Anthem for Doomed Youth,” “what
passing-bells, for these who die as cattle?/— Only the monstrous anger of the guns.”
Irreverent even, Owen often criticized the religious rituals and patriotic ceremonies offered to
the fallen. He did not, however, criticize the concept of war. In a letter to his mother in 1915,
Owen wrote, “Still more Frenchmen have been mobilised since I left France; and the outlook
is not one shade brighter. I don’t want the bore of training, I don’t want to wear khaki; nor yet
to save my honour before inquisitive grand-children fifty years hence. But I now do most
intensely want to fight.”[2]
It is not accurate, in other words, to reduce Owen to being a “political” poet, much less an
“anti-war” poet. Instead of protest, what Owen’s poetry communicates to his audience is a
desire to remove its idealization by depicting the reality of war as it affects the personal
relationship between men, whether they are fighting on the same side or not. In his “Strange
Meeting,” Owen imagined the encounter with an enemy in hell as the possibility of
overcoming pain and violence: “I am the enemy you killed, my friend./ I knew you in this dark:
for so you frowned/ Yesterday through me as you jabbed and killed./I parried; but my hands
were loath and cold./ Let us sleep now. . . .” In the verses of “Dulce et Decorum Est,”
moreover, Owen is reckoning with moral and philosophical questions about war and the
motives behind them: What is justice? How does honor influence our actions? What are the
limits of human sacrifice? What is our responsibility for the suffering of others? These are the
central political and philosophical themes that Owen movingly addresses in his “war” poetry,
which go beyond his experience of war and render his verses into something deeper about
the human condition and its encounter with conflict and violence. This point is not to say that
experience is ever removed from history, rather to emphasize that experience, as
communicated and expressed by the creativity of the artist’s mind, becomes something more
than history. As literature, Owen’s poetry therefore relays an essence of the questions and
themes that pervade politics. These questions are just as inherent and relevant to Owen’s
poetry as to Sophocles’ Antigone, written more than two thousand years apart. So they
remain for us.

-- By Nayeli L. Riano

Abstract
One of the most famous poems to be written in WWI, this poem examines the reality of war. The title is
a reference to Roman poet Horace: “It is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country.”
Wilfred Owen died at only 25 in action, making his examination of war, life and death particularly
poignant. Poem originally published in Poems in 1921.

‘Dulce et Decorum Est’ by Wilfred Owen is a poignant

anti-war poem that exposes the harsh reality of World
War I.

The year was 1917, just before the Third Battle of Ypres.
Germany, in their bid to crush the British army,
introduced yet another vicious and potentially lethal
weapon of attack: mustard gas, differentiated from the
other shells by their distinctive yellow markings.
Although not the effective killing machine of chlorine gas
(first used in 1915) and phosgene (invented by French
 chemists), mustard gas has stayed within the public
consciousness as the most horrific weapon of the First
World War. Once deployed, mustard gas lingers for
several days, and anyone who comes in contact with
mustard gas develops blisters and acute vomiting. It
caused internal and external bleeding, and the lethally
injured took as long as five weeks to die.

Summary
There was no draft in the First World War for British soldiers; it was an entirely voluntary
occupation, but the British needed soldiers to fight in the war. Therefore, through a well-
tuned propaganda machine of posters and poems, the British war supporters pushed young and
easily influenced youths into signing up to fight for the glory of England.

Several poets, among them Rupert Brook, who wrote the poem ‘The Soldier‘ (there is a
corner of a foreign field/ that is forever England), used to write poetry to encourage the
youth to sign up for the army, often without having any experience themselves! It was a
practice that Wilfred Owen personally despised, and in ‘Dulce et Decorum Est,’ he calls
out these false poets and journalists who glorify war.

The poem takes place during a slow trudge to an unknown place, which is interrupted by
a gas attack. The soldiers hurry to put on their masks; only one of their numbers is too
slow and gets consumed by the gas. The final stanza interlocks a personal address to war
journalist Jessie Pope with horrifying imagery of what happened to those who ingested an
excessive amount of mustard gas.

The Poem Analysis Take

Expert Insights by Jyoti Chopra

 B.A. (Honors) and M.A. in English Literature

Painting a nuanced picture of the horrors of the Great War

or the nightmarish calamity and dehumanization of soldiers,
the poem critiques the glorification of war and hero-worship
of soldiers, testing the misleading notions of patriotism that
are relevant even today. The poem unflinchingly calls the
false idealization 'it is sweet and fitting to die for one's
country' a lie stressing the truth that war is always
gruesome and soldiers are the worst sufferers of the
calamity. It looks critically at the society and larger politics
that push young soldiers into dehumanizing cruel deaths
under the guise of hero-worship.

Analysis, Stanza by Stanza

Stanza One
Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,

Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed

through sludge,

Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs

And towards our distant rest began to trudge.

Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots

But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;

 Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots

Of tired, outstripped Five-Nines that dropped

behind.

British soldiers would trudge from trench to trench, seeping further into France in pursuit
of German soldiers. It was often a miserable, wet walk, and it is on one of these voyages
that the poem opens. Immediately, it minimizes the war to a few paltry, exhausted
soldiers, although it rages in the background (’till on the haunting flares we turned our
backs / and towards our distant rest began to trudge’). Owen uses heavy words to
describe their movement – words like ‘trudge’, and ‘limped’; the first stanza of the poem
is a demonstration of pure exhaustion and mind-numbing misery.

Stanza Two
Gas! Gas! Quick, boys!—An ecstasy of fumbling,

Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;

But someone still was yelling out and stumbling

And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime…

Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light,

As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

The second stanza changes the pace rapidly. It opens with an exclamation – ‘Gas! Gas!
Quick, boys!’ – and suddenly, the soldiers are in ‘an ecstasy of fumbling’, groping for
their helmets to prevent the gas from taking them over. Again, Owen uses language
economically here: he uses words that express speed, hurry, and almost frantic demand
for their helmets. However, one soldier does not manage to fit his helmet on in time.
Owen sees him ‘flound’ring like a man in fire or lime’ through the thick-glassed pane of
his gas mask.

Stanza Three
 In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,

He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

For a brief two lines, Owen pulls back from the events happening throughout the poems
to revisit his own psyche. He writes, ‘In all my dreams,/ before my helpless sight’,
showing how these images live on with the soldiers, how these men are tortured by the
events of war even after they have been removed from war. There is no evading or
escaping war.

Stanza Four
If in some smothering dreams you too could pace

Behind the wagon that we flung him in,

And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,

His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;

If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood

Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,

Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud

Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,—

My friend, 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.

