The Old Lie

          Wilfred Owen’s poem, “Dulce et Decorum est,” questions and denounces the old lie, “Dulce et Decorum est pro patria mori,” which means, as Owen translates, “It is sweet and meet to die for one’s country.” This lie is harmful to both future soldiers and those who have experienced the ugly reality of warfare. In “Dulce et Decorum est,” Owen does not portray the soldiers as heroic. He uses irony, a dream motif, and other poetic devices to reveal the lie that has tricked the soldiers in his poem. 

          The last thoughts of Owen’s soldiers “are not of joy at having but one life to give to their country,” says Lutz: they are actually “frightened men in pain, dying gruesomely.” The reason these men, “bent double, like old beggars under sacks, / Knock-kneed, coughing like hags…” (1-2), are still fighting is because they do not want to die, so “they fight aimlessly for life [with]...no comprehension of a righteous cause or a meaning behind their sacrifice” (Lutz). Not only do they “fight aimlessly for life,” as Lutz points out, they are also “bereft of all their senses [and]…exhausted to the point where their fatigue intoxicates them” (Moran). The soldiers “went lame; all blind; / Drunk with fatigue; deaf” (6-7) and when they spring into action in response to a gas attack, they are clumsy and slow: “An ecstasy of fumbling, / Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;” (9-10). Lutz says that Owen’s goal is for his readers to see “the unnaturalness of war [and] its nightmarish qualities.” The picture Owen paints is certainly not an honorable one, but it is painfully realistic.
          Owen first implements irony in his title. With the phrase “Dulce et Decorum est pro patria mori” in mind, the reader is likely to expect a poem about heroism and patriotism, but instead, they read lines like this: 

“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 disappointed shells that dropped behind” (1-8). 

"The Germans,” Moran comments, “are never mentioned by name in the poem, because…they are not the real enemy”; the enemy is the war itself and the horrible conditions that the soldiers live through. “The final, awful irony,” Moran says, “is that Owen himself died fighting in World War I, a week before the armistice was declared.”
          “We see poets trying to respond to unprecedented harrowing and horrific experiences before they had had time to achieve technical mastery,” Heaney says, “and writing in circumstances that prevented their acquiring it” (Kendall). Although Owen’s poem has mixed reviews concerning skill, he is merely trying to capture the horror he experienced. Horror is the main emotion in “Dulce et Decorum est,” but it does not begin that way. Everything is slow and dead until the gas attack throws the speaker of the poem into a panic:

“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” (9-14). 

This panic stays with the reader as Owen shifts from the war to his dreams. It does not matter that the war is done and over, because the dreams are just as real and horrific to the speaker as when it all happened: “In all my dreams, before my helpless sight, / He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning” (15-16). Although the speaker knows he should separate himself emotionally from the situation, Hughes asserts that he “cannot simply do so, both because of his inevitable sympathy for him and…[his need] to protect himself physically from” the soldier whom he never names. The anonymity of the soldier is important because, despite not knowing his name, the speaker still has recurrent nightmares about “the man repeatedly attempting to pull off Owen’s own mask” (Hughes). The dream motif, Lutz explains, describes the “fate of those who survive. [Owen] deliberately stayed up late in order to shorten his sleeping hours.”
          The rhyme scheme of the poem is consistent throughout, until “the two line stanza that mentions Owen’s dreams” (Miller). The portion concerning the dream motif is “the only part,” Miller says, “that deviates from the stricter rhyme scheme of the rest of his poem.” Owen also repeats the word drowning, instead of rhyming with it—“As under a green sea, I saw him drowning / … / He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning” (14-16)—which gives the dream motif repetition, much like the recurrence of the dream itself.

          These two lines appeared in a draft of “Dulce et Decorum est” to describe the man while he was dying in front of the speaker’s eyes: “Think how once his face was like a bud, / Fresh as a country rose, and keen, and young” (Welland). It is interesting that Owen removed these lines from the final because, before his war experience, Owen often wrote poetry like this that included themes of beauty and romance. However, this is also from before he decided that his “subject is War, and the pity of War…[that] all a poet can do today is warn… [and that] that is why the true Poets must be truthful” (Furtak). After Owen “experienced the war,” Furtak explains, “[he] was incapable of writing like [before]…it gave an atrociously sweet and tender representation of a painful and ugly reality…To have only fond memories of a horrible war, one must selectively forget many bitter experiences.” Furtak explains that to continue writing after experiencing war, one would have to “[alter] one’s own emotional memories in order to ignore whatever does not arouse feelings of sweet tender sentimentality” because dying, whether it be for one’s country or not, “is anything but sweet.” Alteration of memories happens often, Furtak continues, because “old soldiers fondly remember the camaraderie of a campaign and forget the terror, bloodshed, and death that surrounded them.” Those who tell their children that patriotic death is honorable, Owen believes, are lying to themselves and their children.

