Wilfred Owen had considerable first-hand experience of the horrors of gas warfare during World War I, and his poem “Dulce et Decorum Est” is an attempt to depict the helplessness of men caught in a gas attack. Writing in four irregular verse paragraphs, Owen describes the general condition of men involved in the war, sketches briefly the shock of a gas attack, then dwells on the aftermath of this tragic event on someone who lives through it.
Although it is often unwise to associate the narrator of a poem with its author, it is quite likely that in “Dulce et Decorum Est” Owen is speaking in his own voice. His method of direct address to the reader makes his appeal in the final lines especially compelling.
Owen opens the poem with a description of a group of demoralized soldiers retreating from the front lines of the battlefield. The men are clearly fatigued (“Men marched asleep,” the narrator observes), so worn down that they are “deaf even to the hoots/ Of gas-shells dropping softly behind” (lines 7–8). Then, suddenly, someone shouts “Gas! GAS!” (line 9), and the men go into an “ecstasy of fumbling” (line 9) to put on masks before the deadly poison can take their lives. All but one are successful; the narrator looks out from behind the glass of his protective mask into the “green sea” (line 14) that the gas has created around him and his comrades, watching helplessly as one of his fellow soldiers dies in agony.
The image of that dying soldier is one that can never leave the narrator. As readers learn in the two lines set off from the rest of the text, the sight of that dying comrade haunts the narrator’s dreams, as the soldier “plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning” (line 16).
That memory prompts the narrator to offer in the final verse paragraph some bitter advice to readers about the nature of warfare and the outcome of blind patriotism. In the last twelve lines of the poem, Owen describes his experience of walking behind the wagon in which the dead man has been placed, seeing the corpse frozen in the twisted agony of its death throes. That sight, he says, would prevent any man from adopting glibly the notion that dying for one’s country is somehow noble.
Forms and Devices
What most readers notice immediately when reading “Dulce et Decorum Est” is the vividness of Owen’s imagery? The poet is able to make the horrors of warfare come alive before readers’ eyes. Some of those images are expressed in carefully chosen metaphors; others are simply presented in graphic language that describes the scene as the narrator sees it or remembers it.
Owen frequently collapses two activities into a single image, thereby heightening the reader’s awareness of the agony of the soldiers he describes. For example, in the opening lines, he captures the frustration of the men as they move across the battlefield in a single phrase; “we cursed through sludge” (line 2) suggests the simultaneous activities of moving forward while uttering a continuous stream of obscenities about their fate. To describe the difficulty of some of his comrades who no longer have boots to wear but who must go on about their duties, he says, “[w]e limped on, blood-shod”—graphically depicting the condition of the men’s feet by a single compound adjective that captures both the sight and the feeling of this situation. Other examples of such vivid language abound: Owen describes the memory of the man who dies of gas poisoning with such phrases as “the white eyes writhing in his face” (line 19), “the blood/ Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs” (lines 21–22). The comparisons, too, are intended to reinforce in readers the sense of frustration and horror these soldiers feel. Owen describes them as being “like old beggars under sacks” (line 1). He characterizes his dying comrade-in-arms as “flound’ring like a man in fire or lime” (line 12); and in his dreams he sees the dead soldier’s face looking “like a devil’s sick of sin” (line 20)—certainly one of the most horrific renditions of distortion and disgust one might imagine.
All of these images are intended to contrast with the Latin maxim from which the poem’s title is taken: “Dulce et decorum est,” that is, “it is sweet and proper,” to undergo the agonies of disfigurement and death in the name of patriotism. Owen’s bitter indictment of this philosophy comes through in the words he chooses to depict the death of his fellow soldier.
Themes and Meanings
The major theme of “Dulce et Decorum Est” is associated with its Latin title, which is taken from a work by the poet Horace (65–8 b.c.). The full phrase (which Owen uses to close his poem) is dulce et decorum est pro patria mori, which can be loosely translated, “it is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country.” Owen consciously works to undermine this noble statement of patriotism by showing the ignominy of death in modern war.
