Owen’s Dulce et Decorum est
Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs,
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots,
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of gas-shells dropping softly behind.
- The poem is an intimate account by an officer who is a direct witness (‘we’) to the physical and mental suffering of the soldiers. ‘Like old beggars’) His voice authenticates the glimpse of a specific moment in the war, where the Germans deploy gas as a weapon, with nightmarish results on both the hapless victim and the helpless witness. War changes humanity out of shape literally and morally. (‘Bent double.’) We can detect feelings of both anger and despair in the poet’s delivery of this stanza( Italian for ‘room’ when translated literally). Look at the rhyme between sacks/backs and sludge/trudge. These rhymes seem spat out rather than merely spoken with any degree of equanimity.
- The reader is catapulted immediately into the war through the use of powerful literary techniques that communicate visceral suffering. Look at the harsh sounds of the opening two lines, (‘knock-kneed’ and ‘ coughing like hags’) where the combination of consonants, alliteration and simile create the impression of a battle where soldiers have lost their humanity through suffering. We can also hear the sounds of the soldiers’ movements which are restricted( ‘cursed through sludge’) and suffused with agony already. (‘ Men marched asleep’) The effect of war is to dehumanise mankind so that all identity is sacrificed. All innocence is gone. Indeed, the weaponry seems more animated and threatening than the impotent soldiers. (‘Haunting flares.’)
- The repetition of ‘All’ shows there is no escape from this living hell. The use of alliteration connects different parts of the first stanza which thus gives the reader a ‘room’ for the scene to unfold horribly before our senses.
Gas! GAS! Quick, boys!—An ecstasy of fumbling
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time,
But someone still was 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 use of direct speech violates the scene, as if we are directly there when the gas attack happens. The oxymoronic ‘ecstasy of fumbling’ reveals the futile desperation and haste of the soldiers trying to fit their ‘clumsy’ masks in order to save themselves from horrible suffering. We get the impression of the soldiers being ill-prepared for this attack and that they are pawns in some terrible game.
- The ‘we’ of the opening shifts to the powerful use of first person, ‘I’ as the poet describes the terrifying spectacle of a man caught out by the poisonous gas. The references to ‘fire’ and ‘lime’ situate the victim in hell, and the disorientating reference to ‘misty panes’ and ‘green light’ reminds us that the poet is seeing the near hallucinatory suffering of his fellow soldier through the lenses of the protective gas mask. The word ‘drowning’ communicates the intense agony experienced by the soldier whose lungs are destroyed by the gas. It is not natural for human beings to drown away from water and yet the unnatural effect of the gas is to destroy any ‘norms’ in suffering and fatality.
- The positioning of the word ‘drowning’ at the end of the stanza shows how the graphic image will continue to haunt the poet and that the poor victim’s suffering went on and on.
In all my dreams before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.
- The poet’s consciousness is haunted by the death of the soldier. The past is only ever finished, never finished with. The verb ‘plunges’ re-enacts the terror of the dying man and the way he almost attacks the living poet in an effort to survive- like a drowning man. The use of participles also emphasises the drawn-out suffering of the soldier. This is what makes his death so graphic and nightmarish.. the victim is desperate to live and his physical striving to survive is pitiful as well as horrifying.
If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,—
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.
- Finally, the poet turns to the readers at home. He invites the patriots cosily back in England to view the degraded death of the soldier up close. as if the camera has changed angle so that the soldier is scrutinised so closely that we can hear his ‘gargling…lungs’. This distortion of the soldier’s primal need to breathe is deliberate. The gas is a weapon employed to destroy the ‘enemy’ in the most inhumane way possible. The fact that the poet has no choice but to fling the victim in ‘the wagon’ underlines the abject horror of war. Respect for the dying is impossible. Ambulances are mere ‘wagons’. Human beings have become disposable objects. Look at the violence and desperation of the verb, ‘flung.’
- The similes convey the truth of the virtuous war. ‘ obscene as cancer.’ Owen’s mission as a poet is to communicate the true ‘pity’ of war, rather than the sanitised bloodless propaganda of a poem like Rupert Brooke’s The Soldier.’ Hence the powerful irony of the title and end of the poem. War is not noble. Death is degraded and agonising. There is nothing heroic about dying in such an abject manner for one’s country. All is an illusion. Propaganda served up by those in power whose respect for the soldiers seem minimal.
Janet Lewison 2020.