Dulce At Decorum Est Analysis Essay

Many people see the sacrifice soldiers make as a purely heroic, glorifying feat when, in reality, it is a woeful and disgusting journey. Wilford Owen shows this pain in his poem “Dulce at Decorum Est.” Owen utilizes dark diction, similes, and gruesome imagery to convey the pain and suffering that comes out of war. Owen’s word choice accurately describes the horrors of battle. The men “trudge” to their “distant rest.” They do not just walk towards their death but painstakingly march to an eternal sleep. The horrors they are experiencing are so awful that death is not something to fear, but brings them peace in the form of slumber. Words such as “clumsy” and “fumbling” depict the soldiers’ struggles to prepare for an attack. Owen describes the fear and anxiety these men experience. The desperate attempts at securing their lives after the gas attack is made apparent by these words, which invoke a sense of pity from the reader.

In the first set of lines the men are “coughing like hags.” This introduces the general ailments the soldiers experience. It also amplifies the gross nature of the poem, inciting an image of a disgusting, sickly witch. As a fellow soldier dies, the memory is described as “obscene as cancer, bitter as cud.” Owen conveys the truly vile nature of war and death through these similes. While the audience may not be able to relate to the soldier’s death alone, they can relate to the grossness of disease and vomit. When the soldier is hit by the deadly gas, he begins “floundering like a man in fire.” The intense agony the man feels is equated with being set on fire. Similarly to the description of his memory, people are much more apt to understand the aftermath of a man set on fire rather than a man inhaling toxic