Dulce et Decorum Est By Wilfred Owen

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. 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 Pro patria mori. = means it is sweet and proper to die for the fatherland.  

Explanation Of Poem

About the harsh conditions of war Brutality of seeing friends die without being able to help them People lying about the conditions of war and how it's taught to impressionable children that it's an honor to die in war

Theme

Theme is war  Owen is anti-war

Tone

Tone is sorrow and revealing  The horrors of war

Analysis

In the first stanza, Owen sets the scene. The soldiers are trudging wearily back to camp where they may get a brief rest from the horrors of the front line. The soldiers, although they are young, are ‘Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,/Knock-kneed, coughing like hags’. This image is in sharp contrast to what many people at the time would have associated with fighting men.There is no glamour or glory in Owen’s description: some soldiers are barefoot, all are exhausted and lame as they stumble towards their ‘distant rest’. Behind them, shells fall, but the men are deaf to the sound, so focused are they on getting to thecamp. The broad vowel sounds and the alliteration ensure that the pace of this first stanza is slow, reflecting the pace of the weary men who are ‘Drunk with fatigue’. In the first stanza, Owen tells us that ‘Men marched asleep’. In the second staza they are awoken, but it is to a living nightmare. The soldiers are attacked with poison gas and they suddenly spring into action. The capital letters and the exclamation marks add to the sense of urgency:‘Gas! GAS!’.The use of internal rhyme in this stanza: ‘fumbling’, ‘clumsy’ and ‘stumbling’ focuses our attention on the men’s awkward movements. In their desperate haste to put on the gas masks, the men are clumsy.In this ‘ecstasy of fumbling’ one soldier does not get his mask on in time. Helplessly, Owen watches as the man stumbles and chokes on the poison gas. Owen is watching through the glass eyepiece of his own gas mask and it appears to him as if the other man is drowning ‘under a green sea’. This simile, in which Owen compares the clouds of green gas to a green sea, is a powerful one. It adds a sense of unreality to the scene, almost as if Owen momentarily cannot take in the reality of what he is seeing.A man is dying in front of his eyes and he can do nothing but watch. The third stanza is only two lines long but it is no less powerful for that. The dreamlike, unreal quality of the last stanza is continued here when Owen tells us that his dreams are haunted by the image of the dying man he could not save.  The imagery in the fourth stanza is chilling and horrific. The dying man is ‘flung’ into a wagon as he can no longer walk. The word ‘flung’ shows how cheap life has become and how there is no dignity afforded to the dying. This is understandable, of course, as the soldiers can do next to nothing to help their comrade. He is just another victim of the senseless waste of life that marked WorldWar One. There is little time for compassion. As Owen paces behind the wagon, he sees the soldier’s death throes. The man is writhing in agony, and every jolt of the wagon brings blood bubbling up from his ruined lungs. Owen addresses the reader directly in this stanza, saying that if those who read his words could see the appalling reality of war, they would not be so quick to tell children ‘the old Lie’ that dying for your country is a sweet and noble end. There is nothingsweet or right about a man choking slowly to death in the back of a wagon.     (http://www.aoifesnotes.com/junior-cert/Paper-Two/docs/studied-poetry/Dulce%20et%20Decorum%20Est%20-%20Notes.pdf)    

Important Quotes

'Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots Of gas-shells dropping softly behind.' Shows the exhaustion of the soldiers and how lethargic and oblivious the are to things around them because of this exhaustion.         Gas! GAS! Quick, boys!—An ecstasy of fumbling Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time, Repetition and capitalization are used to try and show the reader how dire the situation is. It gives the reader a sense of urgency.          In all my dreams before my helpless sight, He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning. Using adjectives like these create a terrifying image and make the horrors of war even clearer to the reader           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.