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DULCE ET DECORUM EST…

…THE OLD LIE

Credits:

Pecorella Francesca

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Class: 5ALS 21 December 2015

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Table of contents

Introduction to the work .……......…………………………………………………...3

About the author…………………………………………………………………………..3

Text of Dulce et Decorum Est…………………………………………………………5

Analysis of the poem……………………………………………………………………..6

Intertextuality: T1 “Gassed”, John Singer Sargent…………………………….8

Intertextuality: T2 Six Head Studies for “Gassed”…………………………….9

Intertextuality: T3 Henry Tonks’ draws of malformed soldiers………..10

Intertextuality: T4 The Soldier, Rupert Brooke……………………………….12

Synopsis……………………………………………………………………………………...14

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The present work focuses on the analysis of Wilfred Owen’s Dulce et Decorum Est. Indeed, it is one of the most relevant poems suitable to build up the most recurrent

and pervasive ideas of the war developed before and after the First World War.

The poem was written by Wilfred Owen, now regarded as one of the leading poets of the First World War and as a significant poetic voice of the twentieth century,

probably between October 1917 and March 1918.

About the author

WILFRED OWEN (Oswestry, 18 March 1893 – Ors, 4 November 1918)

It is relevant to underline Owen fought at first person during the conflict, allowing him to examine all the contradictions of the war. However, it is appropriate to remember the poem I am going to analyse does not reflect all his existence’ point of

view. His life was full of resounding events and meetings, cause of deep and meaningful reflections, which are of course deducible throughout his poetry.

Now I will briefly summarize the most relevant points of his biography that I consider suitable to well understand his maturation in the army, his critical thinking and his stance of denounce towards all the acts of idealization of the war.

When he was nineteen years old, he decided to move to Bordeaux, when he taught for one year at the Berlitz School of Languages, and then in other French countries. During his time in France Owen met and was hugely influenced by the Decadent poet Laurent Tailhade,

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who was a fiercely patriotic, satirical poet. Some current researchers assert the principles of anarchism and individualism professed by Tailhade are representative the young intellectuals’ mood […] in the period from 1880 to the First World War. This attests Tailhade influenced Owen so that, when war was declared in August 1914, he affirmed that he was prepared to die for the language of Keats.

As a result, he volunteered in the Artists' Rifles Officers' Training Corps, a special section of the British Army Reserve aimed to furnish military leadership training to students at British universities. Indeed, he also frankly declared he ‘wanted to fight’.

Owen enlisted when he was just twenty-two and he suddenly started training, taking advantage of his previous experience as a private tutor and as a freelance teacher.

There are some documents and letters related to such period, which perfectly show his disdain towards the ranks he instructed, defined as "expressionless lumps". It follows that, in this period, he could be partially associated to Rupert Brooke’s ideology, due to his fervent hope to form young soldiers willing to sacrifice themselves for their homeland. However, such way of thinking stands only for a temporary stage of his maturation.

Indeed, after spending the rest of the year training in England, he left for the western front early in January 1917.

Here he experienced heavy fighting, being wounded by a trench mortar.

This tragic experience aroused to the diagnosis with shellshock. At Craiglockhart War Hospital, he met the poet Siegfried Sassoon, who already had a reputation as a poet and shared Owen's views. It was at this time Owen wrote many of his most important poems, including “Anthem for Doomed Youth” and “Dulce et Decorum Est.” Sassoon agreed to look over Owen's poems, encouraged him and introduced the young poet to literary figures such as Robert Graves. Graves is an English poet, novelist, critic and classicist, who wrote popular historical novels such as I, Claudius, King Jesus, Count Belisarius and so on, which partially influenced Owen’s rhetorical choices. But he also came across the poetry and literary production of Edith and Osbert Sitwell, Arnold Bennett, Thomas Hardy, and Captain Charles Scott Moncrieff, who later translated Proust. However, what is relevant to remember is that reading Sassoon's poems and discussing his work with Sassoon himself revolutionised Owen's style and his conception of poetry.

In this period, we wrote to his mother:

While it is true that the guns will effect a little useful weeding, I am furious with chagrin to think that the Minds which were to have excelled the civilisation of ten thousand years are being annihilated - and bodies, the product of aeons of Natural

Selection, melted down to pay for political statues.

