Wilfred Owen's Dulce Et Decorum Est

There are plenty of literatures and works of art portraying what war is like. The genre ranges from personal memoirs to novels, and from poetries to journals. As far as I concerned the several work of art we have studies, Wilfred Owen’s Dulce et Decorum Est best illustrates what war is like because of three reasons. First, Owen’s poem exhibits to the audience an especially sensory and realistic experience of war. Second, the poem shows the destructive effective wars can cast on both people’s physical bodies and their mind, and finally Owen illustrates how human relationship manifests in war. First of all, the poem provides the audience an especially realistic and authentic experience of war. This sense of reality is created by the usage

In the poem, Owen uses the word— “ecstasy”, when describing his feeling during a chemical weapon attack. Although this description may appear a bit inappropriate, when encountering imminent threat of death, every soldier enters into a phrase of total madness or insanity. No one is capable of sensing or processing what is happening around. “Gas! GAS! Quick, boys! An ecstasy of fumbling, Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time”(). After hearing the alarm of attack, soldiers exhibit a series of actions. However, there is no fear or anxiety. The only thing the participant has is a sense of abnormal ecstasy, a purely frantic, and a hollow excitement. In a sense, those soldiers are numb because the war consumes their emotions and sanity and finally pushes them into the regime of insanity. Owen’s poem vividly portrayed this process and shows the audience a more complete aspect of

War is never the heroic ideal, and the era, when Homer and Virgin praising the nationalism and military power, has past. Owen’s whole poem demystifies war and the daily reality of soldiers. The vivid depiction of war tears the disguise of idealism away. The glorious lie is smashed by the daunting reality of war: there is nothing sweet about dying for one’s country. There are only pain and fear. On the other hand, this direct communication connects the audience to the war itself and forces the readers to evaluate the war because they are bearing the responsibility of educating their next generation about