"Dulce et Decorum Est" is a poem by the English poet Wilfred Owen. Like most of Owen's work, it was written between August 1917 and September 1918, while he was fighting in World War 1. Owen is known for his wrenching descriptions of suffering in war. In "Dulce et Decorum Est," he illustrates the brutal everyday struggle of a company of soldiers, focuses on the story of one soldier's agonizing death, and discusses the trauma that this event left behind. He uses a quotation from the Roman poet Horace to highlight the difference between the glorious image of war (spread by those not actually fighting in it) and war's horrifying reality.
The speaker begins with a description of soldiers, bent under the weight of their packs like beggars, their knees unsteady, coughing like poor and sick old women, and struggling miserably through a muddy landscape. They turn away from the light flares (a German tactic of briefly lighting up the area in order to spot and kill British soldiers), and begin to march towards their distant camp. The men are so tired that they seem to be sleeping as they walk. Many have lost their combat boots, yet continue on despite their bare and bleeding feet. The soldiers are so worn out they are essentially disabled; they don't see anything at all. They are tired to the point of feeling drunk, and don't even notice the sound of the dangerous poison gas-shells dropping just behind them.
Somebody cries out an urgent warning about the poison gas, and the soldiers fumble with their gas masks, getting them on just in time. One man, however, is left yelling and struggling, unable to get his mask on. The speaker describes this man as looking like someone caught in fire or lime (an ancient chemical weapon used to effectively blind opponents). The speaker then compares the scene—through the panes of his gas-mask and with poison gas filling the air — to being underwater, and imagines the soldier is drowning.
The speaker jumps from the past moment of the gas attack to a present moment sometime afterward, and describes a recurring dream that he can't escape, in which the dying soldier races toward him in agony.
The speaker directly addresses the audience, suggesting that if readers could experience their own such suffocating dreams (marching behind a wagon in which the other men have placed the dying soldier, seeing the writhing of the dying soldier's eyes in an otherwise slack and wrecked face, and hearing him cough up blood from his ruined lungs at every bump in the path—a sight the speaker compares to the horror of cancer and other diseases that ravage even the innocent), they would not so eagerly tell children, hungry for a sense of heroism, the old lie that "it is sweet and fitting to die for one's country."
