First World War poet Wilfred Owen, treated for shell shock, carried readers into the horror of war

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Dispatch rider with pigeons leaving for firing line, His Majestyโ€™s Pigeon Service, November 1917, location unknown.
(William Rider-Rider. Canada. Department of National Defence. Library and Archives Canada, PA-002034), CC BY-SA

Mark Libin, University of Manitoba

Remembrance Day commemorates the end of the First World War on Nov. 11, 1918, and the poppy is the abiding symbol of Remembrance Day in Great Britain and the Commonwealth countries, including Canada.

Wilfred Owen
Wilfred Owen, photograph published in a 1920 anthology of his poems.
(Wikimedia Commons), CC BY

The poppy has been associated with war remembrance in a variety of ways. But
as many who attended elementary school in Canada may remember, the poppyโ€™s iconic popularity is often attributed to the poem by Canadian physician and poet, John McCrae, โ€œIn Flanders Fields.โ€

I would like to submit for consideration a different poem as a more suitable and ultimately more resonant poem to guide our reflections this Remembrance Day: Wilfred Owenโ€™s โ€œDulce et Decorum Est.โ€

โ€˜In Flanders Fieldsโ€™

โ€œIn Flanders Fieldsโ€ begins with a haunting evocation of poppies growing between marked graves of the war dead in Belgium, a description delivered by those very dead. In Canada and beyond, the poem has become a mainstream literary representation of all the wars and casualties remembered on Remembrance Day.

I have always found McCraeโ€™s poem unsuitable to commemorate the war or Remembrance Day. Its appeal may be attributed to its melancholy focus on the makeshift graves of the dead and its earnest attempt to create an empathetic connection with the reader:

โ€œ โ€ฆ Short days ago

We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,

Loved, and were loved, and now we lie,

In Flanders Fields.โ€

What follows from this poignant memory of being alive, however, is a command to โ€œTake up our quarrel with the foe,โ€ and a warning that these dead will not sleep until we, the readers, avenge their death on the battlefield.

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The directive to continue the war until the foe is vanquished is antithetical to the spirit of Remembrance Day as I conceive of it. Itโ€™s similarly antithetical to the finest British poetry of the First World War, including that penned by Wilfrid Owen.

Cover of 'The Hydra' magazine.
Wilfred Owen edited six issues of the Craiglockhart War Hospital magazine, โ€˜The Hydra,โ€™ while being treated for shell shock, including the July 21, 1917, issue.
(The First World War Poetry Digital Archive, English Faculty Library, University of Oxford)

Poetry & shell-shock

Owenโ€™s โ€œDulce et Decorum Estโ€ has an unambiguous anti-war message, and it works skillfully to immerse the reader in a subsuming, visceral representation of the lived experience of the frontline soldier.

Unlike McCrae, Owen never identifies the โ€œfoeโ€ as the German soldiers in their trenches, but rather directs his ire at those at the home front who perpetuate, or simply believe in, the propaganda glorifying the war. The same can be said for Owenโ€™s compatriot writer and friend, Siegfried Sassoon.




Read more:
Owen, Sassoon and Graves: how a golf club in Scotland became the crucible for the greatest war poetry


Both Sassoon and Owen โ€” who met in 1916 while they were both recovering from shell shock at the Craiglockhart Medical Hospital in Edinburgh โ€” felt that young men like themselves had been betrayed as objects of hero worship by their country.

The title โ€œDulce et Decorum Est,โ€ is from Horaceโ€™s epigrammatic line โ€œDulce et decorum est pro patria moriโ€ (it is sweet and proper to die for oneโ€™s country), which is still inscribed on many war memorials. At the end, the poem excoriates this motto as โ€œthe old Lie.โ€

Angry rebuke

Book cover with a sketch of a soldier.
Jessie Popeโ€™s War Poems, published 1915 by Grant Richards.
(British Library)

Owenโ€™s poem is an angry rebuke to jingoistic poets of his time, such as Jessie Pope, whose wartime poems aimed to rally and entice new recruits and lift up โ€œwar girls.โ€

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In 28 lines, Owen strives to convey, as accurately and brutally as possible, the daily horror experienced by front-line soldiers. At once, his poem is conventional โ€” adhering to iambic pentameter and a strict rhyme scheme โ€” and highly innovative. His language is designed to provoke emotion in the reader, as we see from the opening four lines:

โ€œBent 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.โ€

The similes comparing the soldiers to โ€œbeggarsโ€ and โ€œhagsโ€ are striking, but so too is the use of the first-person plural to describe the soldiers.

The words โ€œsludgeโ€ and โ€œtrudgeโ€ stand out in this stanza for being distinctly vulgar in their context, while exemplifying the onomatopoeic language that Owen uses to help us experience the soldiersโ€™ fatigue. The elongated vowel sound โ€” โ€œuhโ€ โ€” perfectly mimics the weary drag of the soldiersโ€™ feet as they โ€œtrudgeโ€ through the muck.

The lethargic pace of the first lines swiftly accelerates when the soldiers are subjected to a gas attack:

โ€œGas! GAS! Quick, boys! โ€” An ecstasy of fumbling

Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time.โ€

The reader must accelerate their reading pace and perhaps even experience a quickening heart rate alongside the soldiers.

Two men carry a wounded soldier.
Bringing in the wounded, Vimy Ridge, April 1917.
(Canada. Department of National Defence. Library and Archives Canada, PA-001042/Flickr), CC BY

โ€˜I saw him drowningโ€™

The rest of the poem is focused on the lone man who didnโ€™t secure his helmet in time, and who the narrator is forced to watch entering his death throes:

โ€œBut someone still was yelling out and stumbling

And floundโ€™ring like a man in fire or lime.โ€”

Dim through the misty panes and thick green light,

As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.โ€

In all my dreams before my helpless sight,

He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.โ€œ

These lines are thick with active verbs; the suffix “ingโ€ dominates the description of the gas attack, and the lines that follow conclude the poem:

โ€œIf 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 โ€ฆ

My friend, you would not tell with such high zest

To children ardent for some desperate glory โ€ฆโ€

No peace for the dying

In these final twelve lines of the poem the โ€œweโ€ shifts to โ€œyou,โ€ when Owen attacks the notion of glorifying war without any direct experience. The โ€œyouโ€ may be both a direct reference to Pope and the kind of audience she sought to capture: Owen originally dedicated the poem in his original manuscript โ€œTo Jessie Pope, etc.,โ€ and then in another version โ€œTo a Certain Poetess.โ€

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The biggest shock produced by โ€œDulce et Decorum Est,โ€ though, is when we realize the victim is still alive at the poemโ€™s end โ€” or, still dying.

Owen does not allow this man to slip off into the ruminative afterlife experienced by McCraeโ€™s war dead. He keeps his victim suspended in the act of dying as a way of preserving the poemโ€™s fraught message. There is no peace for this man, until โ€œyou,โ€ the reader, reject the โ€œold Lieโ€ and fight to end the war.

Owen was killed in action a week before the warโ€™s end, on Nov. 4, 1918.

Owenโ€™s โ€œDulce et Decorum Estโ€ is a meticulously crafted poem of shock and haunting. It might do us good to feel such haunting, such shock, every Nov. 11.The Conversation

Mark Libin, Associate Professor, Department of English, Theatre, Film & Media, University of Manitoba

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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