Contents: IntroductionPoem Text Poem Summary Themes Style Critical Overview Sources For Further Study |
Criticism
What Do I Read Next?
- Randall Jarrell is a writer who, like Owen, uses powerful imagery to convey the horror of war. His poem “Death of the Ball Turret Gunner,” in particular, has themes and incidents similar to those in “Dulce et Decorum Est.” Specifically, the reader is shown the fear and nightmarish reality surrounding a gunner’s last living moments. The poem is included in Jarrell’s 1945 collection, The Complete Poems.
- In the September 18, 1997 issue of English in Australia authors Peter McFarlane and Trevor Temple discuss an innovative plan for teaching Owen’s poetry by having students develop meaning with a dramatic reading of the poem, interpretive music or dance, or artwork. McFarlane and Temple note that the method seems to have fostered for their students a better understanding and student “ownership” of Owen’s poetry. The title of their article is “Making Meaning: A Teaching Approach to the Poetry of Wilfred Owen Using the Visual and Performing Arts.”
- Vietnam veteran and poet Yusef Komunyakaa offers another excellent example of a soldier who recaptures “in country” experiences in his poetry. Like Owen, Komunyakaa saw fellow soldiers fall in action. His poem “Facing It” depicts the physical and emotional reflection a veteran has when visiting the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. This poem can be found in Komunyakaa’s 1988 Dien Kai Dau.
- A true sense of the talent of an artist can not possibly be gained through the analysis of a single piece of that artist’s craft. Students interested in Owen’s poetry should read his other works, including “Anthem for Doomed Youth,” “Strange Meeting,” “Arms and the Boy,” “Spring Offensive,” and “A Terre.” These poems and many others can be found in Owen’s Collected Poems, published in 1964.
- R. L. Barth’s 1983 Forced Marching to the Styx: Vietnam War Poems is yet another example of the impact war has on humanity. An excellent place to begin is with Barth’s poem “The Insert.”
- Students interested in the fiction arising from wartime experience should read the works of Tim O’Brien. An excellent place to start is O’Brien’s 1979 National Book Award-winning novel Going after Cacciato.
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin
The speaker not only wants to convey the horror of his experience — he positively wants the nameless “you” to see what he has seen. (“You, too, should have these dreams,” he suggests, for reasons that become apparent later in the poem.) The image of a man not gingerly lowered into the ground in a casket but instead “flung” into a wagon stresses the indignity of the soldier’s impending death, while the simile “like a devil’s sick of sin” creates the impression that the soldier has become other than human — a revolting, almost supernatural creature.
Even this imagery (and such powerful imagery it is, with the “white eyes writhing in his face”) is not enough for the speaker. He also wants “you” to hear the soldier die as well, in full cinematic sound:
If you could hear, at every jolt, the bloodCome gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues, —
Recalling the notion of the soldier “drowning” in gas, these lines offer the sounds of drowning — except that the “gargling” is not water, but blood. The soldier is, in effect, drowning in himself — in his own blood — which compounds the initial irony of a man drowning on land. The speaker also appeals to the sense of taste here as well, comparing the solder’s taste of his own blood to “the cud / Of vile, incurable sores”; the rhyming of “blood” and “cud” emphasizes their relationship in terms of taste, while the overall impression of the taste is one as revolting as the “white eyes writhing in his face.” The once innocent soldier has been corrupted (“froth-corrupted,” to be exact) by the war, and his body is the brutal proof of that fact.
But who is the “you” upon whom the speaker is forcing these images, sounds, and tastes? The answer lies in the poem’s final lines, after the speaker finishes cataloguing the horrors of the dream he wants this “you” to have: If you could have dreams as vivid as these, he implies, then
My friend, you would not tell with such high zestTo children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.
The “you” is not specifically King Henry V, but all those like him, who clothe the horrors of war in beautiful words and appeal to those “children” (automatic symbols of innocence) who yearn for a glory made “desperate” by the fact that it is only attainable through wounds or death. Nor is this “you” actually the speaker’s “friend,” since that address in this context is a sarcastic one. Horace’s adage — like Henry’s bombast — is an “old lie,” and the poem attacks those who propound it. The final, awful irony is that Owen himself died fighting in World War I, a week before the armistice was declared. Like millions of others, there was no Saint Crispin’s Day for him.
