Dulce Et Decorum Est And The Inhumanity Of War

Wilfred Owen’s “Dulce et Decorum Est” depicts the cruelty and the inhumanity of human war, using personal narrative to convey the horrors the narrator experienced. Owen’s stylistic choices and decisions within the poem also contribute to the narrative and the meaning that it expresses; the form of the poem supplements the words themselves to create a structure that enforces its meaning. These formal decisions include several gaps that embody abrupt shift in some organizational or diction-related aspects of the poem, which provide empty spaces for the reader to examine. Like negative space in art silence in music, these gaps within the poem can act as a significant contributor to its overall meaning.

In the first stanza, the poem uses words like “sludge” (line 2) “limped” (6) to convey a feeling of weariness and exhaustion. It compares the soldiers to “old beggars” (1), betraying a sense of bitterness. Then, the second stanza changes into one of frenzy and panic. It opens

For one to understand the meaning of the quote, they would have to be well educated, pointing to the status and social class of the one he is addressing, making his words a critique against the upper classes who presumed to know about the honor and glory of war without having participated in it. The last line of the poem, “Pro patria mori” (28), also represents a metric shift away from the preceding roughly ten syllable pattern, emphasizing it. In addition, the typographical gap of capitalizing “Lie” (27) represents a choice on the part of the author to deliberately draw attention to the word. Capitalization seems to make the word into a representation for the very concept of lie, giving it significance to underscore how much of a lie Owen considers the saying to