Contents: Poem Text Poem Summary Themes Style Critical Overview Criticism Sources For Further Study |
Wilfred Owen 1920
Many of Wilfred Owen’s poems, including “Dulce et Decorum Est,” paint in stark images the brutality of war. Having fought in some of the bloodiest action of World War I, Owen wished to warn his English countrymen that the horrors of combat far outweigh its glory. He believed that those writers and politicians at home who championed the necessity of war did so only because they had not experienced its suffering — the suffering of the poem’s dying soldier poisoned by mustard gas, his “white eyes writhing in his face,” the blood “gargling” from his lungs. Such images were intended to make civilians experience the troops’ fear and pain. Owen hoped that by displaying in such vivid terms the reality of war he might encourage others to let pity inform their patriotism.
“Dulce et Decorum Est,” like much of Owen’s work, relies on irony — a figure of speech in which the actual intent is expressed in words which carry the opposite meaning — to help convey its message about war. An example of this is title itself, from the Latin poet Horace: “Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori” (“Sweet and fitting it is to die for one’s country”). Although patriotic and romantic depiction’s of war run through British poetry of the Victorian period (see, for instance, Tennyson’s “The Charge of the Light Brigade”), Owen hoped to direct poetry in a new direction. He shows us nothing “sweet” in a gas attack, nothing “fitting” or heroic about bootless, “blood-shod” soldiers marching “like old beggars” and “coughing like hags.” Compared with war’s absurd violence, Owen suggests, patriotism becomes an absurd matter: the poem never tells us what country the poisoned soldier is dying for.
Owen himself was killed in 1918, a week before the armistice that ended World War I. He had just returned to the front after recuperating from illness in a Scottish hospital. While in the hospital, he met and was encouraged by the English poet Siegfried Sassoon, who published much of Owen’s work in a volume titled Poems in 1920. Today Owen is regarded as one of the finest war poets of the century.
