Dulce et Decorum Est
Posted on September 14, 2007
by: Big Jar
In honor of the president’s recent speech attempt to prolong the Iraq War, I would like to share a poem written by a man named Wilfred Owen.
Wilfred Owen was born in England in 1893 and enlisted with England’s Manchester Regiment in 1917 at the height of World War I. Once he arrived on the western front, Owen lost all pretenses of romantic battle scenes and heroic wartime exploits. There was nothing glorious about the deaths of the young men who served in the army with him. They died brutally, painfully, and gruesomely.
The horrors of battle had a profound impact on Owen. He began to write poetry as a means of escape, documenting the senseless slaughter through a powerful and heartfelt language. While Owen might have become one of England’s most famous poets, he tragically perished during a skirmish that took place a week before the armistice agreement between the central and allied powers. Thankfully, his work has survived, even though he did not. It remains a powerful testimony to what war really means.
The title of this poem is an allusion to a line of verse written by an ancient Roman poet named Horace. It translates roughly as: “It is sweet and honorable to die for one’s country.”
Dulce et Decorum Est
WILFRED OWEN
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.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of tired, outstripped Five-Nines that dropped behind.
Gas! Gas! Quick, boys!-An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling,
And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime . . .
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.
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
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,-
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.
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One Response to “Dulce et Decorum Est”
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What horrible, anti-American, pro-Terrorist sentiment… I can’t believe you posted that…
Thanks…
Those words are so real, I recoiled upon reading them…