Who Is Dulce Et Decorum Est By Wilfred Owen?

The poem “Dulce et Decorum Est” was written by twenty-four-year-old British poet and soldier Wilfred Owen between the eighth and fifteenth of October 1917 while he was temporarily staying in Craiglockhart Hospital from shell shock symptoms that he had encountered at war. Through this poem, Owen is portraying the reality of how brutal war is physically, emotionally, and mentally, that he and many young men had experienced, and to show this reality to the citizens of Great Britain who encourage young men to join the army in which they themselves do not know what it is like. One scholar has gone on to say that the poets such as Owen who have witnessed real warfare go on and insert their experiences in to their literary work and use poetry as a
What some scholars have said about these lines is that Owen is giving a clear picture of the poor state that the soldiers are in and it leads to the ugly truth of combat that civilians back home are unaware of. When looking at the first few lines of the poem it is easy for historians to understand the terrible experiences Owen and his fellow comrades had on the battlefield and to understand his position of opposing the war. As the poem moves on, the theme of suffering continues to exist, when stated, “Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots, But limped on, blood-shod.” In these lines, Owen is trying to show the readers that the soldiers are so exhausted from the war that the way that they are walking is if they were already dead, and he even points out that many of the men have blood on
Owen then continues to talk about the human body and how unreal the destruction of the human body is. As Owen is nearing the end of his poem, he is committed to attack the calling for war and patriotism. Owen believes that the calling for young men to go to war is absurd since no one has experienced the brutality, and he seems to come to a conclusion that being patriotic is easy for people at home since it is considered to be honour, but once at war, it feels terrible and casts psychological wounds. The tone that Owen uses through these lines is negative in order to emphasize the big picture of what is actually at cost at war and how people should think twice about supporting war. This leads in to the last line of the poem where Owen portrays his intentions of this poem. Owen states that if the citizens were to experience what he and other soldiers have experienced, they would not tell children the old lie of “It is sweet and right to die for your country”. Some scholars have said that Owen was angry at “the old lie” of patriotism that led him and many other young men to