Wilfred Owen's poem "Dulce et Decorum Est" describes a group of exhausted soldiers retreating after days in the trenches who are attacked by German artillery using chlorine gas. One soldier struggles to put on his gas mask in time and flails as he suffocates, his death haunting the speaker. The poem criticizes the notion that it is honorable to die for one's country, arguing that the true horrors of war should be seen by those who send soldiers to their doom.

1. Dulce et Decorum Est
Wilfred Owen

2. About Wilfred Owen
• Wilfred Owen was born in 1893 in Shropshire, UK.
• Owen wanted to become a teacher but his father could not
afford the university fees. Instead he went to France in 1913
where he worked as a tutor.
• In October 1915, he returned to England and enlisted to fight
in WWI. He was then 22 years of age.
• The poet spent a year in training. Letters to his mother reveal
that he enjoyed the prestige of wearing the military uniform.
His training finished at the end of 1916 and he took
command of No. 3 Platoon.
• His enthusiasm initially abounded but soon he was sent to
the frontline and witnessed firsthand the awfulness of
warfare - living in trenches,knee-deep in mud and water, the
rotting corpses of soldiers, the dreadful war injuries.

3. • Late in 1917 Owen received serious injury and was sent
home, suffering from shell- shock. While recuperating in
the military hospital, he met the anti- war poet, Siegfried
Sassoon, who aided him in polishing his war poetry.
• Owen felt that his poetry could have a far deeper impact
if emanating from a soldier in the trenches.
• He re-enlisted for the army and, in October 1918, he
rejoined his company in France. This time, however, he
appears to have identified himself with the soldiers and
took tremendous risks in battle.
• During one encounter, he captured a German machine
gun and used it to decimate a host of enemy soldiers, for
which deed he won the Military Cross. Although he
denied it in letters to his mother, he appears now to have
become a killing machine.

4. • In early November, just one week before the armistice
which ended the war, he supervised the construction of a
bridge to cross the Sambre and Oise Canal. Wave after
wave of his own men were massacred in the attempt.
Wilfred Owen too fell in a flurry of machine gun bullets.
• He was buried in a small British cemetery in northern
France. He was then just 25 years of age.

5. STANZA ONE
• A band of soldiers is retreating to their base and come under attack
of the German artillery which is using chemical weapons in
particular chlorine gas.
• The soldiers have spent weary and dreary days at the frontlines and
every one of them carries physical reminders of their ordeal. If not
scarred, bruised or injured they are “like old beggars under sacks”
meaning that exhaustion is bringing them closer to collapsing. they
can be compared to hags (old, ugly women), though they are young!
• The men are moving towards a “distant rest”, there is still much to
go through before this ordeal is over and they can get any relief. For
some this could also imply a ‘permanent rest’.
• The soldiers are aloof of their surroundings, many “marched asleep”
and scores of them trudge through the muddy and rocky terrain with
no protection on their feet except their own blood.
• Even these horses with metal shoes are better off than the bare-
footed men. The soldiers’ desperation and their being “drunk with
fatigue” could also be a blessing, the soldiers are so exhausted they
are unaware of their pains and sufferings and can only focus on the
hope that the “distant rest” offers them.

6. STANZA TWO
• The soldiers are now under heavy attack by the German artillery
using long-range chlorine gas shells and have been warned by their
commanding officer to put on their gas masks on. Even then, an
unlucky few are unsuccessful in applying the life-saving order.
• Following the officer’s command, “ecstasy (of fumbling)” seems to
be an unusual word until we see that it means ‘a morbid state of
nerves in which the mind is occupied with solely one idea’.
• This would perfectly describe the state of the soldiers, they would
even have forgotten why they were putting the masks on and in their
frayed nerves and hurry would be fumbling to get the masks on.
• Then we are shown through Owen’s eyes the unlucky soldier who
quite could not manage the effort to put his mask on and as the poet
watches on horrified through his goggles the seemingly ‘distant’
man “flounders” in the mud like a man drowning in water thrashing
his limbs in an effort to break free of the dim green envelope that
surrounds him.

7. STANZA THREE
• From straight description Owens now
looks back from a new perspective in the
light of a recurring nightmare with a more
personal touch. The “haunting flares” in
stanza 1 only foreshadowed a more
terrible haunting in which a friend, dying,
“plunges at me” before “my helpless sight”
an image that Owens could never forget.

8. STANZA FOUR
• The tone of the poem becomes colder and harder, Owen is lashing
back at the men and women who sent the soldiers to their dooms
and are peacefully sitting within their homes unaware of the war’s
realities.
• He describes his experience as a nightmare (“smothering dreams”)
which replicates in small measures the victim’s sufferings and
wishes that the war organizers could experience this.
• The urgency and immediacy of the situation is so great that the
soldiers can do nothing for their comrade save having “flung” him
into a wagon. Even there he continues to disturb Owen.
• The victim’s head is “hanging” out of the wagon and he is hit by jolts
as the wagon rolls on, there is no stretcher-bearing for this dying
man. Owen describes the chilling state the man is in with blood
gurgling out of his mouth and the “froth-corrupted lungs” struggling
to catch every breath. The “devil’s sick of sin” shows pain contorting
the face of the victim.

9. • There is also a hint of hell everywhere which is what the
soldiers are going through. The “vile incurable sores” are the
bitter memories that will remain imprinted in the soldier’s
minds (innocent young tongues) in such a manner that they
will never be healed and will remain unbearable.
• Also, for a majority of the soldiers this would have been their
first view of such horrific devastation and suffering, the
images of which too could never be erased from their minds.
• The “you” that Owen addresses in line 21 could generally
imply people but there is also one person in particular that it
could refer to, the “my friend” identified as Jessie Pope, a
children’s fiction writer whose patriotic poems epitomised the
glorification of war that Owens so despised.
•

10. • The Latin phrase “Dulce et decorum est
pro patria mori” is from an Ode by Horace
and means “It is sweet and becoming to
die for one’s country”. Owen decries this
and claims that it is nothing but a lie that
was manufactured in the dawn of
civilization and has been handed down
from one generation to the next by
propaganda pushers who are often
interested only in their own gains

11. • The theme of the poem “Dulce Et
Decorum Est” is that war is terrible and
tragic. The sufferings and horrors should
be shown clearly to the public so that any
misconceptions of heroes and bravery are
dismissed from their minds and they
accept war as the destruction that it really
is.
• Basically an anti-war poem, it also
criticizes the fact that the people planning
wars are the safest of the lot in their
protected bunkers.