Dulce Et Decorum Est By Wilfred Owen

One of the most known poems to come out of World War I is Dulce Et Decorum Est by Wilfred Owen, which comes from Latin, meaning ‘It is sweet and right’, This title came Horace, who is a Roman poet. The poem itself is riddled with terrifying imagery of the war, at the end of the poem, the title has more light shed on it, completing it. It finished as ‘Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori’, which means ‘It is sweet and right to die for your country’. This serves a purpose of irony throughout the poem, since the poem talks about the treacherous battlefield the soldiers face during wartime.

The theme of the poem is about soldiers on the battlefield, in the middle of a harsh war, and how they’re fighting for survival as their peers around them slowly get picked off one by one by the enemy. Stress barraging continuously on the soldiers, breaking them down in a painfully slow manner. Even with these conditions, the brainwashing saying “It is sweet and right to die for your country” is used to emphasize how good it is to fight for your country and die for it at an early age, which is the irony of the poem. The tone that this poem gives off sends the cruelty and frightening atmosphere of the war. It gives off harshness, intensity and urgency, people are marching asleep, lost boots and trudging through the aches. The gas is rising, the
narrator is yelling about it to warn his side, the urgency to thrown on the gas mask to survive. However, one man is too late to thrown on this gas mask, and he’s consumed by the gas. He’s then simply thrown in a wagon, his corpse going to be sent back for his family, his choking ringing through the narrator's dreams.

Owen uses metaphors, symbolism, similes, irony and imagery to help his theme reach the reader. In the first line, the soldier are marching “... like old beggars under sacks / Knock-kneed, coughing like hags … ”, which is a simile. In this quote, the soldiers are most likely getting sick due to being exposed to harsh conditions, their knees close together as they march slowly, like they’ve aged to be ninety while being in the war. In the seventh line, “[The soldiers are] drunk with fatigue”, a metaphor expressing fatigue having the effects of alcohol, completely consuming the troopers. In lines thirteen through fourteen, there’s symbolism, and the quote can also be considered imagery. The gas thrown by the enemy is described as a “... thick green light / … a green sea … ”, a man “drowning” in the gas. It’s heavy, ready to enter the nostrils of anyone who gets in it’s way.

Owen intends the poem to be for people to be aware of the lie of dying for your country, and how sweet and righteous it is to be a martyr.
He exposes the reality of the war and how it is, how destructive it is on a person, exposing it from a soldier’s point of view. This is shown in lines seventeen and twenty-five, through his use of the word ‘you’. It puts the reader into the poem, like the narrator is actually directly talking to them in hopes of getting his message across. To stop using this lie and to wake up and smell the fresh reality of the soldiers, the war deafening them so they cannot hear the loud gunshots from the enemy
side.

In conclusion, Wilfred Owen created his poem, Dulce Et Decorum Est, in the perspective of a soldier in the middle of World War I. The soldier, at the end, warns the reader or general public to beware of the lie ‘dulce et decorum est pro patria mori’. He doesn’t want the lie to be fed to people who want to have a sense of honor for fighting for their country, blinded by the honor and not realizing the intensity and horrors of actual war, from his own perspective of a soldier.