Dulce et Decorum Est – Poetry Blog #5

When I began reading the poem “Dulce et Decorum Est” by Wilfred Owen, one of the first things that captured my attention was the way he described the images of war. “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” (lines 1-4). These first four lines are describing a soldier’s experience of marching during a war. Throughout the rest of the first stanza, the speaker continues to describe the terrible conditions of the soldier’s march. “Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots/ But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind” (lines 5-6). I also found it hard to believe how they unceremoniously tossed the body of the dead soldier into the back of a wagon. “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” (lines 17-23). I cannot imagine experiencing something like these soldier’s did. I also have a hard time believing that it would not take a toll to some degree on a person’s mind. These images described by Wilfred Owen are some of the horrible truths of war. I feel that he captured these images through his words in this poem.