Dulce et Deorum Est

The next stanza is mostly on the same theme. In it Owen seems to be singling you out, although when you read it is evident why he addressed it to Jessie Pope. It tells of how the dead man was flung into a wagon randomly, and suggests that if it were you instead who had had to watch this dreadful occurrence it would affect you in the same way. He describes his dreams as ‘smothering’, which is related to his use of the word ‘helpless’, meaning that he could not escape the dreams and they surrounded him mentally. He feels a kind of claustrophobia about his dreams, he is stuck in a situation he despises and cannot get out of it. Owen tells in some quite morbid detail of the man’s expression, how his face was hung and his eyes writhing in his face. One particular phrase he uses is rather unusual: ‘like a devil’s sick of sin’. He uses this sentence to describe the expression on the man’s face. A devil sick of sin is a very extreme thought as the devil’s raison d’être is to sin. Using these words to outline the feelings of the man is to say that the man was sick of his life, specifically his life in the war. He has to fight and he was fed up of it, basically. But another point about this sentence is why would Owen choose these words? Why not say, for example, ‘an angel sick of righteousness?’. Why instead proffer an image of the devil? Simple:- the devil has connotations of terror and evil, and this is how the poet has chosen to describe the war, if only in the unfortunate case of the dead man, or of himself.

And is a follow on from the grotesque lines he has just written, saying that the woman would not tell of the war with enthusiasm if she had experienced it first hand or had witnessed such loathsome episodes. His last two lines are the main subject of the poem and include the title itself. Although these lines are not separated from the rest like the ones discussing how the man reappeared in his dreams every night, they are the most memorable as they are the last and the finality is extrusive within them. The final lines are:

In the third line the poet describes flares, long flames often used for signalling, as ‘haunting’ to the soldiers. This suggests that they are sick of the war and hate the constant reminders of it. Obviously they cannot get away from the war and the monotonous, dire lifestyle they faced every day in the ranks. Everywhere they turn constant reminders of the war surround them, weapons or perhaps even people that remind them of the loathsome duties they have to carry out. I know if it were I, I would feel that a sense of claustrophobia, an unease and repulsion of the things that I would be forced to cope with and an irrepressible urge to escape. I would hate the feeling of knowing that I could not just leave when I pleased and had to face the same tragic scene every day. This may be somewhat ‘deep’ for the first few lines of a poem, but I feel that these kind of subjects are already beginning to emerge. The line continues to say that the man turned their heads on the haunting flares, maybe in a half-hearted effort to shut them out of their minds.

‘The old Lie’ is connected to how he views Jessie Pope’s impression of the war, which he feels is captured in the Latin expression. The Latin itself translates directly as ‘It’s sweet and glorious to die for your country’. Pope’s entire poem is focused on the accuracy of this statement, whereas Owen’s entire poem is focused on contradicting the stat

Some topics in this essay:
Siegfried Sassoon, Jessie Pope, Jessie Pope’s, Owen Pope, Lie Dulce, Personally Owen, War Specifically, World War, Wilfred Owen, jessie pope, entire poem focused, dulce et decorum, poem line, thick green, third line, horrors war, lines separated, et decorum est, entire poem, addressed jessie pope, poem focused, word ‘floundering’, droning tone,