Dulce et Decorum Est: Summary & Themes
The speaker begins with a description of soldiers, bent under the weight of their packs like beggars, their knees unsteady, coughing like poor and sick old women, and struggling miserably through a muddy landscape. They turn away from the light flares (a German tactic of briefly lighting up the area in order to spot and kill British soldiers) and begin to march towards their distant camp. The men are so tired that they seem to be sleeping as they walk. Many have lost their combat boots, yet continue on despite their bare and bleeding feet. The soldiers are so worn out they are essentially disabled; they don't see anything at all. They are tired to the point of feeling drunk and don't even notice the sound of the dangerous poison gas shells dropping just behind them.
Somebody cries out an urgent warning about the poison gas, and the soldiers fumble with their gas masks, getting them on just in time. One man, however, is left yelling and struggling, unable to get his mask on. The speaker describes this man as looking like someone caught in fire or lime (an ancient chemical weapon used to effectively blind opponents). The speaker then compares the scene—through the panes of his gas mask and with poison gas filling the air — to being underwater, and imagines the soldier is drowning.
The speaker jumps from the last moment of the gas attack to a present moment sometime afterwards and describes a recurring dream that he can't escape, in which the dying soldier races toward him in agony.
The speaker directly addresses the audience, suggesting that if readers could experience their own such suffocating dreams (marching behind a wagon in which the other men have placed the dying soldier, seeing the writhing of the dying soldier's eyes in an otherwise slack and wrecked face, and hearing him cough up blood from his ruined lungs at every bump in the path—a sight the speaker compares to the horror of cancer and other diseases that ravage even the innocent), they would not so eagerly tell children, hungry for a sense of heroism, the old lie that "it is sweet and fitting to die for one's country."
Themes of the Poem
The Horror and Trauma of War
Wilfred Owen wrote “Dulce et Decorum Est” while he was fighting as a soldier during World War I. The poem graphically and bitterly describes the horrors of that war in particular, although it also implicitly speaks of the horror of all wars. While it is easy to comment on the “horror of war” in the abstract, the poem’s depiction of these horrors is devastating in its specificity, and also in the way that Owen makes clear that such horror permeates all aspects of war. The banal daily life of a soldier is excruciating, the brutal reality of death is unimaginable agony, and even surviving a war after watching others die invites a future of endless trauma. The way Owen uses language to put readers inside the experiences of a soldier helps them begin to understand the horrific experience of all of these awful aspects of war.
In the first stanza of “Dulce et Decorum Est,” the speaker thrusts the reader into the mundane drudgery and suffering of the wartime experience, as the speaker’s regiment walks from the front lines back to an undescribed place of “distant rest.” This is not a portrait of men driven by purpose or thrilled by battle. Instead, they are miserable: “coughing like hags,” cursing as they “trudge” through “sludge” with bloody feet. They march “asleep,” suggesting that these soldiers are like a kind of living dead. The terror and brutality of war have deadened them.
While the speaker is clear that the life of a soldier is painful and demoralizing, he demonstrates in the second stanza—which moves from describing the communal “we” of a regiment to a specific dying man—that death in war is also terrible: barbarous, agonizing, and meaningless. In the first two lines of the second stanza, the speaker captures the terror and dumb confusion of facing a gas attack (a feature of Word War I combat, which had never been used to such a terrible extent before that war), with the movement from the first cry of “Gas!” to the urgent amplification of that cry (“GAS!”), which is then followed by all the men “fumbling” with “clumsy helmets.” The speaker then describes a particular man unable to get his helmet on time, “stumbling” and “floundering” like a “man in fire” while the speaker can only watch helplessly from within his own mask. This other soldier's death is mired in confusion and pain. There isn’t even an enemy to face; it is a physically agonizing death offering no ideal or purpose to hold onto.
