Wilfred Owen: Poems

Explanation and Analysis of the Document

The title and final line of “Dulce et Decorum Est,” written in October 1917, are taken from the Odes of the Roman poet Horace. The full line, “Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori,” is translated as “Sweet and fitting it is to die for one's country”—a sentiment common throughout Britain during the war. Owen said that he addressed this poem to a poet (“my friend”) who encouraged young men to enlist. Although she may have been the original addressee, Owen spoke to everyone who had not personally experienced the war. He was not alone, as many others in the service felt alienated from a society that remained safe in England.

The poem begins with the image of men on the march, so tired that they are oblivious to enemy shells exploding nearby. This procession is interrupted by one of the war's new and dramatic horrors: poison gas. There is the “ecstasy of fumbling,” with soldiers trying to put on their masks quickly enough to avoid death or severe respiratory injury. Owen tells us of one who does not succeed: “He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning” in “froth-corrupted lungs, / Obscene as cancer”—a reality contradicting the notion that battlefield death is sweet and fitting.

“Anthem for Doomed Youth,” written in September 1917, at first emphasizes the war's massive and impersonal nature. When the war began in 1914, almost no one foresaw how it would diminish the individual's importance. At the Battle of the Somme in July 1916, the British casualties amounted to almost 60,000 dead and wounded on the first day alone. That scale informs the poem's beginning, with its opening reference to “these who die as cattle.” In earlier drafts, Owen had actually used the phrase “die in herds.” The atmosphere of noise made by “stuttering rifles' rapid rattle” and “shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells” drown out the individual in a perfect chaos. The poem's conclusion arrives at a human scale, in showing that the monument of the dead will be the sorrow of the women they leave behind. Owen's opening question—“What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?”—was indeed ironic. He was killed leading an attack on November 4, 1918, and his mother received the notification of his death as church bells rang in his hometown on November 11, to celebrate the war's end.

Considered by some to be Owen's best and most complex poem, “Strange Meeting” was written in January 1918. His subject is “the truth untold: / The pity of war, the pity war distilled.” Unlike the previous graphically realistic images of war, “Strange Meeting” describes a confrontation between the narrator and another soldier in a dreamlike setting. They may both be dead, or the narrator may be alive but is soon to be dead; critics have embraced both interpretations. What is not ambiguous is that the narrator has killed the man he meets—and killed him in a frame of mind in which he saw his victim as a completely depersonalized entity. Adopting a distance from killing is not surprising or unusual in one who has been fighting for years. The other man's humanity and the loss that will be suffered by his death confront the narrator in this last meeting, as he becomes aware that he is as dead as the man he encounters: “Let us sleep now.” This poem has often been cited as an example of Owen's increasing sophistication as a poet. What cannot be known is whether that skill would have continued to grow, if he had survived the war. Another question is whether he would have moved to other themes or, like many of his peers, made the war his exclusive subject.