Poetry: Blog Entry 2

Analyze the techniques used by Wilfred Owen in ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’

First Stanza

The soldiers were going off to bed, all overly tired and in very bad shape.It is important to show how exhausted the soldiers were, and how much the war affects them in more ways people reading could imagine. Old, limped, fatigue, tired .Since they are all younger men they are assumed to be in their best shape, the war wore them out that much. The pace and rhythm due to all of the commas is slow and depressed, when reading you stop multiple times while reading for dramatic effects. This shows how slow the men are moving and the rhythm drags on to emphasize this. The words sludge and trudge set the tone and mood of a more depressed story by the work choice.Hoots, outstripped, nines.They all imitate the “s” sound, we can call this an assonance poem, where sounds are getting repeated but there is no rhyming involved. Because the men lost their boots they were walking around barefoot in blood baths of their other fellow soldiers. The word blood-shod resembles blood shot. This shows the harsh time they just went through and how bloody the situation was.

Second Stanza

There was a gas bomb, the soldiers had to frantically get ready but were caught off guard. They all drowned in the gas and smoke, and suffered a harsh death and it all felt like a dream. The pace of the story is picking up and everything is happening all at once, if there was more punctuation it would have been slowed down.

The pace and rhythm is being shown when there is less punctuation, and the words were starting to rhyme and sound much better together. Using the capital letters grabs the reader's attention to show how frantic the situation was and how crazy. Before the text was very slow and calm, this is when it starts to pick up its pace.

There is a lot of gas, it is thick and green, and very dark, “as under a green sea, i saw him drowning” The narrator is saying how much smoke there was it was overwhelming the man he was getting drowned in the gas.
Suddenly the call goes up: "Gas!" We delve deeper into the scene as chemical warfare raises its ugly head and one man gets caught and left behind. He's too slow to don his gas mask and helmet, which would have saved his life by filtering out the toxins.

"An ecstasy of fumbling," the poet writes. The ecstasy is used here in the sense of a trance, like frenzy as the men hurriedly put on their helmets. It has nothing to do with happiness.

Here the poem becomes personal and metaphorical. The speaker sees the man consumed by gas as a drowning man, as if he were underwater. Misty panes add an unreal element to this traumatic scene, as though the speaker is looking through a window.

Third Stanza

Only two lines long, this stanza brings home the personal effect of the scene on the speaker. The image sears through and scars despite the dream-like atmosphere created by the green gas and the floundering soldier.

Owen chose the word "guttering" to describe the tears streaming down the face of the unfortunate man, a symptom of inhaling toxic gas.

Fourth Stanza

The speaker widens the issue by confronting the reader and especially the people at home, far away from the war, suggesting that if they too could experience what he had witnessed, they would not be so quick to praise those who die in action. They would be lying to future generations if they though that death on the battlefield was sweet. Owen does not hold back. His vivid imagery is quite shocking, his message direct and his conclusion sincere.

Written by Audrey Salazar and Valerie Rubio