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CONTEXTUALIZE
- Written by English poet Wilfred Owen who was born in the late 19th century and died in battle in the early 20th century during the first world war
- During his time in the war Owen was diagnosed as suffering from shell shock and was sent to Craiglockhart War Hospital in Edinburgh for treatment. It was during treatment at Craiglockhart that he met fellow poet Siegfried Sassoon who inspired him to translate his experiences into poetry
- This poem, alongside many other poems by Owen, are a commentary on the first World War, which took place from 1914 to 1918
CONTENT
- In "Dulce et Decorum Est," Wilfred Owen vividly depicts the horrors of war. As a soldier in World War I, he experienced the ignobility of war firsthand. By depicting death and destruction in detail, he proves that war isn't heroic at all.. Firstly, Owen depicts soldiers trudging through the unsanitary trenches, weakened by injuries and fatigue. Then the men come under attack and must quickly put on their gas masks to prevent the green gas from choking them. One man dies horrifically in front of the speaker. The speaker then argues that if the reader had seen this man die, they wouldn't glorify war. He knows that the general public has a glamorized view of war, and he wants to dispel it.
PURPOSE Reveal the horrific nature of war and the suffering of soldiers
NARRATION
STRUCTURE
- Made up of four stanzas of varying number of lines. The structure of the poem is integral in the flow of the story told by the speaker
- The rhyme scheme of the poem is ABABCDCDEFEF etc. This rhyme scheme reflects the continuous marching of the soldiers, as told in the beginning of the poem.
- The poem has an iambic pentameter, which also reflects the marching of the soldiers as seen by the stressed and unstressed tones. However, this iambic pentameter is sometimes broken, which allows Owen to utilize the poem’s structure in order to convey further meaning.
THEMES
- Brutality and pointlessness of war
- Attitudes towards war in the modern day
- War and trauma
TONE
- The tone changes from lethargic at the beginning of the poem, it then becomes urgent with the dropping of the gas bombs and it ends being angry and confrontational as the speaker addresses the readers directly
MIPs. in this commentary I will be returning to three main ideas:
- The main themes of this poem
- The ways in which Owen utilizes the poem’s form to convey meaning
- The ways in which Owen highlights the mistreatment of soldiers in the war
LINE-BY-LINE ANALYSIS
Dulce et decorum est
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.
- Simile: Owen compares soldiers to “old beggars” bent under their burdens and their coughing to that of “hags”, a derogatory term for old women. This emphasizes the physical weariness of the soldiers as they struggle through mud. - Consonance and monosyllabic: Owen uses consonance and monosyllabic words 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. - Personification: Owen personifies the flares which the soldiers are walking away from as “haunting”. This personification of weaponry contrasts with the almost ‘dead’ descriptions of the soldiers, further emphasizing their weariness and fatigue - Sibilance: the sibilance of "distant rest," meanwhile, makes it stand out from the rest of the landscape, sounding like a whisper, perhaps not entirely real.
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.
- Hyperbole: The soldiers are not actually "asleep," "lame," "blind," "drunk," or "deaf," but the extreme conditions they are experiencing make these descriptions feel accurate. Another way to read these hyperbolic statements is that the trauma of the war makes them feel lame, blind, drunk, and deaf, even if in a strictly physical sense they are not. - Neologism: blood-shod is a made-up word by Owen. “shod” refers to a horseshoe and is thus utilized as a metaphor to dehumanize the soldiers further, indicating that their weariness is inhumane. - Iambic pentameter is broken: the word “drunk” is stressed and therefore breaks the iambic pentameter which existed in the poem. This loss of metre further accentuates the weariness of the soldiers as even the poem’s form is unable to keep up. - Definition: five-nines are the gas shells - Diction: Owen develops the surprise of the gas attack in the next stanza by letting it sneak up on readers as well, using soft sounds and innocent-seeming words. The shells drop "softly behind" with only "hoots" to signal their presence. The poem also uses enjambment at the end of line 7 after the innocent-seeming "hoots" to entice the reader to rush on to the next line, which reveals the gas-shells. In contrast to the poem's opening lines, the consonants here are mild. Owen uses sibilance again, letting the whispering "s" sounds of "hoots," "gas-shells," and "softly" contribute to the quietness of the attack.
Gas! Gas! Quick, boys!—An ecstasy of fumbling Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time,
- Conditional sentence and tonal shift: the tone changes to one that’s confrontational and angry as the speaker addresses the readers directly. By starting the stanza with ‘if’, and addressing the speakers with words like ‘you’, the speaker is able to hook the readers and challenge them to imagine a hypothetical situation. - Description: The description "the white eyes writhing in his face" in line 19 is unsettling, as it evokes the uncomfortable and disturbing sensation of eyes rolling back far enough to expose the whites. Eyes also shouldn't be able to writhe, a verb which refers to a twisting motion (in pain or otherwise). The movement of the soldier's eyes is thus deeply unnatural and frightening. - Simile: In line 20, the speaker then compares the face to "a devil's sick of sin." This simile is about extremity; how much horrifying sin would it take to make even a devil "sick" of it? This language thus highlights the intensity of the soldier's suffering, which is beyond the usual territory of human experience.
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,—
- Conditional sentence: In line 21, Owen reinforces the structure of the conditional sentence that makes up the final stanza by repeating "If" — this repetition keeps the sentence rolling while piling on more clauses.
- Simile: the description of the blood of the soldier being as “obscene as cancer” makes the comparison between cancer - a disease which struck seemingly for no reason and at the time was incurable - to the soldier’s death. Hereby, Owen argues that the death of soldiers in the war was pointless and morally repulsive, just as cancer is.
- Simile: by comparing the soldier's coughed up blood to “incurable sores” and “cud”, readers have a physically disgusting image in mind. Like cancer, the poison gas attacks innocent victims. The gas, however, is a manmade creation that humans then use on each other—a fact that again underscores the horror of and lack of glory in war.
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.
- End of conditional sentence: Line 25 signals the resolution to the long conditional sentence. The speaker finally comes to his point, ending the stanza. If his audience could experience the horror of his dreams, then they would not pass on to their children the idea that war is glorious. - Addressing the reader: the speaker addresses the readers as “my friend”. This word is ironic given that the speaker is speaking bitterly and sarcastically and believes that anyone passing on the "old Lie" about war and glory is in fact no friend at all. - Diction: The phrase "desperate glory" describes a kind of fever pitch of emotion. While young people back home in England may be told the old Lie about war through war propaganda and may want to join the army, Owen aims to disprove the idea that dying for one’s country is glorious. Instead, Owen depicts a real death, in all its lack of glory, and its terrible inglorious cost. - Capitalization of “Lie”: capitalizing “Lie” gives it weight and definition, emphasizing that this isn’t any old lie but it is the old Lie that death in war is glorious and honorable. - Quote from Horace: the speaker identifies as the actual text of the "old Lie" are in Latin. The lines are a quotation from Horace that is often translated as “ It is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country. ” That original poem celebrates bravery and resilience in battle, with cheerful generalizations about the perils of war. By including the
original lines of the poem here, Owen evokes how far back into history the myth of glorious patriotic death goes, and therefore how deeply ingrained it is in modern culture.
