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When Wilfred Owen first drafted “Dulce Et Decorum Est” in 1917, he was in a hospital recovering from what at the time was known as “shell shock.” Profoundly rattled by his experience of fighting in France, Owen penned an antiwar poem that captures the gruesome suffering that soldiers faced on the front lines of World War I. The poem’s speaker evokes the debilitating exhaustion and the random bursts of chaotic violence that killed, wounded, and traumatized a generation of young men. The speaker relates a particularly traumatizing experience he had, when a surprise attack of poison gas left one of the soldiers in his unit choking to death. The surreal image of the dying soldier “drowning” in “a green sea” (line 14) haunts the speaker’s dreams, forcing him continuously to relive this horrific experience. The speaker’s tone turns scathing in the final stanza, where he condemns anyone who would continue to peddle the “old Lie” (line 27) that war brings glory. On the contrary, the speaker insists, war brings little more than senseless violence. After recovering, Owen returned to the front lines, where he was sadly killed in action. “Dulce Et Decorum Est” was first published in 1920, following his death.
