DULCE ET DECORUM EST

WILFRED OWEN
Visual images are Simile brings to mind Soldiers on the move
used to show the poverty & destitution, near the front lines,
severe pain & they are weighed walking back to
utter exhaustion down under their somewhere they can rest
of the soldiers burdens away from the ‘action’

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,

Similes used to make their physical state
Alliteration
clear
their
- these
state clear
images are far from noble
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Imagery shows the men as old and broken - they
have been prematurely aged by their experiences

The is poem almost in iambic pentameter, but the Consonance -

differences means the poem is over-stressed & lends a harshness
unstable, reflecting the instability & roughness of to the sounds of
the scene the poem
 Inclusive language shows how
the men are unified by their
suffering as they move away to
behind the front lines

Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs,

Sibilance in these words makes them
stand out against the rest of the lines,
Onomatopoeic
whispered, perhaps not entirely real?
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.

These first 4 lines set the scene - Connotations show

helping the audience understand their complete
the soldiers’ fatigue, their frustration exhaustion &
(“cursing”) & the constant anger that weariness of both
still surrounds them (“flares”) body & spirit
Men are reduced to the level of
robots, functioning without
thought. It is as if they are in a
dream. They have no aim but to
exist & survive
These details are particular & vivid,
giving the audience something
specific to focus on within the
atmosphere of general suffering &
produces a visceral sense of pain

Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots,

Alliteration Hyperbole stresses the
terrible condition they
are all in together
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame, all blind;
Metaphor
 Personification/metaphor Men have become numb, not
acknowledging their own
senses which have become
deadened & beyond feeling

Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots

Highlights the horror of war, which is so Onomatopoeia
traumatic the soldiers aren’t alert to the danger

Of tired, outstripped Five-Nines that dropped behind.

Personification Artillery shells - Owen allows the coming attack
Jargon of ‘five- to ‘surprise’ the audience by
nines’ refers to the using soft sounds and innocent-
calibre of the shell seeming words to contribute to
the quietness of the attack that
follows
Sudden explosion of action matches the Irony - ecstasy is usually used
falling bombs, the imperative language to describe a state of joy or
and exclamation points reflect the panic pleasure. The soldiers instead
felt by the soldiers were overwhelmed by terror,
finally aware of the danger
Gas! GAS! Quick, boys! – An ecstasy of fumbling,
No longer ‘hags’, but back to ‘boys’, highlighting Anticlimactic -
their youth & innocence the men are safe
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time,
Connotations of ‘clumsy’ - the men were easily
enlisted, but poorly equipped, a serious issue
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
Qualifying/ Senses of sight, Introduction of an
conditional word, sound & feeling are individual character
‘but’, shatters their used to dramatise
relief, and the Repeated use of
the scene
audience’s present participles
 Highly evocative simile, showing the
audience the intensity of his suffering

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.

Immediacy felt by The images of the

References to ‘green’ relate man both burning
the audience is
to the gas, gas mask & link & drowning shows
heightened by the
to the simile & sea imagery/ this is a news and
use of the personal
metaphor of ‘drowning’ complicated kind of
pronoun ‘I’
suffering
 Sudden shift to a 3rd stanza
This two line stanza reflects shifts within the poem -
effectively takes the from past to present tense, and
reader into the from a description of the
nightmarish scene exterior world to a description
of the persona’s interior world

In all my dreams before my helpless sight

These 2 lines reveal the persona’s current, traumatic reality. Having
survived this attack, he now has recurring nightmares of it, shown
through the hyperbole of ‘all’ and connotations of ‘helpless’
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.
This collection of terrible Identical rhyme to call extra attention to
verbs create a scene that is the word. Deadens the motion of the
continued in the following poem by looping back to what’s already
stanza, extending the horror. been said. Captures how the trauma
The man continues keeps the persona reliving the moment, &
‘drowning’ even after the fact subtly forces the reader to relive it as well
 Sibilance & Last stanza is 1 long The reader is now
assonance conditional sentence embedded into the
combine to make scene, ‘you’ forcing
this image truly Echoes the suffocating effect them to empathise with
horrific of the gas and the dreams the injured victim
If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace
Use of ‘if’ shows Details add to the
persona is agony of the dream
realistic & Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
understands the Eyes also shouldn't be able to ‘writhe’. The movement
opposition these is therefore deeply unnatural & frightening.
ideas face. Knows And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
the message may
not be accepted Connotations of ‘flung’ shows the soldiers
by all. did not even have time for compassion,
nor decorum. This highlights both the
agony & the protracted horror
Alliteration - an unsettling
 Repetition - the sight is strong Simile showing the extremes of
enough the persona needs to repeat the situation - how much
it for emphasis, intensifying the image
horrifying sin would it take to
with the verb ‘hanging’ (something a
make even a devil ‘sick’ of it?
face shouldn’t be able to do)

