The Vimy Pilgrimage Award is an educational program that takes twenty Canadian youth to Europe for one week to learn about Canada’s efforts and the First World War. I was fortunate enough to be chosen to go this year and I was truly moved and honored to go with such a wonderful group of people. To learn more about the award and my experience, go check out my other articles.
Before going on the pilgrimage, all the participants had to research a Canadian soldier who died in the First World War, write his biography and tribute to him. Then, during the experience, we got to visit each of our soldiers’ graves and read these two articles, afterward, we got to make a rubbing of the headstone. My soldier, Sergeant Hugh Cairns, VC, from Saskatchewan, was the last recipient of the Victoria Cross Award. This award is the highest honor that can be bestowed upon a soldier of the British Empire. (I also wrote about this award for my application essay, this is also where I learned about Hugh’s story.) To read the biography that I wrote, click here and click here to read my tribute.
In February 2018, I began to read some First World War novels and poetry in order to give myself some more background before I went on the Vimy Pilgrimage (although I didn’t quite need it, since we were given a lot of articles to read). I came across Wilfred Owen’s Dulce et Decorum Est and it quickly became a favorite. Originally, for my soldier project, I wanted to research Owen, but the project called for a Canadian soldier. But our head chaperone suggested that I research Owen as well as another soldier. I willingly accepted, and we were this close to visiting his grave, but there wasn’t enough time, and we all wanted to get to the hotel faster. Click here to read the biography I wrote, and for my tribute, I decided to analyze Dulce et Decorum Est.
Siegfried Sassoon was one of Owen’s friends, who deeply influenced his writing in the FWW. To learn more about him and Owen, go check out my biography. (Image Source)
I’ll first put just the poem down, and then put my analysis of each line across from it. I suggest that after you read the analysis, you go back and read the poem.
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 floundr’ing 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,
If in some somthering dreams you too could pace,
Behind the wagon 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.
The original Dulce et Decorum Est was dedicated to Jessie Pope, a propaganda poet during the FWW, but the dedication was cut for publication.
Bent double, like old beggars under sacks, – throughout the poem, you can see that Wilfred Owen is trying to destroy the image the reader might have of young strong men gallantly going off to war; not only that, but he is also trying to show that war can change men to boys, as we’ll see later on.
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge, -Owen wants you to imagine these old women, coughing with strangled hair; this once again breaks down the reader’s stereotype, usually we would think soldiers are in good health, but here, he is once again proving us wrong
Till on the haunting flares, we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge. – the march the soldiers have to go through actually existed and Owen and his men had to endure, it lasted about five miles; the soldiers are returning from two weeks of constant action at the front, so the most they can do is drag one foot after another
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots – the First World War is infamous for trench combat; there was about two to three feet of water usually always in them, this caused the soldiers to suffer from a condition known as trench’s foot, their feet would literally rot, because soldiers sometimes would go for weeks on end without drying their feet; it would, lots of times, result in amputation, of varying degrees; here Owen is saying that the trenches were so flooded, that many left their boots behind, since they were extra weight, and many had completely lost them in the water.
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind; – Owen is quite relentless on the graphic imagery in this poem; since the men had lost their boots, they weren’t exactly walking on hardwood, the ground contained a lot of debris from the war, so often as not, these would get stuck in the soldiers’ feet; ‘blood shod’ is saying that the men had to walk on shoes of blood. Another meaning you can draw from this is that the men were walking on a ground of blood, because of the mess under their feet
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of tired, outstripped Five-Nines that dropped behind. – Five-nines was slang used for a type of a shell during the First World War; there are many versions of the poem where they’ve changed this line so the reader understands the poem better; I’m going to indulge my literary geek and point out to you that the first lines start with iambic pentameter, but by now, Owen has dropped it to show the fatigue of the men
Gas! Gas! Quick, boys! – An ecstasy of fumbling, -the gas attack starts now, they are in a trance-like hurry to put on their helmets, ecstasy in these terms has nothing to do with happiness, the use of ‘boys’ contradicts the image we just saw from the last stanza, it’s true, since a lot of the soldiers were either underage or very young , Owen is slowly reducing the soldiers from their stereotype, to what they really are; he said in the first stanza: Men marched asleep, many had lost their boots but now he is saying boys; this continues on with the poem; here Owen is trying to shock the reader, just the way they were when the gas attack started; he was trying to convey the tiredness to the reader, and naturally, the latter was falling asleep, his use of dialogue quickly jolts the reader awake.
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time; -technology in the First World War wasn’t very advanced, and the soldiers were quite creative with what they did with their supplies, often as not, they would carve intricate shapes and designs into bullets, or make lighters out of chunks of metal in order to make time pass at the front; so the gas helmets weren’t the best fit and quite difficult to put on, especially when you’re exhausted.
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling,
And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime. . . -lime is a corrosive material.
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light, -referring to what Owen could see from the gas mask, the eye-holes on these masks had green glass on them.
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning. –green sea is once again referring to Owen’s view; he also uses an oxymoron, as he’s saying that the soldier is drowning on land; this was quite the case with the gas attacks
In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning. -this is where he starts to talk about the effect of this scene has had on him, by using first person nouns ‘I’ ‘my’ ‘me’, through the whole poem, Owen keeps a good rhyme scheme, but here, he rhymes ‘drowning’ with itself, I think he did it on purpose.
If in some smothering dreams you too could pace -starts to confront the reader, breaking the fourth wall, especially the people back at home, shows his outrage with England for sending the soldiers there, (he was mostly angry with England instead of the enemy, because his country could send him back but wasn’t)
Behind the wagon that we flung him in, -the use of flung is really impactful, the soldier was an actual person, but at the same time, they are still honoring him by taking his body, so there won’t be an empty grave or a name on a memorial
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face, – writhing: continual movement, squirming
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin; -irony, when does a devil become sick of sin? How horrible could this war have been
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud -cud: after a cow eats some grass, he/she throws it up from their first stomach in order to chew it again, the spit up stuff is cud; this is suggesting that the man needs to chew his blood because it’s so thick
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues, -this talks not only about the dead soldier’s tongue, but every soldier, repeating propaganda on the battlefield, like: I will die nobly in battle; Owen is saying that they’ve repeated this so much that they sores on their tongues.
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest -you wouldn’t say so energetically
To children ardent for some desperate glory, -children, refers once again to the first stanza and the second, the use of the words to describe the soldiers slowly makes them seem smaller and smaller, to their true age; first we started with Men marched asleep then Gas! GAS! Quick boys! And here Owen is referring to the soldiers as children; ardent: thirsty
The old Lie; Dulce et Decorum est
Pro patria mori. -latin for: It is sweet and right to die for one’s country
Wilfred Owen died November 4, 1918, a week before the armistice. (Image Source) This is Owen’s grave in the Ors Communal Cemetery.
If you liked this poem, I highly suggest that you go and read the rest of his poems, especially the pre-war poems, they are much less graphic, but nonetheless beautiful. In general, if you’re looking for a bit of a challenge and a history lesson at the same time, I suggest that you go and check out First World War poetry in general. One of my favorite books for FWW poetry is the Penguin Book of First World War Poetry.
Stay tuned for the essay that I wrote that got me chosen for this award.