In the last paragraph, Owen condenses the poem to an almost claustrophobic pace: ‘if in
some smothering dreams, you too could pace’, and he goes into a very graphic, horrific
description of the suffering that victims of mustard gas endured: ‘froth-corrupted lungs,”
incurable sores,’ ‘the white eyes writhing in his face’. Although the pace of the poem has
slowed to a crawl, there is much happening in the description of the torment of the
mustard gas victim, allowing for a contrast between the stillness of the background and
the animation of the mustard gas victim. This contrast highlights the description, making
it far more grotesque.

Owen finishes the poem with a personal address to Jessie Pope: ‘My friend, 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.’ Jessie Pope was a journalist who published,
among others, books such as Jessie Pope’s War Poems and Simple Rhymes for Stirring
Times. The Latin phrase is from Horace and means, ‘it is sweet and right to die for your
country’.

The earliest dated record of this poem is 8. October 1917. It was written in the ballad
form of poetry – a very flowing, romantic poetical style, and by using it outside of
convention, Owen accentuates the disturbing cadence of the narrative. It is a visceral
poem, relying very strongly on the senses, and while it starts out embedded in the horror
and in the narrative, by the final stanza, it has pulled back to give a fuller view of the
events, thus fully showing the horror of the mustard gas attack.

Historical Background
While at Craiglockhart, Owen became the editor of the hospital magazine The Hydra.
Through it, he met the poet Siegfried Sassoon (read Sassoon’s poetry here), who later
became his editor and one of the most important impacts on his life and work. Owen
wrote a number of his poems in Craiglockhart with Sassoon’s advice.

After his death in 1918, aged 25, Sassoon would compile Owen’s poems and publish
them in a compilation in 1920.

Poetry+ Review Corner

 Dulce et Decorum Est

Explore an expert's insights on this poem. Join Poetry+ to instantly

unlock fully understanding the poem.

Poet:

Wilfred Owen (poems)

99

Period:

20th Century

85

Nationality:

English

65

Themes:

Death

70

War
 94

Emotions:

Anger

68

Pain

72

Sadness

66

Terror

90

Topics:

Irony

75
PTSD

86

Soldiers

92

Sorrow

67

World War One (WWI)

97

Form:

Sonnet

64
Wilfred Owen

99
Entitled with the Latin phrase meaning 'It is sweet and fitting' in
English, 'Dulce et Decorum Est' is the most renowned poem of
Wilfred Owen. The poem is considered one of the most significant
First World War poems, which moved away from the romantic
patriotism and eulogization of war while showing its horrific
reality. It also sarcastically critiques the propagators and
supporters of the war; the complete Latin phrase translated as 'it
is sweet and fitting to die for one's country' in the title was used
by them to sanctify war. The dreadful portrayal of war in this
poem anticipates the prominent postwar imagery of Eliot's 'The
Waste Land.'

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Home » Wilfred Owen » Dulce et Decorum Est

About Elise Dalli

Elise has a B.A. Honors Degree in English and Communications,

and analyzes poetry on Poem Analysis to create a great insight and
understanding into poetry from the past and present.

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4 COMMENTS
 Most Voted

Anonymous Teacher

It was a volunteer army until 1916, when conscription was introduced.

View Replies (1)

Electrocutioner

Pretty gruesome but it was telling the truth.

View Replies (1)

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Dulce Et Decorum
Est Summary & Analysis
Dulce Et Decorum Est Summary & Analysis

When Wilfred Owen first drafted “Dulce Et Decorum Est” in 1917, he

was in a hospital recovering from what at the time was known as “shell
shock.” Profoundly rattled by his experience of fighting in France,
Owen penned an antiwar poem that captures the gruesome suffering
that soldiers faced on the front lines of World War I. The poem’s
speaker evokes the debilitating exhaustion and the random bursts of
chaotic violence that killed, wounded, and traumatized a generation of
young men. The speaker relates a particularly traumatizing experience
he had, when a surprise attack of poison gas left one of the soldiers in
his unit choking to death. The surreal image of the dying
soldier “drowning” in “a green sea” (line 14) haunts the speaker’s
dreams, forcing him continuously to relive this horrific experience. The
speaker’s tone turns scathing in the final stanza, where he condemns
anyone who would continue to peddle the “old Lie” (line 27) that war
brings glory. On the contrary, the speaker insists, war brings little more
than senseless violence. After recovering, Owen returned to the front
lines, where he was sadly killed in action. “Dulce Et Decorum Est” was
first published in 1920, following his death.

Stanza-by-Stanza Analysis

First Stanza
The poem's first line takes the reader straight into the ranks of the
soldiers, an unusual opening, only we're told they resemble "old
beggars" and "hags" (note the use of similes) by the speaker, who is
actually in amongst this sick and motley crew.

The initial rhythm is slightly broken iambic pentameter until line five,
when commas and semi-colons and other punctuation reflect the
disjointed efforts of the men to keep pace.

Also note the term "blood-shod," which suggests a parallel with horses,
and the fact that many are lame, drunk, blind and deaf. The trauma of
war has intoxicated the soldiers.

Second Stanza

Suddenly the call goes up: "Gas!" We delve deeper into the scene as
chemical warfare raises its ugly head and one man gets caught and
left behind. He's too slow to don his gas mask and helmet, which would
have saved his life by filtering out the toxins.

"An ecstasy of fumbling," the poet writes. The ecstasy is used here in
the sense of a trance-like frenzy as the men hurriedly put on their
helmets. It has nothing to do with happiness.

Here, the poem becomes personal and metaphorical. The speaker sees
the man consumed by gas as a drowning man, as if he were
underwater. Misty panes add an unreal element to this traumatic
scene, as though the speaker is looking through a window.

Third Stanza

Only two lines long, this stanza brings home the personal effect of the
scene on the speaker. Despite the dream-like atmosphere created by
the green gas and the floundering soldier, the image sears through and
scars.

Owen chooses the word "guttering" to describe the tears streaming

down the face of the unfortunate man, a symptom of inhaling toxic
gas.
Fourth Stanza

The speaker widens the issue by confronting the reader (and especially
the people at home, far away from the war), suggesting that if they too
could experience what he had witnessed, they would not be so quick to
praise those who die in action.

They would be lying to future generations if they thought that death on

the battlefield was sweet. Owen does not hold back. His vivid imagery
is quite shocking, his message direct and his conclusion sincere.

The last four lines are thought to have been addressed to a Jessie
Pope, a children's writer and journalist at the time, whose published
book Jessie Pope's War Poems included a poem titled The Call, an
encouragement for young men to enlist and fight in the war.

