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The tone of Owen’s poem is at once honest and scathing. The speaker opens the poem with a powerful account of his experience on the front lines of war. He uses various poetic techniques to evoke both the drudgery of a soldier’s life and the sudden chaos that can erupt at any time. For example, he uses onomatopoeic words that communicate what it’s like to “sludge,” “trudge,” and “limp on blood-shod” (lines 2, 4 and 6) through a dangerous landscape. Owen also uses formatting and punctuation to evoke the chaotic rush of confusion when a canister of poison gas lands nearby: “Gas! GAS! Quick boys—” (line 9). These and other techniques offer a subjective yet honest account of one soldier’s experience. In the poem’s second half, however, the tone grows increasingly severe as the speaker addresses those who publicly champion the glory of war. The speaker’s use of the phrase “my friend” to address this group is particularly scathing, as becomes clear in the poem’s powerful last lines (25–28):

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.

The speaker doesn’t mince his words, and his setup of the final Latin quotation makes it abundantly clear that it’s emphatically not “sweet and fitting to die for one’s country.”

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