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
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.
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...
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,
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;
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
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.
Wilfred Owen
8 October 1917 - March, 1918
This poem, written by Wilfred Owen in 1917, describes the horrors of conflict in the First World War. The long marches, the mud, the gore, the fatigue, and, unique to WWI, the gas. The poem is dominated by darkness and death, but ends with the phrase "Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori." In its original context, the phrase embodies the glory of combat and dying for the country, as it literally translates to, "It is sweet and right to die for your country". However, in the dark context of this poem, the Latin phrase takes on a sarcastic tone, forcing the audience, those who glorify war without having experienced it, to question the true implications of fighting and dying for a country.
The mix between enjambment and caesura in the first stanza hints at the unpredictable flow of war, a constant conflict between crippling difficulty (caesura) and long stretches of marching (enjambment). The break at the end of the first stanza embodies the long nothingness that is said 99% of soldiering even today. The final 1%, the pure terror, comes into play suddenly and with extra syllables in the first line in the second stanza. The poem's meter also reflects the reality of war. The syllables march neatly in iambic pentameter for the majority of the poem, although the occasional gas attack can add chaos, or an extra syllable, into the mix as it did in line 14.
This poem, in 28 lines, gives the audience a taste of war and shatters the illusion of a glorious death for the nation. The speaker accuses the preachers of Horace of fallacy of tradition, using words such as obscene, cancer, corrupted, bitter, and incurable sores to describe the terrible detriment brought by Horace's ideas. As his audience is Western Europeans and Americans, Owen is able to speak to Western culture's appeal to purity. He accomplishes this in the last few lines, effectively saying that to teach that it is noble to die for one's country is corrupting children with terrible lies.
Every couple of decades there is a new war gone bad that reminds Americans of the harsh reality of conflict. The gas in France during the Great War, the island combat in the Pacific Theater in WWII, the dense jungles of Vietnam, and the terrorist bombings and roadside bombs of Afghanistan. I am not trying to say that war is pointless: the United States arguably had a legitimate reason to engage in almost all or all of these conflicts. However, as nominee for Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel claims, the use of force is justified "only after a very careful decision-making process."
The mix between enjambment and caesura in the first stanza hints at the unpredictable flow of war, a constant conflict between crippling difficulty (caesura) and long stretches of marching (enjambment). The break at the end of the first stanza embodies the long nothingness that is said 99% of soldiering even today. The final 1%, the pure terror, comes into play suddenly and with extra syllables in the first line in the second stanza. The poem's meter also reflects the reality of war. The syllables march neatly in iambic pentameter for the majority of the poem, although the occasional gas attack can add chaos, or an extra syllable, into the mix as it did in line 14.
This poem, in 28 lines, gives the audience a taste of war and shatters the illusion of a glorious death for the nation. The speaker accuses the preachers of Horace of fallacy of tradition, using words such as obscene, cancer, corrupted, bitter, and incurable sores to describe the terrible detriment brought by Horace's ideas. As his audience is Western Europeans and Americans, Owen is able to speak to Western culture's appeal to purity. He accomplishes this in the last few lines, effectively saying that to teach that it is noble to die for one's country is corrupting children with terrible lies.
Every couple of decades there is a new war gone bad that reminds Americans of the harsh reality of conflict. The gas in France during the Great War, the island combat in the Pacific Theater in WWII, the dense jungles of Vietnam, and the terrorist bombings and roadside bombs of Afghanistan. I am not trying to say that war is pointless: the United States arguably had a legitimate reason to engage in almost all or all of these conflicts. However, as nominee for Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel claims, the use of force is justified "only after a very careful decision-making process."