Scroll to Continue

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Main Themes of "Dulce et Decorum Est"

"Dulce et Decorum Est" does not have one theme, but many. Still, each
of the themes centre around war and the antiquated notions
associated with it. The main themes of this poem are listed below:

War

One of the main themes of this poem is war. It deals with a soldier's
experience in World War I, and contrasts the realities of war with the
glorified notion of what serving in a war is like.

Propaganda

This poem takes aim at the idea of war presented by war-supporting

propaganda. During World War I, propaganda came in the form of
books, poems, posters, movies, radio and more, and presented an idea
of war full of glory and pride rather than of death and destruction.

Politics

Politics are often the cause war, yet it is the men who have nothing to
do with politics who are recruited to fight it. This poem underlines the
wrongness of this dynamic.

Hero Worship

Everyone wants to be the hero. In reality, the man who keeps his head
down is the one who survives the longest.

Patriotism

"Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori," means it is sweet and proper
to die for one's country. This idea of patriotism fueled the hopes and
dreams of many young soldiers who entered World War I. Once they
realised the horrors that awaited them, however, this ideal patriotism
was rightly viewed as ridiculous.
Lessons Learned From the Past

Owen highlights this Latin phrase to show how antiquated and wrong it
is when applied to the modern age. Through his work, which entirely
destroys the idea that it is sweet and proper to die for one's country,
he hopes to make readers realise that times have changed – that while
war may have once been glorious, now, war is hell.

Form and Meter

"Dulce et Decorum Est" might have started out as a double sonnet

(there are 28 lines in total) and many lines are in iambic pentameter,
with end rhymes. Owen must have decided against it as he worked on
the draft, ending up with four unequal stanzas.

Language and Diction

"Dulce et Decorum Est" surprises the reader from the start. The
opening lines contain words such as bent, beggars, sacks, hags,
cursed, haunting, trudge. This is the language of poverty and
deprivation, hardly suitable for the glory of the battlefield where
heroes are said to be found.

Yet this is precisely what the poet intended. Figurative language fights
with literal language. This is no ordinary march. Most seem asleep,
from exhaustion no doubt, suggesting that a dream world isn't too far
distant–a dream world very unlike the resting place they're headed for.

The second stanza's first line brings the reader directly in touch with
the unfolding drama and, although these are soldiers, men (as well as
old beggars and hags), the simple word "boys" seems to put
everything into perspective.

Poetic Devices

Wilfred Owen makes use of numerous poetic devices in this poem.

Aside from the the structure, which is discussed above, Owen
strategically uses assonance, alliteration, and iambic pentameter to
transmit the dirty and dark feelings felt on the battlefield.
Assonance

It is important to note the poet's use of internal, line-by-line assonance.

For example:

double / under / cursed / sludge / haunting

/turned / trudge.

And again with:

drunk / fumbling / clumsy / stumbling / under

/ plunges / guttering / flung / corrupted /
lungs / cud / dulce

Throughout the poem, these sounds replicate the background rumbling

of distant explosions.

Alliteration

Alliteration also occurs in lines five, eleven and nineteen:

Line 5: Men marched asleep. Many had lost

their boots

Line 11: But someone still was yelling out

and stumbling

Line 19: And watch the white eyes writhing

in his face

More Than Iambic Pentameter

The iambic pentameter is dominant, but quite a few lines break with
this rhythm, such as line five in the first stanza. This inconsistency
reflects the strangeness of the situation. An opening spondee (two
stressed syllables) and a trochee (stress followed by unstressed
syllable) add power to the iambic feet that follow:

Men marched / asleep. / Many / had lost / their boots,

These lines refer to the exhaustion of the men and the fact that
marching through thick sludge led to some losing their boots.

His hang / ing face, / like a / devil's / sick of sin

This is line 20. Note the alliteration and the simile, plus another
spondee and pyrrhic (no stressed syllable.) Whatever you think a devil
looks like, this devil has gone beyond the pale.

bitter as the cud

Cud is a term used in farming to refer to the half digested food of

ruminants which is chewed again to make it digestible. The suggestion
is that the blood coming up from the lungs has to be chewed by the
poor dying man. A sobering image.

This line is very similar to the first line of Owen's poem "Anthem For
Doomed Youth," which reads, "What passing bells for these who die as
cattle?"

The Latin ending is perhaps a gentle reminder of many a slogan, many

a motto and maxim held dear by clubs, military units, teams and
families as an expression of belief and ideals. These are often
displayed in Latin which was, of course, the language of the ancient
Romans.

Tone and Mood

From the start of this poem, you are immersed in the atmosphere of
war. These are the trenches of WWI, full of mud and death. Once
optimistic, healthy soldiers have now been reduced to a miserable,
exhausted gang with little left to give.
The poems takes readers deep into a shocking environment–one that is
oppressive, dangerous and without any real hope.

The poet wants the reader to know that warfare is anything but
glorious, so he paints a gloomy, realistic, human picture of life at the
frontline. He leaves us no doubt about his feelings.

The tone and mood is also set by language such as "misty panes and
thick green light." From the start, we feel that the world has been
turned upside down, and that all things having to do with happiness
and vitality have been cast away. This is not a lively green, but a thick
green. The window is not clear, but misty. This is the land of the
walking dead, of the sickly–a world cold, muddy and metallic.

By the end of the poem, it appears the reader has been moved away
from the "haunting" battlefield, and the setting becomes internal.
Here, the mood is less gruesome, but no less pitiful. In one sense, to
see the way these scenes of death and violence have affected the
poet's mind is just as disturbing as the scenes themselves.

Imagery

This poem is packed full of vivid images forged in the heat of battle,
skillfully drawn by a keenly observant poet.

The opening scene is one of a group of soldiers making their weary

way from the frontline "towards our distant rest" as bombs drop and
lethal gas is released. Details are intimate and immediate, taking the
reader right into the thick of trench war.

These men appear old, but that is only an illusion. War has twisted
reality, which gradually turns surreal as the poem progresses. The
speaker evokes a dream-like scenario, the green of the enveloping gas
turning his mind to another element, that of water, and the cruel sea in
which a man is drowning.

The descriptions become more intense as the drowning man is

disposed of on a cart. All the speaker can do is compare the suffering
to a disease with no known cure. The final image - sores on a tongue -
hints at what the dying soldier himself might have said about the war
and the idea of a glorious death.
Symbols

While Owen utilizes figurative language, similes, and assonance to

combat the illusion that war is glorious, he also uses symbols to
underline his message. There are three overarching symbols that
strengthen the impact of "Dulce et Decorum Est."

