Dulce Et Decorum Est

Wilfred Owen was a brilliant poet that focused on writing about the tragedies of war with complete honesty. Due to the fact that Owen himself used to be a soldier in the first World War, he was able to depict the war more truthfully than many other war poets. Owen was killed at the age of 25, just one week before the Armistice was reached. With that being said, Owen only released a total of five poems while he was alive. After his death though, numerous poems were published that he had written during his short lifetime. As stated above, the majority of Wilfred Owen’s poems are centered around war and the inescapable brutality and tragedy that it brings. Though this theme can be found in a plethora of Owen’s poem, it is more noticeable in certain

The narrator and his team are soon gassed, and a fellow soldier gets caught in the fumes, eventually succumbing to the gas. Following the gas attack, the narrator describes the soldier’s gruesome death in great detail. In describing the soldiers gruesome death, Owen writes “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,” (Owen 238). The amount of imagery that Owen describes this scene with is crucial to the development of theme. The narrator and his team of soldiers are all watching as their fellow soldier and friend choke to death on his own blood. This vile scene is brutal and forces the reader of “Dulce Et Decorum Est” to actively envision the scene as if the reader was there. In an article written by Esther Sanchez-Pardo, Owen and other war poets are at the head of her discussion. When discussing Wilfred Owen specifically, Sanchez-Pardo mentions that because Owen was a soldier himself, he is able to invoke a feeling of pity out of the reader. This, she suggests, helps Owen get his message/theme across. On page 111 of her article, she writes “Bringing horror and pity together into one single image that takes hold of the reader’s psyche with the same force that it possessed the speaker’s, Owen’s poems refigure traditional conceptions of tragedy.”

In this poem, the narrator is describing a wounded soldier recalling exactly why he joined the war as he sits in a wheel chair. The narrator states that the soldier remembers that he joined the war because “someone said he’d look a god in kilts”, and “to please his Meg” (Disabled 25-26). The soldier in this poem has faced a great tragedy in which he lost both his arms and his legs and is now living in an institution. In line 3 of the poem, Owen refers to the wounded soldier as “legless, sown short at [the] elbow.” Through this imagery that Owen uses to describe the soldier, the reader can see that the soldier has seen both the brutality and tragedy that war comes with. With that being said, the soldier’s biggest tragedy is a direct result of being involved in war. On page 111 of her article, Sanchez-Pardo writes “War is tragic because it creates in us feelings of pity and horror that become so intense they are unbearable.” While reading the poem, the reader perhaps feels pity for the soldier who lost all of his limbs. This is no coincidence. In lines 40 through 42 of the poem, Owen writes “Now, he will spend a few sick years in institutes, / And do what things the rules consider wise, / And take whatever pity they may dole.” Owen carefully crafts an image of a man who is worthy of pity and sympathy for a reason. Owens intentions are to