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"Dulce et Decorum Est" is a poem written by Wilfred Owen during World War I, and published posthumously in 1920. Its Latin title is from a verse written by the Roman poet Horace: Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori. The poem is one of Owen's most renowned works; it is known for its horrific imagery and its condemnation of war. It was drafted at Craiglockhart in the first half of October 1917 and later revised, probably at Scarborough, but possibly at Ripon, between January and March 1918. The earliest known manuscript is dated 8 October 1917 and is addressed to the poet's mother, Susan Owen, with the note "Here is a gas poem done yesterday (which is not private, but not final)."
Summary
The text presents a vignette from the front lines of World War I: A group of British soldiers on the march are attacked with chlorine gas. Poison-gas artillery shells explode, and one soldier takes too long to put on his gas mask. The speaker of the poem describes the gruesome effects of the gas on the man, and concludes that anyone who sees the reality of war at first hand would not repeat mendacious platitudes such as dulce et decorum est pro patria mori: "How sweet and honourable it is to die for one's country". Owen himself was a soldier who served on the front line during World War I, and his poem is a statement about a type of war atrocity that the poet had personally experienced.
Dedication
Throughout the poem, and particularly strong in the last stanza, there is a running commentary, a letter to Jessie Pope, a civilian propagandist of World War I, who encouraged—"with such high zest"—young men to join the battle, through her poetry, e.g. "Who's for the game?"
The first draft of the poem, indeed, was dedicated to Pope. A later revision amended this to "a certain Poetess",|
It is sweet and fitting to die for one's country:
Death [also] catches the fleeing man,
nor spares the battle-shy youth's
hamstrings and cowardly back.
These words were well known and often quoted by supporters of the war near its inception and were, therefore, of particular relevance to soldiers of the era. In 1913, the line Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori was inscribed on the wall of the chapel of the Royal Military College, Sandhurst. In the final stanza of his poem, Owen refers to this as "The old Lie". By referencing this formal poetic form and then breaking the conventions of pattern and rhyming, Owen accentuates the disruptive and chaotic events being told. Each of the stanzas has a traditional rhyming scheme, using two quatrains of rhymed iambic pentameter with several spondaic substitutions. These make the poem's reading experience seem close to a casual talking speed and clarity.
The poem is in two parts, each of 14 lines. The first part of the poem (the first 8 line and the second 6 line stanzas) is written in the present as the action happens and everyone is reacting to the events around them. In the second part (the third 2 line and the last 12 line stanzas), the narrator writes as though at a distance from the horror: he refers to what is happening twice as if in a "dream", as though standing back watching the events or even recalling them. Another interpretation is to read the lines literally. "In all my dreams" may mean this sufferer of shell shock is haunted by the friend who suffocated for not managing to wear his gas mask, and cannot sleep without revisiting the horror nightly. The second part looks back to draw a lesson from what happened at the start. The two 14 line parts of the poem echo a formal poetic style, the sonnet, but a broken and unsettling version of this form. In the opening lines, the scene is set with visual phrases such as "haunting flares", but after the gas attack the poem has sounds produced by the victim – "guttering", "choking", "gargling". In this way, Owen evokes the terrible effects of chlorine gas corroding the body from inside.
Only five of Owen's poems were published in his lifetime. However, after his death, his heavily-worked manuscript drafts were brought together and published in two different editions by Siegfried Sassoon with the assistance of Edith Sitwell (in 1920) and Edmund Blunden (in 1931).