Blog 10 Wilfred Owen

In the poem “Dulce et Decorum Est”, Wilfred Owen provides contrasting ideas about what war is. The title itself hints at one of the ideas of what war is like, which is “good”. The primary idea of what war is like is what the poem mostly talks about. The poem talks about the “bad” of war or the true nature of war.

            

            Owen paints a very clear and horrific picture of what war really is. He talks about how the soldiers are like the homeless and the elderly. The poem gives the idea that the soldiers were like a sick and old homeless person using a sack as shelter. They are in a situation that no human should be in.  At one point it says, “Men marched asleep.” (829), which indicates that the men were there physically but at some point the emotional part had “fallen asleep”. These soldiers were just shells of who they use to be. The poem also provides the horrific side of war. It talks about the gruesomeness of the gas they had to face. The poem describes it as, “a green sea,”(829). Owen follows this up by saying (829):

                        His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;

                        If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood

                        Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,

                        Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud

This describes not only the pain cause by the gas but also shows just how much of an effect seeing this happen has on a soldier. The pain of watching someone dying a slow agonizing death would have been so bad that at some point the emotional state of each soldier would have to have been “shut off” to some point.

            

            The contrasting view of war was that it was the big glorious battles. That being a soldier was honorable and the greatest joy that a person could have. Owen says (830):

                        My friend, you would not tell with such high zest

                        To children ardent for some desperate glory,

                        The old lie: Dulce et decorum est

Pro patria mori.

Here he is saying that the view people have of war is that it is honorable and glorious. That war has been built up and exaggerated by soldiers to glorify themselves. There is also a sense that the soldiers do not want to relive the bad things that happened by telling them to other people so they exaggerate the “good” parts of the war.