Wilfred Owen
(1893 - 1918)
"The famous Latin tag [from Horace, "Odes" 3.2.13] means, of course, It is sweet and meet to die for one's country. Sweet! and decorous!" [October 16, 1917, letter of Owen to his mother].
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Dulce Et Decorum Est (1917)
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Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
5 Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of tired, outstripped Five-Nines that dropped behind.
Gas! GAS! Quick, boys!-An ecstasy of fumbling,
10 Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling,
And flound'ring like a man in fire or lime...
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
15 In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.
If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
20 His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,-
25 My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.
Editor´s Comments
Irony is present in many of the literary works that came out of the first World War, and that's probably not too surprising, given the stark contrast between what people were told about the war, and how they actually experienced it. Irony is a device that depends on contrast. We call it dramatic irony, for example, when the audience knows something that one of the characters doesn't. Then when that character speaks or acts in ignorance, the audience sees the situation as ironic. Or, a character may engage in verbal irony by saying one thing, while meaning something quite different.
Wilfred Owen's poem is ironic in more than one sense. As a poetic statement made at a specific moment in history, it speaks what so many people felt as the war dragged on: that they had been misled, lied to, that the war was being described in one way, but in reality it was something very different indeed. But irony is also crucial to the way "Dulce et Decorum Est" is written. Everything in the poem builds toward the last two lines. And those lines are different than anything else in the poem: they're in Latin, obviously. And for readers who know what they mean, and even know that they were written by Horace, one of the great classical authors, they have an aura of tradition, of authority. Owen's purpose, of course, is to undercut that authority, to make the lines sound hollow, ironic. He does that very explicitly by calling the lines a lie. But that explicit statement that we should read the Latin line ironically only reinforces what he has already accomplished. The elevated tone of the last lines, their "decorum," as language, contrasts violently with the language of the rest of the poem. Owen's diction is anything but elevated, drawing instead on words like ugly, guttering, writhing, gargling, obscene cancer, froth-corrupted lungs, bitter as the cud of vile incurable sores on innocent tongues. After listening to such language, the dignified Latin can hardly sound anything other than shockingly ironic and dishonest. In addition to his overarching situational irony, Owen has used verbal irony to powerful effect.
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The Poet´s Life and Work
Biography
Wilfred Owen was born in 1893 and brought up in the back streets of Birkenhead and Shrewsbury, England. On leaving school, he took up a post as lay assistant to a country vicar. Removed from the influence of his devout mother, he became increasingly critical of the role of the church in society. His letters and poems of this period show a mounting awareness of the sufferings of the poor and the first stirrings of the compassion that was to characterize his later poems about the Western Front. In 1913, he broke with the vicar and went to teach English in France.
For more than a year after the outbreak of war, Owen could not decide whether-as both a poet and a firm believer in Christian teaching (as distinct from church practice)-he ought to enlist. Finally he did, and from January to May 1917 he fought as an officer in the Battle of the Somme. Then, taken out of the Front Line with shell shock, he was sent to an Edinburgh hospital, where he had the good fortune to meet Siegfried Sassoon, whose first fiercely realistic "war poems" had just appeared. Under the poems' influence, and with the encouragement and expert guidance of the older man, Owen was soon producing poems far superior to any he had written before.
Throughout his months in the hospital, Owen suffered from the horrendous nightmares symptomatic of shell shock. The experience of battle, banished from his waking mind, erupted into his dreams and then into poems haunted with obsessive images of blinded eyes ("Dulce Et Decorum Est")! and the mouth of Hell ("Miners" and "Strange Meeting"). The distinctive music of such later poems owes much of its power to Owen's mastery of alliteration, onomatopoeia, assonance, half-rhyme, and the pararhyme that he pioneered. This last, the rhyming of two words with identical or similar consonants but differing, stressed vowels (as hatt / hett), of which the second is usually the lower in pitch, produces effects of dissonance, failure, and unfulfillment that subtly reinforce his themes.
Owen matured rapidly. Success as a soldier, marked by the award of the Military Cross, and as a poet, which had won him the recognition of his peers, gave him a new confidence. He wrote eloquently of the tragedy of young men killed in battle. In his later elegies, a disciplined sensuality and a passionate intelligence find their fullest, most moving, and most memorable expression.
Owen was killed in action in 1918, a week before the war ended. Sassoon published Owen's poetry posthumously.
Click here to listen to Jon Stallworthy talk about Wifred Owen's experience of the war.
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