Analysis of Dulce Et Decorum Est

What is the message of ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’? How effectively does the poem convey the message?

The main message of Dulce et Decorum Est is that of the futility and emptiness of war and just how unherioc wartime action can be. Wilfred Owen wrote the poem as a bitter attack to those he perceived to be warmongers back home and who he blamed for inciting a generation of young boys to fight in a seemingly impossible and neverending war that was World War 1. I will outline some of the techniques he employed to try to convey his message as powerfully as he could.

Owen uses powerful, horrendous imagery to walk us through a specific incident that he and the platoon experienced, that of a gas attack; and by using his personal experiences as one of the men he adds tremendous power to the poem. In particular, he uses the images of disfigurement and nightmares in this poem. He begins the poem by describing the men as ‘bent double like old beggars under sacks’ and we are immediately drawn into the battlefield scene and the image of the men as broken down, disfigured versions of themselves, the man they were before the war and the man now. In line two, he adds to this by alluding to the men as ‘coughing like hags’. By comparing the men to hags he is adding a lot of cultural weight to his message, as hags or witches are used a lot in English literature (for example, the three witches of Shakespeare’s Macbeth), and these images also fit well into the nightmare scene of the battlefield. He adds to the nightmare imagery in line 13 by decribing the scene as murky ‘green-lights’ which were filled with the all-encompasing fog of nightmares. From line 15 onwards, Owen uses the image of the soldier again, as it becomes a literal nightmare, one which haunts him for the rest of the poem. Finally, in lines 21-24, Owen uses the horrendous imagery of ‘cancer’ sores, ‘blood’ and the physical breakdown and disfigurement of the human body which has been affected by a gas attack, and...