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Dulce

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11 views2 pages

Dulce

Uploaded by

thewaywardlaureate
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Shunning Horace’s glorious words ‘Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori’, Wilfred Owen, paints a

raw image of the warfront , hinging around a poison gas attack that took place on January 12, 1917.
Akin to most war poets from WW1, Wilfred Owen had served in the army during the war and as
such, had a rather grim outlook towards war, unlike the grandiose and glorious notion of a youth
sacrificing himself for his country that was prevalent during the War.

The poem which is segmented into four uneven paragraphs depicts soldiers not as valiant heroes
fighting to save their country, but as beggars, fearfully clinging onto their life. By drawing a similie
between hags and the soldiers, Wilfred Owen explicates how pathetic the conditions in the trenches
were. The first stanza itself bombards the reader with a barrage of similies and metaphors in typical
modernist imagism. Direct and jarring metaphors like ‘blood-shod’, ‘drunk with fatigue’, and ‘deaf
even to the hoots of gas-shells dropping softly behind’ depict how sanguinary and disconcerting the
war-front can be. The last of the three afore-mentioned metaphors has to be brought into the
cynosure of every reader. Describing the dropping of the gas-shells as ‘softly’, clearly elucidates the
gravity of the situation.

The instance of the word ‘ecstacy’ in the second stanza is ironic given how dire the situation is.
Fumbling and clumsy are words that are often never used in myopic poems that aggrandise the lives
and deaths of soldier. Owen succinctly divorces the notion of ‘unflinching patriotic courage’ with
real life soldiers. The choice of the words also creates an air of confusion and fear. The line ‘As
under a green sea, I saw him drowning.’ crystalises the overwhelming nature of gas attacks and how
soldiers are generally helpless in front of something that does not even have an actual form. The
next stanza hints at PTSD and survivor’s guilt that usually soldier’s face , especially after
unexpected routs that claim the lives of other people in their battalion. The stanza also paves way
for a jab that is readied in the final stanza.

The final stanza is a caustic attack on Jessie Pope, an English poet best known for her pro-war
poems that usually appeal to young men. An extract from her poem ‘Who’s for the Game?’ reveals
the levity with which she views and presents war.

‘‘‘Who’s for the game, the biggest that’s played,


The red crashing game of a fight?
Who’ll grip and tackle the job unafraid?
And who thinks he’d rather sit tight?’’’

For a solider who has seen splintered legs, eviscerated innards, disfigured faces, charred bodies,
contorted torsos, and half-alive vestiges of human beings clinging onto each heart beat with fear and
regrets, war could never be a game. Yet these pro-war poems urge people to see it as a game that
tests a person’s courage.

The final stanza directly addresses her and other poets of the same ilk, claiming that the mere sight
would dissuade her from claiming the very thing that Horace claims in his odes. It also unclothes
the fact that many of the soliders that come to the forefront are kids (young adolescent men) who
simply believe in such fanfaronade that pro-war poems portray and, sign up their lives for vile
machinations of orders and powers way beyond them.

As a war poem, ‘ Dulce et decorum est’ shines owing to the credence that has been conferred to it
by Wilfred Owen’s experience in trench warfare. It does not talk about annexing or losing regions,
or commanders barking orders. It instead shows soldiers who survive for the sake of surviving. It
bring to the readers the battlefield where death and misery reign over irrational and exalted valour
and patriotism. It does not mention mothers who have lost their children or children who have lost
their fathers. Instead, the loss of a soldier’s life is presented in relation with the soldier himself. The
poem also moves from depicting extrinsic sounds of warfare to intrinsic sounds of battle-worn
soldiers, and this when coupled with the broken structure of the French Ballade poetic form,
projects an extremely unsettling picture to the readers. Venturing outside the confines of Wilfred
Owen’s life within the poem, what he wrote to his mother regarding the poem while at
Craiglockheart, where he met Siegfried Sassoon, is further unsettling.

"Here is a gas poem ... done yesterday”

The mere banality of the words reveal how this unsettling event is common in the battlefield that is
often depicted as glorious.

To summarise, this war poem, attempts to shed light onto the gulf between the lofty and ideal
expectations of a warfront and the real and gruesome happenings in a battlefield.

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