The reader who has some knowledge of classical literature, especially epic poetry and the heroic odes which celebrate great warriors who fall in battle while serving their nation, will immediately see Owen’s strategy. The men he describes in this war are anything but noble. Instead of confronting their foes in single combat, the soldiers in Owen’s poem are retreating from the front lines. They are tired, both physically and psychologically. They are almost deaf to the sounds of the falling gas bombs that could take their lives at any moment.
Unlike the heroes of earlier wars, these soldiers do not face death at the hands of a recognizable enemy who bests them with sword or spear. Instead, death comes from afar; worse still, it comes impersonally in the form of an insidious poison that snuffs out life in a brief instant of agony (which Owen contrasts subtly with the “ecstasy of fumbling” [line 9] that occurs when the men try to put on their masks). These soldiers utter no death-bed speeches, as did their classical counterparts whom Horace and earlier poets celebrated. Instead, the only sounds emitted by those under gas attack are incoherent yells and—after death—a “gargling” from “froth-corrupted lungs” that occurs as the corpse of the soldier too slow to put on his mask in time is carted off to burial.
Owen served as a lieutenant in the British Army during World War I; ironically, he was killed shortly before the armistice was signed. Having grown up in England at the end of the nineteenth century, Owen would have come to the war imbued with a sense of patriotism, as the British had gone to great lengths to convince themselves that they were engaging in a noble conflict to save humankind. The graphic realities of the battlefield did not match the glorious descriptions of war prevalent in the literature Owen and his educated officer comrades had read. There was no glory in dying from gas poisoning. What Owen seems to have realized is that death by gassing was a metaphor for all death in modern warfare; the notion of a glorious death was simply a lie. “Dulce et Decorum Est” graphically depicts a central irony of death on the modern battlefield: No matter how noble the cause may be, the individual soldier can expect nothing but misery in combat and an ignominious end should he be unfortunate enough to become a casualty.
Bibliography
Griffith, George V. “Owen’s ‘Dulce et Decorum Est.’” Explicator 41, no. 3 (1983): 37-39. Provides a detailed reading of the poem, with an emphasis on images of voice. Griffith argues that “Dulce et Decorum Est” is as much a poem about poetry as it is about “the pity of war.”
Hibberd, Dominic. Owen the Poet. Basingstoke, England: Macmillan, 1986. An illuminating study of Owen’s “poethood” based primarily on careful readings of the poems, including “Dulce et Decorum Est.”
Owen, Wilfred. The Collected Poems of Wilfred Owen. Edited with an introduction and notes by C. Day Lewis. New York: New Directions, 1964. The definitive edition of Owen’s poetry includes juvenilia, notes concerning manuscript variants, and two essential essays by accomplished poets. Also includes a memoir by Edmund Blunden.
Stallworthy, Jon. Wilfred Owen. London: Oxford University Press, 1974. This definitive biography sheds valuable light on the context and occasion of “Dulce et Decorum Est.”
Welland, Dennis. Wilfred Owen: A Critical Study. Rev. ed. London: Chatto and Windus, 1978. In this first and perhaps most influential study of Owen’s poetry, Welland argues that “Dulce et Decorum Est,” though masterly, is inferior to later, less strident poems such as “The Sentry.”
Critical Evaluation:
Wilfred Owen set his poem “Dulce et Decorum Est” during World War I on the Western Front in France. His purpose—to protest against the mentality that perpetuates war—is unmistakable, but what sets the work apart from much other antiwar literature is the effectiveness of his tightly controlled depiction of war.
