Dulce Et Decorum Est Analysis Essay

You are a student in Germany during 1914, and The Great War has just begun to start. Your professor gives a long lecture about fighting for your country and the glory of war! You are intrigued and want to do your service for your country, so that it may live peacefully when the war is over. You then enlist as a private in the military, and are sent to the front-lines immediately. There, you see a hell beyond no man's understanding. You watch your friends die right next to you to a plethora of weapons. You are traumatized and ask yourself why you signed up in the first place. In the poem Dulce et Decorum est, Wilfred Owen describes war in a way that would wake up the eyes of both the old and young. Owen uses a lot of imagery and similes to

He zooms in on one small aspect of the war to get his main point across. He writes about a gas attack, and the death of a fellow soldier. Gas grenades land in the trenches, and the men start to panic, “fitting the clumsy helmets just in time.” These are the gas masks they used to survive these terrible attacks. “But someone still was yelling and stumbling.” At this point we go from a dark tone to an even darker one. One soldier did not have his mask and is now currently dying. The speaker says, “I saw him drowning.” The dying soldier is choking on his own blood from the gas, and all the other soldiers have to watch him slowly die in pain before their eyes. The dying man then plunges at the speaker “guttering, choking, drowning.” The soldier has now died right in front of the speakers eyes, and the speaker has a sense of responsibility and guilt for what has happened. The soldiers fling the body out of the trench, they don’t have time to bury a man. This is another twisted thing about war, that most of the bodies were just thrown into no-mans land. After the speaker describes the dead body, he goes onto the main theme of this poem. “The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est...Pro patria mori.” The saying is latin which translates to it is sweet and proper to die for one’s country. This is also the title of the poem which makes it ironic because nothing the author described in this poem was sweet and fitting. The speaker states this saying is an old lie, which is essentially addressing the public in saying, stop glorifying what should not be