Disfiguration

Owen focuses on the way war disfigures and warps all things that
come into contact with it. Primarily, he focuses on the human body and
the way it is slowly damaged and changed before ultimately being
destroyed. We see the symbol of disfiguration in the first stanza, when
the poet reports on the state of his fellow men:

Lines 1–3

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,

Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed
through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our
backs

Lines 5–7

Men marched asleep. Many had lost their

boots,
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all
blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots

By looking closely at the language used in the above lines, the symbol
of disfiguration becomes clear. The men are no longer the men the
used to be. They are shadows of their former selves: dead men
walking.

Allusion
As we can see by the title and last line of this poem, one of the main
symbols is allusion (in this instance, an allusion to Horace's Latin
phrase). The allusion points to the idea that fighting and dying for your
country is glorious. After making this allusion, the poet devotes all of
his efforts to proving it wrong.

The devil is also alluded to in line 20, indicating the badness of the
battlefield.

His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;

Nightmares

Another symbol that pervades this poem is the idea of the nightmare.
Owen presents the scenes of war as a nightmare with their greenish
color and mistiness. Also, the terrifying imagery adds to the feeling of
a bad dream.

This symbol indicates that the horrors of war are almost too hard to
comprehend. This must be a nightmare, mustn't it? The reality is that it
is not a nightmare: These are real atrocities that happened to real
people. The fact that the poet presents the poem as a sort of
nightmare makes it all the more terrible.

Sources

Ferguson, Margaret W, et al. The Norton Anthology of Poetry. Fifth ed.,

New York, NY: W.W. Norton & Company, 2005.

Lennard, John. The Poetry Handbook. Oxford: Oxford University Press,

2005.

Phillips, Rodney. The Hand of The Poet: Poems and Papers in

Manuscript. New York, NY: Rizzoli International Publications, 1997.

Poetry Foundation, "World War 1: Poetry By Year."

Online: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/70139/the-poetry-of-
world-war-i
 More by Wilfred Owen
 Analysis of Poem 'Anthem for Doomed Youth' by Wilfred Owen
A powerful war poem, a sonnet, written whilst Owen was in hospital in
1917. The poet highlights the madness of war and the many young
men who die 'as cattle'.

© 2016 Andrew Spacey

Stanza-by-Stanza Analysis

First Stanza

The poem's first line takes the reader straight into the ranks of the
soldiers, an unusual opening, only we're told they resemble "old
beggars" and "hags" (note the use of similes) by the speaker, who is
actually in amongst this sick and motley crew.

The initial rhythm is slightly broken iambic pentameter until line five,
when commas and semi-colons and other punctuation reflect the
disjointed efforts of the men to keep pace.

Also note the term "blood-shod," which suggests a parallel with horses,
and the fact that many are lame, drunk, blind and deaf. The trauma of
war has intoxicated the soldiers.

Second Stanza

Suddenly the call goes up: "Gas!" We delve deeper into the scene as
chemical warfare raises its ugly head and one man gets caught and
left behind. He's too slow to don his gas mask and helmet, which would
have saved his life by filtering out the toxins.

"An ecstasy of fumbling," the poet writes. The ecstasy is used here in
the sense of a trance-like frenzy as the men hurriedly put on their
helmets. It has nothing to do with happiness.

Here, the poem becomes personal and metaphorical. The speaker sees
the man consumed by gas as a drowning man, as if he were
underwater. Misty panes add an unreal element to this traumatic
scene, as though the speaker is looking through a window.

Third Stanza

Only two lines long, this stanza brings home the personal effect of the
scene on the speaker. Despite the dream-like atmosphere created by
the green gas and the floundering soldier, the image sears through and
scars.

Owen chooses the word "guttering" to describe the tears streaming

down the face of the unfortunate man, a symptom of inhaling toxic
gas.

Fourth Stanza

The speaker widens the issue by confronting the reader (and especially
the people at home, far away from the war), suggesting that if they too
could experience what he had witnessed, they would not be so quick to
praise those who die in action.

They would be lying to future generations if they thought that death on

the battlefield was sweet. Owen does not hold back. His vivid imagery
is quite shocking, his message direct and his conclusion sincere.

The last four lines are thought to have been addressed to a Jessie
Pope, a children's writer and journalist at the time, whose published
book Jessie Pope's War Poems included a poem titled The Call, an
encouragement for young men to enlist and fight in the war.

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Main Themes of "Dulce et Decorum Est"

"Dulce et Decorum Est" does not have one theme, but many. Still, each
of the themes centre around war and the antiquated notions
associated with it. The main themes of this poem are listed below:

War

One of the main themes of this poem is war. It deals with a soldier's
experience in World War I, and contrasts the realities of war with the
glorified notion of what serving in a war is like.

Propaganda

This poem takes aim at the idea of war presented by war-supporting

propaganda. During World War I, propaganda came in the form of
books, poems, posters, movies, radio and more, and presented an idea
of war full of glory and pride rather than of death and destruction.
Politics

Politics are often the cause war, yet it is the men who have nothing to
do with politics who are recruited to fight it. This poem underlines the
wrongness of this dynamic.

Hero Worship

Everyone wants to be the hero. In reality, the man who keeps his head
down is the one who survives the longest.

Patriotism

"Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori," means it is sweet and proper
to die for one's country. This idea of patriotism fueled the hopes and
dreams of many young soldiers who entered World War I. Once they
realised the horrors that awaited them, however, this ideal patriotism
was rightly viewed as ridiculous.

Lessons Learned From the Past

Owen highlights this Latin phrase to show how antiquated and wrong it
is when applied to the modern age. Through his work, which entirely
destroys the idea that it is sweet and proper to die for one's country,
he hopes to make readers realise that times have changed – that while
war may have once been glorious, now, war is hell.

Form and Meter

"Dulce et Decorum Est" might have started out as a double sonnet

(there are 28 lines in total) and many lines are in iambic pentameter,
with end rhymes. Owen must have decided against it as he worked on
the draft, ending up with four unequal stanzas.

Language and Diction

"Dulce et Decorum Est" surprises the reader from the start. The
opening lines contain words such as bent, beggars, sacks, hags,
cursed, haunting, trudge. This is the language of poverty and
deprivation, hardly suitable for the glory of the battlefield where
heroes are said to be found.

Yet this is precisely what the poet intended. Figurative language fights
with literal language. This is no ordinary march. Most seem asleep,
from exhaustion no doubt, suggesting that a dream world isn't too far
distant–a dream world very unlike the resting place they're headed for.

The second stanza's first line brings the reader directly in touch with
the unfolding drama and, although these are soldiers, men (as well as
old beggars and hags), the simple word "boys" seems to put
everything into perspective.

Poetic Devices

Wilfred Owen makes use of numerous poetic devices in this poem.

Aside from the the structure, which is discussed above, Owen
strategically uses assonance, alliteration, and iambic pentameter to
transmit the dirty and dark feelings felt on the battlefield.

