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.

Lines 9–14 make up the poem’s second stanza, in which the speaker and his fellow soldiers rush to don their gas masks after a canister of poison gas lands nearby. The speaker uses several poetic techniques to evoke the chaos of the scene. First, note the prominent use of capital letters and punctuation in the opening line, which reflect the sense of urgent terror. Also effective is the use of words that end in -ing. Despite recounting the story in the past tense, the speaker uses the progressive tense to evoke a sense of present action. The speaker describes this action as “an ecstasy of fumbling.” The series of -ing words that follows effectively conveys the chaos of the scene: “yelling,” “stumbling,” “flound’ring,” and “drowning.” The final lines of the second stanza shift focus from the chaos of soldiers fumbling with their “clumsy helmets” to a surreal image of one man’s death. One soldier has failed to put his gas mask on in time, and he now lies choking on the poison gas. The speaker recalls how the spreading gas created something like “a green sea” around the dying man, such that he appears to be underwater, drowning.

In all my dreams before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

Lines 15–16 constitute the entirety of the third stanza, which is by far the shortest in the poem. The brevity of this stanza makes it stand out visually. It also marks a shift in the speaker’s focus from the past to the present. Significantly, this shift involves a brief suspension of time, as the speaker lingers on the memory of the dying soldier that he described at the end of the second stanza. Here, the speaker notes how the image of the “guttering, choking, drowning” soldier has continuously haunted his dreams since the event of his death. The speaker emphasizes just how “helpless” he feels in the face of these dreams. He also intimates the terror these dreams cause him. It isn’t merely that he replays the experience of watching the soldier die. Rather, he relives the experience, which he suggests when he says that the dying soldier “plunges” at him. The active nature of this recollection strongly implies that the speaker is suffering from the aftereffects of trauma. Though at the time this condition was known as “shell shock,” it’s now referred to as PTSD, or “post-traumatic stress disorder.”

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.

These lines (25–28) bring the poem to its bitter conclusion. Throughout the final stanza, the speaker has been addressing an unnamed “you” who lacks first-hand experience of battle and yet persists in idealizing war. In these final lines, the speaker’s address turns ironic as he calls this uninformed person “my friend.” He then criticizes this “friend” for encouraging young men who are “ardent for some desperate glory” to seek that glory in war. In other words, the “friend” has peddled “the old Lie,” which may be summed up in the Latin line by the Roman poet Horace: “It is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country.” After describing at length the violence and suffering entailed in war, it’s clear that the speaker’s message is diametrically opposed to that expressed by Horace. Far from being “sweet and fitting,” dying for one’s country is bitter and pointless. Owen reflects this sense of bitter pointlessness in his refusal to make the final line metrically complete. Whereas the rest of the poem is written in iambic pentameter, this line consists of just three metrical feet, each of which has a different rhythm: “Pro pa- / tri-a / mor-i.” Like the dead soldier described earlier in the poem, this line ends prematurely.

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