We enter a poem, in media res:

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,

Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,

Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs,

And towards our distant rest began to trudge.

Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots,

But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;

Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots

Of gas-shells dropping softly behind.

Gas! GAS! Quick, boys!—An ecstasy of fumbling

Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time,

But someone still was yelling out and stumbling

And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime.—

Dim through the misty panes and thick green light,

As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams before my helpless sight,

He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace

Behind the wagon that we flung him in,

And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,

His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;

If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood

Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,

Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud

Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,—

My friend, you would not tell with such high zest

To children ardent for some desperate glory,

The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est

Pro patria mori.

By the end of this poem, a shift has taken place from the descriptive opening stanzas and the final stanza where the speaker reflects on the events he has just recounted. The subject of the poem is no mystery, and its intention is succinctly communicated in the final lines. It is a weighty poem known and memorized by many. And it is musical: aided by the poem’s meter in iambic pentamenter, the alliteration and assonance throughout, onomatopoeic sounds, speech, and rhyme scheme (ABABCDCD) is meant to make us feel as though we were on the ground with the speaker.

It is a poem to read aloud. It is also an unsettling poem.

One of the most difficult subjects to reconcile with when contemplating the nature of politics—which regards, to a significant extent, the nature of conflict—is the subject of war. War represents the culmination, the most violent form, of conflict. Whether foreign or domestic, this subject has never evaded the concern of political theorists. After all, the phenomenon has not ceased since the ages of Saint Augustine, Thucydides, Grotius, Hobbes, Machiavelli, or Clausewitz. But has it changed? 

With the advent of modern warfare in the twentieth century exemplified by the First World War came a new scale of destruction, and with it a new form of war poetry that distinguished itself from its literary predecessors. The classical tradition (such as Homer’s Iliad) and medieval tradition (such as the Song of Roland) incorporated myth and fantasy into the imaginative retelling of historical battles, which were themselves subjected to the interpretation of their poets. These epics shared as a common theme their emphasis on the idea of glory in battle. Even verses as memorable as the St Crispin’s Day Speech of Shakespeare’s Henry V, where Henry V galvanizes his men before the Battle of Agincourt by telling them to envision their glory and immortality, echoed this longstanding account of what war poetry traditionally conveyed: Glory. Victory. Honor. 

Perhaps no poet frustrated this account in war poetry as notably as Wilfred Owen. His “Dulce et Decorum Est” (1920) has repeatedly been included in the list of the U.K.’s favorite poems, among other poems by Owen.[1] A lieutenant in the British Army, ultimately killed in France one week before Armistice Day, Owen’s poetry contributed to a social awakening in the history of war poetry that introduced the experiences of foot soldiers into its myriad narratives. To be sure, Owen was just one of many soldiers who wrote poetry during the Great War, including his mentor and friend Siegfried Sassoon, such that the term “war poetry” is commonly understood today to refer to the poetry written during World War I. This genre of poetry provides a glimpse into the horrors that many of these men, combatant or non-combatant, experienced. “Dulce et Decorum Est” is the paradigm poem of this tradition.

And so we call Owen a “war poet.” Yet, I believe that this label does not do complete justice to the role that poetry played in Owen’s life. Worse yet, it detracts from the broader significance of his verses. To call Owen a war poet places him within a historical period and limits his experience, and therefore his thoughts, to this moment. Yes, Owen’s poetry has an unquestionably important role as a piece of social history during WWI. His poems demonstrate his awareness of the scale of human suffering, which was exacerbated by the technological advancements of the twentieth century. In this respect, his poetry has contributed to studies about modernity and the changing nature of warfare and its scope of destruction. 

But let us not conflate history with art. Literature, after all, sits comfortably established between the two. The subjects of poetry, historical or otherwise, should not constrain their meaning or significance. For poetry to be poetry, it must speak to something broader that resonates with readers decades and even centuries after the historical event has passed. It should resonate, moreover, even if the reader had no familiarity with the historical event the poem is describing. Such is the case with Owen. War is the context—the unfortunate circumstance—that shaped Owen’s thoughts. His poetry, nevertheless, engages with death, violence, guilt, religion, life-after-death, and, within these, even beauty in nature and in friendship. None of these are restricted to the war experience, but they certainly are intensified by it.

The literary medium through which Owen conveyed his thoughts and experiences provides us today with an alternative form of expression to better understand the subject of war, but we should also remember that the act of writing poetry provides the author with their own form of catharsis. Poetry and literature, unlike a political treatise or philosophical essay, offers respite for the writer. Through this process of creating, poetry and literature can transcend their respective histories and become art, unveiling the aesthetic qualities of the human mind. Now, aesthetic does not necessarily imply beauty (this is one understanding of aesthetic, albeit narrow). There are a number of WWI poets who wrote about the beauty of nature amid the violence of war—Francis Ledwidge’s “A Soldier’s Grave” is a good example—to communicate a cycle of renewal. 

