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About

Genius Annotation

One of the most famous war poems written by Wilfred Owen, who died in the British Army’s trenches near the Sambre-Oise Canal in France, a week before the end of World War I. “Dulce” uses the powerfully repulsive imagery of a soldier’s death from poison gas as a counter to propagandists,like the poet Jessie Pope who praised the glories of war.

Watch actor Christopher Eccleston recite the poem here

Structure
The poem comprises four stanzas of uneven length. The metrical rhythm is predominantly iambic pentameter, that is five metrical feet or iambs per line, where a iamb is one unstressed followed by one stressed syllable. However, the poet departs from this at certain points.

There is a regular ABAB CDCD EFEF etc rhyme scheme and lines are enjambed to create a natural flow that in places imitates human speech, interspersed with ironically lyrical sections.

Language
The voice is that of a speaker, presumably the poet, using the first person plural “we”. The tone is one of horror expressed through concise, vivid language, but interspersed with the colloquial speech of the men. So, for example, ‘Gas! GAS! Quick, boys!’ expresses the words the soldiers would use, compared to the end of the last stanza which refers to ‘… children ardent for some desperate glory …’ , then followed by the quotation from the Roman poet, Horace' that gives the poem its title. The annotation in the last stanza explains this fully.

Image Credit
Copyright The British Library / The Wilfred Owen Literary Estate
Via The First World War Poetry Digital Archive

Credits
Produced By
Written By
Recorded At
69 Monkmoor Road, Shrewsbury
Release Date
1920
Songs That Interpolate Dulce et Decorum Est
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