Dulce Et Decorum Est -- Wilfred Owen

I tend to dislike topicality, but now is as good a time as any...

(Poem #132) 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 floundering 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

[The title is from a line of Horace - "It is sweet and honourable to die
for one's country."]

If ever proof were needed that the 19th century was truly over, it came
in the shape of the First World War. The horrors of that conflagration
scarred the English psyche to an extent that marked the end of an era -
no more would sentimental Victorian poets talk about death and honour in
the same breath. More than anything else, the conflict that decimated a
generation of young Europeans opened the public's eyes to the sheer
inhumanity of large-scale trench warfare, the pointlessness of it all.

Owen's genius was his ability to celebrate the ordinary without
profaning it; he had a deep and abiding sympathy for his fellow
soldiers, while his own undisputed courage in action and sense of duty
gave him the moral authority to denounce the war (and War, for that
matter) for what it was - a sickness, a corruption, a festering evil of
which no good could possibly come.

Yes, I know that the language I use is strong, but then, so is Owen's
verse. He does not hold back or disguise his horror at what he saw -
        " ... the blood
    Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
    Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
    Of vile, incurable sores... "
- and this, too, is an aspect of his greatness; by using the natural
rhythms of speech, by soiling his hands with solid, everyday words, he
cuts closer to the heart of experience than did any of the genteel
Victorians. This is what gives him his power; this is what makes his
poetry real.

Oh, and the second syllable of the third line is pretty good, too :-).

thomas.

[Biography]

Wilfred Owen was born in 1893 and died in action in 1918. He was a man
of great sensitivy, and an intellectual, plunged against his will into
the holocaust of an atrocious war. He responded to the war, which
horrified and disgusted him, in a way which was never simple. In one
letter he wrote 'My senses are charred', but there is certainly no
evidence in his surviving poetry that they were numbed.

[LitCrit]

... Owen came to see the war, not as a disease to be cured by purely
political action, nor as a crusade against evil, but as a major tragedy
to which the only appropriate response was compassion. 'The poetry is in
the Pity', he wrote in the much-quoted introduction he had prepared for
his first book of poems...

... In his best poems, he writes not only about war, but about war as a
metaphor for the human condition. This give his best work a far-reaching
gravity and moral force which will never date and which makes his poems
applicable to any situation in which people must suffer and die.

[Today's poem]

... As so often, Owen seems in this poem to have taken over some of the
vocabulary and imagery of late 19th century poetry and injected a new
realism into it, [reminding] us that some of the public horror of the
First World War had already been experienced and predicted by the
agonies and breakdowns aof decadent poets from Baudelaire onwards...

    -- from 'Poetry 1990 to 1975', George Macbeth

[Trivia]

  The English composer Benjamin Britten (1913-1976) mixed several poems
or fragments of poems by Owen (" Anthem for Doomed Youth", " The Next
War", " Sonnet (On seeing a piece of our heavy artillery brought into
action)", " Futility", " The Parable of the Old Man and the Young", "
The End", " At a Calvary near the Ancre" and " Strange Meeting") with
liturgical texts from the "Missa pro defunctis" in his War Requiem,
composed in 1962 at the occasion of the re-opening of the cathedral of
Coventry, bombed during the second World War.

[Post Scriptum]

"Grey highrise buildings...
When I unmask the forger
I will wring his neck."

(though I must admit the spoof post was one of the best laughs I've had
in ages - simply hilarious... and I was most flattered by the comparison
to Mr Toad).

thomas.
The 14-year old Haiku Wizard.