Notes by Roxanne Willemse
Dulce et Decorum Est by Wilfred Owen
Background: World War 1 (used to be called the Great War, the War to End All Wars)
Structure
Blank verse, four unequal stanzas
Language
Title: ‘it is sweet and fitting’
Last line: ‘to die for one’s country’
Diction: jargon of war, plain language (human body – frailty) -> sense of realism
Ironic because title and last line give impression of being pro-war
Lines 7-8: enjambement rushes reader to next line to reveal bombs
Line 10: transferred epithet shows that the exhausted men are clumsy as they panic and
fumble
Stanza 2: use of present participle and gerund form stretches out actions as if they are still
happening, makes horrors and suffering seem ongoing, current (a comment on how the
horrors of war cause PTSD that can make soldiers relive traumatic events as if they were
actually happening again)
Movement
Iambic pentameter – mimics trudging/marching
ABAB alternating rhyme scheme
Plot (three separate experiences) : 1. Night march, 2. Gas attack, 3. Nightmare
Imagery
Similes used for sensory effect and to deepen and clarify images
o Compares soldier’s posture to that of old beggars to emphasise exhaustion
o Compares soldier’s coughing to that of hags to emphasise pain, illness, suffering
o Compares death by gas poisoning to being on fire or exposed to lime in terms of
struggle, pain, suffering
o Compares soldier dying to drowning under a green sea, because speaker was
witnessing death through the glass pane of his gas mask, and toxic gas gave off
green smokey light
o Compares dying soldiers face to a devil’s face because it is a scene you would expect
to witness in hell
o Compares soldier dying to cancer in terms of implacable death to heighten reader’s
disgust and fear
Intention
To counter war propaganda (told you are a coward/unpatriotic if you do not enlist) : ‘the old
Lie’
Line 16 – vivid image of soldier’s death in order to connect the reader to the violence of war
(makes it feel real for the reader, as if they themselves experienced it) – uses ‘drowning’ to
describe soldier’s death because drowning is a more familiar concept to the reader
To show that war is barbaric, agonizing, and meaningless
, Notes by Roxanne Willemse
Educate on PTSD (used to be called shell shock, caused by the shock of falling bombs) : ‘cud’
is regurgitated, difficult to digest – soldiers after a war (witnessing horrific death) may feel
that they have dealt with trauma (or sufficiently ignored trauma), but the horrors of war will
come back repeatedly to haunt them
To reveal the horrors of war to the unknowing/ignorant public
To condemn institutions (governments) that have for time immemorial sent young men to
their deaths based on ‘the old Lie’
Speaker demands that the reader faces the truth and stops being complicit in ‘the old Lie’
To warn future generations of the horror of war- brutally honest and truthful
To expose the horror and duplicity (deceitfulness) of war, especially to those who do not see
battle
Themes
Anti-war
o First stanza: emphasises mundanity, drudgery, suffering, and shows that soldiers are
not driven by purpose, but they are instead miserable, in pain, and demoralized
o Ironic, cynical twist in lines 27-28: it is good to live for one’s country, not to die for
one’s country
o Tells first-hand account and experience of war to show how the ‘old Lie’ is false by
vividly showcasing the horrific reality of war
Horrors and trauma of war
o Graphically and bitterly describes horrors, devastating in specificity (detailed recall
or memory shows how horrific images have been burned into speaker’s mind –
PTSD)
o Stanza 1: banal (lacking in originality/obvious/boring – war has been ongoing in
human history) daily life of a soldier is excruciatingly painful
o Stanza 2 and 3: brutal reality of death is unimaginable agony
o Stanza 4: even surviving a war after watching others die leads to a future of endless
trauma
o Shows that all aspects of war are brutal, agonising, and meaningless (living through
war, dying in war, surviving war)
o Poet uses language to place reader within experiences of a soldier (speaker) to help
them begin to understand the horrors of war
The enduring myth that war is glorious
o Stanza 1,2,3: speaker presents brutal, bitter, and pessimistic vision of war, focuses
on soldiers’ daily lives, death of a soldier, and traumatised speaker
o Stanza 4: focuses on reader by directly addressing them to try make reader
understand the brutal reality of war
o Speaker puts in effort to contradict the commonly held belief that war is meaningful
and full of glory
o Final stanza shows pessimistic despair as speaker struggles with possibility that his
use of language is not enough to change reader’s opinion of war
o Implied pessimism – speaker quotes Horace because he believes his own words to
be insufficiently impactful/powerful, falsehood (‘the old Lie’) could be purposely
promoted to increase power at the cost of innocent lives
Tone
