Which brings us to "Dulce Et Decorum Est"1, by Wilfred Owen. I cannot truly speak to the form and style Owen uses. I do not know. What I can speak to is what makes the poem work from a dramatic standpoint. What is so beautiful about this poem is its ability to move the reader. The poem is an example of writing graphically and from the gut, while adhering to a prevailing, or accepted form. Poetry does not have to be pretty, however some poets do not seem to realize this fact. The language chosen in many poems about grisly subjects flows beautifully and elegantly from the page, leaving one feeling less pain about the subject matter of the poem than one really should.
Owen, on the other hand, hurls the pain into the readers face. The first line gives one of the best metaphors for being tired that I have ever read. Picturing "old beggars under sacks", tell us these men are battle weary, but also gives us a hint that they are scared of what is ahead for them. Using graphic terms such as "blood-shod", Owen is not merely telling us of the hell of war, he is showing us. As a poet, this is the task. Certainly Owen is relaying a specific event to us, but the context of that event is important.
It is important for many reasons, not the least of which is the universality of the work. I have never seen war of any kind. Most will not have seen the war of Owen's experience. But through his vivid words, his gruesome portrayal, I think we all can know that we do not want to see war.
But how does this apply to us, the poets of today's cities, today's decadence and today's love of violence. How do we of the Faces of Death generations, strike a chord with people?
Do what Owen did. The pain of this piece ...
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It is important for many reasons, not the least of which is the universality of the work. I have never seen war of any kind. Most will not have seen the war of Owen's experience. But through his vivid words, his gruesome portrayal, I think we all can know that we do not want to see war.
But how does this apply to us, the poets of today's cities, today's decadence and today's love of violence. How do we of the Faces of Death generations, strike a chord with people?
Do what Owen did. The pain of this piece of writing is its truth. This is something we believe the poet saw and actually experienced. Your experiences can be just as vital. Go ahead, proclaim your love for Mary Sue (or for Mary and Sue), but strive to find a defining moment in that love. What were the circumstances? What was the context? Was the moonlight cascading to earth and drowning in its image on Lake Michigan? Was a gentle summer breeze blowing the beach grass gently, whistling words of encouragement? Was there sand in your underwear? These things matter. It puts us in your shoes.
And then go further. Wrap those metaphors into your context. Weave a quilt of unity, which will tie into the reason for your writing.
The reason for your writing does not have to be to convey a moral lesson, as we see in Owen's poem. The poem has a message to convey; war is an ugly, brutal and nightmarish business. Consider the poem without the final 12 lines. It changes the direction and context certainly, but we are still left with a truthful and disturbing image. Many poetry connoisseurs enjoy this kind of non-judgment. Your readers are smart and sensitive people and they will understand your image if it is honest.
As a dramatist, I love to use poems so I can hear myself talk. Reading poetry aloud is as much an art as writing it is, in my mind. Read the Owen poem out loud while you are alone. Feel every word, every pause, and every breath. This is the beauty of poetry for many people. Think of this as you decide where to break a verse or add punctuation. This guides the reader and lends much to the texture of your work.
I have spent time with this particular Owen piece in Reader's Theatre groups. It is a wonderful example of a poem that just begs to be spoken. At the top of the second stanza notice the first two words: "Gas! GAS!…" Owen did not write those words simply for the visual impact on the page. His purpose was to tell us that maybe the first cry was the instant, almost lazy reaction to something he'd seen a hundred times. But that second one is a bellow, a true warning. He did not mean for these to be read in the same way.
A great example of using punctuation for texture is the ellipses in line 12 (5th line, 3rd stanza). Owen tells us that this image trails off, and that by extension gives a sense of the rhythm and the mood of the speaker at that point. It is not a proclamation, it is an eerie realization.
I truly believe that reading your work aloud to yourself will make you a better poet. I cannot think a poem I love and cherish that is not made more enjoyable by a good old fireside recital of it
Although poetry is probably the most free form of writing there is, there are still certain elements to which the poet must pay attention. The rhythm, the texture, the images are all important and they separate good poetry from journal entries. Honesty is the key. A novel can lie and survive, but a poem relies on its truth as its heartbeat. Write your moments as vividly and as passionately as you lived them. Don't cheat me, because I want to feel what you felt. I want to laugh, cry, sigh, scream, fight, fly, drive, sit, and ponder as you did.
