Dulce Et Decorum Est, by Wilfred Owen – World War I in poetry

 

By MªJosé Jorquera Hervás

 

The Poem: 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 tired, outstripped Five-Nines that dropped 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 (excerpt)
Wilfred Owen (1893 - 1918)

 

 

 

Analysis of the poem

 

This paper will deal with WWI (World War I) through the poetry, seen through the poets of the war. This poem belongs to Wilfred Owen’s anthology, and it acts as a background to the war’s poets movement. These poets wrote about the horrors and atrocities lived during the war, and particularly Owen took up to write about World War I, the one he had to live.

 

Through his poetic work, Owen describes and tells us how he lived this awful war that shook mainly Europe but also the whole world at the beginning of the 20th century, the biggest war known until then, it was called the “Great War” or “The War To End All Wars” (Forés).

 

Particularly this poem, Dulce Et Decorum Est, Owen makes us be witnesses, the same as he was, of the war, and we can see or imagine how terrifying it must have been for the soldiers.

 

If we should analyse the poem we would notice that Owen makes a detailed description of this hard situation through unpleasant verses such as in the first stanza: “But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind”, in the second stanza: “Gas! GAS! Quick, boys!”, or in the last stanza: “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”, narrates so brilliantly the atrocities they lived, that the lucky of us that can read it, are almost present in the war too. It’s 1918 (when he was fighting, as well as the previous moments to death) each time it is read because it is extremely real to our eyes. Although other verses are less frightening but they are all dramatic ones and can be found in the second line of the first stanza: “Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge”, where Owen expresses the bad conditions they lived in the shelters, body to body, dirty, ill without hope of getting better and lying in their own dirt, with the mud to their feet, or in line 7 of first stanza: “Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots”, where he tells us how they have turned to lose their senses, then they mess all and the brain is able to reason no more, they are so tired out and fed up with the situation and conditions that they have finished their senses and are exhausted, feel destroyed, and they only wish it would end.

 

According to professor Forés, ‘the main question of the poem, the theme or idea Owen wants us to transmit, means an attempt to dismantle the big myth, the old belief of those who go to war must feel proud of it and never have to give up no matter the adversities, and that the opportunity of fighting for your country is worthwhile. That was the traditional point of view in Owen’s days England. The poet tells us about men, partners, that have to fight all together in a battlefield for a unique aim: their country’s glory. What the poet wants to do in this poem is actually to dismantle and leave bare the myth of the war, especially in those points of a higher enthusiasm for taking part in a battle for one’s country, where it is supposed to feel good if you go to war and fight and die defending your country and your flag, but it doesn’t take into account the tremendous consequences and the terrible moments lived while the war develops. The message the war sends before starting is a sensation of encouragement to achieve the aim, no matter how hard it is, you have to honour your country and serve it faithfully even if it takes your own life, but the proud feeling of a soldier, a fighter, the honour it means, is bigger than everything.’ (Forés)

 

Thus we can understand that, against all these ancestral beliefs, Owen comes to break them down and shows the lie they hide, through the title itself firstly, and strengthen or clarifying in the last two verses of the poem: the great lie of life ever, is that going to war in order to fight for your country is honourable and desired by many. Owen uses the reference of the title ironically to treat this idea. He uses ironically the question of honour and tries to stress what the important things in life are. Moreover, he wants us to see what moral the children from any generation are learning, that becoming a soldier is the best idea and fighting in a war for a shared interest is the right way, it is the right attitude to everyone’s eyes and everybody should go to war. Owen tries to break down that old belief and tries to tell not to continue expanding that idea to next generations, since he is suffering like ever the horrors of what the war means. He wants to transmit that it’s not necessary to go to war to feel as if you are serving your country and feel as a real man, but preventing men before they go to war, that nothing is what it seems. All the brave you think you are at once, that feeling disappears when you are right there at the war, right there on the battlefield. No one can expect what is coming until it’s there. Owen points out that it is not worthwhile going to war, as it is believed, that men shouldn’t have on it a proud feeling because it will provide them the worst conditions and atrocities, and they should think twice if they are ready to go, not only taking into consideration the question of honour and patriotism, because it will take them to the most terrifying death.

