7. Wilfred Owen

The horrors of war in "Dulce et Decorum Est"

1. Introduction

This seventh paper also has World War I as a setting. Owen was British so the reason for his disappointment was the deceptive propaganda that came from his country to encourage soldiers to enlist and fight to reach victory and glory. Reality was very different and the promised grandeur was forgotten among the rotting corpses of fellow soldiers.

2. About the Poet

Wilfred Owen was born on March 18, 1893 in Oswestry, a town in Shropshire, England. He was ten years old when he decided to become a poet and his first writings were influenced by Romantic poets like John Keats, Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley. He was also interested in the Bible because he was influenced by his mother, a devout Anglican.

Owen was a good student and passed the matriculation exam for the University of London in 1911, but his grades weren’t high enough to give him a scholarship. His family couldn’t afford to pay for his studies but Owen was able to attend classes at University of Reading by becoming an assistant to the Vicar of Dunsden in Oxfordshire. He failed to get a scholarship in 1913 so he spent two years in France as a tutor at the Berlitz School of Languages in Bordeaux.

On his returning to England, Owen enlisted in the Artists’ Rifles Officers’ Traning Corps and after training in Essex for several months, he was commissioned as a second lieutenant in The Manchester Regiment and sent to France. He was posted to the Western Front and participated in the Battle of Somme. The poet intended to help his countrymen in battle and to narrate their experiences later. However, Owen was sent home several months later because he suffered from shell shock due to the horrors he witnessed.

He was admitted to Craiglockhart War Hospital in Edinburg two months later. There he met fellow poet Siegfried Sassoon, who was also critical of war and who encouraged him to write about his experiences in the front. He was given some months of convalescence during which his relationship with Sassoon grew deeper. Sassoon didn’t want him to return to the battlefield, but Owen ignored his advice and returned to the front in September, 1918. He was killed only one week before the war ended, and his mother knew of his death on Armistice Day.

Owen’s most well-known poems are "Anthem for Doomed Youth", "Dulce et Decorum Est", "The Parable of the Old Man and the Young", "Futility" and "Strange Meeting.

3. The horrors of World War I

In the 20th century, the Romantic figure of the patriotic hero who died honorably for his country is no longer applicable. Poems that eulogize soldiers seem out of place because modern wars have been dehumanized.

Face-to-face combats have become outdated when modern technology burst onto the battlefield. Now everyone could result wounded or killed when they least expected it — the new weapons were deadly and silent and could come from the air. Soldiers could be killed while they were sleeping, resting or eating with their comrades as they watched them die in an instant.

Due to this lack of safety, dead soldiers had to be carried unceremoniously in wagons. Living conditions were horrible as well — soldiers rested in trenches and even if they weren’t wounded in combat, the unsanitariness deteriorated their health, and spirit, greatly.

World War I weaponry included tanks, submarines, warplanes, grenades and firearms; weapons of mass destruction that annihilated whole groups of people. The weapon of which this poem is talking about is poison gas, probably chlorine or mustard.

The use of poison gas had been banned in the Hague Convention of 1899 along with air bombings and hollow point bullets. This agreement was ignored in World War I and even though gas attacks supposed only a 4 percent of the total casualties, the slow and painful death they caused was very feared.

In this context, recruitment propaganda seemed almost cruel. Journalists and writers living in England supported propaganda with slogans such as "Every fit Briton should join our brave men at the Front" or "Come into the ranks and fight for your King and Country - Don’t stay in the crowd and stare" that depicted soldiers as the most honorable job to which every child should aspire.

World War I affected almost forty million of soldiers and civilians. At least ten million died because of the war, twenty million were wounded and eight million went missing. There were just too many indiscriminate killings to regard war as virtuous.

4. Style

The poem is divided into four stanzas of eight, six, two and twelve lines each. There are twenty-eight lines in total divided into quatrains by the rhyme scheme (ABABCDCD...), the only regular element in the poem.

The numbers of syllables per line is not consistent and neither is the meter. The number of syllables in each line ranges from nine to eleven, except for the last line that has only three.

The meter is constantly changing to convey the likewise unstable nature of war:

Line 1: Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,

Line 25: My friend, you would not tell with such high zest

The rhythm is also interrupted by the use of punctuation marks that give the poem a conversational tone, this can be seen especially in line 9: "Gas! GAS! Quick, boys!—An ecstasy of fumbling,", where the author includes a spoken line to bring us closer to war scenarios.