Remember, "Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori". Or that Jethro Tull song with the line about a guy with a runny nose. Poetry. It's all in the image.
1 It is sweet and meet to die for one's country History has taught us that no other war challenged existing conventions, morals, and ideals in the same way World War I did. World War I saw the mechanization of weapons (heavy artillery, tanks), the use of poison gas, the long stalemate on the Western Front, and trench warfare, all of which resulted in the massive loss of human life. "We must remember not only that the battle casualties of World War I were many times greater than those of World War II, wiping out virtually a whole generation of young men and shattering so many illusions and ideals; but also that people were wholly unprepared for the horrors of modern trench warfare. World War I broke out on a largely innocent world, a world that still associated warfare with glorious cavalry charges and the noble pursuit of heroic ideals" (Norton Anthology of English Literature, Fifth Edition, 1891).
A handful of poets, including Wilfred Owen, participated in the war, fought in the war, and some like Owen, died in the war. The poetry of these "war poets", as they are later termed, shows a first-hand account of the brutality and the devastation of war in a world which still believed that war was heroic and proud. Norton further tells us that
"those poets who were involved on the front, however romantically they may have felt about the war when they first joined up, soon realized its full horror, and this realization affected both their imaginations and their poetic techniques"(1890-91).
In "Dulce Et Decorum Est", Wilfred Owen reacts to the war by turning conventional poetic technique into something that appears to be normal on the surface but in reality is tainted and corrupted. Owen's break from the conventional poetic form serves to symbolize the breakdown of society's value system - a system that had been trusted for many years. Owen also breaks from the pretty language prevalent in the poetry of his day to show his society the awful images of real and not romantically heroic war. Finally, Owen juxtaposes the idea of war as devastating and the idea of war as heroic to illustrate the poem's ultimate irony - "Dulce Et Decorum Est, Pro Patria Mori"1.
Upon one's first consideration of Wilfred Owen's poem, "Dulce Et Decorum Est", the form it takes appears conventional. It rhymes well enough, following an ABAB, CDCD, etc. pattern and travelling in one 8-line stanza, one 6-line stanza, one 2-line stanza and one 12-line stanza. The number of lines and the rhyme scheme of Owen's poem echoes that of the French Ballade which consists of an ABABBCBC rhyme scheme repeated three times followed by a short 4 line BCBC Envoy at the end. Owen's stanza breaks are irregular and he does not separate the last four lines into the Envoy. However, a more significant formal feature of "Dulce Et Decorum Est" is the fact that Owen makes it look like a poem written in Iambic Pentameter. True Iambic Pentameter has 10 syllables and five stresses per line with the stress falling on the second syllable of each foot. An example of Iambic Pentameter comes from "Modern Love" by George Meredith.
Owen's poem adheres to 9, 10, or 11 syllables per line although there are a few lines which have less. Initially, the reader will point and say, "Oh, Iambic Pentameter". However, there is nothing poetically conventional about the stresses within each line. For example, take the first line. If one were to scan the poem, it would go something like:
The point is that hardly any line in the poem follows the iambic rhythm of de-Dum, de-Dum, de-Dum, de-Dum, de-Dum. Owen breaks up this iambic rhythm mainly with his use of punctuation. The punctuation (commas in the middle of lines, dashes, hyphens, exclamation points, periods) causes the poem to sound conversational when read. There is hardly any rhythm or music to the lines. Why should there be? Owen's war is not music, Owen's war is not a rhythmic dance. Owen's poem is full of stumbling, fumbling, tired, hopeless, dying men. He is writing about a ghastly scene of war and of a man drowning in poisonous gas. If there is music in Owen's poem, it is a dirge for the dying.
