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Dulce Et Decorum Est," Wilfred Owen Vividly Depicts the Horrors of War

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Dulce Et Decorum Est, CONTEXTUALIZE - Written by English poet Wilfred Owen who was born in the late 19th century and died in battle in the early 20th century during the first world war - During his time in the war Owen was diagnosed as suffering from shell shock and was sent to Craiglockhart War ​ ​ ​ Hospital in Edinburgh for treatment. It was during treatment at Craiglockhart that he met fellow poet Siegfried ​ ​ ​ ​ Sassoon who inspired him to translate his experiences into poetry ​ - This poem, alongside many other poems by Owen, are a commentary on the first World War, which took place from 1914 to 1918 CONTENT - In "Dulce et Decorum Est," Wilfred Owen vividly depicts the horrors of war. As a soldier in World War I, he experienced the ignobility of war firsthand. By depicting death and destruction in detail, he proves that war isn't heroic at all.. Firstly, Owen depicts soldiers trudging through the unsanitary trenches, weakened by injuries and fatigue. Then the men come under attack and must quickly put on their gas masks to prevent the green gas from choking them. One man dies horrifically in front of the speaker. The speaker then argues that if the reader had seen this man die, they wouldn't glorify war. He knows that the general public has a glamorized view of war, and he wants to dispel it. PURPOSE Reveal the horrific nature of war and the suffering of soldiers NARRATION STRUCTURE - Made up of four stanzas of varying number of lines. The structure of the poem is integral in the flow of the story told by the speaker - The rhyme scheme of the poem is ABABCDCDEFEF etc. This rhyme scheme reflects the continuous marching of the soldiers, as told in the beginning of the poem. - The poem has an iambic pentameter, which also reflects the marching of the soldiers as seen by the stressed and unstressed tones. However, this iambic pentameter is sometimes broken, which allows Owen to utilize the poem’s structure in order to convey further meaning. THEMES - Brutality and pointlessness of war - Attitudes towards war in the modern day - War and trauma TONE - The tone changes from lethargic at the beginning of the poem, it then becomes urgent with the dropping of the gas bombs and it ends being angry and confrontational as the speaker addresses the readers directly MIPs. in this commentary I will be returning to three main ideas: - The main themes of this poem - The ways in which Owen utilizes the poem’s form to convey meaning - The ways in which Owen highlights the mistreatment of soldiers in the war LINE-BY-LINE ANALYSIS 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. - Simile: Owen compares soldiers to “old beggars” bent under their burdens and their coughing to that of “hags”, a ​ derogatory term for old women. This emphasizes the physical weariness of the soldiers as they struggle through mud. - Consonance and monosyllabic: Owen uses consonance and monosyllabic words to lend a harshness to the ​ ​ ​ sounds of the poem. In the first line, the letter "b" appears in three stressed words ("bent," "double," and "beggars"). This gives way to hard "c" and "k" sounds, with "sacks," "coughing," "cursed," and "backs." Although the "k" sounds of "knock-kneed" are silent, they contribute visually to the hard consonants of this section. - Personification: Owen personifies the flares which the soldiers are walking away from as “haunting”. This ​ personification of weaponry contrasts with the almost ‘dead’ descriptions of the soldiers, further emphasizing their weariness and fatigue - Sibilance: the sibilance of "distant rest," meanwhile, makes it stand out from the rest of the landscape, sounding ​ ​ ​ like a whisper, perhaps not entirely real. 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. - Hyperbole: The soldiers are not actually "asleep," "lame," "blind," "drunk," or "deaf," but the extreme conditions ​ ​ ​ they are experiencing make these descriptions feel accurate. Another way to read these hyperbolic statements is that the trauma of the war makes them feel lame, blind, drunk, and deaf, even if in a strictly physical sense they are not. - Neologism: blood-shod is a made-up word by Owen. “shod” refers to a horseshoe and is thus utilized as a ​ metaphor to dehumanize the soldiers further, indicating that their weariness is inhumane. ​ - Iambic pentameter is broken: the word “drunk” is stressed and therefore breaks the iambic pentameter