‘Dulce Et Decorum Est’ Essay
For years, war and the honour of war has been built up and glorified 'unfairly by the media in cartoons, movies, games, news and even songs as well as warmongers trying to cash in on unsuspecting and gullible young men who want to be recognized as heroes.
Wilfred Owen, who had served in World War 1 and died while defending his country age 25, wrote the poem ‘Dulce Et Decorum Est’ as an attempt to dismantle the unrealistic expectations about war that boys who are ‘ardent for some desperate glory’ have taken from television and that has been reinforced by warmongers. Conveying horrific and frightening imagery from the war he served in, Owen expresses his strongly anti-war sentiments to the reader. Through the
It depicts the man as ‘yelling out’ and ‘stumbling’, which makes the reader imagine he is in pain and in need of help. ‘Floundering like a man in fire or lime’ and ‘as under a green sea, I saw him drowning’, describe how quickly the mustard gas engulfed and consumed the man, like a vast ocean overwhelming its victim and drowning him.
Owens third and final stanza is probably the most powerful and confronting of the poem. In it, Owen is attempting to correct the people encouraging young men to fight in the war who are saying that it is sweet and fitting to die for ones country. He relates the experience of walking behind a wagon being used to transport the body of a dying man who had ‘blood (come) gargling from the froth corrupted lungs’ and having to ‘watch the white eyes writhing in his face’, in an incredibly successful attempt to convince his audience that most men’s’ deaths’ during war were not heroic, but instead horrific. To establish a connection between the reader and his writing, Owen makes use of the reader’s senses to ensure that the final stanza makes the intended intense impact on the reader.
‘If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face
His hanging face, like a devils sick of sin.’
In this phase, the poet is making use of the readers sense of sight, attempting to implant in the readers mind some of