Dulce et Decorum Est [Not] Pro Patria Mori

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Dulce et Decorum Est [Not] Pro Patria MoriDulce et Decorum Est is a poem by Wilfred Owen that has deepened my understanding of war, in particular of the First World War when this work is set. The poem focuses on a gas attack and its aftermath and in this essay I intend to show how Owen's use of poetic techniques and choice of content add to my own comprehension of this event, and of war more generally.  From Owen's description of the soldiers in his poem we can deduce that they have been broken by the war. The men who march away from the battlefield at the start of the poem, surely, did not march onto it in the same desperate state of ill-health. Owen's troops are the opposite of what you would expect them to be; the stereotype is of smart, proud, strong men not of “old beggars under sacks” as Owen describes them  (their uniforms, once crisp and clean, are now dirty and over large). The simile “coughing like hags” also adds to the idea that the soldiers have been reduced to the likes of the lowest, least respected members of society (this image is
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particularly notable when contrasted with the religious metaphors Owen employed to describe  soldiers in his other works.) They are no longer able-bodied but severely disabled as Owen's word choices show ('limped', 'lame', 'blind', 'deaf'). Within the battlefield Owen has established a semantic field of injury and, by sending his soldiers into this, he communicates to the reader the damage that war has done to them. However, Owen makes it quite clear that it is not only physical damage that the soldiers suffer but psychological too. By including himself in the poem, telling us about the trauma he lives with, Owen ...

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