Dulce Et Decorum Est By Wilfred Owen

One of the most known poems to come out of World War I is Dulce Et Decorum Est by Wilfred Owen, which comes from Latin, meaning ‘It is sweet and right’, This title came Horace, who is a Roman poet. The poem itself is riddled with terrifying imagery of the war, at the end of the poem, the title has more light shed on it, completing it. It finished as ‘Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori’, which means ‘It is sweet and right to die for your country’. This serves a purpose of irony throughout the poem, since the poem talks about the treacherous battlefield the soldiers face during wartime.

The theme of the poem is about soldiers on the battlefield, in the middle of a harsh war, and how they’re fighting for survival as their peers around them slowly get picked off one by one by the enemy. Stress barraging continuously on the soldiers, breaking them down in a painfully slow manner. Even with these conditions, the brainwashing saying “It is sweet and right to die for your country” is used to emphasize how good it is to fight for your country and die for it at an early age, which is the irony of the poem. The tone that this poem gives off sends the cruelty and frightening atmosphere of the war. It gives off harshness, intensity and urgency, people are marching asleep, lost boots and trudging through the aches. The gas is rising, the
He exposes the reality of the war and how it is, how destructive it is on a person, exposing it from a soldier’s point of view. This is shown in lines seventeen and twenty-five, through his use of the word ‘you’. It puts the reader into the poem, like the narrator is actually directly talking to them in hopes of getting his message across. To stop using this lie and to wake up and smell the fresh reality of the soldiers, the war deafening them so they cannot hear the loud gunshots from the enemy