Literary Analysis Of Dulce Et Decorum Est

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Shruti Manglik ENGL 1102 Diebert June 12, 2016 Dulce Et Decorum Est Analysis The poem ‘Dulce Et Decorum Est’ by Wilfred Owen is a thought provoking and shocking poem which details the experiences of soldiers in World War I. Owen himself had served in the war. Caught in trenches while waging the war, he found it hard to justify all the suffering and deaths he had witnessed. He soon realized the division between the elevated language of nationalism and his reality of death and remorse due to the war. Increasingly convinced that the war had been going on for no fruitful reason, Owen began to write poetry to express the irony of the situation. He set the tone for an entire generation of men and women affected by the war to think and write about the events that had resulted in a blood bath around the world. Owen’s gripping realism is important today because when we read his poetry, we feel as though we are with him on the battlefield, watching as men suffer in a frantic struggle to stay alive. Throughout this essay, I will explore the techniques used by Owen to illustrate the notion of the horror and futility of war. The reader is introduced to the horror of the war in the first lines of the poem through the description of the poor physical condition of men: “bent double, like old beggars under sacks” (1). The comparison to old beggars is interesting; it depicts how soldiers have aged prematurely by their experiences even though soldiers are usually supposed to be young and
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