Source: Daniel Moran, in an essay for Poetry for Students, Gale, 2001.
Tyrus Miller
In the following essay, Tyrus Miller examines the vivid images of Owen’s poem.
Wilfred Owen’s “Dulce et Decorum Est” is justly one of his most celebrated poems and a landmark amidst the poetry written by combat soldiers during World War I. Owen combines vivid sensory immediacy, conveyed through his careful composition of sound, imagery, and syntax, with a powerful psychological and ideological denunciation of war. Juxtaposing an implied schoolboy past when he still believed in the “Old Lie” of glory in war, the horrifying recent past of the gas attack, and the present of dreams and writing in which the Old Lie of glorious death appears in all its falseness, Owen weaves a complex pattern of time and changing consciousness throughout his poem. In a few terse lines, he manages to contrast the classical age of the Latin poet Horace to his own modern age, the idealizing words of the schoolbook to the reality of
“Juxtaposing an implied schoolboy past when he still believed in the “Old Lie” of glory in war, the horrifying recent past of the gas attack, and the present of dreams and writing in which the Old Lie of glorious death appears in all its falseness, Owen weaves a complex pattern of time and changing consciousness throughout his poem.”
warfare, the blind patriotism of the homefront to the cynical demystified attitude of the frontline soldier, and the naïvety of the child to the dismaying recognitions of the adult.
The Latin phrase “Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori,” which lends the poem its title and concluding lines, comes from a poem of Horace, writing under the emperor Augustus Caesar. It means, “It is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country.” For Owen, a junior officer in the British army who died in combat in 1918, the line has a number of resonances that make it an appropriate target of his anger and criticism in his poem. First, the sentiment the line expresses is obviously an incentive to patriotic self-sacrifice, to be willing to die in war for one’s country so as to experience the glory of one’s deeds. Yet equally importantly, such lines were the mainstay of British classical education, which stressed learning classical languages and experiencing the morally uplifting quality of the literary culture of the ancients. While the less savory or sexually racy parts of the classical canon were edited out, the textbooks and anthologies were full of such edifying phrases as the one that gives Owen his theme. Owen, thus, is primarily interested in the latter-day uses of the classics rather than in their historical reality. He not really concerned whether Horace himself was being sincere or hypocritical when he penned his lines. Rather, he is pointing to the hypocrisy or blindness of those who continue to feed children on classical ideals in a modern world in which these values no longer correspond to any reality: the terrifying new world in which the trench soldier found himself, an infernal landscape of mud, flares, devastated houses, machine guns, gas grenades, barbed wire, and long-range artillery. If the schoolmaster and the war recruiter could really experience what modern warfare was like, Owen believes, they would not be so eager to trot out the well-rehearsed lines written hundreds of years in the past: “My friend, you would not tell with such high zest / To children ardent for some desperate glory, / The Old Lie.”
Owen begins his poem in confusion and apparent violence, strongly implying that the reader has entered in the middle of some action already well underway. With the first two words, “Bent double,” the reader gets the impression of a blow that has been struck or a dangerous near-miss that has compelled a tense, rapid, violent contraction of a body. Owen reinforces this sense of contortion and displacement by withholding the person who has been bent until the second line (“we”) and adding several other images further contributing to this impression of a body knocked out of kilter: “Bent double, like old beggars under sacks, / Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge.” Up to this point, these figures have no definite location or features. Soon, the reader will learn that they are drawn from the trenches of World War I; but in the opening lines, they might just as well be damned souls trudging all eternity through the hell of the medieval Christian poet Dante. Only with the flares of line 3 and the “trudge” to a distant rest does the reader finally begin to intimate who and where “we” are: a group of trench soldiers withdrawing from combat at night.
The next four lines draw a veil of extreme weariness over the scene. The men are marching in a half-sleep. They are insensate to pain. Many have lost their boots in the sludge and mud of the rain-filled trenches and shell holes, and they trudge on wearing their own blood as a kind of boot (“blood-shod”). In their fatigue, they are stunned and senseless, as if lame, blind, drunk, and deaf. So tired are they that the artillery shells that fall short of their lines seem to miss them because the shells themselves are fatigued. Clearly, the men are projecting their own tiredness onto everything around them.
