Wilfred Owen, in depicting the atrocities of war, creates very graphic and distressing visual images in his World War I poem, Dulce et Decorum Est. He makes no apologies in his attempts to remove the romantic notion of war as if, like the title suggests, it is noble and glorious. Owen takes this title, and the last words of the poem, from Horace's Odes and exposes "the Old Lie" by personalizing the poem and...
Wilfred Owen, in depicting the atrocities of war, creates very graphic and distressing visual images in his World War I poem, Dulce et Decorum Est. He makes no apologies in his attempts to remove the romantic notion of war as if, like the title suggests, it is noble and glorious. Owen takes this title, and the last words of the poem, from Horace's Odes and exposes "the Old Lie" by personalizing the poem and reliving one soldier's own trauma as he witnesses a fellow soldier, helpless and dying before him.
The young man whose misfortune it is to be unprepared for the gas attack, "plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning." The man is obviously choking on his own blood and the narrator wants the reader to imagine a terrible ("smothering") dream where the reader is also walking with the men. The dying man has been thrown ("flung") into a wagon while the survivors "pace behind." To the young survivor's horror, he is aware of the dying man's pain and fear; which he can see in "the white eyes writhing in his face." This means that the dying man may not be able to move his body to reveal his pain but his eyes are "writhing" meaning that they are moving rapidly and uncharacteristically in all directions, and together with his "hanging face," reflect the horror of the moment.
Owen uses a simile to describe how the dying soldier's face is "like a devil's sick of sin." The situation must be dire for the devil to be tired of sin because the devil's very existence relies on sin and so the reader can understand that the dying soldier no longer sees the glory in war just as if the devil no longer sees the so-called glory (for him anyway) in sin. Only the pain and suffering is left behind.
Every time the wagon goes over a bump ("jolt"), the dying soldier coughs and the blood which has by now filled his lungs, is "gargling." Owen uses the word "gargling" because it sounds inoffensive until you consider it in context with cancer. The dying soldier's mouth is filled with his blood and the sounds and visuals are "obscene as cancer," suggesting that you can't really see the damage (just like cancer) but it is apparent. "Cud" is partly digested food which returns stomach acid to the mouth when it is regurgitated and, in this case, the dying soldier may as well have sores on his tongue. The young soldier is "innocent" and his only part in this war is to fight for his country, to do his duty. It is time to reveal that war is violent and unforgiving and Owen contends that it is not noble at all. Where is the nobility in such suffering?
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