Dulce Et Decorum Est Diction

Wilfred Owen’s “Dulce et Decorum est” shows what life was like for soldiers in WWI. The poem discusses a soldier's point of view of losing someone they knew on the battlefield and their thoughts about the worthiness of the sacrifice after the fact. The speaker uses diction and imagery to show their disdain for war in the poem through a series of negative emotions such as fatigue, and sadness. The speaker uses diction to show their disdain toward the harsh reality of living on a battlefield and the mental toll it takes. The speaker opens the poem by showing us the fatigue all of their fellow soldiers feel by saying, “Bent double, like old beggars under sacks / Knock-kneed…” (1, 2) They were worn out both physically and mentally from the stress

They just all feel burdened and worn down. To further strengthen this idea that the soldiers are worn out our speaker says, “Men marched asleep.” (5) The soldiers were exhausted from the war, they were quite literally asleep from the hardships they had to go through. The speaker goes on to keep talking about his fellow soldiers and says. “All went lame; all blind; / Drunk with fatigue…” (6, 7) The soldiers here were “lame”, they could barely walk, and some of their limbs didn’t function, “blind” as well just shows another physical impairment of the soldiers caused by the war. When it says “drunk with fatigue” it means that the soldiers here were so tired that they were acting in a drunk-like manner, they were stumbling when they walked, slurring their words, not out of drunkenness but exhaustion. As the speaker views this it makes them disgusted at the war and what it has done to these men. Finally, in the last lines of the first stanza, the speaker says, “deaf even to the hoots / Of gas-shells dropping” (7, 8) The soldiers were “deaf” to the chaos going on around them, this is talking about how they had become so used to it that they just regarded the bombs and the chaos as normal. All throughout this first stanza the speaker watches his fellow soldiers and

As this gas attack occurs our speaker says, “But someone still was yelling out and stumbling / And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime.” (11, 12) this imagery provided by our speaker shows the horrible physical pains of war. This soldier is in “fire or lime” he is basically being burned from the inside out. For context here, lime is a reference to a substance called calcium oxide which when it comes in contact with human skin, and when ingested can cause severe burns to the lungs and throat. This chemical was also used in warfare to blind and choke soldiers like in this instance and could be very well what is being used here. The use of describing this chemical burn as fire shows us readers that the soldier here was going through excruciating pain and we can almost picture him struggling for his life as he painfully died. This grotesque image greatly portrays our speaker’s viewpoints on war by giving us a glimpse at the horribleness of it and just why they hate it. Our speaker goes on to prove their point, even more, when they say, “Dim through the misty panes and thick green light, / As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.” (13, 14) The image portrayed here compares the soldier choking to death from this poisonous gas to drowning. The sea that this soldier is drowning in is the sea of lime, which is why it burns green, since the chemical