Repetition of the His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;

conditional. Keeps Consonance combines to makes
the sentence a sharp/harsh hissing sound
moving while If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
piling on more A grim & intimate image
clauses. It also
builds tension as Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
the audience has
to wait longer for Onomatopoeic Readers are confronted not only
the follow-up they ‘gargling’ startles with the disgusting sight of a
know is coming the reader pain ravaged face but also the
sounds and taste of suffering
 Associating "sores" with "cud," it creates a distinctly Tone of bitter
upsetting texture. The sores are rough, grainy, wet, scorn &
chewed on. They are "bitter," too. This doesn't just refer sarcasm
to taste, but to the harshness of the situation. The mere
fact of the sores existing, and being incurable, is bitter.

Similes to explain the horror seen. Historical

Connotations of obscene - the view context - this
is offensive or disgusting to word was not
standards of moral decency spoken
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud

Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues, —

Owen seeks to shock the reader, to disgust them with the realities of
war. The word ‘innocent’ stresses the man’s helplessness

This is an interesting choice of words, given that cancer isn't usually described as obscene or offensive in a moral sense. It's impersonal, a disease that attacks the body.
Owen's use of the word urges reconsideration, however; perhaps there is something about cancer that is morally revolting in the way it invades and feeds on an innocent
body. The poisonous gas is offensive and horrifying in a similar way. The moral revulsion might also stem from the fact that death by cancer was essentially meaningless:
cancer struck seemingly for no reason, and (at the time) it was incurable. There was no heroic victory to be had against cancer, no ideals to hold up. There was just gross,
terrible death. By equating such a death to the soldier's own death, Owen is arguing that the death that soldier's face is similarly unheroic and pointless.
 Refers to the audience. An attempt to
secure sympathies & to reject the war

My friend, you would not tell with such high zest



Oxymoron - “desperate" indicates a
situation of hopelessness, despair. It can also mean an extreme measure
taken to avoid defeat. To pair this with "glory," a word that connotes both
honour and magnificence, seems contradictory. It captures both what
must be faced to achieve glory according to the "old Lie," but also that
the very effort to achieve glory is itself desperate.
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
Attributes the wish to Anyone Connotations show that if they
‘children’ - showing ‘ardent for’ will only ‘knew’ what men really
how childish/naïve it be sorely endured, then war could never
is considered disappointed been seen as glorious
 Throughout history Allusion to a well known quote from the
young men have been ‘Odes’ of Horace, the ancient Roman poet.
lied to by the ‘old Lie’ It translates to ‘it is sweet and fitting to die
that glorifies war for one’s country’. This slogan echoed
through the ages in many cultures,
particularly in propaganda

The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est

Pro patria mori. Ironic rhyme

Owen gives Horace the last

Horace’s original poem line. He clearly hopes to
celebrates bravery and combat the old lie, but the
resilience in battle, with structure of the poem hints
cheerful generalisations about that he is pessimistic about
the perils of war. being successful.
 HISTORICAL CONTEXT
• WW1 was a stalemate - trench warfare meant that any
advancement was exceedingly slow

• New methods had to be conceived to end this

stalemate

• Poison gas, once thought ‘uncivilised’, was introduced

to the front lines, first tested by the French in August
1914

• The debut of the first poison gas, however, in this

instance chlorine gas, came on 22 April 1915, at the
start of the Second battle of Ypres
EFFECTS OF GAS ATTACK &
EARLY GAS MASK