Dulce_Et_Decorum_Est

Dulce Et Decorum Est ..by Wilfred Owen Summary It is 1916. Soldiers have been fighting terrible battles on the Western Front for over two years. On this night, a group of soldiers trudge slowly through the mud of no-man’s land as they make their way back to the trenches. They are exhausted; some have lost their boots and others seen to be asleep as they stumble onwards. Before they reach their own lines they are hit by a surprise gas attack. The soldiers fumble with their gas masks in the confusion. The smoke catches one soldier and, as he fumbles, he chokes on the fumes. Later, when the attack is over, the soldiers watch as his body is thrown on a wagon filled with other dead bodies. Theme The theme of ‘Dulce et Decorum est’ that there is neither nobility in war, nor honour for your country. Instead there is tragedy and waste of human life. Wilfred Owen fought in some of the major battles of World War I and the reality and horror of war shocked him. In the face of the desperate suffering he saw around him, it was no longer possible to pretend warfare was adventurous and heroic. Instead Owen recorded in his poetry how shocking modern warfare was and he sought to describe accurately what the conditions were like for soldiers at the Front: ‘Bent-double, like old beggers under sacks, Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge’ More importantly, Owen wanted the readers to see the reality and misery of war. Imagery ‘Dulce et Decorum est’ is built around three powerful and disturbing images. We find the first in the opening stanza: a group of soldiers’ moves through no-man’s land in attempt to get back to the relative safety of the trenches. Owen wants us to imagine what it was like in these trenches; to see the detail ‘many had lost their boots’, and reality of dying in such a place. Look carefully at the words Owen uses to describe the condition of the men: ‘Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind. After the image of the soldiers stumbling towards the trenches in the first stanza, the second image is more dramatic. The first words of the stanza change the pace of the poem, making it more urgent as the soldiers come under attack and try put on their gas masks before they choke: ‘Gas! GAS! Quick, boys! – An ecstasy of fumbling, Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time’ The poet manages to get his mask on. After the sudden activity of the men, the last two lines of this stanza changes the pace again. They have an almost dreamlike quality as the poet watches from behind his gas mask. As the thick green smoke washes over the men, the poet uses a simile of the sea to describe the gas. But one man fumbles with his mask and is overcome by the fumes and ‘drowns’ in the sea of thick smoke: ‘Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light, As under a green sea, I saw him drowning’ The dream quality of this stanza gives way to a harrowing picture of the dead man as his body is put on a wagon filled with the bodies of other dead soldiers: His hanging face like a devil’s sick of sin; …Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues’ Although young men went to war with the promise of glory, in these lines the poet presents us with the awful truth about war and conflict: that is a brutal waste of life that causes unspeakable human misery and corruption. Language Alliteration – ‘Dulce et Decorum est’ is a poem filled with powerful and harsh language. In the opening lines the poet uses alliteration to emphasise the tiredness of the soldiers as they walk through the sludge. The alliteration gives the poem a slow and heavy rhythm: Bent double, like old beggers under sacks, Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge’ Rhyme – In the second stanza the soldiers are attacked and the pace of the poem speeds up as the soldiers try to put on their gas masks: ‘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…’ In these lines the poet uses internal rhyme as well as end rhyme. This use of rhyme gives the poem a change in tempo; it also conveys the confusion and panic of the soldiers as they scramble to put on their masks. Tone – It is a very dramatic poem. It shows us the terrible waste of life during World War I. The tone of the poem is desperate, shocked and angry. In the last stanza, the poet pleads us with acknowledge what has happened to him and many other men like him at the front. He wants the readers to know this awful reality: ‘If in some smothering dreams you too could pace Behind the wagon that we flung him in’ At the end of the poem he tells us that if we truly imagine what he has written about, we could no longer tell another generation of ‘children ardent for some desperate glory,’ the ‘old lie’, that it is honourable to die in this way, fighting for your country.