Dulce Et Decorum Est Response

In “Dulce et Decorum Est,” Wilfred Owen exposes his readers to the harsh and quite graphic reality of a soldier in World War I. The title is ironic; excerpted from the saying referenced at the end of the poem, “Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori,” which translates to “It is sweet and glorious to die for one's country,” the poem exists to argue against that precise notion: that death on a battlefield is in any way “sweet.” His audience, then, is those people who believed at that time that war was something glorious - people who upheld the idea of war as something exciting and glorious. He opens the poem with a simile, “like old beggars under sacks,” painting these soldiers not as men but as the poor who have little dignity left. These beggars are then said to “[curse] through sludge” and “trudge” towards their “distant rest.” The negative connotations associated with words such as “trudge” and “curse”, when used as a verb, are reflected onto these men. They do not frolick or walk like one might want to assume, but rather, they walk slowly, weighed down by tiredness and the

Below that, though, is a depiction of it as dream-like. “Under a green sea,” Owen states, referencing the fact that when underwater, images are shaky and blurry; the same applies to images seen through a thick gas. Human dreams are often the same - a blurry reality forgotten once we awake. Stanza three begins with Owen stating “In all my dreams... He plunges at me, guttering, choking drowning.” the nightmare is not only on the battlefield, but in the sleep of these soldiers, especially Owen. Going back to the first stanza, the soldiers are portrayed as deathly tired, but as seen here, they are not granted the rest of a good night’s sleep but rather plagued by the living nightmares they face when