Assonance

It is important to note the poet's use of internal, line-by-line assonance.

For example:

double / under / cursed / sludge / haunting

/turned / trudge.

And again with:

drunk / fumbling / clumsy / stumbling / under

/ plunges / guttering / flung / corrupted /
lungs / cud / dulce

Throughout the poem, these sounds replicate the background rumbling

of distant explosions.
Alliteration

Alliteration also occurs in lines five, eleven and nineteen:

Line 5: Men marched asleep. Many had lost

their boots

Line 11: But someone still was yelling out

and stumbling

Line 19: And watch the white eyes writhing

in his face

More Than Iambic Pentameter

The iambic pentameter is dominant, but quite a few lines break with
this rhythm, such as line five in the first stanza. This inconsistency
reflects the strangeness of the situation. An opening spondee (two
stressed syllables) and a trochee (stress followed by unstressed
syllable) add power to the iambic feet that follow:

Men marched / asleep. / Many / had lost / their boots,

These lines refer to the exhaustion of the men and the fact that
marching through thick sludge led to some losing their boots.

His hang / ing face, / like a / devil's / sick of sin

This is line 20. Note the alliteration and the simile, plus another
spondee and pyrrhic (no stressed syllable.) Whatever you think a devil
looks like, this devil has gone beyond the pale.

bitter as the cud

Cud is a term used in farming to refer to the half digested food of

ruminants which is chewed again to make it digestible. The suggestion
is that the blood coming up from the lungs has to be chewed by the
poor dying man. A sobering image.

This line is very similar to the first line of Owen's poem "Anthem For
Doomed Youth," which reads, "What passing bells for these who die as
cattle?"

The Latin ending is perhaps a gentle reminder of many a slogan, many

a motto and maxim held dear by clubs, military units, teams and
families as an expression of belief and ideals. These are often
displayed in Latin which was, of course, the language of the ancient
Romans.

Tone and Mood

From the start of this poem, you are immersed in the atmosphere of
war. These are the trenches of WWI, full of mud and death. Once
optimistic, healthy soldiers have now been reduced to a miserable,
exhausted gang with little left to give.

The poems takes readers deep into a shocking environment–one that is

oppressive, dangerous and without any real hope.

The poet wants the reader to know that warfare is anything but
glorious, so he paints a gloomy, realistic, human picture of life at the
frontline. He leaves us no doubt about his feelings.

The tone and mood is also set by language such as "misty panes and
thick green light." From the start, we feel that the world has been
turned upside down, and that all things having to do with happiness
and vitality have been cast away. This is not a lively green, but a thick
green. The window is not clear, but misty. This is the land of the
walking dead, of the sickly–a world cold, muddy and metallic.

By the end of the poem, it appears the reader has been moved away
from the "haunting" battlefield, and the setting becomes internal.
Here, the mood is less gruesome, but no less pitiful. In one sense, to
see the way these scenes of death and violence have affected the
poet's mind is just as disturbing as the scenes themselves.
Imagery

This poem is packed full of vivid images forged in the heat of battle,
skillfully drawn by a keenly observant poet.

The opening scene is one of a group of soldiers making their weary

way from the frontline "towards our distant rest" as bombs drop and
lethal gas is released. Details are intimate and immediate, taking the
reader right into the thick of trench war.

These men appear old, but that is only an illusion. War has twisted
reality, which gradually turns surreal as the poem progresses. The
speaker evokes a dream-like scenario, the green of the enveloping gas
turning his mind to another element, that of water, and the cruel sea in
which a man is drowning.

The descriptions become more intense as the drowning man is

disposed of on a cart. All the speaker can do is compare the suffering
to a disease with no known cure. The final image - sores on a tongue -
hints at what the dying soldier himself might have said about the war
and the idea of a glorious death.

Symbols

While Owen utilizes figurative language, similes, and assonance to

combat the illusion that war is glorious, he also uses symbols to
underline his message. There are three overarching symbols that
strengthen the impact of "Dulce et Decorum Est."

Disfiguration

Owen focuses on the way war disfigures and warps all things that
come into contact with it. Primarily, he focuses on the human body and
the way it is slowly damaged and changed before ultimately being
destroyed. We see the symbol of disfiguration in the first stanza, when
the poet reports on the state of his fellow men:

Lines 1–3
 Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed
through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our
backs

Lines 5–7

Men marched asleep. Many had lost their

boots,
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all
blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots

By looking closely at the language used in the above lines, the symbol
of disfiguration becomes clear. The men are no longer the men the
used to be. They are shadows of their former selves: dead men
walking.

Allusion

As we can see by the title and last line of this poem, one of the main
symbols is allusion (in this instance, an allusion to Horace's Latin
phrase). The allusion points to the idea that fighting and dying for your
country is glorious. After making this allusion, the poet devotes all of
his efforts to proving it wrong.

The devil is also alluded to in line 20, indicating the badness of the
battlefield.

His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;

Nightmares

Another symbol that pervades this poem is the idea of the nightmare.
Owen presents the scenes of war as a nightmare with their greenish
color and mistiness. Also, the terrifying imagery adds to the feeling of
a bad dream.
 This symbol indicates that the horrors of war are almost too hard to
comprehend. This must be a nightmare, mustn't it? The reality is that it
is not a nightmare: These are real atrocities that happened to real
people. The fact that the poet presents the poem as a sort of
nightmare makes it all the more terrible.

Sources

Ferguson, Margaret W, et al. The Norton Anthology of Poetry. Fifth ed.,

New York, NY: W.W. Norton & Company, 2005.

Lennard, John. The Poetry Handbook. Oxford: Oxford University Press,

2005.

Phillips, Rodney. The Hand of The Poet: Poems and Papers in

Manuscript. New York, NY: Rizzoli International Publications, 1997.

Poetry Foundation, "World War 1: Poetry By Year."

Online: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/70139/the-poetry-of-
world-war-i

More by Wilfred Owen

 Analysis of Poem 'Anthem for Doomed Youth' by Wilfred Owen
A powerful war poem, a sonnet, written whilst Owen was in hospital in
1917. The poet highlights the madness of war and the many young
men who die 'as cattle'.

© 2016 Andrew Spacey

What is the poem about?

The poem ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’ was written by English poet Wilfred Owen in
1917 and published after his death in 1920. This war poem graphically portrays
the horrors of war on the front line, detailing the agonising death of a soldier after
a gas attack. The content of the poem is in stark contrast with its Latin title, which
means, “It is fitting and sweet to die for one’s country”.

