Dulce et Decorum Est by Wilfred Owen

At a time when accounts of war were heavily romanticized, Wilfred Owen's poetry was blunt and real. Having been swayed to volunteer for service in World War I in part by the glory of war, Owen felt it was his duty to relay the harsher truth, writing in a letter to his mother: "All a poet can do today is warn." His best known poem: Dulce et Decorum Est, is brutal even by today's standards.



Dulce et Decorum Est

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.






Wilfred Owen was born in 1893 in Shropshire, England. Teaching in France at the start of World War I, he joined the army in 1915. During that time met and befriended many writers, including Sigfried Sassoon, Robert Graves, and H.G. Wells. He died in battle one week before the end of the war, and his parents heard of his death while the armistice bells were ringing. He would become one of the most admired war poets of all time.