Dulce Et Decorum Est And The Inhumanity Of War

Wilfred Owen’s “Dulce et Decorum Est” depicts the cruelty and the inhumanity of human war, using personal narrative to convey the horrors the narrator experienced. Owen’s stylistic choices and decisions within the poem also contribute to the narrative and the meaning that it expresses; the form of the poem supplements the words themselves to create a structure that enforces its meaning. These formal decisions include several gaps that embody abrupt shift in some organizational or diction-related aspects of the poem, which provide empty spaces for the reader to examine. Like negative space in art silence in music, these gaps within the poem can act as a significant contributor to its overall meaning.

In the first stanza, the poem uses words like “sludge” (line 2) “limped” (6) to convey a feeling of weariness and exhaustion. It compares the soldiers to “old beggars” (1), betraying a sense of bitterness. Then, the second stanza changes into one of frenzy and panic. It opens

abruptly with frantic dialogue: “Gas! Gas! Quick, boys!” (9); the use of short, exclamatory phrases and exclamation points juxtaposes against the slow pacing of the long sentences and slow pacing of the first stanza, creating a sense of urgency. This shift in the poem shows a departure from begrudging, lethargic acceptance to dynamic grief and fear; it contributes a sense of the lingering power of these events to generate potent emotional reactions.
The poem begins with a past tense recollection of a specific event, when the narrator “saw [a comrade] drowning” (14). However, in the next lines it becomes evident through the use of a present tense phrase—“he plunges at me”—that this occurrence is not only being remembered at that exact moment, but is also a recurring nightmare that visits him “in all [his] dreams” (15). The language shows a shift from the past to the present, with a hint that this memory will continue into the future; this gap acts as a framing narrative for the poem, placing the narrative with a context that highlights the continuity of the narrators trauma as something that carries on far past the time of the experience. By shifting in time during the recounting of “Dulce et Decorum Est,” Owen documents the enduring suffering that soldiers face, augmenting his critique of war.
Between the first two stanzas and the third stanza, the type of poem shifts from a descriptive “I” (14) narrative about the narrator’s life, to an accusatory social critique of “you” (16). Instead of merely recounting his experience for the sake of conveying the details, and even relieving his own personal struggles, the narrator begins to make judgmental statements about those experiences, uses evaluative phrases like “obscene” and “bitter” (23) to convey his more direct disgust with the situation. This disgust is used to criticize the one being addressed. The third stanza represents a kind of moral condemnation that uses the first two as ammunition against what he views as a class of authority figures oblivious to the suffering it can cause. Owen addresses this “friend” (25) by challenging him to endure the same things the narrator has and still believing in the “glory” (26) of war. The use of the word “friend” (25) also represents a tonal shift, because, for the first time in poem, Owen seems to be using irony—it doesn’t anyone who really has such an opposite world view from the narrator can really be considered a friend—to augment his already sharp accusations in the stanza.
Linguistic and metric gap: The phrase on which the poem is based, “Dulce et decorum est Pro patria mori” (27-28), also represents a linguistic gap, as it is both in a different language and an allusion to an ancient Horace poem.

For one to understand the meaning of the quote, they would have to be well educated, pointing to the status and social class of the one he is addressing, making his words a critique against the upper classes who presumed to know about the honor and glory of war without having participated in it. The last line of the poem, “Pro patria mori” (28), also represents a metric shift away from the preceding roughly ten syllable pattern, emphasizing it. In addition, the typographical gap of capitalizing “Lie” (27) represents a choice on the part of the author to deliberately draw attention to the word. Capitalization seems to make the word into a representation for the very concept of lie, giving it significance to underscore how much of a lie Owen considers the saying to

be.
The gaps in “Dulce et Decorum Est” often exist between the speaker, the one has experienced the trauma of war, and the lofty, authoritarian class who is being addressed. In many ways, the one being indicted is actually the reader, because they, too, are removed from the narrator’s experience. The shifts in the poem help to highlight the chasm between the tactile and emotional horror that the narrator went through and the comfortable ignorance of the addressee, the gentle classes who are allowed to enjoy their ideas about nobility and national pride. These gaps allow the poem to maintain relevance throughout time, consistently revealing the rifts that exist between those praising war and those who must participate in it. This critique transcends any particular war, addressing the universal disconnect that exists within all large-scale human conflict.