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The quotation shows his evident ideological metamorphosis from an idealized vision of reality, to a more objective, inquiring and condemnatory one.

Nevertheless, he returned to France in August 1918 and in October received an award from the Military Cross in recognition for his “bravery” and “leadership” at Amiens.

On 4 November 1918 he was killed during the battle while attempting to cross the Sambre canal at Ors, a commune in the Nord department in northern France, when he was twenty-five years old.

A review of Owen’s poems published on December 29, 1920, just two years after his death, asserts:

Others have shown the disenchantment of war, have unlegended the roselight and romance of it, but none with such compassion for the disenchanted nor such sternly just and justly stern judgment on the idyllisers.

Now I will try to find out Owen’s “stern judgement” from one of his most well-known poems, Dulce et Decorum est.

DULCE ET DECORUM ESTBent double, like old beggars under sacks, Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge, Till on the haunting flares(2) we turned our backs And towards our distant rest(3) 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(4)  Of tired, outstripped(5) Five-Nines(6) that dropped behind.

Gas!(7) Gas! Quick, boys! – An ecstasy of fumbling, Fitting the clumsy helmets(8) just in time; But someone still was yelling out and stumbling, And flound'ring like a man in fire or lime(9) . . . Dim, through the misty panes(10) and thick green light, As under a green sea, I saw him drowning. 

In all my dreams, before my helpless sight, He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning. 

If 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, His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin; 

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If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs, Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud(12)  Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues, My friend, you would not tell with such high zest(13)  To children ardent(14) for some desperate glory, The old Lie; Dulce et Decorum est Pro patria mori.(15)

Analysis of the poemReading the title, the reader may be curious to find out why it is written in Latin. Some documents and memoirs related to the period of the First World War show that the sentence was highly known and quoted by the England population. It follows that the addressee of the poem was not only a cultured élite able to speak and understand the Latin language and literature, but maybe the whole English population who experienced the context of the war, even indirectly.

Going on reading, it is possible to notice the poem is almost addressed to young people, “children ardent for some desperate glory”, who have a misrepresented idea of the war. Such idea is the one conveyed by the title itself, which recall an extract from a Latin saying, taken from Horace’s Odes (III.2.13). In the saying, Horace’s point of view related to the soldiers’ behaviour is evident: on one side he condemns the ones who escape the war, defined as coward and shameful warriors while, on the other, he praises the brave soldiers who accomplish bold and quite heroic deeds. In particular, the poet encourages Roman young people to imitate their ancestors’ virtues and heroism. However, it is interesting to notice Owen does not quote the entire saying: he withholds the referent of the denotation. On my opinion, it is done on purpose for two reasons: firstly, to tempt the reader going on reading, secondly to let him or her think the poem will be about something sweet and honourable. It is so a strategy to mislead the reader who, at first glance, thinks the poem will be strictly connected to the lyrical poetry, the elegiac style and also to the Greek poetry of the Archaic period, as Horace’s one.

Will the conjectures of the reader be disregarded by the reading of the poem?

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The answer is: yes! The poem totally overturns the readers’ opening expectations, right from the first line.

The poem is based on the poet’s experience of the horrors of war in the trenches, and so it stands for an effort to communicate the ‘pity’ of war to future generations. Indeed, Wilfred Owen has effectively taken part to the conflict; he has fought and has experienced the shocks of war, as visible by his biography notes. Therefore, the speaking voice, that is a soldier’s voice, is actually the poet himself.

Considering the general comprehension of the whole poem, the intelligent reader immediately finds out the topic: the wickedness of the use of gas, which will stand for a deeper message. Actually, the poem traces the consequences of the modern use of gas as a weapon of destruction. Indeed Owen meticulously portrays a gas attack at the frontline, paying particular attention to the description of the soldiers’ physical and psychological condition.

