DULCE ET DECOURM EST!

DULCE ET DECOURM EST!

"Dulce et Decorum Est" is a poem written by Wilfred Owen during World War I, and published posthumously in 1920.

The Latin title is taken from the Roman poet Horace and means:

"it is sweet and honorable...”

followed by pro patria mori, which means:

“to die for one’s country”.

I hope you enjoy the poem as much as I do.

Dulce et Decorum Est

~Wilfred Owen

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.

    Thought to have been written between 8 October 1917 and March, 1918

First of all, the title. “DULCE ET DECORUM EST” the first words of a Latin saying (taken from an ode by Horace). The words were widely understood and often quoted at the start of the First World War. They mean "It is sweet and right." The full saying ends the poem: Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori - it is sweet and right to die for your country. In other words, it is a wonderful and great honor to fight and die for your country.

            Secondly, the description of Guttering. Owen probably meant flickering out like a candle or gurgling like water draining down a gutter, referring to the sounds in the throat of the choking man, or it might be a sound partly like stuttering and partly like gurgling, anyway it paints the graphic scene of war.

            These notes are taken from the book, Out in the Dark, Poetry of the First World War, Pronunciation

The pronunciation of Dulce is DULKAY. The letter C in Latin was pronounced like the C in "car". The word is often given an Italian pronunciation pronouncing the C like the C in cello, but this is wrong. Try checking this out in a Latin dictionary!  -  David Roberts.

(n.d.). Retrieved April 16, 2018, from http://www.warpoetry.co.uk/owen1.html

Now I would like to begin my personal interpretation of the poem. This poem introduced me to my love of other languages being incorporated into literature. Prior to that, I would look down on people who would do that perhaps out of ignorance or more likely I did not find someone who could introduce me to it the way Owen did. In the poem itself he was able to describe such gruesome and chaotic events happening. Each of the stanzas has a traditional rhyming scheme, they use two quatrains of rhymed iambic pentameter with several spondaic substitutions. Which give the poem a reading pace that of which is closest to casual talking speed, clarity and volume.

The poem is in two parts, each of 14 lines. The first part of the poem is written in the present as the action happens and everyone is reacting to the events around them. In second part, Owen writes as though at a distance from the horror: he refers to what is happening twice as if in a "dream", as though standing back watching the events or even recalling them. Another interpretation is to read the lines literally. "In all my dreams" surely means this sufferer of shell shock is haunted by his friend drowning in his own blood and cannot sleep without revisiting the horror nightly. The second part looks back to draw a lesson from what happened at the start. The two 14 line parts of the poem again echoes a formal poetic style, the sonnet, and again it is a broken and unsettling version of this form. The second half of this poem, has the narrator reminded by seeing the soldier who didn't get his helmet on fast enough to offer some dark and harsh advice to readers about how quick and impartial thinking can get you thinking irrationally and can and will ultimately get you killed. Studying the two parts of the poem also reveals a change in the use of language from visual impressions outside the body, to sounds produced by the body - or a movement from the visual to the visceral. In the opening lines, the scene is set with visual phrases like ‘haunting flares’ but after the gas attack, Owen uses sounds produced by the victim - ‘guttering’, ‘choking’, ‘gargling’.