"Dulce Et Decorum Est" is a subversion of traditional poetical style, to show how war has made society confused. It shows, by using the flashback technique, in all clarity the horrors and agony of war from the perspective of the people in it, and therefore sends an anti-war message and denounces the idealist's thinking that it is glorious, good and fitting to die for one's country.
The title, "Dulce Et Decorum Est" (latin for "how sweet and fitting it is") gives an unsettled feeling to the reader because of its very incompleteness. The reader is left hanging on the cliff, as he does not know what exactly is sweet and fitting. Moreover, the title provides a sharp contrast to the rest of the poem, because it implies that the poem is going to celebrate something good about life, but the poem instead serves up the horrific reality of war and death.
One of many, many graveyards in the Somme battlefi...
Dulce Matuz
Bookplate for Brown University Library books purch...The soldiers are portrayed as wretched, like "old beggars" and "hags". They are made to "trudge" long distances through dirt and "sludge" before they can rest. They are in a deplorable state of physical health, being "bent double", "knock-kneed" and "coughing like hags". They are "limping" bare-footed, "blood-shod" because they had lost their boots. With no exceptions, "all" have become "lame" and "blind", "drunk with fatigue" and "deaf" even to loud missiles and shells fired behind them. This shows the reader that there is no escape, as a soldier, from all these agonies, and that the soldiers have become desensitized even to "Five-Nines" which could kill them. Indeed, the effects of war have taken their toll on the soldiers, and they certainly are not the typically envisioned glorified heroes.
Despite the dramatic description of the wretched state of the soldiers, there remains a sense of...