Owen's break from conventional poetic form can teach us a valuable lesson as writers. Owen obviously was aware of the existing poetic techniques of his day and prior to the war, he wrote in what Norton terms "sub-Keatsian luxuriance" (1909). Owen changed this form to prove a point and to change society's attitudes. It is important to note that Owen could never have changed poetic technique without first understanding what he was changing. We must remember that poetry, like painting, sculpture, dance, or music, is an art form. Any formal school established to study an art form teaches its students the history of the art form and the history of the technique of that art form. The school encourages its students to utilize past and present techniques and finally it gives its students the knowledge and the skills to use their own creativity to evolve or change what already exists. Poetry is a dynamic force. Poetry will always change and it will always evolve as long as there are new writers to write. But tradition and traditional forms must be respected and understood in order to change it. We have to remember, even if we have not studied poetry formally in an institution, that we are students of poetry, not only writers.
Putting aside any more discussion of different forms and operating under the idea that Poetry is an art form, I would like to point out that there is a misconception among a lot of people today that one can just write down a reaction or a feeling and call it poetry. Poetry is a reaction and it is a feeling, but reacting to something and feeling something doesn't necessarily create Poetry. Everyone reacts and everyone feels but not everyone can turn feelings and reactions into Poetry. It is ludicrous to say, however simply, "I am sad, so I will write about it and now I am a poet". Essentially we are saying that anyone can be a poet and anything written can be Poetry.
There are certain elements that should exist within any poem such as metaphor, simile, personification, alliteration, imagery, etc. All of these things keep the poem focused on the subject and keeps the subject "tight". Tightness of imagery is an essential difference between a good poem and a great poem. When your image loosens, you lose your reader. When you keep your image tight, the reader stays with you. A poem can have more than one image, but the images must somehow work together. In "Dulce Et Decorum Est", Wilfred Owen does this brilliantly through the use of his reactionary language.
There are 4 main image groups which run all the way through the poem. The first is that of sleep or dreams. In fact, as Norton once again tells us, Owen suffered from "horrendous nightmares symptomatic of shell shock. The experience of battle, banished from his waking mind, erupted into his dreams and thence into poems..." (1909). Instances of this image are found in line 3-haunting, line 4-rest, line 5-"Men marched asleep", line 7-fatigue, line 9-"tired, outstripped Five-Nines", line 15-"In all my dreams", and line 17-"smothering dreams". The second image group is that of the sea or of someone drowning. These images can be found mainly in the second and third stanzas in line 12-flound'ring, line 13-"misty panes (portholes), line 13 "thick green light", line 14-"as under a green sea, I saw him drowning", line 16-"guttering, choking, drowning", and line 22 "gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs". The third image group is one of un-coordination. These are found in line 1-Bent-double, line 2-Knock-kneed, line 6-lame and limped, line 7-drunk, line 9-fumbling, line 10-clumsy, line 11-stumbling, and line 19-writhing. The fourth image group is one which shows lack or loss of the senses. These are found in line 3-"turned our backs" (blindness/ignorance), line 6-blind, line 7-deaf, and line 15-"helpless sight".
Owen also shows us a small group of images which are just ghastly pictures of war and occur largely in the last stanza. In any case, all of the specific image groups work together and throughout the poem to show us a vivid picture of war. These images are utilized by Owen to show the ultimate irony and the moral of the poem; it is not in fact a "sweet and meet" fate to die for one's country even though current writers of his day were touting it as something heroic. This irony is illustrated in a clever juxtaposition (another poetic technique) at the end of the poem. The men who enlist are "innocent" (line 24), they are "children" (line 26) who have learned that war is full of "high zest" (line 25) and this makes them "ardent for some desperate glory" (line 26). The innocents are willing to believe the Lie but they will, of course, learn differently once they experience the war first hand.
The reader's attention does not wander throughout the poem because of Owen's consistent imagery. By the end of the poem, the reader can fully appreciate the irony between the truth of what happens in the trenches and the Lie being told at home. It is this attention to form and imagery that makes the poem effective.
"Dulce Et Decorum Est" is a reactionary poem. Owen reacts to a horrible war and to the Lie being told about war. He shows us his reaction through the changes he makes to poetic form illustrating the breakdown of an established system (after all, the poets who were touting the war were still sticking to form), and through the realism of his language.
