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 scramb
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.