In the midst of this dull, thudding atmosphere, Owen portrays a sudden, violent event that shatters the deadened mood of the previous stanza. As if the reader were present on the scene, the gas attack is announced only by the desperate warning of the officer in charge: “Gas! GAS! Quick, boys!” They have only a few seconds to get their gas masks on to save themselves from the acrid, searing, toxic gas that has been released from a shell. Again, Owen captures the confusion and fear of a panicky mass of men scurrying to save themselves from threatening death: “An ecstasy of fumbling, / Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time.” Yet if the gas masks render the soldiers literally faceless, one man, a soldier who has failed to get his mask fitted in time, stands out from the rest: “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 one of the most surprising turns of the poem, Owen suddenly pulls the reader out of the narrated war scene and into his own dreams: “In all my dreams, before my helpless sight, / He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.” The shift is, in its own way, as violent as the gas attack that broke into the dozing fatigue of the first stanza. Once again, as at the beginning, the reader is unsettled and dislocated: was the vivid narration of the night march and gas attack a real event or a traumatic dream? Owen implies that in the end it does not really matter which it is, dream or reality. To have experienced this scene in real life is to be doomed to repeat it in dreams, and to dream it so vividly is to suffer its real agony all over again. Owen reinforces this sense of identity of dream and reality in his only departure from the otherwise strict alternating rhyme scheme (ABABCDCDEFEF etc.). In the two line stanza that mentions Owen’s dreams, rather than rhyming with the word “drowning” in line 14 from the previous stanza, Owen exactly repeats the word “drowning,” thus implying that this scene must recur over and over without change.
In the final stanza, the poem once again shifts, now from the poet’s dream to his address to a reader, presumed to be a person on the homefront who has experienced nothing of the horror of war and who still believes that war is glorious and ennobling. Owen angrily wishes that his reader could be haunted by dreams like his own, to feel drowned and smothered with guilt and horror as he does over the gassed soldier that had been under his command. Although he cannot literally bring this haunting about, through his poem and its grotesque details, he can force his reader to confront the ugly reality of war that masks behind fine phrases and edifying sentiments. Thus, Owen lingers over the sounds and sight of the dying body, destroyed by the poisonous gas. In six horrifying lines, he drags his reader slowly up to the brink of death. He displays the eyes moving convulsively about in the paralyzed face, expressing in this contradictory figure the soldier’s unspeakable suffering. He exhibits the blood and fluid that bubble up from the burned and blistered lungs, describing the gargling and croaking noises that the man makes as his wracked body is jolted along the road in the wagon in which it has been “flung.” And finally, the poet even takes us into the mouth of the man himself, forcing us to feel with him the sensation of his chewing and biting to relieve the pain of his burnt, ulcerated, swollen tongue.
Owen insists on the innocence of this tongue, so as to contrast it with the lack of innocence of those whose tongues continue to speak and teach “the Old Lie.” It is as if Owen were wishing that the innocent tongues of his men would be left unharmed, while those who continue to participate in the lie of the war, feeling no risk themselves, would have their tongues burned and blistered as soon as they tried to speak. Thus, Owen’s final lines are addressed to the teachers and parents who have helped prepare these young men to go to war, but left them unprepared for anything they would actually face. Many of these soldiers, he implies, were little more than children who thought they were going off to some high adventure, having been taught that war was a glorious thing, that death ennobles youth, and that they would prove their courage and virtue in combat. But the war being fought in the trenches, with gas and machine guns, Owen makes clear, is nothing like the idealized scenes of the one-on-one strife of valorous heroes fighting in classical poetry. Its violence strikes anonymously, destroys young bodies in the ugliest and most disgusting ways, makes men scurry to survive like rats, and give rise to a necessary cynicism and indifference towards the dying and dead. This, Owen implies, is the real face of “dying for one’s country,” and we should cease to fool ourselves and others about it. His final rhyme and closing line let the full irony of this phrase ring past the ending: glory rhymes with “mori” (die) as if glory is swallowed up in death. In the poem, as in real life, Owen has seen too clearly, it is death that has the last word, not glory.
