First Semester

Deconstructive Criticism in association with Structuralism, New Historicism & Psychoanalytic

Criticism of Dulce et Decorum Est by Wilfred Owen 2017

Agbay, Noralyn G. December, 2017

Overview

According to Bressler, under deconstruction, a text has an almost infinite number of

interpretation. That is why instead of providing answer about the meaning of the text or presenting
methodologies on how to discover text meaning, deconstruction asks new set of questions endeavoring
‘what a text claims, it says’ ‘what a text actually says are discernibly different’.
Under binary opposition, one center of unity automatically means that another is decentered. The
methodologies that Bressler posited in the book are as follow:
First, in deconstructive reading, it is to recognize the existence and operation of the binary
opposition in our thinking as readers. Second, upon recognition and acknowledging the binary
opposition, we can now proceed to reversing its elements. Then when the hierarchy is reversed, we can
now examine the values and beliefs that give rise to both the original hierarchy and the newly created one.
Such examination reveals how the meaning of the term arise from the differences between them. Simply
it suggests that text has multiple meaning. So, re-reading and re-interpretation are suggested making the
ultimate meaning of the text undecidable.
More so, Deconstructor seek to override their own logocentric and inherited ways of viewing the
text. Thus, find the binary opposition, then reverse it because this limits us and leading us to stick to what
we believe.

Dulce et Decorum Est
BY WILFRED OWEN
1- Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
2 - Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed
through sludge,
3 - Till on the haunting flares we turned our
backs,
4 - And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
5 - Men marched asleep. Many had lost their
boots,
6 - But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame;
all blind;
7 - Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
8 - Of gas-shells dropping softly behind.
9 - Gas! GAS! Quick, boys!—An ecstasy of
fumbling
10 - Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time,
11 - But someone still was yelling out and
stumbling
12 - And flound’ring like a man in fire or
lime.—
13 - Dim through the misty panes and thick
green light,
14 - As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

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 First Semester
Deconstructive Criticism in association with Structuralism, New Historicism & Psychoanalytic
Criticism of Dulce et Decorum Est by Wilfred Owen 2017

Agbay, Noralyn G. December, 2017

15 - In all my dreams before my helpless sight,
16 - He plunges at me, guttering, choking,
drowning.
17 - If in some smothering dreams, you too
could pace
18 - Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
19 - And watch the white eyes writhing in his
face,
20 - His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;
21 - If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
22 - Come gargling from the froth-corrupted
lungs,
23 - Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
24 - Of vile, incurable sores on innocent
tongues,—
25 - My friend, you would not tell with such
high zest
26 - To children ardent for some desperate glory,
27 - The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
28 - Pro patria mori

Deconstruction. Contrasting theme: Patriotism and Abandonment.

Dulce et Decorum Est presents a scene from soldiers who were sent to war with a strong
nationalist idea, but had to face with the horrible reality. In the poem, a moment of war in which a group
of soldiers are included is staged. The poem consists of three stages, each dealing with a different
experience. It opens with the lines depicting the reality of war: “Bent double, like old beggars under
sacks, Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge, Till on the haunting flares we turned
our backs And towards our distant rest began to trudge line 1-4”. In the first stanza, fallen from power
and become depressed state of mind, the conditions of soldiers unite with the symbols of senility and
deficiency, thus depicture unavoidable pain and they suffer from the symptoms of shell shock. “Bent
double like old beggars” and “coughing like hags”, these soldiers are bodily deformed and walking to a
space where they can take rest without thinking of any ideal of heroism.
This is the turning point that acridly changes the line of the poem: “9 - Gas! GAS! Quick, boys!
An ecstasy of fumbling 10 - Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time, 11 - But someone still was yelling out
and stumbling 12 - And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime.— 13 - Dim through the misty panes and

thick green light, 14 - As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.” Starting stanza with first in
lower case and then in capitals, Owen alarms both the soldiers and readers against gas attack. Shocked
and desperate, this soldier is on the fine line between life and death. Leading this patriotic soldier at the
beginning to their atrocious death in which their patriotism somehow abandoned them to death. Their
patriotism was compromised between life and death situation.

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 First Semester
Deconstructive Criticism in association with Structuralism, New Historicism & Psychoanalytic
Criticism of Dulce et Decorum Est by Wilfred Owen 2017

Agbay, Noralyn G. December, 2017

In the last stanza, we see that, unable to stop his suffering, soldiers put their comrade into a
wagon and the poem becomes a challenging question posed to the reader. Rendered with the voices of
violence and death, this dreamlike scene, which is between reality and fantasy, will never pester the
narrative voice and turn into nightmare with surrounding his dreams.
Thus, he harasses them and creates an awakening poem. Ending the poem with justified anger at
“The old Lie line 27” of patriotism that led him and other young men to battle where they will be
abandoned and die shows that Owen's personal struggle is far from over”

Binary oppositions in the poem:

softly vs quick; gentle vs fast.

