Wilfred Owen’s ‘dulce Et Decorum Est’ Against Romanticized Depiction of War

In Dulce et Decorum Est, Wilfred Owen uses a variety of literary devices to highlight the monstrous disjuncture between the gruesome reality of the battlefield and the romanticised image of war that circulated through poetry, newspapers, and magazines at the start of the World War I. Owen's manipulation of traditional rhyming forms and metre, combined with his use of irony, figurative language and vivid sensory description help to establish the piece as a powerful anti-recruitment poem. The poem is also representative of a collective shift in values, as a generation shocked by the horrors of the First World War became disenchanted with pro-war romanticism.

Owen creates a strong sense of dissonance by contrasting the form of the poem with its content. Though he makes subtle alterations to the poetic trend, Owen makes use of traditional rhyming patterns and conforms to a loose iambic pentameter, echoing the form of a French Ballade. As the imagery becomes increasingly grotesque the stanzas deviate from these conventions, highlighting the gruesome reality of war. For example, to describe the 'guttering, choking, drowning' soldier plunging towards him, Owen isolates the event from the preceding verse, creating a new stanza that consists of only two lines. The shift in focus and tense (from the past to the present) suggests that this horrific image is of particular significance to Owen and is permanently stamped onto his consciousness. This technique also suggests that only by altering the form is Owen able to adequately communicate the scene before him; recognizable poetic forms, like the French Ballade, are no longer an appropriate way to convey the horror of a reality that is no longer recognizable to Owen and his fellow soldiers- any attempts to do so are now jarring and parodic. Like the title of the piece, the conventional poetic form has becomes a source of ironic tension. By subverting the conventions used by pro-war poets like Rupert Brooke and Jessie Pope (to whom the poem is addressed to in an earlier draft), Owen condemns the rhetoric of pro-war romanticists and their promulgation of self-sacrifice as the ultimate heroic act.

Owen's feeling of disenchantment towards pro-recruitment propaganda is a pervading theme throughout the poem, and is particularly evident in the first stanza. Using onomatopoeia and alliteration, he creates a blunt, lumbering rhythm that mirrors the actions of the tired soldiers 'trudging through sludge.' The repetition of the hard t sound in the line 'Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs' gives the action a mechanical quality, and emphasises the monotony and purposeless of their endeavour. The result is almost soporific- they are at an ominous lull- and makes the break in the iambic rhythm in the next stanza more arresting. The line opens with 'GAS! Gas! Quick, boys!--'', violently disrupting the metre with the use of exclamation marks and dashes. This gives the piece a surge of energy that parallels the adrenaline-fuelled panic of the soldiers 'fumbling' for their 'clumsy helmets just in time'- an image of war diametrically opposed to the one in Pope's poetry, whose enthusiastic verse paints conflict as a form of pseudo-recreation.

To fully convey this discrepancy between pro-war sentiment and the hellish reality of war- a war that, for many, shattered an entire world-view- Owen skilfully uses figurative language and vivid sensory description. The attribution of disappointment to a missile- a paragon of destructionis especially compelling, and can be interpreted in two ways: the bombs are disappointed because they have failed to fulfil their purpose (to kill), or because the apparent futility of the conflict renders their purpose meaningless. The latter interpretation creates a strong sense of pathos, as it is a psychological projection of the soldier's mental states onto the conflict itself. The use of simile in the poem is another effective technique, particularly the comparison of the face of a soldier in agony to 'a devil's sick of sin.' Owen highlights the absurdity of war by suggesting that even the devil is weary of the constant onslaught of human suffering. Like the 'disappointed bomb', the devil's impulsion to destroy is the reason for it's existence, and the nonsensical idea that war has disillusioned evil itself demonstrates the unreality of the the world Owen and his fellow soldiers find themselves in. The archetypes are subverted to further the pervading theme that war is an an unnatural transgression- one that violates even the devils standards of morality.

Owen further contributes to the relentless stream of horrific imagery in the third stanza by likening the prolonged death of the soldier to the obscenity of cancer. Dying 'for one's country' is not portrayed as honourable- instead, like cancer, it is senseless and an affront to human dignity. The visceral immediacy of the word 'cancer' is especially effective, evoking the idea of something that kills indiscriminately, is malignant and universally despised. In addition, Owen's corruption of the word ecstasy to mean a state of panic rather than intense joy is paradoxical, yet effectively conveys the psychological impact of a gas attack. The idea of ecstasy existing in a battlefield where joy can not be conceptualised means the word is reduced to it's worst elements, and can only be experienced by the soldiers as a state of diminished awareness. Owen discards the concept of aestheticism and chooses to portray war in an entirely negative light. This divorce between popular notions of pro-war romanticism (the 'Old Lie', that Owen presumably once believed) and the gruesome reality of the battlefield is indicative of the shift in world-view that he, and many others, experienced during four years of war between 1914- 1918. In fact, in a recent article Nicole Smith (2011) interprets the poem as the work of a man not only completely disillusioned with pro-recruitment propaganda and literature, but by the entirety of Western culture: -2- '[ Dulce Decorum Est is] the grotesque and twisted words of a war-ravaged poet who finally understands that all of the literature, art, and knowledge in the course of Western history was a sham —that it was an elaborate farce and that by no means should young men be instructed in the idea that it is truly “decorous” to die for one’s country.'

Dulce et Decorum est vehemently rejects the jingoistic, pro-recruitment rhetoric that was popular in magazines and newspapers at the start of the First World 1, and the glorification of 'selfsacrifice' that preceded it. Wilfred Owen's graphic depiction of the horrors of warfare is not only a incendiary response against this sentiment, but a representation of the shift in societal values and conventions from the romanticism of war to anti-war protest.

Smith, C. c2011. Poetry Analysis of “Dolce et Decorum Est” by Wilfred Owen [Online]. [no pagination]. [Accessed 10 February 2015]. Available from: http://www.articlemyriad.com/analysis-dolce-decorum/