Name: JOHN PAUL T.

HOLGADO Score:

Program, Yr. and Section: BSE III - ENGLISH

Name of College and University: COLLEGE OF EDUCATION – BATAAN PENINSULA STATE UNIVERSITY 80

Course Code and Course Title:

Schedule: FRIDAY 2pm – 5pm

Semester and Academic Year: SECOND SEMESTER, 2018 – 2019

Dulce et Decorum Est: An Opposite Stance – A Stylistic Analysis

 Dulce et Decorum Est: A Stylistic Analysis

Dulce et Decorum Est is a poem written by Wilfred Owen based on his experiences fighting in the
channels in Northern France during World War I. He wrote a letter to his mother from a recovery hospital in
Craiglockhart, Scotland in 1917. Owen was 24 years old that time and a year later, he was killed in action just
one week before the Armistice of November 11, 1918 was signed to signal the end of hostilities.

The text was printed afterwards in a 1920 book basically Poems. Wilfred Owen’s preface reads: “This
book is not about heroes…My subject is war, and the pity of war. The poetry is in the pity.”

Dulce et Decorum Est pro patria mori is a Latin line odes of the Roman poet Horace which means “It is
sweet and proper to die for one’s country. But Owen opted to make an opposite stand differ what the title says.

This stylistic analysis will tell us how Dulce et Decorum Est was formed and how it shapes a particular
mood and teaches us, the readers, about the old lie: Dulce et Decorum Est pro patria mori.

Stylistic Theory

Sociolinguistic is an umbrella term covering a variety of methods and objectives, but there is a close
relationship between the approaches to literary style adopted by reader response theories and sociolinguists.
Basically, it is theory of varieties, of correlations between distinctive linguistic choices and particular socio-
cultural circumstances. The individual text can be described and interpreted in relation to the stylistic
conventions which generate it and the historical and socio-logical situation which brought it into existence.

Since it deals with sociolinguistics, the author participates in the text (he is omnipresent in it) with
almost no direct language of his own. The language of the text is a system of languages that mutually and
ideologically interanimate each other. It is impossible to describe and analyze it as a single unitary language.
(1067; repr. in Lodge, 1988: 130).

Discourse in this sense refers to a collection, at a specific time in history, of different stylistic registers
with different purposes (political, literary, social) which transmit and maintain institutionalized values or
ideologies. Saussure proposed that the relation between the linguistic system and the continuum of objects,
events and ideas that it presents is arbitrary, that the structures of language enable us to discriminate between
concepts and ideas. Foucault extended this thesis to our perceptions of history and ideology, arguing that the
various discourses of a period and society promote and institutionalize its fears, hatreds, obsessions and ideals.

Owen, considerably, had experienced first-hand what was written in the text – the horrors of gas
warfare during the World War I leading us to its external focalizing, contributing to what is happening in the
society during that time which tells us about Sociolinguistics and makes us understand more the poem.

Diction

Dulce et Decorum Est begins the poem with its opening lines containing the words bent, beggars, sacks,
hags, cursed, haunting, trudge which somehow delineates the word poverty by which is not suitable for the men
fighting in the battlefield. These words may be in contrast to what is happening in the battlefield. But, this is
what the writer intended to form the text in order for the readers that it is depriving to be in war experiencing
poverty.

The second stanza opens a dramatic scene in the poem and the word “boys”, simply describes how
weak are men, how helpless compare to the war.

Meter and Rhyme

Iambic pentameter is prevailing throughout the text but at times break with rhythm which reflects its
strangeness.

In the first stanza, rhythm is somewhat broken in the line five to when commas and semi-colons reflect
the rambling efforts of the war men to keep pace.

In the last quartets, we can see in the line seven (line 23); bitter as the cud, where in cud is termed as
digested food which is chewed again to be digested. As what in the poem, blood is coming up the broken lungs
and has to be chewed again by the poor dying war man.

Dulce et Decorum Est pro Patria Mori

Owen gave us the images of what war men went through during war in the battlefield like “we cursed
through sludge” which suggests activities of moving forward; “we limped on, blood-shod” which depicts the
difficulty of some comrades who no longer have boots to wear; memories of dying men because of gas
explosions in lines “the white eyes writhing in his face”, “the blood/come gargling from the froth-corrupted
lungs”; sense of frustration and horrors in the line “like old beggars under sacks”; and the image of a dying
comrade in the line “flond’ring like a man in fire or lime”.

These images contradict the title of the poem “Dulce et Decorum Est”, that is “It is sweet and proper”,
to undergo the pain of disfigurement and death in the name of patriotism. We can see Owen’s bitterness as the
words he chose depicted the death of his fellow soldier that is why he has the opposite view of the line “Dulce
et Decorum Est pro patria mori.