The poem’s very short third stanza suddenly plunges into the speaker’s own mind. In doing so, the poem reveals another aspect of the horror of war: that even surviving war offers ceaseless future torment. The surviving speaker describes himself as seeing in “all my dreams” this man dying in agony. The speaker can’t escape this vision, which means he can't ever achieve the "rest" that was the sole positive thing mentioned in the first stanza. The speaker's sleep is permanently haunted by the trauma of the death he has witnessed.
Since the third stanza is written in the present tense, it indicates that these dreams never fade. The speaker, who has survived—perhaps for a moment, perhaps the entire war—is permanently scarred by this trauma for however long his life will last. The poem’s portrayal of the horror of war, then, is complete and total. It reveals all aspects of war—living through it, dying in it, and surviving it—as being brutal, agonizing, and without meaning.
The Enduring Myth that War is Glorious
In its first three stanzas, “Dulce et Decorum Est” presents a vision of war—and World War I in particular—that is entirely brutal, bitter, and pessimistic. The fourth and final stanza marks a shift. While the first stanza focused on the “we” of the regiment, the second focused on the “he” of the dying soldier, and the third on the “I” of the traumatized speaker, the fourth stanza focuses on the “you” of the reader. In this stanza, the speaker directly addresses the reader, trying to make them understand the brutal reality of war. This is an effort to contradict what the speaker describes as the “old Lie,” the commonly held belief—communicated in the lines of Latin from the poet Horace (“it is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country”)—that war, and dying in war, is meaningful and full of glory.
It is possible to read this last stanza in a hopeful way by imagining that the poem could effectively communicate to non-soldiers the brutality of war. In this view, Owen wrote the poem with the belief that by highlighting the juxtaposition between a sanitized image of honourable death (as described by Horace) versus the messy, horrifying truth of actual war, perhaps the poem’s audience will change its attitude towards war and cease cheerfully sending young men—mere "children"—to die in agony.
To read the poem in a hopeful way, however, requires readers to believe that empathy is enough to change central beliefs. This is a plausible reading, but it hinges on the speaker’s descriptions being disturbing and evocative enough to counter what Owen describes as a sentimental belief about the war that dates back to antiquity—a difficult task for one short poem, no matter how powerful. In light of this, it’s perhaps a more careful reading of the poem to interpret the final stanza with a degree of pessimism. In this reading (while one might still agree that Owen wrote the poem in hopes of changing minds), the speaker is ultimately pessimistic about his ability to change the civilian public’s attitude towards war. As the speaker puts it: If the audience could experience the trauma the speaker describes (“the white eyes writhing,” the “gargling from froth-corrupted lungs”), then they wouldn’t pass their patriotic militarism down to their children. But they don’t experience it, except through the language of the poem, and the poem gives a hint of despair that such language isn’t enough.
In the final two lines of "Dulce et Decorum Est," Owen implies this pessimistic view in two main ways. First, and simply, the speaker allows Horace to have the final word. The speaker undercuts Horace’s lines by calling them a lie, but that description comes before the Latin text. That Horace’s words are allowed to end the poem implies a sense that Horace’s words and belief in the glory and honour of war will outweigh the vision of horror described by the poem. Further, by referring to this false story about the glory of war as “the old Lie,” and then quoting a Latin line from the Roman poet Horace, the speaker makes clear that the depiction of war as glorious is not just a simple misconception made by those unfamiliar with war. It is, rather, a lie—a purposefully told falsehood. And it is a lie that has been told for thousands of years in order to inspire young men to willingly give their lives to serve the political needs of their countries.
“Dulce et Decorum Est” is not, then, simply trying to reveal the horror of war to the unknowing public (though it certainly is trying to do that). The poem is also condemning the historical institutions and political/social structures that have, for time immemorial, sent young men to their deaths based on pretty tales of glory. The poem demands that the reader face the truth and no longer be complicit with that old Lie, but even as it does so, it seems to bitterly perceive that nothing will change, because nothing ever has.
.gif
)