Dulce Et Decorum Est - Critical Analyisis Essays -

Dulce et Decorum Est - Critical Analyisis It is sweet and meet to die for ones country ,better known as ?Dulce et Decorum Est? is a great poem written by war poet Wilfred Owen.It involves a tragic war situation.It is easily understood.The poem also has a very unique sound to it. Wilfred Owen was born on March 18th in 1893.He was the eldest of four children born in Oswestry.He was brought up in the Anglican religion of the Evangelical school.An evangelical man is saved not by the good he does but by faith he has in redemin power of christs sacrafice. He rejected most of his belief by 1913, the influence of his education remains visible in his poems and their themes:Sacraifice biblical language,and his discription of hell. In 1913 he moved to Bordeaux ,as a teacher of english in the Berlitz School of language:one year later he was a private teacher in a prosperous family in the Pyrenees. He enlisted in the Artists Rifles on the 21st of october 1915 there followed 14 months training in England.He was drafted to France in 1917 the worst war winter.His total war experience will be a short four months,from which only five weeks in the front line.On this is based all his war poetry. In August 1918,after his friend, the other great war poet ,Sigfried Sassoon had been severly injured and sent back to England,Owen returned to france war was stll as horrid as before.The butchery war ended on November 11th, 1918 at 11 o clock.Seven days before, Owen had been killed in one of the last vain battles of this war. The situation of ?Dulce et Decorum est?is a tragic situation.The poems speaker is Wilfred Owen.He is a soldier who is sent into the front lines of battle.There is not a particular audience that he is looking for. The occasion is the cold winter war in the trenches.It is men fighting for their country and dying for an honor.The poem takes place on a cold day in 1917.It is outside on the Western Front in France.The poem is telling you about the hard ships that the soldiers went through. The theme of the poem is about trench warfare.Owen is hurling the pain into the readers face.The pain of this piece writing is its truth.This is something that poet saw and experienced.This sets the serious tone for the poem. The poem starts by telling you the soldiers had a long walk back to their camp and to safety and they were oblivius to the fighting.Then it tells you about a gas attack and how the men are scrambling to prepare. Then he sees his friend dying and is not able to help him.he watches his friend die in pain.Next it talks about how his friend died for his country.I basically see this poem as a soldier telling you about one of the probly many situations that he has been through. In ?Dulce Et Decorum Est?Wilfred Owen reacts to the war by turning conventional poetic technique into some thing that appears to be normal on the surface but in reality is tainted and corrupted.The poem is written in Iambic Pentamenter.The sound in the poem makes you feel like you are right there watching the guy die from the gas.Dulce et Decorum est has a conventional form.It ryhmes well enough following ABAB,CDCD etc pattern. The most important means of developing the effectiveness of the poem is the graphic imagery. They evoke such emotions so as to cause people to become sick. The images can draw such pictures that no other poetic means can, such as in line twenty-two: "Come gargling from the froth corrupted lungs." This can be disturbing to think about. It shows troops being brutally slaughtered very vividly, evoking images in the reader's mind. In the beginning of the poem the troops were portrayed as "drunk with fatigue." With this you can almost imagine large numbers of people dragging their boots through the mud, tripping over their own shadow. Later in the poem when the gas was dropped, it painted a psychological image that would disturb the mind. The troops were torn out of their nightmarish walk and surrounded by gas bombs. How everyone, in "an ecstasy of fumbling" was forced to run out into the mist, unaware of their fate. Anyone wanting to fight in a war would become nervous at the image of himself running out into a blood bath. The graphic images displayed here are profoundly affecting and can never be forgotten. The poem ties it all together in the last few lines. In Latin, the phrase "Dulce et decorum est pro partria mori" means: "It is sweet and becoming to die