 

As professor Forés explains, ‘war poetry is obscure, black poetry, and it deals with terror, panic, pain, anguish, blood, phantasmagoria, decadence, death, it all shows the atrocities committed and all that soldiers had to suffer unfairly in their bodies and psyche. For World War I poets, this was the greatest war ever, and the last likely expected, because of the size, conditions and consequences. But furthermore, as they couldn’t expect Second World War would come after, they referred to it as the biggest war, the most awful ever, the so-called “The War to End all Wars”, giving all the importance they could and narrating it with detail and horror.’ (Forés)

 

Kenneth Case states that “the existence of evil was almost forgotten in the period of stability which preceded the First World War. The outbreak of that war in 1914 heralded an era in which evil became an immediate reality to most people. Rupert Brooke (1887-1915) was the last English poet to make war glamorous. The satirical verse of Siegfried Sassoon (1886-1967) and the poetry of Wilfred Owen (1893-1918) showed that chivalrous notions of warfare belonged to the past and that modern war was as barbaric as futile. The war revealed to an incredulous world that scientific progress and industrial power could be harnessed for the purpose of mass slaughter. It has been an age haunted by nightmares. And by the end of Second World War in 1945 it was obvious that technical ingenuity had brought the world to the brink of annihilation.” (Case, 58)

 

Esteban Pujals contributes to the study of War poets: “In 1914, August 3th. First World War came to materialize the unavoidable political and economic crisis that had in the XIX century system basis its cause. England took part in the war and fought the German enemy. Many of these soldiers were young and some were poets. For these, at first, war meant the freedom of a materialised and not much respecting environment, it was the door to the patriotic movement and they were to prove their capacity against the enemy, the traditional heroic origin of idealisation of risking one’s life to a noble and fair cause.” (Pujals, 559-560)

Michael Yee studies the situation too, and states that ‘Owen's generation was experiencing monumental changes in the fundamental structure of their society. Imperial Russia was in the throes of a revolution that would depose an emperor (Tsar) and replace him with communists. Small, independent Germanic baronies were unified for the first time as a single, powerful nation that upset the balance of European power. And, in Britain, the suffragettes engaged in "unladylike conduct" to win their right to vote. In tumultuous times such as this, young men desperate to find their places in the new society were easily inspired by visions of past glories and colonial expansion. The prevailing attitude was to have one last, great war for the glory of the empire. The grim reality, however, was that the methods of warfare had changed, and no one really understood what the new rules were. In past wars, a platoon of infantrymen with bayonets fixed to their rifles could successfully capture an enemy position. But during World War I, machine gun nests could decimate these soldiers as they charged forward. The soldiers dug trenches and fortified their positions with barbed wire, but the enemy countered with poison gas. Mustard gas was such a horrible death that soldiers climbed out of their trenches to risk sniper fire and artillery shells rather than expose themselves to the gas. No one back home could truly comprehend what life and death on the front was like unless they had experienced it themselves. Television and CNN did not exist to beam images of the war into the comfort of their homes. To remedy this, Owen drew upon familiar images and wrote poetry in the style of parables like Aesop's, The North Wind and the Sun . He wrote a short, compelling story to lure in unsuspecting readers and ensnare them at the end with a moral. The moral of Dulce et Decorum est is a warning not to be so zestfully tell young adults how glorious it is to die for one's country’ (Yee)

Esteban Pujals, in attempt to set Owen’s attitude once he was concerned about reality and his own situation as a soldier, adds: ‘In the sonnet ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’, Owen wonders which funeral orations and bells would attend those who die as a flock. Reply is contemptuously obvious: orations, regrets and bells would seem mocks because they would be the consequence of guns, and crying would remember the noisy fire opened. Men would kill each other with no hate nor resentment, everything would come to be unimportant.’ (Pujals, 561)

In conclusion, we have seen how Owen tries to show through this poem that things on the battlefield are quite different than those moral lessons, nothing is the same once you are there, the enthusiasm and the courage you started with, are blown away little by little and finally they disappear giving way to desolation, crying, desperation.

 

In my opinion, it is certainly a wild poem that seems taken out from the most terrifying film ever created. It seems unbelievable the barbarities that took place, but fortunately we  dispose of poems like this and brilliant poets as Owen, that it makes us go back to that time and experience in a way what for the soldiers it meant to be there at that moment.

 

 

BIBLIOGRAPHY:

 

 

Dr Vicente Forés, 2007 University of Valencia

 

Kenneth Case, “A Short History of the English Literature”, 1961 Max Hueber Verlag, München. (13/03/07)

 

Esteban Pujals, “Historia de la Literatura Inglesa”, Ed. Gredos, Madrid, 1988 (13/03/07)

 

http://users.fulladsl.be/spb1667/cultural/owen.html#wilfr2 (13/03/07)

 

http://www.warpoetry.co.uk/owena.htm#Shock-of-war, by 1999 Saxon Books and James Mitchell, and David Roberts and Saxon Books 1995 (13/03/07)

 

http://damoo.csun.edu:8888/13959, by Michael Yee English 1B MWF 9am Moorpark College, Spring 2004 (13/03/07)