The following verse takes on a more urgent tone, and someone gives a warning “Gas! Gas! Quick, boys!” Owen uses direct speech to connect to the reader, allowing us to hear the urgency of the situation. The soldiers managed to fit the “clumsy helmets just in time”, but there was one unfortunate man who failed:
But someone was still yelling out and stumbling,
And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime…
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
The reader sees through Owen’s eyes, through the “misty panes” of his gas mask, the soldier caught in the gas attack. The simile, “flound’ring like a man in fire or lime” creates a disturbing image of the man thrashing about in the “green sea” of poisonous gas. Owen continues, “In all my dreams, before my helpless sight, he plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning”, providing more disturbing images of the suffering man coming after the reader.
But Owen does not stop there, he moves on in the last verse to depict in detail the horrifying physical effects the gas had on the soldier. Again, Owen attempts to connect to the reader, asking us to try and imagine this horrible scene as if we are seeing it through our own eyes, watching the “white eyes writhing in his face, his hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin. He also asks us to imagine hearing it through our own ears, claiming, “If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs”, again using onomatopoeia, “gargling”, to appeal to the reader’s sense of sound. Owen even evokes taste, describing the taste of the poisoned blood as being “bitter as the cud of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues.” Owen clearly spares no detail in “Dulce Et Decorum Est”, using such graphic portrayals to appeal to our senses of sight, sound, and even taste.
Similarly in “The Sentry”, Owen describes the terrible conditions of the war while also focusing on the tragedy of one man, this time the incident of a sentry who was blasted from his post and was badly injured. The first verse of this poem brings the reader to realize the abysmal conditions of the trenches in war. The weather conditions were palpably terrible, and the line, “Rain, guttering down in waterfalls of slime” exaggerates the strength and volume of the falling rain. At the same time, Owen induces sound in the reader’s mind with the onomatopoeic verb, “guttering”, as well as the sense of touch, reminding us of the sticky consistency of the rain by metaphorically describing it as “slime”. He also tells of “slush waist-high and rising hour by hour” and steps that are “choked” “too thick with clay”, recreating the scene for the reader. Even the smell of the trenches was provided, be it the “murk of air” which “stank old, and sour”, “fumes from whizbangs”, or the “smell of men”.
In the second verse, the men “herded from the blast of whizbangs” by seeking shelter in the dug-out, and “herded” evokes an image of the mass of men moving in unity like animals. After the impact of another bomb the sentry is then introduced into the poem:
And thud! flump! thud! down the steep steps thumping
And sploshing in the flood, deluging muck,
The sentry’s body…
Here Owen uses a lot of onomatopoeia, “thud! flump! thud!” to evoke the sound of the sentry’s body “thumping” down the steps and “sploshing” in the mud. The exclamation marks further emphasize the loudness of the sound. The soldiers picked the body up, thinking he was dead, “until he whined ‘O sir – my eyes, - I’m blind, - I’m blind, I’m blind.” The use of the word “whined” evoked the sentry’s voice in the reader’s mind, childlike and high-pitched from fear and distress. This distress is further highlighted by the repetition of “I’m blind”, acting as a disturbing echo that mimics a panicking child. The sentry’s eyes are vividly depicted as “Eyeballs, huge-bulged like squids”; this simile provides a disturbing image of how the eyes protruded out of the sockets. Owen must ‘forget’ the sentry to tend to his other responsibilities, such as “sending a scout to beg a stretcher somewhere, and floundring about to other posts under the shrieking air” This last line of the verse gives a different image, an image of a scout struggling to get to other posts, and the personification in “shrieking air” evokes the sharp high-pitched sounds of shells exploding in the air.
The last stanza further provides imagery of the other soldiers also in the trench, “Those other wretches, how they bled and spewed, and one who would have drowned himself for good.” The reader is provided with a horrific scene of distressed men bleeding and vomiting, even to the point of choking themselves. This is accompanied by the sentry’s “moans and jumps, and the wild chattering of his shivered teeth”. The onomatopoeia in “wild chattering” along with the other sounds coming from the sentry is induced in the reader’s mind, underlining the trauma that is suffered by soldiers in the war. The poem concludes in a disturbing note, “Through the dense din, I say, we heard him shout ‘I see your lights!’ But ours had long gone out”. The “dense din”, emphasized by the use of alliteration, depicts the thick noise in the small dugout, and though it literally evokes the sound, it also seems to evoke the sense of touch, almost as if the noise is thick to the point of suffocation. The hopeful voice of the sentry is made tragic by the fact that the lights had gone out. The reader is left with only darkness, no hope is left.
Owen has clearly utilized all five senses, sight, sound, smell, touch, and taste, in his poems “Dulce Et Decorum Est” and “The Sentry”. Be it the wide range of horrific scenes in war, the sounds bombs and suffering men, the smell of trenches, the feel of mud, or even the taste of blood, Owen has managed to deliver all these aspects of his experiences to the reader, inviting us to try and imagine experiencing the same situations. To people not having experienced it firsthand, war is more or less an abstract issue, fully understood only by those who experienced it. Owen manages to make war more tangible to us with his sense-evoking poetry, allowing us to perhaps understand its horrors better.
