Poesía inglesa de los siglos XIX y XX    

"Dulce Et Decorum Est", Wilfred Owen

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                        5
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of disappointed shells that dropped behind.

GAS! Gas! Quick, boys!- An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;                            10
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And floundering 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,                                 15
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;                                  20
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                        25
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.[i]

1. INTRODUCTION

The popular idea of dying for your country or willingness to die for your country was the patriotic tone and common spirit at the time England was living the First World War. It was used propagandistically to make young people believe that this is the best thing to happen to them ever. This representative mood of the time becomes harshly questioned and criticized by this poem written by Wilfred Owen.

His objective is to show the horror and reality of war and to set this horror against the way in which war is so often glorified. Throughout this paper we will see how the author succeeds in conveying the absurdity of sacrifying people in order to gain a little piece of land.

2. BACKGROUND INFORMATION

Wilfred Owen is among the most famous poets of the First World War. This is the opening of a poem written in his own hand while he served as a soldier in the appalling conditions of the trenches. 'Dulce et Decorum Est' gives a chilling account of the futility of war, engendered from intense personal experience. It was composed during a burst of extraordinary creativity between the summer of 1917 and Owen's death in the autumn of the following year.[ii]

3. ANALYSIS OF THE POEM

Owen presents us a conventional rhyming structure with full rhymes (sacks1-backs3, sludge2-trudge4, boots5-hoots7, etc.) and alternating rhymes:

               · ABAB CDCD EFEF GHGH IJIJ KLKL MNMN

However, this is not as conventional as we expected as irregularities come when these quatrains are not presented as such but made up of four stanzas. The first stanza comprised by eight lines, the second one by six, the third one by two, and the last one by twelve lines.

The poem is written loosely in iambic pentameter, and similarly unconventional as the quatrains, the author breaks up the monotonous rhythm by introducing exclamation marks and hyphens as well as commas and full stops. Owen's iambic pentameter comprises from nine to eleven syllables per line and unlike the conventional pentameter (ustressed syllable + stress syllable), the stresses do not follow the traditional pattern. If we take a look at the first line we can notice this irregularity:

As the poem goes on, the iambic pentameter is disrupted in the most intense moment of the action:

               “GAS! Gas! Quick, boys!- An ecstasy of fumbling,” (line 9)

Through breaking the metric structure, it seems that Owen wanted to highlight the sense of panic, fear and helplessness of this situation.

The title “Dulce Et Decorum Est” means "It is sweet and fitting to die for one's country."[iii] It was a famous phrase taken from an ode of Horace and it was used as a patriotic motto to attract young people to fight in the war. For those who have not read the poem they would expect a pro-war poem, but at the moment we read the poem we will find quite an opposite attitude. As in the metre, where the conventional becomes the unconventional, the title conveys a traditional message of the time and then the very first line of the poem gives us a completely different angle of the patriotic image. “Owen reacts to the war by turning conventional poetic technique into something that appears to be normal on the surface but in reality is tainted and corrupted.”3

The title encloses the beginning and the end of the poem, and although it gives us the opposite position of the speaker, it is much related to the central idea of the poem that we will later develop on.

The speaker is Wilfred Owen, who describes the action of the poem. His attitude is totally against war. His tone and mood conveys a sense of tiredness, horror, and fear altogether, and his ultimate resolution is to fight against the message and meaning of the title.

Wilfred Owen describes the tired soldiers “Bent double, like old beggars under sacks, /knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge” (lines 1-2)3. In the first stanza he describes the men and the deplored conditions they are going through, giving thus a very realistic and harsh image. Then in the second stanza he moves on to describe how even in their weak conditions the soldiers continue to march on. Suddenly the enemy fires gas shells at them causing them to put on their masks and the most dramatic situation comes when a soldier failed to put the mask in time and died in a dreadful way. The death of this soldier causes a profound effect on the author and will pursue him in his dreams.  Owen tells us how the death and horror condition of the war cannot be erased from his mind, he describes the cruel vision of the death and its hard consequences moulded on his mind. In the last stanza he tells the readers that if they had seen such a terrible scene, they would never encourage the next generations to get involved in a war.

With regard to the structure of the poem, I would divide it into five parts taking into account both the formal and thematic structure of the poem:

1.      [lines 1-8] description of the deplored conditions of the soldiers.

2.      [lines 9-14] the appearance of the gas and the fate of the soldier who could not put on his mask.

3.      [lines 15-16] the nightmares of the speaker after seeing the horror of war and death.

4.      [lines 17-24] the poet describes the effect on him of the harsh image of the death soldier.

5.      [25-28] the central idea of the poem and the didactic message the author wants to convey: the horror of war and death that lead to question the sweet message of “Dulce Et Decorum Est Pro Patria Mori”

The strength of the poem is strongly rooted in its imagery[iv]. Owen uses four main groups of imagery that emphasizes the reality of war and helps to set both the tone and mood of the poem:

1. dreams: “Men marched asleep” [5], “In all my dreams” [15], “If in some smothering dreams” [17]. The author suffers from nightmares, where the horror of war is profoundly moulded on his subconscious. 

2. the sea and the drowning: “As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.” “He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.”, “gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs”.

3. loss of coordination: “Bent double”, “Knock kneed”, “Drunk with fatigue”, “fumbling”, “clumsy”, “stumbling”, “floundering”, “writhing”. It conveys the feeling of exhaustion felt by the soldiers, who are probably carrying heavy packs as well as having been sleepless in the trenches.

4. loss of the ability to use the senses: “marched asleep”, “all blind”, “deaf even to the hoots”, “my helpless sight”.

Another important literary figure in the poem is the simile, which reaches a hyperbolic meaning in order to make effective the contrast between the young soldiers and their current physical condition as old men: “Bent double, like old beggars” [1] “coughing like hags”[2]. Notice also the effectiveness of the use of the simile at the end of the poem when Owen identifies the soldiers as “innocent tongues”, as “children ardent for some desperate glory”. Furthermore, he contrasts the “old lie”, which is instilled into those innocent children.

All those literary devices (metre, rhyme, imagery, etc) carry the same aim, to uncover the harsh face of war, to see the reality of war hidden behind the sweet and ignorant phrase “Dulce Et Decorum Est Pro Patria Mori”, and at the same time giving strength to the brutality of this war. Everything is carefully chosen in order to carry out the ultimate message, that of the cruelty of war.

 4. CONCLUSION

I wonder how this affected the readers at the time, as for me it has been a hard poem to read like a shock to the cruel reality of war. The anger and frustration of the poem really wakes up the reader’s awareness.

There are plenty of films nowadays to provide us with cruel war images; however I can see as clear as if it were a film when the soldier was drowning in the water, as well as I can feel the atmosphere surrounding the poem. The author has definitely and successfully moulded the harsh image of war, at least on me.