He uses a quotation from the Roman poet Horace to highlight the difference between the glorious image of war spread by those not actually fighting in it and war's horrifying reality. All went lame; all blind;.
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 gas-shells dropping softly behind. Quick, boys! In all my dreams before my helpless sight, He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning. 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. Select any word below to get its definition in the context of the poem. Volume 1. Context Dates. United Kingdom, England Country of Origin. Other Resources. Related Groups. In June , he was sent to Craiglockhart War Hospital, near Edinburgh, where he spent four months under the care of the renowned doctor, Captain Arthur Brock.
The title of the poem is from a Latin tag repeated in full on the last line. In September , Owen returned to the front during the final stages of the war. He fought in another fierce battle and was awarded the Military Cross for his bravery.
He was killed at the age of 25 while leading his men across the Sambre and Oise Canal near Ors, on 4 November — just one week before the Armistice was declared. However, after his death his heavily worked manuscript drafts were brought together and published in two different editions by Siegfried Sassoon with the assistance of Edith Sitwell in and Edmund Blunden in They are among some of the most visceral and heartbreaking poems about World War One.
Aware that his work could do nothing to help his own generation, he succeeded in warning the next, and his poetic legacy has had a major impact on attitudes to war. The poet wants the reader to know that warfare is anything but glorious, so he paints a gloomy, realistic, human picture of life at the frontline.
He leaves us no doubt about his feelings. By the end of the poem, it appears the reader has been moved away from the "haunting" battlefield, and the setting becomes internal. Here, the mood is less gruesome, but no less pitiful. In one sense, to see the way these scenes of death and violence have affected the poet's mind is just as disturbing as the scenes themselves.
This poem is packed full of vivid images forged in the heat of battle, skillfully drawn by the young, keenly observant poet. The opening scene is one of a group of soldiers making their weary way from the frontline "towards our distant rest" as bombs drop and lethal gas is released. Details are intimate and immediate, taking the reader right into the thick of trench war.
These men appear old, but that is only an illusion. War has twisted reality which gradually turns surreal as the poem progresses. The speaker evokes a dream-like scenario, the green of the enveloping gas turning his mind to another element, that of water, and the cruel sea in which a man is drowning.
The descriptions become more intense as the drowning man is disposed of on a cart. All the speaker can do is compare the suffering to a disease with no known cure. The final image - sores on a tongue - hints at what the dying soldier himself might have said about the war and the idea of a glorious death.
While Owen utilizes figurative language, similes, and assonance to combat the illusion that war is glorious, he also uses symbols to underline his message. There are three overarching symbols that strengthen the impact of "Dulce et Decorum Est. Owen focuses on the way war disfigures and warps all things that come into contact with it. Primarily, he focuses on the human body and the way it is slowly damaged and changed before ultimately being destroyed.
We see the symbol of disfiguration in the first stanza, when the poet reports on the state of his fellow men:. 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.
All went lame; all blind; Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots. By looking closely at the language used in the above lines, the symbol of disfiguration becomes clear. The men are no longer the men the used to be. They are shadows of their former selves: dead men walking. As we can see by the title and last line of this poem, one of the main symbols is allusion in this instance, an allusion to Horace's Latin phrase. The allusion points to the idea that fighting and dying for your country is glorious.
After making this allusion, the poet devotes all of his efforts to proving it wrong. Another symbol that pervades this poem is the idea of the nightmare. Owen presents the scenes of war as a nightmare with their greenish color and mistiness.
Also, the terrifying imagery adds to the feeling of a bad dream. This symbol indicates that the horrors of war are almost too hard to comprehend. This must be a nightmare, mustn't it? The reality is that it is not a nightmare: These are real atrocities that happened to real people. The fact that the poet presents the poem as a sort of nightmare makes it all the more terrible.
I'm amazed by the amount of effort put into this poem.
0コメント