which ​ existed in the poem. This loss of metre further accentuates the weariness of the soldiers as even the poem’s form is unable to keep up. - Definition: five-nines are the gas shells ​ - Diction: Owen develops the surprise of the gas attack in the next stanza by letting it sneak up on readers as well, ​ using soft sounds and innocent-seeming words. The shells drop "softly behind" with only "hoots" to signal their presence. The poem also uses enjambment at the end of line 7 after the innocent-seeming "hoots" to entice the ​ ​ reader to rush on to the next line, which reveals the gas-shells. In contrast to the poem's opening lines, the consonants here are mild. Owen uses sibilance again, letting the whispering "s" sounds of "hoots," "gas-shells," ​ ​ and "softly" contribute to the quietness of the attack. Gas! Gas! Quick, boys!—An ecstasy of fumbling Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time, - Tonal change: With the stanza break, the reality of danger slams into the poem and the tone becomes instantly ​ urgent as the gas attack takes place. This urgency is immediately seen in the 3 exclamation marks in line 9. Owen also jams a lot of stressed syllables in line 9 which, in comparison to the first stanza, illustrates the urgent and panicked tone of this new stanza. - Contrast: Owen describes the panic to put on gas masks as an "ecstasy of fumbling." Ecstasy is usually used to ​ describe an overwhelming state of joy or pleasure. However, for the soldiers this ecstasy is turned into terror as they fumble to put on their masks. Evidently, war has taken what is usually a word connoting joy, and turned it into terror. - 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. - Line 11 introduces an individual character, allowing the reader to focus on the fate of a single person instead of the larger group of soldiers. - Simile and metaphor: Through the misty goggles of his gas mask, the speaker sees the landscape as dim, full of ​ the green glow caused by chlorine gas. He compares this landscape to being underwater, and this leads him to a new way of explaining what he is seeing. "I saw him drowning," he says. This decision to move from simile to metaphor intensifies the image. It is not "like" the man is drowning, he is drowning. ​ ​ ​ - Descriptive words: the speaker takes three different examples of danger that is common (fire, lime, and water) to ​ explain what the gassed soldier is experiencing. The fact that the speaker struggles to explain what this kind of death looks like makes it all the more frightening and unknown, emphasizing the horrific nature of death in war. In all my dreams before my helpless sight, He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning. - Reflective shift: in this new stanza the speaker shifts the poem from past tense to present tense and from a ​ description of the exterior world to a description of his interior world. - Diction: the speaker states that he has recurrent nightmares about the gassed soldiers in “all” his dreams, ​ describing the extent of his trauma and thus emphasizing the multitude of ways in which death in the war affected soldiers. - Broken rhyme scheme: The poem's first stanza is 8 lines long, and follows the rhyme scheme ABABCDCD. The ​ second stanza begins to follow this pattern, but does not complete it. After six lines that follow the scheme ABABCD, the break comes, leaving the rhyme incomplete. However, the third stanza then completes the rhyme scheme from stanza 2 ("sight" rhymes with "light"; and "drowning" rhymes with itself). Owen does this in order to further emphasize and embody the meaning of the poem. In this case, the new stanza is not capable of standing on its own; it's as if it is a shard that has broken off the previous stanza. It's linked to the previous stanza, but cut off from it by the break. Similarly, the speaker is linked to his past through trauma, but cut off from it by time. 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; - Conditional sentence and tonal shift: the tone changes to one that’s confrontational and angry as the speaker ​ addresses the readers directly. By starting the stanza with ‘if’, and addressing the speakers with words like ‘you’, the speaker is able to hook the readers and challenge them to imagine a hypothetical situation. - Description: The description "the white eyes writhing in his face" in line 19 is unsettling, as it evokes the ​ uncomfortable and disturbing sensation of eyes rolling back far enough to expose the whites.
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