Dulce et Decorum Est is a poem by Wilfred Owen Essay Example

including himself in the poem, telling us about the trauma he lives with, Owen makes his words all the more memorable. After watching a fellow soldier die, in what can only be one of the worst ways imaginable, Owen is forever haunted by the scene: "in all my dreams, before my helpless sight he plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning".

The guilt that Owen confesses about the fatality of the gas attack is clear and he is not so much seeking help as looking for somebody to blame. He turns to his reader: "If in some smothering dream you too could pace behind the wagon that we flung him" shows his contempt for the "stinking Leeds and Bradford war-profiters" (as he once called them in a letter expressing a wish for them to be killed by a U-boat coming into Scarborough bay). So, the injury - both physical and psychological - that Owen reveals in Dulce et Decorum Est as a consequence of war can also lead to hatred across society.

Ultimately though, I think it is not the civilian that Owen blames for the misery of war but rather the politician. The use of the second person singular is certainly effective in pointing the finger although it is someone ambiguous. Perhaps you, the "you [that] could hear, at every jolt, the blood come gargling... ", is not intended to be anyone other those responsible for engineering the war. It seems to me that what Owen really wants to emphasise in Dulce et Decorum Est is that it was the soldiers on the Front Line who paid the price of the war - with their lives.

The dead

man's face, "his hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin" is an image designed never to leave the reader's mind. Owen wants the reader to understand that, because what it did to them was so awful, the soldiers could not possibly have caused the war; the soldiers are simply the victims. Even more important than the idea that it was the soldiers who paid the price of First World War is the question the poem raises of whether their battle was futile, their losses unjustifiable. Is dulce et decorum pro patria mori [... it a sweet and fitting thing to die for your country]?

Owen's final word on the subject, in this poem at least, is that it is not. He scorns the politician with his patronising use of 'friend' when addressing them: "My friend, you would not tell with such high zest... The old Lie; Dulce et Decorum est Pro Patria Mori". 'Lie' is a strong word and is made stronger though Owen's deliberate and unconventional capitalisation. I would say that there is a theme of bitter/sweet running through the poem intended to pick up on this issue; there is another semantic field containing words such as: 'lime', 'green', 'bitter', 'vile' and 'zest' with only 'dulce' on the side of sweet.

Sighting the injury suffered by the soldiers and their non-involvement in starting the war as evidence, Owen is arguing that fighting out political conflicts with human pawns on the battlefield is not the answer. In conclusion, although it is specific to the First World War (for instance in that gas is no longer used as weapon) Dulce et Decorum Est offers some wider observations

about war which continue to be relevant today.

It is an anti-war poem and I believe that this is the sentiment which can still be considered in the context of modern society. I have always had a deep rooted sense that war is wrong and studying Dulce et Decorum Est has affirmed this view in me. The points Owen makes in the poem, which he presents so effectively with his use of a range of poetic techniques, support my view that we must find alternative solutions to global disputes.

They said that there would never be another war in Europe after the First World War - it had been so horrific - yet since then there have been many more. To think that Wilfred Owen was killed in the Great War, just one week before the end, and that he could have lived to be one of the Greatest British poets of all time - given the skill with which Dulce et Decorum Est is written - for me is the final blow the poem makes: war can destroy genius when it destroys life.