The first fourteen of the poem’s twenty-eight lines comprise a sonnet that vividly describes a single terrible moment. The last twelve address the reader directly, explaining the significance or moral of the incident. The speaker is among a company of exhausted men who after a stint at the front are marching unsteadily toward the rear when they are suddenly overtaken by poison gas. After they hastily pull on their gas masks, the speaker sees through the misty lenses that one of them, somehow maskless, is staggering helplessly toward him. He watches the man succumb to the gas, desperately groping the air between them as he drops to the ground, like someone drowning. The third stanza shifts the context to the speaker’s dreams. In a single couplet, the speaker declares that in all his dreams he sees that soldier plunging toward him. In the final stanza, he turns to the readers, telling them that if they too could have experienced such dreams and watched the soldier dying on the wagon into which the soldiers flung him, they would never repeat to their children “The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est/ Pro patria mori.”
Throughout the war, this Latin phrase—a quotation from the Roman poet Horace (Odes III. 2.13, 23 and 13 b.c.e.)—was frequently used in inspirational poems and essays. In a letter to his mother, Owen provides the translation, “It is sweet and meet to die for one’s country,” and he expostulates sarcastically, “Sweet! And decorous!”
Wilfred Owen is often judged to be the most remarkable of the group of “war poets” who emerged during World War I. Although “Dulce et Decorum Est” is seldom considered to be technically Owen’s finest poem, it is nevertheless among his most famous because it captures so compellingly not only the tribulations of the soldiers who fought in the war but also their belief that the patriotic rhetoric on the home front and the government’s refusal to negotiate a peace were more to blame for their suffering than the opposing soldiers. Owen, who was an officer with the Manchester Regiment, planned to publish “Dulce et Decorum Est” in a volume that was to present the truth about the war, which he knew to be utterly at odds with the belligerent cant that appeared daily in newspapers and magazines in England.
Two drafts of the poem carry the dedication “To Jessie Pope etc” (two other drafts simply say “To a certain Poetess”), suggesting that Owen had originally specifically targeted such individuals as Jessie Pope, whose collection of children’s verses, Simple Rhymes for Stirring Times, was intended to kindle enthusiasm for the war.
In the end, Owen removed the sarcastic dedication, perhaps so as to make clear that he wished to address a much broader readership. Most English men and women had greeted the outbreak of war in August, 1914, with enthusiasm. Wars of recent memory had been limited, distant affairs; the people expected adventure and heroism from a contained conflict that would be over by Christmas. Instead, after the second month of the war, when Germany’s march on Paris was halted at the Marne, the opposing armies dug themselves into trenches facing each other across a narrow strip known as “No Man’s Land” along a line that stretched across Belgium and France. In part because of the efficiency of machine guns and because tanks were not deployed until near the end of the war, neither side was able to dislodge the other. Millions of men lost their lives in costly and fruitless attempts to break the stalemate; in just one day, July 1, 1916, the great offensive at the River Somme took the lives of 60,000 men. Rats, lice, and the sight of exposed corpses were inescapable conditions of trench warfare. By the time the war ended, all those who had experienced the horrors of trench warfare had been forced to abandon their belief in the superiority of European civilization and the idea of European progress.
In the opening lines of “Dulce et Decorum Est,” Owen vividly portrays the price of trench warfare, the exhaustion of soldiers who have become like old women, “hags,” coughing, lame, blind, and deaf. The poet speaks for these individuals who, though they no longer function in tidy military unison, are joined by their shared experience of a nightmare that seems just at the point of being over when the new assault arrives. The deadly gases (at first chlorine, later phosgene and mustard gas) that remain a hallmark of World War I, were first used on a large scale on the Western Front. Although soldiers were equipped with respirator masks, more than one million men died from such attacks. The gas whose effects Owen describes in the second stanza is the odorless and colorless mustard gas that was frequently used after July, 1917. Detectable only by its sting, it gave its victims only seconds to protect themselves and caused severe, often fatal, burns to exposed skin and lungs. Owen also mentions other miseries of the “Great War” such as the unusually heavy rainfalls that turned the fighting zone into a bog in which the men suffered crippling foot ailments and sometimes even drowned.
