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.
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.
In all my dreams before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.
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.
Author Wilfred Owen
SUMMARY
It’s just another day on the battlefields of World War I . As our speaker lets us know right away, however, “normal” isn’t a word that has any meaning for the soldiers anymore. They’re all mentally and physically ravaged by the exertions of battle.
And then it gets worse. Just as the men are heading home for the night, gas shells drop beside them. The soldiers scramble for their gas masks in a frantic attempt to save their own lives. Unfortunately, they don’t all get to their masks in time. Our speaker watches as a member of his crew chokes and staggers in the toxic fumes, unable to save him from an excruciating certain death.
Now fast-forward. It’s some time after the battle, but our speaker just can’t get the sight of his dying comrade out of his head. The soldier’s image is everywhere: in the speaker’s thoughts, in his dreams, in his poetry. Worst of all, our speaker can’t do anything to help the dying soldier.
Bitterly, the speaker finally addresses the people at home who rally around the youth of England, and urge them to fight for personal glory and national honor. He wonders how they can continue to call for war. If they could only witness the physical agony war creates – or even experience the emotional trauma that the speaker’s going through now – the speaker thinks they might change their views. In the speaker’s mind, there’s noting glorious or honorable about death. Or, for that matter, war itself.
STANZA I SUMMARY
Lines 1-2
Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
The soldiers in this poem are crippled, mentally and physically overcome by the weight of their experiences in war.
Did you notice how unwilling our speaker seems to introduce himself (and his fellow soldiers)? We’re almost all the way through the second line before we (the readers) hear who “we” (the subjects of the poem) actually are. In fact, we get simile upon simile before we are acquainted with the subjects of this poem. We hear that they’re “like old beggars” and “like hags.” The speaker’s searching for images that his reader can understand, as if he’s convinced that none of his readers will be able to understand how horribly twisted and deformed the bodies of the soldiers have become.
Lines 3-4
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
The battle’s about to end for the day.
The soldiers turn away from the lights and noise of war and head back in the direction of their camp. There’s an oh-so-subtle irony in the reference to the soldiers’ “distant rest” (4).Sure, he could be talking about the barracks to which we guess that they’re headed. Then again, they’re soldiers in a war that wiped out over nine million men. Nine million. The “distant rest” to which our soldiers are heading may just be death. Trudging through the sludge is a pretty decent description of the trench warfare that became the battle plan for much of the First World War. Check out our “Best of the Web” links for detailed analyses of how disgusting and awful the trenches were.
Line 5
Men marched asleep.
Zombies.
Owen’s opting for concise realism here: there’s no need to fancy up the language of the poem. The horror of men walking as if they were dead (out of exhaustion, we’re guessing) says it all. By ending a sentence in the middle of line five, Owen creates a caesura (a pause in the line), a formal effect that underscores the terseness of the poem’s language at this point.
Lines 5-6
Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod.
We mentioned that these guys seem a bit otherworldly before, but we’ll say it again.
Notice how lines 5-6 collect lots of “l” sounds? Words like “lost” and “limped” and “blood” all roll on our tongues, making the experience of reading the lines seem even lllonger. It’s all part of Owen’s technical dexterity: he’s trying to get us to feel how interminable the soldiers’ march seems right now. Also notice that the blood that has been shed seems to clothe them now, (or at least their feet). This creates a vivid image suggesting that the war – figuratively and literally – is enveloping their very beings.
Lines 6-8
All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of tired, outstripped Five-Nines that dropped behind.
Once again, the choppiness of lines 6-7 mimics the terseness of tired men.
The rhythm of the lines even sounds a bit like the tramp of men marching in rhythm. Plus the repetition of “l”s continues. Notice how we’ve moved beyond the elaborate similes at the beginning of this stanza. Our speaker’s not worried about comparing his comrades to things that the folks at home can understand. Worn out by the march, he’s content to speak in sweeping observations. All the men are rendered disabled by the traumas that they’ve experienced. Maybe this isn’t exactly an accurate historical account of a soldier’s life in the war. After all, all of the men can’t be lame and blind, can they? Or…can they? Perhaps the “drunk” and “deaf” soldiers might be temporarily overwhelmed by the never-ending strains of battle. Even the shells seem “tired” and “outstripped.”(Five-Nines are gas shells. We’ll hear lots more about them later.)The whole war, in other words, seems worn out.
STANZA II SUMMARY
Lines 9-10
Gas! Gas! Quick, boys! – An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
The repetition of a frantic cry, “Gas! Gas! Quick, boys!—” draws us straight into a frenzy of action.
We’re in the midst of an “ecstasy” of fumbling for helmets and gas masks.(If you’re wondering just how nasty and terrifying gas attacks were, check out some of the historical links in our “Websites” section. Believe us, on a nastiness scale of 1 to 10, we put gas attacks at 10.5.)Does the word “ecstasy” seem strange here? It does to us. We’re guessing that Owen’s trying to draw upon an apocalyptic language: at the end of the world, just about anything that you’re doing will probably seem ecstatic. The “ecstasy of fumbling” which goes on here, however, is anything but rapturous. We’re back to the sort of ironic language that we’ve seen in the title – combining elevated language with absolute chaos makes the whole experience seem totally out of proportion.
Lines 11-12
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime…
The eeriness of this line might have something to do with the fact that we don’t know who the “someone” stumbling about in the night actually is.
Notice how the verbs here have changed: our speaker’s no longer describing universal conditions that could apply to anyone. He’s in the moment, watching as a man is “stumbling” and “yelling” and “floundering. “Those “–ing” conjugations of verbs create a sense of immediacy. The man’s out there right now. His actions occur as we speak. As we say in our “Quotes” section, lime, or quicklime, is a chemical compound that can burn through the human body (sort of like fire).In other words, whatever the gas is doing to that man out there, it’s awful. It’s so awful that our speaker can’t face it head-on: he has to describe it through similes, (like those similes we talked about in the first lines).