“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” (21-24). 

These horrific images—“blood…gargling,” “froth-corrupted lungs,” “obscene…cancer,” “bitter… cud,” “vile, incurable sores”—all describe the mouth and tongue of the dying soldier. Owen describes the tongue as innocent. Compare the innocence of the man’s tongue to the tongues of those who speak the Old Lie, and it is evident that the liar does not suffer, but the innocent. “The truth happens to be brutal, and it would be a distortion to give it a different coloring,” Furtak asserts. “Poets who do not give a clear or true picture of what they are writing about are lying to themselves and their readers” (Furtak). It is the lie and the distortions that are harmful to soldiers; perhaps the dying man came to war looking for the honor that he was told came with it.
          There is a clear difference, Draper declares, “between [reality] and the falsified image of war cultivated for the benefit of youth by an ignorant and unthinking patriotism. [The lie] is basically propaganda” (80-81). Owen successfully discredits this propaganda in his poem with his clever usage of irony and other poetic devices. He proves through his images of horror that it is not sweet and meet to die for one’s country, but rather that it is painful and horrific to fight in a war at all. If those who told the Old Lie knew and saw what Owen did, they “…would not tell with such high zest / To children ardent for some desperate glory, / The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est / Pro patria mori” (25-28).

Works Cited 

Draper, Ronald. An Introduction to Twentieth-Century Poetry in English. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999. Print.

Furtak, Rick Anthony. “Poetics of Sentimentality.” Philosophy and Literature 26 (2002): 207-215. Rpt. in Poetry Criticism. Ed. Michelle Lee. Vol. 102. Detroit: Gale, 2010. Literature Resource Center. Web. 11 Apr. 2011.

Hughes, John. "Owen's 'Dulce et Decorum Est'." Explicator 64.3 (Spring 2006): 160-162. Rpt. in Poetry Criticism. Ed. Michelle Lee. Vol. 102. Detroit: Gale, 2010. Literature Resource Center. Web. 4 Apr. 2011.

Kendall, Tim. “Wilfred Owen’s Concern.” Modern English War Poetry. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. 46-64. Rpt. in Poetry Criticism. Ed. Michelle Lee. Vol. 102. Detroit: Gale, 2010. Literature Resource Center. Web. 11 Apr. 2011.

Lutz, Kimberly. "Overview of 'Dulce et Decorum Est'." Poetry for Students. Ed. Michael L. LaBlanc. Vol. 10. Detroit: Gale Group, 2001. Literature Resource Center. Web. 4 Apr. 2011.

Miller, Tyrus. “Overview of ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’.” Poetry for Students. Ed. Michael L. LaBlanc. Bol. 10. Detroit: Gale Group, 2001. Literature Resource Center. Web. 6 Apr. 2011.

Moran, Daniel. "Overview of 'Dulce et Decorum Est'." Poetry for Students. Ed. Michael L. LaBlanc. Vol. 10. Detroit: Gale Group, 2001. Literature Resource Center. Web. 4 Apr. 2011.

Owen, Wilfred. “Dulce et Decorum Est” The Compact Bedford Introduction to Literature: Reading, Thinking, Writing. Eighth Edition. Ed. Michael Meyer. Boston, Massachusetts: Bedford/St. Martin’s. 2009. 671-72. Print.

Welland, Dennis. “The Impact of War on Owen’s Poetry.” Wilfred Owen: A Critical Study. London: Chatto & Windus, 1978. 48-61. Rpt. in Poetry Criticism. Ed. Michelle Lee. Vol. 102. Detroit: Gale, 2010. Literature Resource Center. Web. 6 Apr. 2010.

            Song: Driftwood by Underoath

            Quote: "Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia." - E.L. Doctorow