The Old Lie

Everyone has heard poems, stories, and songs about the glory and heroism of war. It is a common image: strong, noble, courageous soldiers, helping a fallen comrade or sneaking up on the enemy, flying a plane through hostile territory to bring supplies to troops in need, running boldly into the front lines of a battle, or perhaps rescuing innocent civilians from the clutches of whichever evil army threatens them. If a soldier dies, it is bravely and beautifully, while “The Star-Spangled Banner” plays in the background. However, in his poem “Dulce et Decorum Est”, Wilfred Owen says this picture is not the reality of war. Though many people say that “dulce et decorum est pro patria mori” – sweet and fitting it is to die for one’s country –the poet says that dying in war is not grand or graceful; it is clumsy and common and nothing to aspire to.

In this poem, the poet says that dying in war (and war in general) is not “dulce” or “decorum” at all, but bitter and wrong. Wilfred Owen writes that this statement, that it is “sweet and fitting to die for one’s country”, is “the old Lie”. He describes the death of a soldier at the hands of poison gas: “But someone still was yelling out and stumbling/And floundering like a man in fire or lime”. When this soldier falls, the other men must walk “behind the wagon that we flung him in”. The death is the exact opposite of honorable, graceful deaths described in ballads and such; the dead body is not even properly disposed of. “Dulce et decorum est”, indeed.

In “Dulce et Decorum Est”, the words and imagery used in the poem and their connotations reinforce how horribly unremarkable and inelegant the death of a soldier can be, and how ugly the whole matter of war is....

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...h the defense of one’s country is important, it is just as important that one has an idea of the reality of war before risking one’s life, and that is what Wilfred Owen tried to do in this poem. Abandon your picture of glory, he says, and prepare yourself for the real world of war, a world that is far from the ideas everyone encounters in idealistic literature, art, and music. Look past the stately gravestones with their flowers and tiny flags fluttering in the wind to the story behind these seemingly heroic deaths: look to the clouds of gas, look to the hidden mines, look to the ceaseless shooting and the pools of blood. Look to the desperate troops, to the fear, to the weakness behind all the macho men. Look to the mutilated bodies – if there even is a body; look to the grieving families with their endless tears. That is war, he says, and it is anything but sweet.