The title of the poem is a quotation from the Latin poet, Horace. The title tag is completed at the end of the poem: Dulce et Decorum Est Pro Patria Mori- it is sweet and right to die for ones country. Wilfred Owen wrote this poem because he wanted people to know what war was actually like.
The first fourteen lines of the poem are in sonnet form. There is nothing military about the soldiers described at the beginning of this poem they are “like old beggars under sacks”. In just a few lines Owen creates a picture for us of these exhausted men, “bent Double” under the weight of their packs and capes, struggling away from the battle field to the rest areas behind the lines. They are shaken out of their fatigue by the arrival of the gas shells and they struggled desperately to get their gas masks on before the gas gets to them. One man fails to do so and Owen describes his death in clinical detail-“he plunges at me, guttering, chocking, drowning”.
He has shown in this poem how one man had died in a lot of pain, as he did not get his gas mask on in time.
Owen wrote another poem called The Dead Beat, it was written in 1917. This poem is about a man who had collapsed and Owen described him as “lay stupid like a cod, heavy like meat”. Owen describes the man as just lying there not knowing that there was a war. There he was sent to a doctor and was put out of the way. The doctor being drunk ha no concern about anything. Later the man died and all the Doctor could say was “Hooray!”
In the dead beat Owen describes his feeling about a soldier who had enough of war.
Another of Owen’s poems was Exposure. It was written during the bitter, cold winter of February 1917. The tone of this poem is that of anger and frustration.
The soldiers are Lying down in the trenches as dawn approaches waiting for the enemy to attack. The night is silent. The whispered voice of the sentries and the sound of the wind emphasises the silence. In the distance there is a sound of gunfire. Flares illuminate the scene. Then snow begins to fall and the men, begin to get exposed to the misery of there situation, the men begin to dream of home and happier times. But these are just memories and the soldiers return to their dying, “we turn back to our dying”. They even question their faith in God.
In the fifth line of each stanza, Owen emphasises his anger and amazement at how a human life could be frittered away so worthlessly. Owen constantly questions the reader in this poem- “But nothing happens”, “What are we doing here?”
All of these three poems are not about glory, honour and power. They are about the reality of war.
Owen was not concerned about poetry, but about the subject of war and letting everyone know how war really was.
Owen describes in his poem that it is a dreadful to die in war and not glorious.