Source: Tyrus Miller, in an essay for Poetry for Students, Gale, 2001.
“Even more hauntingly, Owen writes of the fear of those who survive. The images of battle, ever imprinted on their minds, will haunt their sleep. The nightmare of the trenches can never be erased.”
Kimberly Lutz
Kimberly Lutz is an instructor at New York University and has written for a wide variety of educational publishers. In the following essay, she examines how Wilfred Owen broke from literary tradition in “Dulce et Decorum Est.”
Generally regarded as the the poet of World War I, Wilfred Owen broke with many of the literary conventions of war literature in his poetry. Most strikingly, Owen does not present his soldiers as necessarily heroic. Instead he shows frightened men in pain, dying gruesomely. Their last thoughts are not of joy at having, in the words of American revolutionary patriot Nathan Hale, “but one life to give for their country.” Instead, they fight aimlessly for life. As they gasp their final breaths, Owen suggests that they have no comprehension of a righteous cause or a meaning behind their sacrifice. Even more haunt-ingly, Owen writes of the fear of those who survive. The images of battle, ever imprinted on their minds, will haunt their sleep. The nightmare of the trenches can never be erased. Indeed, Owen biographer and critic Dominic Hibberd records that Owen himself “deliberately stayed up late in order to shorten his sleeping hours” during his wartime hospitalization in Scotland, trying hopelessly to escape the memories that invaded his dreams. Hibberd believes that in “Dulce et Decorum Est” Owen was describing his own recurrent nightmares, “directly facing the central experience of his war dreams, the sight of a horrifying face which renders him a ‘helpless,’ paralyzed spectator.”
This sensibility of the cost of war to both the dead and surviving soldier stands in stark contrast to the types of poetry with which Owen’s readers would have been familiar. Take for instance, “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” a famous poem by the Victorian era’s most famous poet (and poet laureate) Alfred, Lord Tennyson. Written in 1854 in response to a newspaper account of a military mistake that sent hundreds of men to die battling the Russians in the Crimean War, the poem acknowledges the awful cost of war. However, the reader learns only that “horse and hero fell.” The bloodshed, the smells, the confusion that go along with battle are not depicted. Further, Tennyson describes how these soldiers, even while knowing that they are being sent to die because “Someone had blundered,” accept their fate ungrudgingly: “Theirs not to make reply, / Theirs not to reason why, / Theirs but to do and die.” Abandoning the ethos of self-sacrifice, the narrator of Owen’s poem does question why he and his fellow soldiers must miserably die in what seems to be a fruitless campaign. Directly addressing the reader, Owen argues that “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.” The Latin line, taken from the ancient poet Horace, means “It is sweet and meet to die for one’s country.” Calling this “The old Lie,” Owen shows how dying is anything but sweet and questions the pursuit of “glory” that leads boys to the trenches. Breaking from the not too distant past — Tennyson died the year before Owen was born — Owen sets out to both question authority and to show realistically what World War I was like from the perspective of the trenches.
In trying to capture the feeling of modern warfare, however, Owen not only violated the literary conventions of poets like Horace and Tennyson, but of the popular poetry of his own time. In the newspapers, poets were writing of the glory of war, enjoining young men to rally to the cause and fight in the trenches. More than his other poems, “Dulce et Decorum Est” was written in direct response to such patriotic and sentimental dribble, and particularly in response to one prolific pro-war poet, Jessie Pope. In an earlier version of the poem, Owen actually named this woman, indicating that she was the “friend” who tells “children” the “old Lie.” One of her poems, “A Cossack Charge” describes soldiers in action: “The wine of war they’re quaffing,/ The glorious draught of swift, resistless death.” Death in her vision is heroic and almost desirable.