Language, structure and What happens in the poem?

form revision
Language: Stanza One:

 

Metaphor (“drowning”) Owen depicts soldiers as they march towards somewhere to rest
exhausted. Despite losing their boots, many carry on barefoot, t
 bloodied, so fatigued that the sounds of gas shells exploding see
 “dropping softly”

Simile 

 Stanza Two:


Alliteration and sibilance
The cry of “Gas!” prompts the soldiers into a desperate effort to
 gas masks. One soldier fails to secure his mask in time, inhaling
 “flound’ring like a man in fire”. Owen describes the soldier as d
“under a green sea”
Onomatopoeia (“gurgling”)


 Stanza Three:
Vocabulary associated with 
hell and horror
Owen recounts the haunting vision of the choking, dying soldie
 dreams, plunging at him


Juxtaposition
Stanza Four:




Powerful verb choice Owen addresses the reader directly, vividly detailing the agonis
the soldier writhing in pain in a wagon as he dies. The stanza co

with Owen denouncing the notion there is glory in dying for one
as an “old Lie”
Form:



Four stanzas of varying

length; the first two in the
 form of a sonnet




Iambic pentameter




Irregular rhyme scheme

Structure:

Enjambment




Caesura

Poems for comparison:

‘The Soldier’ by Rupert Brooke: war, death, disillusionment, patriotism




‘Mametz Wood’ by Owen Sheers: war, death, memory




‘A Wife in London’ by Thomas Hardy: war

Key words
Context: War Propaganda Realism
Themes: Horrors of war Death Loss of innocence

Poem analysis
'Dulce et Decorum Est' by Wilfred Owen

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,

Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,

Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs,

And towards our distant rest began to trudge.

Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots,

But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;

Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots

Of gas-shells dropping softly behind.

Gas! GAS! Quick, boys!—An ecstasy of fumbling

Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time,

But someone still was yelling out and stumbling

And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime.—

Dim through the misty panes and thick green light,

As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams before my helpless sight,

He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace

Behind the wagon that we flung him in,

And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,

His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;

If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood

Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,

Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud

Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,—

My friend, you would not tell with such high zest

To children ardent for some desperate glory,

The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est

Language

Sensory language renders the descriptions vivid and impactful; visually,

Owen portrays men “bent double”; audibly he captures the “hoots” of gas
shells, and the phrase “ecstasy of fumbling” conveys the physical
sensation of panic



Similes comparing soldiers with “old beggars” and
“hags” juxtaposes sharply with the idea of soldiers as strong and fit




The use of alliteration and sibilance imbues the poem with a linguistic
harshness that reflects the distressing setting




The diction “blood-shod” and “cud” evokes animal imagery to highlight the
dehumanising impact of war. The words “devil’s”, “writhing”, “froth-
corrupted” and “vile” evoke imagery reminiscent of hell




The metaphor “I saw him drowning” depicts a strong visual image,

conveying the shocking event as momentarily drowning out sound, as if
submerged in water




Stanza one maintains a consistent rhyme scheme, connoting an

orderliness and discipline as the soldiers march. This pattern is interrupted
in the second and third stanzas, reflecting the chaotic scene




The Latin phrase “dulce et decorum est/Pro patria mori” reveals Owen’s
condemnation of the glorification of war which strengthen the impact of his
argument
 

Structure

The line beginning “Knock-kneed” deviates from the typical iambic

pentameter pattern, thus reflecting the challenges of the soldiers’
movement




The third stanza is isolated within the poem to emphasise the

psychological horror of witnessing (and reliving) the soldier’s agonising
death




Caesura highlights the the soldiers’ plight, forcing the reader to pause
after each description: “All went lame; all blind;/Drunk with fatigue”




By using the first person, Owen compels the reader to envision witnessing
the harrowing events described

Form


 Stanza one maintains a consistent rhyme scheme, connoting a orderliness
and discipline as the soldiers march. This pattern is interrupted in the
second and third stanzas, reflecting the chaotic scene




The deliberate disruption to a traditional poem form, with varied stanza

and line lengths reinforces the chaos and horror of battle

Overview of themes
Themes Key quotations Language, form and structure
Horrors of “Drunk with fatigue; deaf The metaphor “Drunk with fatigue” highlights the severity of the so
war even to the hoots exhaustion; the word “softly” accentuates the physical and psycholog
The largely consistent rhythm and rhyme scheme of the first stanz
Of gas-shells dropping sense of order, but its inconsistency perhaps mirrors the soldiers’ lim
softly behind” movements

The abrupt exclamation reflects the soldiers’ panic, contrasting with

trudging of the previous stanza. Caesura creates tension and a pause
as the men grapple with their gas masks, disrupting the rhythm to re
chaos. Enjambment quickens the pace, heightening the sense of pan

The speaker compels the reader to visualise the scenes through the se
person “you”. Through onomatopoeia the poem vividly portrays th
“Gas! GAS! Quick, boys!— and gruesomeness of the soldier’s suffering
An ecstasy of fumbling

Fitting the clumsy helmets

just in time”
 “If you could hear, at every
jolt, the blood

Come gargling from the

froth-corrupted lungs”

Death “And watch the white eyes Repetition of the word “face” presents the image as all-consuming
writhing in his face, the alliteration intensifies the dreadful imagery. There is no sense of
death is prolonged and agonising, intended to shock and dispel any p
His hanging face, like a notion of glory
devil’s sick of sin”
The speaker is haunted by the memory, perhaps reflecting Owen’s ow
experiences of shell shock. The present tense stresses the perpetual n
nightmare

Caesura and capitalisation of “Lie” convey the definiteness of Owen

“In all my dreams before

my helpless sight,/He
plunges at me, guttering,
choking, drowning”

“The old Lie: Dulce et

decorum est

Pro patria mori”

Loss of “Bent double, like old The imagery and simile of the soldiers as old men highlights their p
innocence beggars under sacks” exhaustion and the dehumanising conditions of warfare

The alliteration linking “incurable” and “innocent” highlights the so

suffering. Enjambment conveys the horror of war juxtaposed with
subsequent line where the speaker addresses the reader
“Of vile, incurable sores on
innocent tongues,—”
The word “children” has both literal and figurative interpretations, su
that those who idealise war as glorious are naive about its gruesome
 “To children ardent for
some desperate glory”

Historical and literary context

Wilfred Owen was a soldier in the First World War and a highly acclaimed
poet:

In 1916 he sustained injuries in battle and remained trapped in a

shell hole for 12 days, close to the dead body of one of his
comrades

o
o

Following this traumatic experience, he was diagnosed with shell

shock before being transferred to Edinburgh for treatment

o
o

It was there that he formed a friendship with another World War I

poet, Siegfried Sassoon

o
o
 Based on his own experiences on the battlefield, Owen wrote
‘Dulce et Decorum Est’ a year before he was killed in action in 1917

The Latin lines “Dulce et decorum Est/Pro patria mori” (“It is sweet and
fitting to die for one’s country”) come from the Roman poet, Horace:

The lines were often quoted as propaganda by those who were pro-
war and wanted to encourage people to fight

o
o

A propaganda poem called ‘Who’s for the game?’ by Jessie Pope

was published in a British newspaper during the First World War
promoting patriotism, which presented the war as a game — “the
biggest that’s played” — and fighting as “fun”

o
o

Owen wrote ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’ as a rebuttal to such

propaganda by depicting the harsh realities of war

o
o
 He even included an ironic dedication to Jessie Pope in the original
manuscript

Comparing poems
Look at this exam-style question about ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’:

Choose one other poem from the anthology in which the poet also writes about death.

