Dulce Et Decorum Est

– Critical Analyisis Essay, Research Paper

It is sweet and meet to die for ones country ,better known

as ?Dulce et Decorum Est? is a great poem written by war

poet Wilfred Owen.It involves a tragic war situation.It is

easily understood.The poem also has a very unique sound

to it.

Wilfred Owen was born on March 18th in 1893.He

was the eldest of four children born in Oswestry.He was

brought up in the Anglican religion of the Evangelical

school.An evangelical man is saved not by the good he

does but by faith he has in redemin power of christs

sacrafice. He rejected most of his belief by 1913, the

influence of his education remains visible in his poems and

their themes:Sacraifice biblical language,and his discription

of hell.

In 1913 he moved to Bordeaux ,as a teacher of english

in the Berlitz School of language:one year later he was a

private teacher in a prosperous family in the Pyrenees.

He enlisted in the Artists Rifles on the 21st of october

1915 there followed 14 months training in England.He was

drafted to France in 1917 the worst war winter.His total

war experience will be a short four months,from which

only five weeks in the front line.On this is based all his war

poetry.

In August 1918,after his friend, the other great war

poet ,Sigfried Sassoon had been severly injured and sent

back to England,Owen returned to france war was stll as

horrid as before.The butchery war ended on November

11th, 1918 at 11 o clock.Seven days before, Owen had

been killed in one of the last vain battles of this war.

The situation of ?Dulce et Decorum est?is a tragic

situation.The poems speaker is Wilfred Owen.He is a

soldier who is sent into the front lines of battle.There is not

a particular audience that he is looking for.

The occasion is the cold winter war in the trenches.It

is men fighting for their country and dying for an

honor.The poem takes place on a cold day in 1917.It is

outside on the Western Front in France.The poem is telling

you about the hard ships that the soldiers went through.

The theme of the poem is about trench warfare.Owen

is hurling the pain into the readers face.The pain of this

piece writing is its truth.This is something that poet saw

and experienced.This sets the serious tone for the poem.

The poem starts by telling you the soldiers had a long

walk back to their camp and to safety and they were

oblivius to the fighting.Then it tells you about a gas attack

and how the men are scrambling to prepare. Then he sees

his friend dying and is not able to help him.he watches his

friend die in pain.Next it talks about how his friend died for

his country.I basically see this poem as a soldier telling you

about one of the probly many situations that he has been

through.

In ?Dulce Et Decorum Est?Wilfred Owen reacts to

the war by turning conventional poetic technique into some

thing that appears to be normal on the surface but in

reality is tainted and corrupted.The poem is written in

Iambic Pentamenter.The sound in the poem makes you feel

like you are right there watching the guy die from the

gas.Dulce et Decorum est has a conventional form.It

ryhmes well enough following ABAB,CDCD etc pattern.

The most important means of developing the

effectiveness of the poem is the graphic imagery. They

evoke such emotions so as to cause people to become sick.

The images can draw such pictures that no other poetic

means can, such as in line twenty-two: “Come gargling

from the froth corrupted lungs.” This can be disturbing to

think about. It shows troops being brutally slaughtered very

vividly, evoking images in the reader’s mind. In the

beginning of the poem the troops were portrayed as “drunk

with fatigue.” With this you can almost imagine large

numbers of people dragging their boots through the mud,

tripping over their own shadow. Later in the poem when

the gas was dropped, it painted a psychological image that

would disturb the mind. The troops were torn out of their

nightmarish walk and surrounded by gas bombs. How

everyone, in “an ecstasy of fumbling” was forced to run out

into the mist, unaware of their fate. Anyone wanting to

fight in a war would become nervous at the image of

himself running out into a blood bath. The graphic images

displayed here are profoundly affecting and can never be

forgotten. The poem ties it all together in the last few lines.

In Latin, the phrase “Dulce et decorum est pro partria mori”

means: “It is sweet and becoming to die for one’s country.”

Owen calls this a lie by using good diction, vivid

comparisons, and graphic images to have the reader feel

disgusted at what war is capable of. This poem is extremely

effective as an anti-war poem, making war seem absolutely

horrid and revolting, just as the author wanted it to.In conclusion I think Wilfred Owens? Dulce et Decorum

Est ?is a great war like poem. That involves a tragic war

situation.It is easily understood and the poem also has a

very unique sound to it.