Remembrance Day 1; Wilfred Owen
Last week Robbo read to us Wilfed Owen’s moving poem ‘Anthem for a Doomed Youth’. To commemorate Remembrance Day, we bring you another of Wilfred Owen’s poems.
Dulce et Decorum Est
Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turn our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; and blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of tired, outstripped Five-nines that dropped behind.
Gas! GAS! Quick boys! – An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling,
And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime…
Dim, through the misty panes 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;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues, -
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro partria mori.
Note: Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori is a line from the Roman poet Horace and translates as ‘It is sweet and proper to die for one’s country’. Before 1920 it was commonly inscribed on war memorials. After its description as ‘the old lie’ in Owen’s poem, the phrase was no longer used on war memorials and acquired something of an anti-war and anti-propaganda meaning, the opposite of its original intended message.
