Dulce et Decorum est- Analysis of Last Two Lines

The year 2018 marks the centennial of Wilfred Owen's death and provides an appropriate opportunity for a reexamination of the poet's work. One of Owen's best-known poems, "Dulce et Decorum Est," though much anthologized, has not received the close scrutiny it deserves, particularly in terms of its linguistic and rhetorical features. While the poem's intensely felt emotions and horrific imagery capture the reader's attention at first, upon closer examination it is the artful diction, syntax, and construction of the argument that prove particularly compelling. In challenging what was considered a noble truth and in confronting an audience opposed to his message, Owen undertook a daunting rhetorical task in writing "Dulce et Decorum Est." The poem employs strategies from classical rhetoric to achieve its goal of persuading a hostile audience to rethink its acceptance of a cherished belief. In repudiating this belief, Owen helped shift the discursive frame surrounding war.

Poetry Class, 2016

Journal of International Social Research

Wilfred Owen's "Dulce et Decorum Est" is a poem written with a sublime style about a horrible and terrifying event: an exhausted soldier seeing his comrade gassed to death in the battle field. The paper critiques the eloquence with which the events are narrated in the poem. While Owen challenges patriarchy and insinuates that it is responsible for the horror of war, he maintains in the poem, to a great extent, a conventional approach to versification that does not subvert the traditional patriarchal forms of composition. The diction of the poem is deliberately chosen to create aural, visual, and intellectual effects familiar to generations of poets before him. This failure of representation confirms my suspicion that the poet at the moment of composing the text has never lived the agony and the intensity of the experience described by the traumatized soldier. Owen's exaggeration in detailing violence in sequential order and with sublime idiom leads to the desensitization of the readers' feelings, as is the case with the presentation of horror and violence in today's visual media. The sublime language used in the text, subliminally moderates the final images stored in the reader's subconscious about the violence of war and renders the soldier's experience less terrible than what the reality is. Thus, Owen's poem through its sublimated style and idiom, acts subliminally on the reader's subconscious paving the way for the familiarization of the horrors of war, to the extent that these horrors cease to become that terrible

“Dulce et Decorum Est Pro Patria Mori.” This is one of the most famous Latin sentences in Roman literature. The quote is from Ode 3.2 by Quintus Horatius Flaccus, known as Horace, the Roman poet. The meanings of these words are commonly translated as “it is sweet and honorable to die for one’s country.” This paper would explore how seemingly unrelated poems could be interpreted as responses to this famous quote.

A short examination of one of Horace's Roman Odes compared with Wilfred Owen's World War One poem 'Dulce et Decorum est'

The Criterion , 2023

World War 1 had brought in several cataclysmic changes in English society, most of which manifested in the form of war trauma and a deep longing to go back to the idyllic prewar world. War had become a symptom of the modern condition. The wartime conditions became increasingly grim leading to various appalling social repercussions. For instance, 'shell-shock', a psychological condition due to war trauma surfaced among soldiers that showcased the futility of mankind's ingenuity for inventing more effective or lethal ways to annihilate. Thus, the irrationality and futility of war called for a re-examination of the foundation of modernist society which occurred in modernist poetry. Poetry seemed to express the language of trauma, having taken the form of a 'wounded' subgenre, expressing the severe aftermaths of the hostilities of the First World War. My paper will therefore attempt to highlight the themes and techniques employed in the English war poet, Wilfred Owen's authentic poetic narratives to uncover real war trauma by inverting the very conventions of war poetry.

This in-depth study explores in detail four of Wilfred Owen’s most moving First World War poems, each selected for their variations in emphasis and viewpoint. Dulce Et Decorum Est was selected for its contempt for jingoistic recruitment verses; The Send-off was chosen for its portrayal of the dispatch of newly-conscripted soldiers; The Disabled for its depiction of life-changing, war-induced infirmity; Anthem for Doomed Youth for its disdain for death conventions and rituals. Each poem is investigated for:- Background to its composition; Stanza by stanza synopsis and meaning; Prosody and poetics; Owen’s choice of vocabulary; Conclusions and critical opinions.

International Journal for Research in Applied Science and Engineering Technology, 2022

This study provides a prismatic view of the First World War and the jarring piece of literature salvaged from the time, by the incandescent bard, Wilfred Edward Salter Owen. This study offers a close analysis of three of Owen's poignant poems; Dulce et Decorum Est, Strange Meeting, and Futility-with every aspect of literary technique, it deploys. It will contain annals of close and comprehensive verbatim analysis, which would help understand the aspects of war in its cognitive, affective, existential, and political stridency. This study has put much weight on the unsullied reasons that might have fanned the embers of the Great War, the emotional and moral compulsion of the combatants, and the tumultuous impact on the lives of the common people. Owen; through an impressive panoply of poetry, grieves the sheer wastage of life war brings about in its trail. The smarting lassitude and inanition at the war front and the unremitting helplessness of the people in ruins. He claims, that even though a country wins, it still loses.

Transstellar journals, 2022

Wilfred Owen, known as war poet, is an English soldier and poet, wrote a number of war poems. This work focuses on his writing by providing some of his biographical data and literary works prior to and during the war. The study examines selected poems of Owen from both a thematic and an artistic standpoint. The poems "Dulce et Decorum Est," "Futility," and "Strange Meeting" have been studied here. The goal is to figure out the poems' topics and connect them to the poet's underlying meaning and to investigate Furthermore. In this paper, his thoughts regarding anti-war protest will also be analysed by using the relevant studies. An attempt is made to undertake a critical assessment of these war poems using a close reading of the poems as primary sources and the use of existing critical works as secondary sources in order to bring out the key themes and experiences portrayed in his poetry.