Lines 13-14
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
The repetition of the word “green” here allows our sense of the scene to fold in upon itself, almost as if the fog of green stuff is surrounding us as well. The long “ee”s of green lengthen the time it takes us to read the lines, slowing our tongues down slightly. It’s like those scenes in horror movies that suddenly shift into slow motion: what’s going on here is so awful that we have to pause in order to take it all in.
STANZA III SUMMARY
Lines 15-16
In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.
What’s with the fact that these two lines form their own stanza? Shouldn’t they be part of the second stanza?
We don’t have a solid lock on Owen’s intentions here, of course, but here’s what the poem itself tells us: this stanza fits into the rhyme scheme of stanza two. In fact, it’s almost like Owen snapped it off of the second stanza and pushed it down the page a little ways. Why? Well, for one thing, these two lines bring us out of a past experience (the experience of the gas attack) and into a horrific present. In some ways, the present is a lot like the past – after all, all our speaker can think about is the gas attack.In others, however, it’s a marked shift in the momentum of the poem. We can’t think of the dying soldier as part of the past, if only because he plays such a huge role in our speaker’s present. “All” his dreams have been taken over by a nightmarish memory of the gas attack. Notice now how the speaker seems to be directly involved in the man’s suffering: in lines 14-15, watching through “dim” light as his comrade goes down. By the time we get to line 16, however, the other soldier “plunges” directly at our speaker. Moreover, the helplessness of our speaker takes center stage. He can’t do anything. He can only replay the horrors of the scene, turning them over and over in his mind. It’s almost as if using the word “drowning” at the end of line 15 triggered our speaker’s memory, making him re-hash the horrors that he’s witnessed. “Drowning” occurs again in line 17. In fact, it actually rhymes with itself.
STANZA IV SUMMARY
Lines 17-18
If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
Ah, now we get to the “you.”
Are we the audience to whom Owen addresses this poem? We’re not quite sure. Several earlier versions of this poem were explicitly addressed to “Miss Pope,” or Jessie Pope, a British propagandist who printed public letters urging men to take up arms in defense of their country’s honor. Owen could be addressing the poem specifically to her. For the sake of argument, though, let’s see what happens if our speaker’s “you” is supposed to be us (the readers).If we accept that we’re the people to whom our speaker addresses himself, something interesting happens: we’re told that we can’t understand what’s going on in the poem…even as the speaker tells us what’s going on. In fact, it’s like a story that your friend might tell you. They might try to describe something that happened, but then end by saying, “you just had to be there.” These lines actually take it a step further, though: our speaker doesn’t even care whether we could actually experience the horrors of battle or not. He knows that we can’t share those experiences with him. He’s just wishing that we could share the dreams of the experiences of battle, but we can’t do that. Such deliberate distancing of the speaker from the “you” of the poem creates a huge gap of isolation in which our speaker dwells. We just can’t understand how horrible his life was…and is.
Lines 19-20
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;
We’re still in the land of hypotheticals here.
Our speaker’s going into detail, forcing “you” (or, well, us) to imagine just how horrible his dreams can be. The body of the dream-soldier writhes in surreal agony. It’s almost over-the-top, unless, of course, you’ve read descriptions of the pain and suffering of gas victims. Notice all the “s” sounds stacking up in the last line? (For starters, there’s “face” and “devil’s” and “sick” and “sin.”)When you read line 20 aloud, it’s almost as if you’re hissing your way through the line. The fancy technical term for repeating “s” sounds is sibilance…it’s what snakes do.(And devils, if you take John Milton’s word for it. Describing a devil by using an aural technique that forces the reader to hiss? That’s pretty darn cool.)
Lines 21-24
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,–
This is pretty disgusting.
And that’s our speaker’s point. He wants to ram home just how absolutely degrading, humiliating, and surreal the destruction of the human body can be. Within minutes, the body of a young man turns into a mass of aging sores – almost as a version of cancer moved through his body at warp speed. Owen takes on a bitter, ceaseless realism towards the end of this stanza. His speaker is deep in the memory of his own dream – and he’s dragging us along for the ride.
Lines 25-27
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie:
Now we get to the serious teeth of this poem: after drawing us deep into the hell of his personal experiences, our speaker lashes out at the those who helped get him into this mess.
As he bitterly reflects, the war efforts begin at home. Lots of people are willing to convince young (and, he suggests, gullible) “children” that they can find glory on the battlefield. When you compare the heightened rhetoric or (“high zest”) of these “patriots” to the stark realism of the lines preceding it, the difference between the two seems almost farcical. Owen sets up an implicit comparison between personal experience and national rhetoric. It’s almost like we see two separate versions of war being fought: the one that’s full of “glory” and “honor,” and the other that breaks men in to “hags” and hallucinations.
Lines 27-28
Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.
If you haven’t buffed up on Latin lately, don’t worry. Your friendly Shmoop translation team is here to help.
These Latin lines are quoted from Horace (a Roman philosopher and poet).Here’s the lines in English: “It is sweet and proper to die for one’s country. “After reading all of the stuff that our speaker (and our speaker’s comrade) have gone through, it’s pretty hard to believe that Horace actually knows what he’s talking about.We’re guessing that that’s Owen’s point. Notice how the last line of the poem doesn’t have anywhere close to ten syllables?For readers accustomed to seeing or hearing a line that’s ten syllables long, this would sound like a huge, awkward silence.Maybe like the silence of death.