Dulce Et Decorum Est By Wilfred Owen

Poetry is meant to be experienced and read over repeatedly for better understanding. Whether it is the heartfelt feeling of a good love poem, agony from an illness, the brokenhearted, or dealing with a world event, such as a war, the words written by a poet are meant to be felt and enjoyed by the reader. Wilfred Owen used his writing to show the true horrors of World War I in “Dulce et Decorum Est,” a poem that showed reader that war was not all the glory and honor the government promoted to be, but was filled with painful and horrific deaths.
In order to get soldiers enlisted in World War I, young men (since women did not fight during this time period) were encouraged “by propaganda’s pretenses of glory and heroism” (Jones). Owen went straight to the point with his opening lines describing the soldiers as ‘bent double, like old beggars…coughing like hags” (Roberts & Zweig). In addition, the reader’s visions of tired, worn out men are enforced with such phrases as “drunk with fatigue, deaf even to…outstripped Five-Nines” (Roberts & Zweig). This provides the reader with imagery of soldiers so exhausted that they did not hear the sounds of war around them.
“The anonymous panic of the gas attack” begins to reveal the “horror and the cost of war” as the scene unfolds (Hughes). Owen describes a fellow soldier, who in his fatigued state, failed to get his gas mask on in time and begins to die. In fact, Owens ends that stanza with “through the misty panes and thick green light…I saw him downing” to help the reader understand what has happened (Roberts & Zweig). Thus, providing the reader with the vision of through the gas mask and chlorine gas, the solider could be seen choking on the toxic