Poets must react. Effective Poetry is usually a reaction to something experienced first hand by the author. Poets also must educate themselves in classic form and attempt to write in classic form. Whether success occurs while attempting classic form is another matter. The point is that we must appreciate the traditional past of the art form and we must utilize poetic device in any poem we try to write. A gut reaction, a respect for form, and a utilization of poetic devices go hand in hand in hand.
1 It is sweet and meet to die for one's country.
However in the second poem I studied, Jessie PopeÆs æWhoÆs for the Game?Æ, the presentation of war is quite different. She also writes in a more conversational manner which makes the poem more memorable and persuasive. She compares the war to a ægameÆ, implying that there is little danger on the battlefield. She also refers to the war as a sport where a player would return with a minor injury such as a crutch. Within the poem, Pope uses many questions which involve the reader more and together with the use of everyday language give the poem a less formal feel. She persuades the men to join the army by making them feel deceitful and cowardly if they were to æ lie lowÆ. She also has a friendly manner in her propaganda poem as she refers to the men as æladsÆ. She pressurises the men into joining the forces with her assumption that theyÆll æcome on alrightÆ. She makes the country more appealing and dependable upon their support when she gives it a female gender. This capitalises on the sexist attitude of the era where men were expected to take care of and protect their women. Pope has written this poem in four quatrains with a regular rhythm and rhyme scheme. This makes the poem more memorable. This is also a technique employed in childrenÆs poetry and as such trivialises her subject matter. This poem is a recruiting poem with the aim of encouraging men to volunteer to join the forces. It was written at the beginning of the First World War and therefore the true disastrous effects of the war had not been experienced. Those left behind, women, children and exempt men, were often unaware of the true horror of the war and instead were seduced by a romantic ideal. In conclusion, I feel that both these poems are effective in studying the literature of the First World War as they both present such different pictures. OwenÆs poem is an excellent example of poetry portraying the realism of war whereas PopeÆs poem is an excellent example of the unfortunate attitude cultivated on the home front. The contrast between the two allows the reader to see the reality of the First World War from two immensely different perspectives
like a man in fire or lime.’ Wilfred Owen makes an immediate separation between the dying soldier and himself. This is shown metaphorically. Owen refers to the sea metaphorically showing the strength of the ocean or in this case, the gas. He infers that you are powerless against the gas. This is shown by ‘as under a green sea I see him drowning’. This paragraph is showing the ease of death on the front. One shell of gas can kill a person in an instant and he is powerless against it. This personalised view makes the death of the soldier have a far greater effect. The third paragraph is very powerful and it is saying that Wilfred Owen will never forget that moment and that the man can never be replaced. However the army generals use the men as pieces in a game, but it is somebody’s life. This is why Wilfred Owen dislikes Jessie Pope. She is saying that war is just a game however it is not and many people died in the First World War. In the final paragraph, Wilfred Owen takes an immediate shot at Jessie Pope by saying ‘you too could pace’ and ‘if you could hear’. It is trying to say that they should not be able to write about the war when they do not have a clue about the consequences of her poetry. Sarcastically Owen calls the pro-war poet my friend; this implies a fellow poet, Jessie Pope, rather than an actual friend. Being referred to as friend will not offend the pro-war poet yet it shows their responsibility to tell the truth and their adverse effect on the youth. Wilfred Owen named his poem after a well known Latin phrase ‘Dulce et Decorum est’ which means ‘It is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country.’ This is basically Jessie Pope’s attitude ...
The next poem 'Dulce et Decorum est' by Wilfred Owen was a complete contrast. This looked more at realism and one climax was the death of a soldier. He described everything in very vivid detail so that you could see the horrific picture of what was really going on in the war. He talks of 'the old lie' referring to the Latin phrase 'Dulce et Decorum est Pro patria Mori'. This means 'it is sweet and fitting to die for your country'. Calling this a lie you can see what his attitude to war is.
In the last poem that we looked at by Jessie Pope we can see a very jingoistic attitude to war. She was one of the kinds of people who were called white-feather women. They were very strongly pro-war and believed that if you didn't go to war you were a coward. They spread lots of propaganda telling people how good war was.
Jessie Pope is a poem that creates disillusioned ideas on war. It implies that war is a good thing and that real men go to war. This is the sort of text that gives the misleading ideas on war, which make war seem a good thing.