But Owen’s poetry, to be sure, resists the idea that poetry must be tied to some idea of the beautiful. Instead, what is aesthetic about Owen’s poetry pertains to his ability to take his thoughts and experiences and from them create something sensorial, emotional, lasting. This effect is also aided by the form of his poetry that communicates such thoughts and experiences through the various literary devices (mentioned above) that heighten our senses and emotions. 

Consider as an example Owen’s poetic form—the composition style of his poem—in “Dulce et Decorum Est,” which betrays his own intention to interrogate (if not subvert) the traditional elegies to honor the dead. It is a double sonnet (a sonnet is a fourteen-line poem). Owen’s rhyme scheme immediately strikes similar to that of an English sonnet (ABAB CDCD EFEF GG), in which the final two lines (GG) are supposed to harmoniously ‘conclude’ the poem by pairing their rhyme. When we get to the final two lines (the couplet) of the first sonnet, however, there is no paired rhyme:

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks, (A)

Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge, (B)

Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs, (A)

And towards our distant rest began to trudge. (B)

Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots, (C)

But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind; (D)

Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots (C)

Of gas-shells dropping softly behind. (D)

Gas! GAS! Quick, boys!—An ecstasy of fumbling (E)

Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time, (F)

But someone still was yelling out and stumbling (E)

And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime.— (F)

Dim through the misty panes and thick green light, (G…)

As under a green sea, I saw him drowning. (X)

Owen creates a sense of confusion, discomfort even, by refusing to close the rhyme scheme of this frightening scene. He creates his own rhyme scheme, instead, by rhyming the last two lines of the first sonnet with the first two lines of the second sonnet:

In all my dreams before my helpless sight, (G)

He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning. (X)

Notice that Owen does not find a rhyme to substitute the word ‘drowning.’ Instead, by repeating the word twice, he heightens the sense of disquiet that this vision has on him. The word, and therefore the image, of drowning stays with us, emphasized and suspended between two sonnets. As the second sonnet continues, Owen again refuses to conclude the sonnet with a rhyming couplet. Thus, just by the choices that Owen makes in his rhyme scheme, even if we had no idea what the poem is about, we are able to perceive that something is incomplete and out of harmony. 

Then there is the most obvious interpretative question about “Dulce et Decorum Est,” but no less profound: is it a protestpoem? In other words, is it a political poem insofar as it presents an apparent criticism about war? After such heavy verses and macabre imagery above, which are echoed throughout many of his poems, we might assume the response to this question is yes. Owen asked in his despondently-titled “Anthem for Doomed Youth,” “what passing-bells, for these who die as cattle?/— Only the monstrous anger of the guns.” Irreverent even, Owen often criticized the religious rituals and patriotic ceremonies offered to the fallen. He did not, however, criticize the concept of war. In a letter to his mother in 1915, Owen wrote, “Still more Frenchmen have been mobilised since I left France; and the outlook is not one shade brighter. I don’t want the bore of training, I don’t want to wear khaki; nor yet to save my honour before inquisitive grand-children fifty years hence. But I now do most intensely want to fight.”[2]

It is not accurate, in other words, to reduce Owen to being a “political” poet, much less an “anti-war” poet. Instead of protest, what Owen’s poetry communicates to his audience is a desire to remove its idealization by depicting the reality of war as it affects the personal relationship between men, whether they are fighting on the same side or not. In his “Strange Meeting,” Owen imagined the encounter with an enemy in hell as the possibility of overcoming pain and violence: “I am the enemy you killed, my friend./ I knew you in this dark: for so you frowned/ Yesterday through me as you jabbed and killed./I parried; but my hands were loath and cold./ Let us sleep now. . . .” In the verses of “Dulce et Decorum Est,” moreover, Owen is reckoning with moral and philosophical questions about war and the motives behind them: What is justice? How does honor influence our actions? What are the limits of human sacrifice? What is our responsibility for the suffering of others? These are the central political and philosophical themes that Owen movingly addresses in his “war” poetry, which go beyond his experience of war and render his verses into something deeper about the human condition and its encounter with conflict and violence. This point is not to say that experience is ever removed from history, rather to emphasize that experience, as communicated and expressed by the creativity of the artist’s mind, becomes something more than history. As literature, Owen’s poetry therefore relays an essence of the questions and themes that pervade politics. These questions are just as inherent and relevant to Owen’s poetry as to Sophocles’ Antigone, written more than two thousand years apart. So they remain for us. 

-- By Nayeli L. Riano