Dulce et Decorum Est Summary

At a Glance
In "Dulce et Decorum Est," Wilfred Owen vividly depicts the horrors of war. As a soldier in World War I, he
experienced the ignobility of war firsthand. By depicting the death and destruction in detail, he proves that war
isn't heroic at all.

 Owen depicts soldiers trudging through the unsanitary trenches, weakened by injuries and fatigue.
 Suddenly, the men come under attack and must quickly put on their gas masks to prevent the green gas
from choking them. One man dies horrifically in front of the speaker.
 The speaker argues that if the reader had seen this man die, they wouldn't glorify war. He knows that the
general public has a glamorized view of war, and he wants to dispel it.

Summary
(Critical Survey of Literature for Students)

Wilfred Owen set his poem “Dulce et Decorum Est” during World War I on the western front in France. His
purpose—to protest against the mentality that perpetuates war—is unmistakable, but what sets the work apart
from much other antiwar literature is the effectiveness of his tightly controlled depiction of war.

The first fourteen of the poem’s twenty-eight lines comprise a sonnet that vividly describes a single terrible
moment. The last twelve address the reader directly, explaining the significance or moral of the incident. The
speaker is among a company of exhausted men who after a stint at the front are marching unsteadily toward the
rear when they are suddenly overtaken by poison gas. After they hastily pull on their gas masks, the speaker
sees through the misty lenses that one of them, somehow maskless, is staggering helplessly toward him. He
watches the man succumb to the gas, desperately groping the air between them as he drops to the ground, like
someone drowning. The third stanza shifts the context to the speaker’s dreams. In a single couplet, the speaker
declares that in all his dreams he sees that soldier plunging toward him. In the final stanza, he turns to the
readers, telling them that if they, too, could have experienced such dreams and watched the soldier dying on the
wagon into which the soldiers flung him, they would never repeat to their children “The old Lie: Dulce et
decorum est/ Pro patria mori.”

Throughout the war, this Latin phrase—a quotation from the Roman poet Horace (Odes III. 2.13, 23 and 13
b.c.e.)—was frequently used in inspirational poems and essays. In a letter to his mother, Owen provides the
translation, “It is sweet and meet to die for one’s country,” and he expostulates sarcastically, “Sweet! And
decorous!”

Owen is often judged to be the most remarkable of the group of “war poets” who emerged during World War I.
Although “Dulce et Decorum Est” is seldom considered to be technically Owen’s finest poem, it is nevertheless
among his most famous because it captures so compellingly not only the tribulations of the soldiers who fought
in the war but also their belief that the patriotic rhetoric on the home front and the government’s refusal to
negotiate a peace were more to blame for their suffering than the opposing soldiers. Owen, who was an officer
with the Manchester Regiment, planned to publish “Dulce et Decorum Est” in a volume that was to present the
truth about the war, which he knew to be utterly at odds with the belligerent cant that appeared daily in
newspapers and in magazines in England.

Two drafts of the poem carry the dedication “To Jessie Pope etc” (two other drafts simply say “To a certain
Poetess”), suggesting that Owen had originally specifically targeted such individuals as Jessie Pope, whose
collection of children’s verses, Simple Rhymes for Stirring Times (1916), was intended to kindle enthusiasm for
the war.

In the end, Owen removed the sarcastic dedication, perhaps to make clear that he wished to address a much
broader readership. Most people in England greeted the outbreak of war in August, 1914, with enthusiasm.
Wars of recent memory were limited, distant affairs; the people expected adventure and heroism from a
contained conflict that would be over by Christmas. Instead, after the second month of the war, when
Germany’s march on Paris was halted at the Marne, the opposing armies dug themselves into trenches facing
each other across a narrow strip known as No Man’s Land, a line that stretched across Belgium and France. In
part because of the efficiency of machine guns and because tanks were not deployed until near the end of the
war, neither side was able to dislodge the other. Millions of men lost their lives in costly and fruitless attempts
to break the stalemate; in just one day, July 1, 1916, the great offensive at the River Somme took the lives of
sixty thousand men. Rats, lice, and the sight of exposed corpses were inescapable conditions of trench warfare.
By the time the war ended, all those who experienced the horrors of trench warfare were forced to abandon their
belief in the superiority of European civilization and the idea of European progress.

In the opening lines of “Dulce et Decorum Est,” Owen vividly portrays the price of trench warfare, the
exhaustion of soldiers who become like old women, “hags,” coughing, lame, blind, and deaf. The poet speaks
for these individuals who, though they no longer function in tidy military unison, are joined by their shared
experience of a nightmare that seems just at the point of being over when the new assault arrives. The deadly
gases (at first chlorine, later phosgene and mustard gas) that remain a hallmark of World War I were first used
on a large scale on the Western Front. Although soldiers were equipped with respirator masks, more than one
million men died from such attacks. The gas, whose effects Owen describes in the second stanza, is the odorless
and colorless mustard gas frequently used after July, 1917. Detectable only by its sting, it gave its victims only
seconds to protect themselves and caused severe, often fatal, burns to exposed skin and lungs. Owen also
mentions other miseries of the “Great War,” such as the unusually heavy rainfalls that turned the fighting zone
into a bog in which the men suffered crippling foot ailments and sometimes even drowned.

