Dulce Et Decorum Est Honor

It is Not Sweet and Honorable Dulce et Decorum Est by Wilfred Owen is a poem about a man who had seen the horrors of war and is not able to stop thinking about them. He even tries to warn the reader that there is nothing sweet about war and dying for one’s country, as shown in the very last line of the poem. The poet, Wilfred Owen, had witnessed similar horrors as the speaker in the poem, because he was a Second Lieutenant in the war he wrote about. He was injured in 1917, then returned to the war in 1918. Owen died the same year, in battle, at the age of twenty-five. At the start of the poem, it is understandable for the reader to think that this poem will be about glory and honor because of the title, Dulce et Decorum Est, which means
For example, Owen used alliteration of the letter “w” and “s” to show that the memory of this soldier’s fateful end is a recurring scene in the speaker’s dreams. As a soldier in the war, the author had to go through the same types of dreams that the speaker is going through. In line 18, the other soldiers and narrator “flung” their comrade into the wagon, as if in a hurry to get away from the next attack. This shows that the respect of the dead and dying is lost in the heat of war.
“If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood / Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs.”(21-22) Wilfred Owen, the author of this poem, was diagnosed with shell-shock in 1917, when he was in the hospital. The statement “At every jolt” reveals that this is what the speaker is suffering from. The author uses lines 21 and 22 to let the reader know that the visions of seeing someone suffer is an outcome of going to war, and it may even be worse than dying. Owen helps readers understand that war is not a sweet thing by using foul words. “Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud / Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues.”(23-24) The image words like “cud”, “vile” and “sores” create in the reader’s mind make them squeamish, and assists the author compose his