8 - Of gas-shells dropping softly behind.
9 - Gas! GAS! Quick, boys!—An ecstasy of fumbling

New Historicism. Wilfred Owen had considerable first-hand experience of the horrors of gas
warfare during World War I, and his poem “Dulce et Decorum Est” is an attempt to depict the
helplessness of men caught in a gas attack. Writing in four irregular verse paragraphs, Owen describes the
general condition of men involved in the war, sketches briefly the shock of a gas attack, then dwells on
the aftermath of this tragic event on someone who lives through it. He opens the poem with a description
of a group of demoralized soldiers retreating from the front lines of the battlefield. The men are clearly
fatigued “Men marched asleep, line 5” the narrator observes, so worn down that they are “deaf even to
the hoots/ Of gas-shells dropping softly behind. lines 78”. Then, suddenly, someone shouts “Gas! GAS!”
line 9”, and the men go into an “ecstasy of fumbling” line 9 to put on masks before the deadly poison can
take their lives. All but one is successful; the narrator looks out from behind the glass of his protective
mask into the “green sea” line 14 that the gas has created around him and his comrades, watching
helplessly as one of his fellow soldiers dies in agony.
Thus, since the author had first-hand experienced the events being portrayed in the poem, we can
further critique this poem using New Historicism which somehow gives us understanding of the history
through literature

Psychoanalytic. The image of that dying soldier is one that can never leave the narrator. As
readers learn in the two lines set off from the rest of the text, the sight of that dying comrade haunts the
narrator’s dreams, as the soldier “plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning. line 16”.

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 First Semester
Deconstructive Criticism in association with Structuralism, New Historicism & Psychoanalytic
Criticism of Dulce et Decorum Est by Wilfred Owen 2017

Agbay, Noralyn G. December, 2017

That memory prompts the narrator to offer in the final verse paragraph some bitter advice to
readers about the nature of warfare and the outcome of blind patriotism. In the last twelve lines of the
poem, Owen describes his experience of walking behind the wagon in which the dead man has been
placed, seeing the corpse frozen in the twisted agony of its death throes. That sight, he says, would
prevent any man from adopting glibly the notion that dying for one’s country is somehow noble.
Thus, the feelings or emotions the author felt and stored in his subconscious mind during his
experience of the war undeniably manifested in the poem. “19 - And watch the white eyes writhing in his
face, 20 - His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin; 21 - If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood.”. This
traumatic neurosis and shell shock were the keys in the literature of The First World War. Throughout the
history of humanity, war has always affected the political, philosophical and literary representation of the
ethos, because the experience of violence puts tremendous pressure on nations, persons, ideas, and
language.

Structuralism. Phonetically looking at the poem: The opening lines, through their alliterative and
visual force, situate the bodies in our field of perception: bent-double, knock-kneed, the soldiers continue
to limp with their bloodied feet as iambs and trochees straggle within the pentameter in order to keep up
with the somnambulist rhythm of the march. Underneath 'blood-shod', one can hear the pararhyme
'bloodshed'.

'Double', coupled with 'old', also anticipates one of the most powerful uses of 'd' to be found
anywhere in English poetry: the consonant not only weaves itself into the end-rhymes and the key images
('drunk', 'deaf', 'drown', 'dreams') but its accretive intensity is central to the denunciatory polysyllabic
force of 'The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est'.
Sound plays a particularly important role in a poem that climaxes on a macabre contrast between
tongues: the lacerated tongue of the soldier and the grand polysyllabic sound of the Latin phrase as he
plays on the two meanings of ‘lingua’ (in Latin, it means both tongue and language). If the heavy,
monosyllabic rhymes of the first stanza (sacks/backs, sludge/trudge) are reminiscent of Sassoon’s war
realism, there is a more intimate sound pattern that his much-idealized soldier-mentor never manages to
achieve. This is the sound of vowels – the ‘e’, ‘o’ and ‘u’ sounds (knock-kneed, coughing, cursed, sludge,
our, trudge, lost, blood-shod, went, even, outstripped, dropped) – which evokes the body in pain and
culminates in the noises of the retching body in the final lines. The sounds of the similes (‘beggars’,
‘hags’) soon metamorphose into the central reality (‘gargling’) of the poem.

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 First Semester
Deconstructive Criticism in association with Structuralism, New Historicism & Psychoanalytic
Criticism of Dulce et Decorum Est by Wilfred Owen 2017

Agbay, Noralyn G. December, 2017

Bressler, Charles E. (1994). Literary Criticism: An introduction to theory and practices. 2nd Ed. New
Jersey: Prentice Hall, Inc.
Tyson, Lois. (2006). Critical Theory Today: A User-Friendly Guide.2nd Ed. New York: Garland
Publishing

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