This poem is rich in rhetorical devices:

alliteration of ’k’ in the second line ("Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,") that makes the verse sound piercing, aggressive.
use of powerful similes such as "Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light / As under a green sea. I saw him drowning." (13-14) and "His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin" (20). The first simile connects the violent events from the outside with the lonely and silent nature of the dreamworld, often associated to oceans. In the second simile, the "devil" would be the soldier but without negative connotations associated to his figure. The devil’s life centers around sin as the soldier’s life centers around heroism and glory, but after living the experience in first person he is sickened by the harsh reality.
heavy use of punctuation marks that prevent the poem from flowing smoothly and give it a faltering tone instead. Also worth noting are the use of ellipsis in the second stanza, in which the poet describes the gruesome scene that haunts him in his dreams. These ellipsis give a feeling of an oneiric transition.

5. Summary

A group of soldiers are walking tiredly towards their trenches at the end of the day. They’re so weary that only one of the men hears the sound of a gas shell behind them. They all struggle to put on their gas masks but one soldier is too late and suffers a painful death in front of his comrades, who can’t do anything to save him. The speaker is marked by that event and can’t understand how people at home can encourage soldiers to enlist and fight on such a cruel war.

6. Analysis

The first stanza features a group of soldiers who have finished their work for that day and are returning to their camp. Contrarily to what the title suggests, theirs is not an heroic story — they’re exhausted and run-down, "bent double" (1), "knock-kneed" and "coughing" (2), as if they had been downgraded to "old beggars under sacks" (1) and "hags" (2). The speaker gains credibility when he includes himself as part of the group referring to the soldiers as "we" (2). He isn’t a poet that writes about war, he is a soldier that is experiencing it first-hand.

The soldiers are so worn out that they "trudge" (4), "march asleep" (5) without their boots, blood covering their feet as a substitute. They "limped on", "lame", "blind" and "deaf" to their surroundings (6-7). They’re so "drunk with fatigue" that they could not hear the "tired, outstripped Five-Nines that dropped behind" (8). Even weapons are tired.

If the first stanza showed a desolate, dull world, the second one disrupts it violently. One of the soldiers yells "Gas! GAS!" (9) to warn the other that hadn’t heard the shells drop. Everyone seems to come back to their senses as they try to put on "the clumsy helmets just in time" (10), and when they’re done they wait in silence until the gas is gone. But one of the soldiers was still "yelling out and stumbling" (11), he hadn’t been quick enough and now he was "flound’ring like a man in fire of lime" (12). Gas attacks led to a painful death as they affected the victim’s respiratory system and they couldn’t breathe because of the blood that filled their lungs. And that’s what the speaker saw "through the misty panes and thick green light" (13), the soldier drowning in his own blood "as under a green sea" (14).

The speaker was so deeply marked by that sight that he can’t help dreaming about it. He is haunted by that poor man who "plunges" at him, "before [his] helpless sight", "guttering, choking, drowning" (15-16). He feels guilty that he couldn’t do anything to save his life.

In the fourth and last stanza, the poet speaks to the reader to make them understand that war is not glorious and heroic. The readers are far away from the battlefield and their main source of information is war propaganda. This poem was addressed to Jessie Pope, an English poet, writer and journalist whose works glorified war and encouraged young men to enlist and fight with honor for their country. Owen is speaking to all those people, he is narrating the last seconds of life of this soldiers and how they disposed of his rotting corpse. There are no cheering crowds, only a modest wagon that carries a man with "white eyes writhing in his face, / his hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin" (19-20), and whose blood comes "gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs" "at every jolt" (21-22), and its sound is "obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud / of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues" (23-24). His state is appalling and terrifying, very far from the "old Lie" trying to lure in "children ardent for some desperate glory" (26-27) — "Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori" (28-29), a line from Horace’s Odes that means "It is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country".

7. Conclusion

War exaltation has always been present and it still is. Governments try to justify their actions in the name of justice and dignity but at the same time ban morbid records and images from being shown to the general public. Owen’s poetry is desperate, hopeless, because he knows that his compatriots at home will never understand the hell that exists in the front.