Dulce et Decorum Est

In Wilfred Owen’s “Dulce et Decorum Est,” we see a very intense picture of war. Owen fought and died in WWI, and we see a picture of his experience in this poem. We are thrown right into the action with the first line beginning with “Bent double,” and are carried through a tale of battle and war scenes. With graphic diction and metaphors that help us get a sense of the feelings that went through the author’s mind, the second stanza leads us into a gas attack on his group of soldiers. After describing the death of one of his comrades, we are quickly thrown into the author’s dreams. After going through his terrible and horrifying dreams the poem wraps us with the crux of the message: “you would not tell with such high zest…The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est Pro patria mori.” This Latin phrase means “It is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country.” After a vivid and mortifying description of the war he has seen, the author warns those at home that this thing called war is not all that it’s cracked up to be.

One very important structural feature of this poem is the dramatic thematic shift in line 15. The first two stanzas present a picture of the ugliness of war, with the first one showing a general view of different areas of his war life, and the second a very specific scenario of a gas attack and the death of a fellow soldier. But beginning with stanza three, we are taken on a very stark transition into the dream life of the author. “In all my dreams” begins the stanza, and “He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning” continues the theme of the no-holds-barred approach to his descriptions of his surroundings. Just before he starts to talk about his dreams, Owen is describing the death of a soldier, so I think the transition to his dreams deliberately follows such a traumatic event. As we now know, soldiers often struggle to cope with the sights and experiences of war, and this trauma comes through very clearly in this section as his dreams follow directly after watching this death. Of course, showing this effect of war would support his point of how awful war is, and not at all what many people proclaim it to be with the phrase “dulce et decorum est pro patria mori.”

Another point of structural importance is the rhyme scheme. Owen follows the pattern ABABCDCDEFEF… This pattern is very structured, maybe alluding to the structure of the military, but I think the most important part of the rhyme scheme comes in lines 14 and 16. Here we see, for the only time in the poem, Owen does not rhyme the line with its partner. Instead, drowning is used at the end of both lines. This agrees very well with the point made above, that the event of watching his fellow comrade die was both traumatic and unforgettable. This also crosses over the boundary between recounting his experiences and revealing his dreams. I think the intertwining of experience and mental thoughts and dreams is a key part of the horrifying part of war. The fear of death obviously would be a key feature to how bad of an experience war would be, but surviving also presents terrible consequences such as this dream that is being described and emphasized with this repetitive line.

The third structural part that jumps out at the reader is the diction used throughout the poem. The laundry list of image-evoking words becomes almost overwhelming: “blood-shod,” “guttering,” choking,” “writhing,” “gargling,” “froth-corrupted,” “vile, incurable sores.” These words not only create mental images that disgust and disturb, but also are just painful to speak. The images are not pretty, but the words aren’t either. These rough war-filled words are contrasted sharply with the last stanza and its word choice of “zesty,” “children,” and the Latin phrase that hardly feels choppy or harsh: “Dulce et decorum est Pro patria mori.” Owen is further proving his point that what people at home heard when they were being recruited to fight is absolutely nothing like the actual experience of war. A great gap existed and it amounted to a lie that covered the terrible thing of war.