The poem also expresses “the pity of war,” the theme Owen also articulated in the short preface he drafted for the intended collection. English poetry, he explains, is “not yet fit to speak” of heroes, but speaking the truth of war may act as a warning to the next generation. Owen uses the word “pity” in a special sense, one that encompasses a profound fellow feeling for all those who suffer; and, ultimately, that includes everyone. Hence, his protest against war transcends itself and becomes a protest against all inhumanity. The ability of Owen’s poems to transcend the particular circumstances of their creation was a quality some of his early critics, including the poet W. B. Yeats, failed to see. “Dulce et Decorum Est” accomplishes this as effectively as anything Owen wrote, for the focus of its protest is not the pain suffered by a few men but rather the transhistorical “Lie.” The horrible death of the gassed soldier exposes the fallacy behind the oft-repeated, high-sounding Latin epigram: The poem’s protest is against an abuse of language.
Owen drafted the poem in August, 1917, at the age of twenty-four, while he was convalescing at Craiglockhart War Hospital in Edinburgh. He finished it about one year later, perhaps shortly before his death. The event described in the poem is almost certainly based on actual experience, as Owen reported such “smothering” dreams to his doctor. Recovering from concussion, trench fever, and “shell shock” or “neurasthenia” (terms that were often used as euphemisms for exhaustion), Owen’s stay at Craiglockhart was crucial in his poetic development, in part because he became acquainted with the more experienced soldier-poet Siegfried Sassoon but, even more important, because it gave him a chance to work steadily during a period when his sense of poetic purpose was most urgent.
Owen was deeply concerned about the technical problems involved in the expression of his passionate convictions. Some of his later poems use striking methods such as half-rhyme, but in this poem too, Owen’s technical mastery is impressive. The first stanza employs heavy, single-syllable rhymes throughout; to convey exhaustion, Owen breaks up the rhythm, which only composes itself in the third line. After several comparatively regular lines, a dramatic shift occurs with the fragmentary syntax of the first lines of the stanza about the gas. The four repeating “um” sounds of those line in the words “fumbling,” “clumsy,” “someone,” “stumbling” produce interior rhymes that create a sudden, panicked sense of double-time. After the ellipsis, an eerie, dreamlike calm sets in as the poet coolly, objectively describes the man drowning “as in a green sea.” The couplet literally rehearses the moment as do the dreams, and in place of a rhyme it repeats the falling cadence of “drowning” with extraordinary effect, as though poetry itself must stumble and fall at this juncture. The final stanza exploits the steady, relentless rhythm of iambic pentameter for the purpose of “accumulatio,” heaping up declarations in couplets that each describe more of what could be seen. “My friend” announces a last turn: a direct accusation against the time-honored, respectable, capitalized “Lie.” The extra foot in line 25 shatters the iambic pentameter and produces particularly heavy stresses on the two long syllables of “old Lie,” enhancing the resonance of the foreshortened half-line that ends the poem.
In a late revision, Owen substituted lines 23 and 24 (“Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud/ Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,—”) for two lines that had introduced a note of eroticism that might have distracted attention from Owen’s main purpose (“And think how, once, his head was like a bud,/ Fresh as a country rose, and keen, and young,—”) The new lines recall images from Dante’s Inferno (c. 1320), and their guttural sounds enhance the impression of outrage.
After a year of convalescence, Owen returned to the front in August, 1918. In October, he received the Military Cross, and on November 4, 1918, just one week before the Armistice, he was gunned down on the Sambre Canal. Owen published only five poems during his lifetime, and “Dulce et Decorum Est” was first published posthumously in Poems (1920), the eleventh poem in a volume of only twenty-three. His reputation grew rapidly after the publication of Edmund Blunden’s 1931 edition of his poems, which included a lengthy memoir. Although the C. Day Lewis edition of Owen’s poems is now considered standard, “Dulce et Decorum Est” is often reprinted in versions that differ significantly. In particular, some editors follow Blunden in preferring a manuscript variant of line 8, “Of gas shells dropping softly behind.”
No comments:
Post a Comment