The poem also expresses “the pity of war,” the theme Owen also articulated in the short preface he drafted for
the intended collection. English poetry, he explains, is “not yet fit to speak” of heroes, but speaking the truth of
war may act as a warning to the next generation. Owen uses the word “pity” in a special sense, one that
encompasses a profound fellow feeling for all those who suffer; ultimately, that includes everyone. Hence, his
protest against war extends to become a protest against all inhumanity. The ability of Owen’s poems to
transcend the particular circumstances of their creation was a quality some of his early critics, including the poet
Yeats, failed to see. “Dulce et Decorum Est” accomplishes this as effectively as anything Owen wrote, for the
focus of its protest is not the pain suffered by a few men but rather the transhistorical “Lie.” The horrible death
of the gassed soldier exposes the fallacy behind the oft-repeated, high-sounding Latin epigram: The poem’s
protest is against an abuse of language.

Owen drafted the poem in August, 1917, at the age of twenty-four, while he was convalescing at Craiglockhart
War Hospital in Edinburgh. He finished it about one year later, perhaps shortly before his death. The event
described in the poem is almost certainly based on actual experience, as Owen reported such “smothering”
dreams to his doctor. Recovering from concussion, trench fever, and “shell shock” or “neurasthenia” (terms
often used as euphemisms for exhaustion), Owen’s stay at Craiglockhart was crucial in his poetic development,
in part because he became acquainted with the more experienced soldier-poet Siegfried Sassoon and, even more
important, because it gave him a chance to work steadily during a period when his sense of poetic purpose was
most urgent.

Owen was deeply concerned about the technical problems involved in the expression of his passionate
convictions. Some of his later poems use striking methods such as half rhyme, but in this poem, too, Owen’s
technical mastery is impressive. The first stanza employs heavy, single-syllable rhymes throughout; to convey
exhaustion, Owen breaks up the rhythm, which composes itself in the third line. After several comparatively
regular lines, a dramatic shift occurs with the fragmentary syntax of the first lines of the stanza about the gas.
The four repeating “um” sounds of those line in the words “fumbling,” “clumsy,” “someone,” “stumbling”
produce interior rhymes that create a sudden, panicked sense of double time. After the ellipsis, an eerie,
dreamlike calm sets in as the poet coolly, objectively describes the man drowning “as in a green sea.” The
couplet literally rehearses the moment as do the dreams, and in place of a rhyme it repeats the falling cadence of
“drowning” with extraordinary effect, as though poetry itself must stumble and fall at this juncture. The final
stanza exploits the steady, relentless rhythm of iambic pentameter for the purpose of “accumulatio,” heaping up
declarations in couplets that each describe more of what could be seen. “My friend” announces a last turn: a
direct accusation against the time-honored, respectable, capitalized “Lie.” The extra foot in line 25 shatters the
iambic pentameter and produces particularly heavy stresses on the two long syllables of “old Lie,” enhancing
the resonance of the foreshortened half-line that ends the poem.

In a late revision, Owen substituted lines 23 and 24 (“Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud/ Of vile, incurable
sores on innocent tongues,—”) for two lines that introduced a note of eroticism that might have distracted
attention from Owen’s main purpose (“And think how, once, his head was like a bud,/ Fresh as a country rose,
and keen, and young,—”) The new lines recall images from Dante’s Inferno (c. 1320), and their guttural sounds
enhance the impression of outrage.

After a year of convalescence, Owen returned to the front in August, 1918. In October, he received the Military
Cross, and on November 4, 1918, just one week before the Armistice, he was gunned down on the Sambre
Canal. Owen published only five poems during his lifetime, and “Dulce et Decorum Est” was first published
posthumously in Poems by Wilfred Owen (1920), the eleventh poem in a volume of only twenty-three. His
reputation grew rapidly after the publication of Edmund Blunden’s 1931 edition of his poems, which included a
lengthy memoir. Although the C. Day Lewis edition of Owen’s poems is now considered standard, “Dulce et
Decorum Est” is often reprinted in versions that differ significantly. In particular, some editors follow Blunden
in preferring a manuscript variant of line 8, “Of gas shells dropping softly behind.”

Theme:
Warfare: As Owen describes it, war becomes a never-ending nightmare of muddy trenches and unexpected
gas attacks. Interestingly, with the new-fangled technology of WWI, there doesn't even need to be a real enemy
present to create the devastation and destruction. Set in the middle of a gas attack, this poem explores the
intense agony of a world gone suddenly insane – and the unfortunate men who have to struggle through it. As
the poem itself asks, how can anyone condone so much suffering?

Suffering: Physical pain and psychological trauma blur in this searing description of a World War I
battleground. Caught in the memory of a gas-attack, the poem's speaker oscillates between the pain of the past
(the actual experience of battle) and the pain of the present (he can't get the image of his dying comrade out of
his head). As Owen argues, war is so painful that it becomes surreal.

Patriotism: In this poem, dying for your country (or even fighting for your country) seems a lot less
worthwhile than the trumped-up truisms of old patriotic battle cries imply. Strategically drawing his readers
through the ghastly reality of life in a battle zone, Owen turns patriotic fervor into a kind of deadly life force.
The people at home just can't understand how horrible life on the front actually is. The soldiers in war can't
remember why they are fighting. Everyone, it seems, is lost: lost in a fog of war or in the useless ideals that
sacrifice youth at the altar of national glory.

Versions of Reality: "Dulce et Decorum Est" creates a sharp and deeply ironic line between the civilians
who prop up war efforts and the men who fight their battles. As Owen suggests, there's almost no way for either
group to understand the other. Only those who have experienced the horror of battle can understand the trauma
of losing a fellow soldier. Ironically, however, these soldiers don't have the ability to communicate fully with
those at home who could bring the war to an end – the people who reiterate old slogans about honor, duty, and
patriotism without ever having to experience the terror of battle themselves. The very word "war" begins to
mean two very different things for the two populations in this poem. Tragically, these views seem increasingly
irreconcilable.