The first quatrain builds up a vivid image of the soldiers’ way of living, or better, surviving at the frontline. They are depicted as “old beggars”, coughing “hags”, injured, wounded, tired and worn-out. Therefore, the speaking voice exploits a metaphorical language in order to empathize the soldiers’ description. Even if they are young, they are compared to hags and beggars, who seem to stand for adolescents and young people’s antithesis. It follows that the war and its vicissitudes are able to overturn each certainty that is valid in a period of peace. The soldiers Owen talks about are deformed on two levels: physically, if you stand on the denotative level, metaphorically and psychologically, if you move to the connotation of the text.

Indeed, the second section of the poem moves from the man marches, to the gas attack. The soldiers are out of range of the Five-Nine bombs, away from “No Man's Land”, they are out of the trenches and they are now forced to be responsive in order to survive. However, not all of them are able to put the gas masks on in time. There are so reactions of “yelling out” and “stumbling”, which are strong semantic choices, followed by the image of someone burning in a fire, with no possibilities of rescue. Now the speaking voices focuses on one of such unlucky soldiers, wounded by the bombs, “drowning”. This is another metaphorical image, which reinforces the idea of a certain death, a totally absence of assistance, due to something lightning quick, which will determine many lives’ elimination.

The speaking voice tells all the soldiers became “lame”, “blind”. It is evident that not all of them where injured at the same way, but using the adjective “all” he extends some individual hurts to the totality’s. It is a strategy to universalize the condition of the soldiers, who are indeed generic soldiers, whose nationality is not highlighted. Such stylistic choice of hiding the enemy’s identity is also useful to build up an atmosphere of mystery and curiosity.

The second quatrain appeals to sight and hearing, as if the speaking voice wanted the reader to be present at the dramatic scene. It seems that the reader fights alongside the speaking voice and perceive with him the absurdity of war. His aim is reinforced by lines 15-16, when the speaking voice reveals he is compelled to re-experience the facts described in the poem each night, in his dreams which are, of course, nightmares. In this way, the poet moves from a physical description, to a psychological survey, exploiting his same experience. The use of the present simple highlights the periodicity of the dream, as an eternal cycle. Such image is coherent with the repetition of the verb “drowning”, which connects the previous description with the subject of the speaking voice’s dreams.

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Therefore, the third quatrain portrays the difficult memories of the speaking voice in having looked at first person one of his mates’ death, in all its sides and facets, in all the resulting pain of a drowning man, whose light is blowing out. The metaphor is developed in the last stanza, the longest one. Shocking images come out through the poet’s mind: the white eyes of the soldier and his face cut off by the gas. The strength of the image grows rapidly, in a crescendo of deformation and degradation. The soldier is so compared to a devil, but what is even more disconcerting is the image of the evil, no less than the speaking voice, repulsed by the sight of the scene.

In the conclusion, the speaking voice addressees to his friend, unveiling the message of the whole poem and the missing piece of the title. The saying professed by Horace, that is “Dulce et Decorum est pro patria mori” is a lie: dying for one’s homeland is not honourable. It is just a falsehood which withholds the brutal reality of pain, suffering, injuries and death.

It is evident the reason why the poem is considered an anti-First World War propaganda piece. However, it is interesting to notice Owen wrote Dulce et Decorum Est at a time when military propaganda to get young men to enlist to join up and fight was still going on. The actual horrors of what the soldiers were experiencing on the front lines have not been made fully apparent to the British public at the point when Owen gave the world this particular poem.

In this regard I will provide you a quotation by some Owen’s notes dated October 1918, to conclude the analysis:

"I came out in order to help these boys - directly by leading them as well as an officer can; indirectly, by watching their sufferings that I may speak as well as a pleader can."

Intertextuality The analysis of “Dulce et Decorum Est” represents a relevant step in the process of reconstruction of the perception of the war developed before and after the First World War, but it would be at least one small element of an overall comprehension. At this regard, I choosed some texts that are strictly connected with the themes exploited by Wilfred Owen, in order to reinforce his point of view or put it into question.