Compare the way the poet presents death in your chosen poem with the way Wilfred Owen presents death in ‘D
Decorum Est’.

In your answer, you should:

compare the content and structure of the poems — what they are about and how they are organised




compare how the writers create effects, using appropriate terminology where relevant




compare the contexts of the poems, and how these may have influenced the ideas in them

How you could approach this question:

Thesis/Essay introduction: ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’ and ‘The Soldier’ are both examples of poetry from the F
War and explore the theme of death. While Brooke employs peaceful, idyllic imagery to glorify death as a nob
in contrast, Owen starkly depicts the brutal reality of the battlefield. Although both poems were inspired by Wo
Owen and Brooke’s poems reveal two contrasting views on the notion of dying for one’s country.
Similarities Differences
Both ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’ and Brooke employs pastoral imagery, reminiscent of Romantic poetry (“w
‘The Soldier’ draw inspiration from rivers, blest by suns of home”). Conversely, Owen employs graphic,
the harrowing experiences of the First hellish imagery to achieve a brutally realistic tone
World War
Both poems explore the theme of a Owen’s depiction of death is intended to present the harsh reality of a pa
soldier’s death and reflect on the haunting death. In contrast, Brooke’s poem portrays death as a source of
human cost of war contributing to a legacy of “richer dust” forever associated with England
of where the body lies
Both poets explore the concept of Whereas Owen wrote his poem as a direct response to wartime propagan
patriotism by exploring the sacrifices glorifying war and patriotism, Brooke presents death as the ultimate exp
made by soldiers for their country patriotism and a means to immortality, for both the fallen soldiers and th
Thesis/Essay introduction:

‘Dulce et Decorum Est’ and ‘Mametz Wood’ are both rooted in the context of the First World War, and explor
of death. Writing at the time of the conflict in 1917, Owen depicts the agonising death of a soldier, using vivid
convey the horror of battle and its enduring impact on those who survived. Sheers, although writing decades la
reflects on the long-lasting legacy of war by reflecting on the discovery of soldiers' remains in a field to explor
past continues to reverberate into the present.
Similarities Differences
Both ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’ and ‘Mametz Wood’ are Written during the First World War and from Owen’s
inspired by the events of the First World War and its experiences, the poem captures the immediacy and ho
enduring consequences In contrast, ‘Mametz Wood’ was composed decades la
offers a retrospective exploration of the lasting repercu
the conflict
Both poets depict the physicality of death and portray Owen describes the speaker’s individual experience an
the suffering and agony endured by soldiers on the agonising death of a soldier whose face haunts the spe
battlefield. By depicting the physical toll of violence, dreams. In contrast, Sheers explores the collective and
both poets confront the reader with harsh truths about nature of war through faceless unearthed bones
war
Both poets use metaphorical language to enrich the In ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’ the tone is bitter and brutal
vividness of their imagery and deepen the emotional intended to shock the reader into realising the horrors
impact of their poems contrast, ‘Mametz Wood’ adopts a reflective tone with
contemplating the consequences of war from a long-te
perspective

Predicted exam questions to prepare for

Compare the ways poets present soldiers in ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’ and in
one other poem from the anthology.



 Compare the way conflict is presented in ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’ and in
one other poem from the anthology.

Examiner Tips and Tricks

Remember that a good response will integrate contextual understanding with

detailed textual analysis and will enhance the overall discussion of the poems.
For example, if you are writing a response to a question about ‘Dulce et Decorum
Est’, you could comment that Wilfred Owen was himself a soldier whose own
experiences left him traumatised and bitter towards those who glorified war.
Summary
The poem is written as a harsh, but ultimately fair criticism of
the atrocities of war. The poet wrote this whilst hospitalized
after experiencing fighting in the trenches of Northern France
in World War I. The soldiers in a languid, drowsy state march
slowly, shell-shocked by the traumas of war and losing touch
with their own senses. He recounts in graphic detail being
caught in the noxious gases of chemical warfare and watching
one of his fellow soldiers unable to fit the gas helmet on in
time. This man, stumbling, yelling and screaming suffers a slow
painful death, choking in the cruel toxic gas. This image of the
man dying before the persona's eyes, with him unable to help,
stays with him in his dreams. This graphic, traumatic sight
leads the persona to a blunt conclusion. Having seen this man
die before his eyes, his lungs corrupted by the chemicals, he
finds no true glory or goodness in martyrdom for one's country.
The image of an innocent man needlessly killed in his country's
conflict drives the persona to rebuke the hackneyed maxim
'dulce et decorum est pro patria mori.' He doesn't believe that
any child searching for glory should ever be told this; a
shameful falsehood that death on the battlefield is 'sweet.'
Owen does not hold back in this criticism, and sincerely
concludes the gruesome death of war is not sweet, nor are
these innocent lives lost in such traumatic ways reflective of a
joy in patriotic martyrdom.
The themes of the poem include war, propaganda, patriotism,
trauma and martyrdom. The mood of the poem is pitiful, and
the tone is both critical and pitiful.

Analysis
"Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,"
The soldiers are slouched over, lacking energy and vivacity as
though encumbered by a literal weight. The poet uses a simile
in "like old beggars under sacks," showing that just like
beggars weighed down by heavy sacks and unable to stand up
straight due to old age, the soldiers are bent over in their slow
trudge, fatigued by the spoils of war.

"Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through

sludge, Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs,
And towards our distant rest began to trudge."
This line begins with an alliteration 'knock kneed' continuing
a theme that progresses throughout the poem- the description
of the disfiguration of the soldiers. They definitely didn't go to
war looking like this, but they have been spent, and their
bodies are reeling from the deleterious effects of war. Another
simile is used here 'coughing like hags' comparing their dry,
hacking coughing to that of an old woman (hag).
Now, they turn their backs on the 'haunting flares,' showing
that they are leaving the battlefield now, with its distressing
explosions (flares) and gunshots. Finally, they can trudge to
their 'distant rest' away from the agonies of war.
"Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots, But
limped on, blood-shod."
The poet uses alliteration once again with the repetition of
the 'm' sound: "men marched asleep." The 'm' sound is often
associated with the mindless humming of a person severely
tired or groggy. Thus, the drowsy way in which the men walked
is communicated both with the alliteration and the line itself,
as their trudging makes it seem as though they are asleep and
merely sleepwalking.
Many men are said to have 'lost their boots,' which may be a
euphemism for losing their feet in explosions. Nonetheless,
they limp onward 'blood-shod.' Shod here means to be fit with
a shoe (like a horse). So, having no boots (and maybe missing
a foot), their feet are instead covered with blood.

"All went lame; all blind; Drunk with fatigue; deaf even
to the hoots Of gas-shells dropping softly behind."
The soldiers are exhausted to such a point that they are losing
their sense of touch, sight and even hearing as they are
intoxicated with enervation and fatigue. Their reactions and
senses dulled by tiresome battle on the frontlines, some are
even unable to hear the gas-shells thrown out behind them.

"Gas! GAS! Quick, boys!—An ecstasy of fumbling Fitting

the clumsy helmets just in time,"
Toxic gas, the cruel weapon of chemical warfare used by
countries during WWI, begins to spew out of the shells, and
they must fumble madly to fit their gas masks over their heads
to survive the gas attack. The poet uses 'ecstasy of fumbling'
to communicate the frenzy the soldiers are in to try get their
helmets on.
"But someone still was yelling out and stumbling And
flound’ring like a man in fire or lime.—"
Not everyone is able to slimly avoid breathing the noxious gas
by slipping on their helmets- one man still struggles amidst the
toxic fumes. He is yelling, stumbling and floundering about,
showing distress and agony. The poet uses simile again here
in 'flound'ring like a man in fire' to compare his struggling,
stumbling, plunging movements to that of a man doused in
flames.

"Dim through the misty panes and thick green light, As

under a green sea, I saw him drowning."
The poet uses vivid visual imagery to convey what the persona
is seeing. Through the misty panes of the eye-piece his gas
mask and the thick green tint of the gas surrounding them, he
sees the struggling man stumbling about like he is drowning
under a green sea. The simile 'as under a green sea.' the thick
green light around them is compared to a green sea. In the
same way the sea is a thick body of water surrounding the
person submerged in it, the gas has surrounded them and
seems as thick as the water in the ocean.

"In all my dreams before my helpless sight, He plunges

at me, guttering, choking, drowning."
This graphic image seems to haunt the persona, as he speaks
about it 'in all [his] dreams.' The persona is helpless, unable to
assist this man dying before him. He is guttering (tears
streaming down his face, a symptom of inhaling toxic gas),
choking and drowning- the poet paints a gloomy, disturbing
image that communicates his critical view of war and its
casualties.
"If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in, And watch the
white eyes writhing in his face, His hanging face, like a
devil’s sick of sin;"
The poet comes to the final stanza, where he intends to drive
home his point. The horrific image illustrated previously leads
directly into the gloomy atmosphere created here. They throw
the unfortunate man in a wagon, and the poet describes his
eyes using a personification: 'eyes writhing in his face.' His
eyes are said to be writhing, moving randomly, in the same
way a human twists and squirms, contorting their body in pain.
A simile in 'his hanging face like a devil's sick of sin' compares
the unnatural appearance of his face to that of a devil horrified
of its own evil.

"If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood Come

gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs, Obscene as
cancer, bitter as the cud Of vile, incurable sores on
innocent tongues—"
The poet continues the description of the horrific state of the
man. Blood gargles from his lungs, corrupted by froth from the
noxious chemicals. It is described with a brief simile 'obscene
as cancer,' comparing the obscenity and fatality of this blood
emerging from his lungs to that of cancer. He describes it now
with another simile, comparing the blood to the bitter,
regurgitated, half-digested material cattle ruminate/chew on.
The sores on his tongue are incurable, and he is now victim to
this lifelong affliction despite his innocence.

"My friend, 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."
The poet now concludes with the scathing remark that, if you
were able to experience those atrocities, the gruesome
corruption of an innocent man's lungs drowning amidst the sea
of green noxious gas- you definitely would not tell children the
hackneyed maxim "dulce et decorum est Pro patria mori."
This line is taken from the Odes (III.2.13) by the Roman poet
Horace. The line translates: "It is sweet and fitting to die for the
homeland." The poet sees no true glory or anything sweet in
such a painful, excruciating death.

Analysis of Dulce et Decorum Est by Wilfred Owen

Wilfred Owen’s Dulce et Decorum Est is one of the most famous anti-war poems, written
during World War I. The poem challenges the glorification of war, exposing its brutal
reality and the suffering of soldiers.

1. Context

Wilfred Owen (1893–1918) was a British soldier and poet who fought in WWI.




The poem was written in 1917 and published posthumously in 1920.




The title comes from a Latin phrase:


o

"Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori."

 o
o

Meaning: "It is sweet and right to die for one’s country."

o


The poem rejects this idea, calling it "The old Lie."

2. Structure & Form

Four irregular stanzas, reflecting the chaos of war.




Iambic pentameter, but with a broken rhythm, mirroring the exhaustion of the
soldiers.




Rhyme scheme: ABABCDCD (some variation).

3. Themes

A. Horror of War

War is portrayed as hellish and inhumane rather than heroic.




The imagery of a gas attack highlights the suffering of soldiers.

 

B. Disillusionment & Betrayal

The poem criticizes propaganda that glorifies war.




Young soldiers were lied to—they believed war was honorable, but in reality, it
was horrific.

C. Death & Suffering

Owen vividly describes the painful death of a soldier caught in a gas attack.




There is no glory in dying this way—only agony.

4. Literary Devices

A. Imagery (Vivid war descriptions)

Hellish battlefield:

"Bent double, like old beggars under sacks," → Soldiers are exhausted
and broken.

o
 

Gas attack:

"As under a green sea, I saw him drowning." → The gas is compared to
water, suffocating the soldier.

B. Simile & Metaphor

"His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin." → The soldier’s face is twisted in
agony.

C. Irony

The poem’s title and final lines are ironic: war is NOT sweet and noble.

5. Final Message

The last stanza directly addresses those who glorify war.




Owen calls the phrase Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori "The old Lie."




War is not honorable—it is cruel, horrifying, and inhumane.

 

Conclusion

This poem remains one of the most powerful anti-war statements in literature. It
exposes the brutal truth behind patriotic propaganda, making the reader question the
cost of war

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