Dulce Et Decorum Est By Wilfred Owen

The seminal catastrophe saw the birth of a great poet. Recovering from shell-shock in a hospital near Edinburgh in 1917, a poet named Wilfred Owen penned Dulce et Decorum est as retaliation to Jessie Pope, a pro-war poetess. The poem served as an antidote to the glorification and romanticization of the war by her and other propagandists. Owen wrote of the reality of war through horrifying imagery and simile.

Owen uses familiar imagery to dehumanize the soldiers of the war. They “limped on, blood-shod”, referring to the shoeing of a horse. Without their boots, the soldier’s feet were caked with blood, or “blood-shod” like a horseshoe on a horse. By degrading the soldiers into horses trudging along, Owen tells the people back home these were not the heroes you envisioned, these were men reduced to animals because you sent them to war. The image of men walking on blood-soaked feet is horrifying and speaks volumes of the degrading nature of war. The ‘blood-shod’ feet are a symptom of trench foot, a real medical condition that causes soldiers’ toes to fall off.

Owen suggests that a devil responsible for evil and chaos is disgusted by the cruel death of the soldier. He tells us that the war being fought was worse than anything even the devil could conjure up. We find it shocking that sending young men to die for their country is a line even the devil would not cross. The sibilance of the line reminds us that the devil is commonly associated with snakes, and the venomous creatures are far less dangerous than the mustard gas or tanks used during