Second Year : Dulce Et Decorum Est

Wilfred Owen was born in 1893
and died in 1918) . He was one of the leading poets of the First World war. His poems have the realistic touch of the cruelty of war as he had witnessed the reality of war in the battle field as a soldier.

‘Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori’ is a line from Horace's Odes (III.2.13), which means, “It is sweet and right to die for your country." The classical poets have glorified the soldiers and war. But Oven’s poems have a sharp contrast to the glorification of war and to the patriotic verse written by earlier war poets such as Rupert Brook.

The title and the poem have  contrasting ideas. The title illustrates that dying for someone’s own country is sweet. Whereas Own depicts the heart gripping picture of a soldier’s death in a gas attack in the poem. He dramatically gives a graphic picture of the soldiers’ suffering on the war field. He dramatically describes the gas attack where all the soldiers wears the mask where one happens to lose it and gets too late to help himself from the demonic power of the gas. Owen from here on gives the minute details of that soldier’s suffocation from the moment he inhales that toxic gas till he suffocates to death.

After illustrating this cruel death of the soldier, Owen ends the poem with the following lines

‘My friend, you would not tell with some desperate glory,
The old Lie : Dulce et decorum est
Pro patia mori.’

which tells the poets not to popularize the glorified lie of war.