The texts are the following:

T1 “Gassed”, John Singer Sargent, March 1919, 231 cm × 611 cm;

T2 Six Head Studies for “Gassed”;9

T3 Henry Tonks’ draws of malformed soldiers;

T4 The Soldier, Rupert Brooke, 1914

T2. “Gassed”, John Singer Sargent, March 1919, 231 cm × 611 cm

The paint depicts the aftershock of a mustard gas attack during the First World War, with a line of wounded soldiers walking towards a dressing station. Sargent was commissioned by the British War Memorials Committee to document the war and visited the Western Front in July 1918 spending time with the Guards Division near Arras, and then with the American Expeditionary Forces near Ypres.

The soldiers’ eyes are bandaged because of exposure to gas and each man holds on to the shoulder of the man in front.  It gives the idea that they needed to help each other in other to survive. They run out towards a new field, but they also run out searching a road which could enable them to stay alive and not be wounded again. They are walking between two lines of alleged dead soldiers, except some rare cases of soldiers who are still alive and try to pick up again. The painting gives clues about the management of the victims, their relative lack of protective clothing, the impact and extent of the gas attack as well as its routine nature. The canvas is lightly painted with great skill. Sargent draws the viewer into the tactile relationships between the blinded men. There is a suggestion of redemption as the men are led off to the medical tents, but the overall impression is of loss and suffering, emphasised by the expressions of the men standing in line.

The themes and the subjects faced by Singer Sargent are so coherent with Wilfred Owen’s ones: suffering, injuries, deformities, gas attacks. Even if their products have different language, they seem to convey the identic message, namely a condemnation of the atrocities of the war, embodied by the terrible weapons of the bombs.

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These are some of Singer Sargent rough sketches, which focus on the head of the soldiers wounded by the gas attack. They perfectly show the soldiers’ mood, which is coherent with the one visible throughout the lecture of “Dulce et Decorum Est”. Indeed, they appear exhausted, tired and they also seem to have all the same expression, element which reinforces the idea that what really cares is not the alliance, but the common and collective brutality of the war.

T3. Henry Tonks’ draws of malformed soldiers

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"I have decided that I am not any use as a doctor. I do not think the government very clever at using people's services. Munitions, anything in fact, I am ready to take up," wrote Henry Tonks in 1915. It would be pastel and paintbrush with which Tonks, 52 and an assistant professor at the Slade School of Fine Art when war broke out, would most memorably contribute to the war effort, first by drawing the patients of the pioneering plastic surgeon Harold Gillies and then as an official war artist.

The following paint is “Soldiers with Facial Wounds”, produced between 1916 and 1918 by Tonks. It is an explicit drawn of the effect of the gas attacks, indeed the representation of the soldiers’ faces is not subtle and veiled, but course and realistic. Such feature can be easily transferred to Owen’s poems. Furthermore, Tonks wants to convey what war really implied, which is in contrast with the raging spread of a common idyllic and utopic perception of the war.

Another analogy is the choice of young guys, which seem to be transfigured, becoming so bent

double, like old beggars under sacks.

Henry Tonks drew lots of series of paints dealing with facial injuries suffered by soldiers for documentation purposes.

Gillies needed Tonks’s anatomical knowledge and draughtsmanship; his drawings could capture the faces of patients in a way photographs could not. Gillies called his surgery a "strange new art, and unlike the student today, who is weaned on small scar excisions and gradually graduated to a single harelip, we were suddenly asked to produce half a face". Gillies reconstructed the faces of 11,572 soldiers during the war. His and Tonks's contribution was immense. 

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Tonks’ artistic products may prove to be historic in the true sense of the word, being some kinds of explicit and verified proofs of the bombs

effects.

The rich pigments in his hands easily lend themselves to rendering the glimmers of light on recent scar tissue, his reds and pinks allowing us to really feel the angry absences of destroyed sections of face. The beauty of his handling of the colours and forms can only serve to make the observer feel more sickened by what he or she would be witnessing.

So, as Owen exploits rhetorical devices, Tonks exploits some artistic techniques and a specific use of colours and volumes, in order to create a hyperbolic shocking image.

In conclusion, Tonks’ body of drawing produced during the First World War represents a strong and deep critic, the same done by Wilfred Owen, regarding the effects of the war. However, Tonks lingers on the physical injures, while Owen talks

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about nightmares, metaphor which hints at the psychological traumas, going in depth

in the soldiers’ souls and minds.

