Wednesday, September 11, 2013

Poem Explication



In the poem “Dulce et Decorum Est”, Wilfred Owen illustrates the tragedies of war. The poem itself is a piece of juxtaposition; the title literally means “It is sweet and becoming to die for one’s country”, yet the poem speaks of the horrors of losing a fellow soldier in war.
Owen begins the poem with similes, comparing the doubled-over soldiers to “old beggars under sacks” as they are “coughing like hags”. He paints a picture of the soldiers being beyond the state of exhaustion, but still marching. The soldiers are so tired that they do not even hear the sound of a gas bomb dropping behind them. Owen uses a paradox to describe the bombs, claiming that they are “dropping softly behind”. This paradox is used to demonstrate that the soldiers are in such a state of fatigue that the sound of bombs barely affects them.
After the soldiers see the gas bomb, Owen describes the chaos as an “ecstasy of fumbling”. This expression shows that the gas sent the soldiers into a state of utter confusion, which is the same affect that ecstasy would have on a person. Owen’s story then turns to the soldier who fails to make it out of the cloud of gas, describing him as “flound’ring” and “drowning…under a green sea”. This terminology relates to fishing and the ocean. When the soldier is described as floundering, it relates to when a fish is pulled out of the ocean and is struggling to cling on to life.
Owen then continues with the extended metaphor and uses words such as “drowning” and “choking” to express the soldier’s last moments of life. As the soldier suffers his painful death, his face is described with a simile as being like “a devil’s sick of sin”. The poem is wrapped up with Owen speaking to the reader, asking them if they would tell this story to an aspiring soldier who is searching for “desperate glory”. He is trying to convince the reader that there other ways to find glory without putting oneself in danger. In the last line of the poem, Owen finishes his juxtaposition saying that the expression is a lie, and it is neither sweet nor becoming to die in war.           

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