Owen’s argument with such patriotic writers was not well received by the early critics of his work. Critic D. S. R. Welland (who in 1960 called “Dulce et Decorum Est” “moralising”) cites a 1921 review in the Times Literary Supplement: “The suggestion is that a nation is divided into two parts, one of which talks of war and ordains it, while the other acts and suffers. We can understand how such a thought might arise, but not how it can persist and find sustenance.” In other words, this reviewer believed that Owen’s strong feelings of betrayal are overstated. In a 1924 letter, Sir Henry Newbolt, another patriotic poet who as critic Gertrude M. White records “had called death in battle sweet,” heartily disagreed with Owen’s conclusions: “Owen and the rest of the broken men rail at the Old Men who sent the young to die: they have suffered cruelly, but in the nerves and not the heart — they haven’t the experience or the imagination to know the extreme human agony . what Englishman of fifty would-n’t far rather stop the shot himself than see the boys do it for him?” Newbolt thought Owen blind to the sorrow of those who stay at home awaiting news of further casualties. A more recent critic, Adrian Caesar, while believing that Owen’s anti-war message was important in 1917, argues that there is a “tendency in a poem like this to substitute different types of glorification and heroism for those being satirised.” Particularly, Caesar finds that “Dulce et Decorum Est” wants the reader to admire the “sufferings not only those of the gassed soldiers, but also Owen the poet’s.” In over seventy years of criticism, many see Owen as a little too satisfied in his own righteousness.
But if “Dulce et Decorum Est” is didactic — tending towards preachiness — it is a highly effective sermon. And it is effective for two reasons. First, Owen successfully captures the ugliness of war, and particularly his war — World War I. Second, Owen is able to create new and powerful metaphors to describe war, metaphors that can replace the truisms of heroism and glory that poets had for so long depended on.
In the first stanza, Owen places his reader immediately in the experience of war. “Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,/ Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge.” Nothing is pretty about this world, and the soldiers, far from seeming manly, have been reduced to “beggars” and “hags.” Old women, rather than young men, they cannot stand upright. Instead of victoriously marching they “trudge,” not to battle, but away from it: “on the haunting flares we turned our backs / And towards our distant rest began to trudge.” Having already deflated the sentimental picture of soldiers, Owen in the second stanza turns his eye to what battle and death actually look like: “Gas! GAS! Quick, boys! — An ecstasy of fumbling, / Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time; But someone still was yelling out and stumbling.” In this war, the men desperately try to defend themselves, not from an attacking enemy, but from the almost unseen poison gas deployed by the enemy. They defend themselves not by reaching for their guns to fight but by ineffectively “fumbling” for protective gas masks. The man who fails to reach his mask in time is doomed to die, “guttering, choking, drowning” with “the white of his eyes writhing in his face,” and “the blood / gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs.” This vividly described death is far from “sweet.” Some critics suggest that Owen tried for an even less palatable realism in his line about “incurable sores on innocent tongues.” Merryn Williams, for one, believes that in this description, Owen “seems to have been thinking of venereal disease.” This interpretation furthers the idea that Owen’s soldiers are not heroic. Far from being youthful boys, they are corrupted and diseased men. The corruption and the disease, however, spring directly from the experience of war. Soldiers on short leave infamously frequent prostitutes, the implied source of the “incurable sores.”
What is most effective about this poem, however, is that Owen does not merely turn to realism to combat the literary images of the past. Rather he creates new metaphors and images. The narrator of the poem who watches the man being gassed describes, “As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.” Here Owen leaves the realistic description of guns and mud behind, and instead through figurative language seeks for images to convey the world of war. The green gas becomes the green sea. The man choking on the gas is pictured as drowning in that sea. Next, Owen moves from the battlefield to his nightmares: “In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,/ He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.” The war is at once real and unreal, happening in life, but repeated in dreams. It is the unnaturalness of war, its nightmarish qualities that Owen wants his readers to see. He does not ask the reader to join him on the battlefield, but to join him in his dreams: “If in some smothering dreams you too could pace / Behind the wagon that we flung him in.” Dream my dream, says Owen. Bringing his reader with him under the sea, Owen demands that his audience recognizes what it really means to die for one’s country. D. S. R. Welland notes that “Dulce et Decorum Est” is a bit “unpolished.” For of course, as he points out, Owen was unable to make his final corrections before his slender book of poetry went to press. Owen died on the battlefield in 1918, one week before World War I ended.
Source: Kimberly Lutz, in an essay for Poetry for Students, Gale, 2001.
“Owen’s poem, which describes a gas-attack upon a British company during World War I, attacks the kind of sentimental notions about war that Henry espouses so skillfully.”