T4. The Soldier, Rupert Brooke, 1914

THE SOLDIER

If I should die, think only this of me:That there’s some corner of a foreign fieldThat is for ever England. There shall beIn that rich earth a richer dust concealed;A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam,A body of England’s, breathing English air,Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home.

And think, this heart, all evil shed away,A pulse in the eternal mind, no lessGives somewhere back the thoughts by England given;Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day;And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness,In hearts at peace, under an English heaven.

Reading the title, the reader may suppose the poem to be about a soldier’s experience during or after the war, about his actions, his role or/and feelings. Many conjectures are possible, because no kind of judgement is offered by the title. In order to find out the poet’s point of view, you must go on reading.

The poem is made up of two stanzas, an octave and a sestet, coherently with the Petrarchan sonnet structure and its rhyme scheme is ABABCDCD EFGEFG, recalling the Elizabethan scheme.

It deals with a soldier, who is addressing to somebody, telling him or her what to think just in case he should die. He speaks about his dust, underlining the link with such specks of dust and the whole England. Also in the following verses, the

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speaking voice persists connecting him to England and all her aspects: “her sights”, “sounds”, “thoughts”… The death is set in a foreign field, a field of battle, which is considered by the soldier to be England however. The speaking voice describes his death resorting to the last breath and pulse, contrasting the end of his life with the eternity of his soul: his “eternal mind”. This idea is reinforced by the image of “heaven”, which is not a generic one, but the English heaven. In addition, the speaking voice love for England and his willingness to sacrifice is equivalent to a son’s love for his mother.

Therefore, the poem deals with a soldier’s feelings and thoughts about his death during war. The thoughts are strictly connected with the speaking voice’s nationality, “by England given”, in an English heaven. It is evident “heaven” and other semantic choices such as “blest”, “evil”, “eternal mind” are Biblical references, coherently with Brooke’s faith. Here evil stands for the enemy, for someone the poet depicts as a man who deserves to be killed. In “Dulce et Decorum Est” evil is just a stunned spectator of the atrocities of the war. Owen wants to convey the idea that the devil is not the enemy, but the war itself and all its miserable manifestations.

On the contrary, the link between the themes faced by Brooke’s poem and the ones quite gathered by the Bible reinforces the message: dying for one’s country is a noble gesture. In addition, it is also evident the speaking voice believes that England is the noblest country for which to die, since it was the one which educated him and contributed to his maturation, no less than a mother.

The poem represents an interesting text, suitable to show the patriotic ideals that characterized pre-war in England.

Therefore, after having analysed the poem, the reason why it was used as a recruiting poem to get young boys to go and fight in the First World War is evident. It was read out in Westminster Abbey and Winston Churchill was involved in the promotion of the poem itself. It represented the poster child for the early years of that horrific tragic conflict.

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The reason why I choosed such poem to make an intertextual analysis with Owen’s “Dulce et Decorum Est” is that the two texts convey opposite messages and, therefore, a totally opposite perspective on the reality. While Owen wrote painful poems in their accurate accounts of gas causalities, quite urging young people to rethink their ideas of the war, Brooke conveyed an idea of the war as something clean and cleansing, in which death is no a pity, an horror event or a shame, but a reward.

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Synopsis

In conclusion, the War poets, as the whole artists who lived and worked during the war, did not show unanimity. On the contrary, as it is visible by the intertextual analyses above, they conveyed many opposing opinions regarding the meaning of the war. In addition, what is different is not only the message, but also the way they went in depth in the matter: while some of them investigated the object in all its details, even if course or pitiless, others just covertly reproduced the surface.

Rupert Brooke, as Siegfried Sassoon, S. Sargent and H. Tonks, choosed to protest against the war, proving their trust in making a difference in the panorama of fervent patriotist ideals, widespread when the conflict broke out. They tried to save some guys, young people who had whole life ahead of them, from a likely death at the frontline.

In my opinion, they made the difference, because they still make the difference. Their moving body of work has profoundly affected generations of readers. They passed one to their readers and to the whole humanity not just some sonnets, some pattern of lines, but something stronger and never-ending:

A MESSAGE OF PEACE

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