Dulce Et Decorum Est
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.
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 disappointed shells that dropped behind.
GAS! Gas! Quick, boys!-- An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And floundering 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.
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,
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,--
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.
SURFACE MEANING
The title is taken from Horace's poem, the ode 3213. it means "it is sweat and right to die for your country."
In the first line, we have the image of soldiers are drown in the mud because of their heave bags and guns. Soldiers' knees are turned inward (knock-kneed), they were coughing like old women and walking through the mud. There were some flares or gleam mysteriously residing in that area, and the soldiers turn their backs on it. Then, with difficulty, they star moving toward their shelter or "rest". Soldiers are so exhausted that they were actually walking in an incautious and half-conscious state. They were "limping on" or walking lamely. Their feet were covered with blood "blood-shod". They were lame, not having alert senses. They were extremely tired (drunk with fatigue) they could not even hear an owl's cry. Also they had dropped their guns "five-nines" behind. It could be metonymic, meaning that the guns left behind also indicate the soldiers themselves.
In the second stanza, soldiers are threatened by some certain gas, they were clumsily (being troubled by the heavy gas masks) trying to put on their gas masks or "helmets". Some of the soldiers had not met a chance to wear them on time, thus they were being troubled, moving uncontrollably and shouting as though they were burning out in lime or fire (both burning the live tissues). The dim, dark and colorless gas the atmosphere had turned "misty". Through his gas mask's eyepieces which had been darkened by the green gas covering everywhere like a sea, the speaker sees someone moving awkwardly, choking while being deprived of air. Since the speaker says "in all myh dreams", one can infer that he is presently remembering and recounting that war tragedy.
Nevertheless, in the third stanza, the speaker explains more on his dream which is "smothering" or causing him to feel suffocated. He remembers that they had thrown the gas-poisoned soldier into the very back of the wagon. His eyes were writhing (moving from side to side), an image indicating the soldier's excessive reverberation and nervous physical reactions. His face looked like someone expecting to be hung (hanging face), which quite ambiguously, might indicate a face being decomposed whose muscles are loose, like those pair of eyes turned white – all of which showing his intoxicated-ness. The soldier's face also looks like some devilish man tired of his sins. Such an image implies his hopeless and frightened state. With every blow of breath, his throat is filled with blood. His lungs were also affected by the poison. The blood is being seen similar to cud (the grass which some mammals chew while masticating.) the cud, signifies tongues all corrupted by that gas with no cure, and it all resembles to a disgusting or "veil" scene.
In the final lines, he renounces his addressee for being ideologically eager for war (notice the word "Zest"), and condemns the addressee for motivating the children who are keen on (ardent) for a glory which is not righteous to be glorified.
ANALYSIS
At first the poem was written to Jessie Pope, because she had written a poem with the same allusion to Horace's ode celebrating heroism and nationalism. However, later on, Owen removed the dedication to make his poem more generalized. The poem is written in 28 lines in, approximately, iambic pentameter. The rhyming scheme of the poem is (a,b,a,b,c,d,c,d,e,f,e,f, etc.)
Of course, the allusion to Horace is being applied to this poem ironically, since the honor, rightfulness and sweetness of such nationalism mentioned in Horace's ode, is depicted exactly in the opposite way. Many an image, extremely bitter and obscene makes the reader disable to sympathize with any sort of ideological heroism or nationalism. However, in the final lines, the speaker directly censures such kind of poetry, or, at least, such way of alluding to it.
LITERARY APPROACH
Apart from its minute, concrete and highly effective imagery, the poem moves towards an environment in which everything is intermingled. When the gas spreads through the air, everything becomes indefinable. For instance, the soldier victimized by the gas, looks like devil. Innocence is shown is "sores on innocent tongues." The fact that the speaker remembers such tragic event in ever single dream of his, and the image of the gas spreading into the air looking akin to a sea in the midst of the air adds up to the surrealistic facet of the work, showing that the poem, text if you may prefer, is trying to make such an event expressible through incorporeal imagery and a dream-like environment; moreover, it shows that even 20th century's man's unconscious mind is preoccupied with crisis and fear.
Seeing the poem through Marxism, it is actualized that how jokes, proverbs, quotations etc. can be applied for preserving an ideology. Horace's line, is exactly used by Jessie Pop to pass the nationalistic ideology to the future generations, or "Children ardent for some desperate glory."
Ali Sbati