The Sensory Imagery of Dulce Et Decorum Est by Wilfred Owen's - Research Paper Example

 Written in 1917 and published posthumously in 1920, Wilfred Owen's war poem “Dulce et Decorum Est” is a powerful piece of literature which rejected the glorification of war in propaganda which suggested that 'it is sweet and noble to die for one's country'. At the time this poem was truly shocking, highlighting the realities of then-modern warfare – new technologies had revolutionized international conflict and civilians were simply unaware of what their country's soldiers were living through. Owen, who was immensely troubled by his wartime experiences, wrote a significant amount of poetry about the Great War, describing the unimaginable in terms of the unknowable. However, as film developed as a medium, and the unknowable became manifest in people's acted interpretations of it, audiences began to react to Owen's work in a slightly different but nonetheless perceptible way. In “Dulce Et Decorum Est”, the horrors of war are revealed through visual imagery, auditory imagery, and the ironic juxtaposition of contradictory ideas. First, Owen's manipulation of the visual begins in the opening stanza, when he refers to the characters of the poem as blind: the reader is suddenly catapulted into a half-seen world of horrors, a nightmare which overwhelms the senses and leaves one at a lesser capacity. When his comrade is gassed, the speaker sees him “drowning” in the poison “As under a green sea” (14), portraying the limited visibility of the piece. The image that this line invokes is worthy of consideration because it must have aroused different ideas in its contemporary and modern audiences: in the twenty-first century, we are familiar with movie sequences shot underwater which depict drowning, but people reading this poem in 1920 would have imagined standing on a bank watching someone slip out of view under the water. The modern image is one of impassive observation, whereas the older one is of futility and mystery. Owen's continuing description of the gassed soldier brings the then-only-imagined horror of drowning to life; the man's suffering “before [the speaker's] helpless sight” (15) is evocative of filmed underwater struggles, to which a modern audience is sadly inured. Meanwhile, the transition of media input from radio to television has made another aspect of Owen's work more effective – his use of auditory imagery has a more resonant influence on a modern audience who are not as accustomed to thinking of literature as oral. From the first stanza, which describes the coughing of the soldiers, to the end of the poem when the gassed soldier's blood “Comes gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs” (22), “Dulce Et Decorum Est” is alive with noise – so much noise that it deafens the soldiers, and remains half-heard. In the same way that Owen uses blindness to suggest that there are more terrible sights than can be seen, he uses deafness to hint (heavily) that the trenches were the home to sounds so traumatizing as to be beyond imagination. Given the speaker's graphic description of the gassed soldier's bloody coughing, this intelligently-used device has a forceful effect. Auditory imagery is also present in the second stanza, which begins with the speaker interrupting himself to call out to his comrades: “GAS! Gas! Quick, boys!” (9). The unmarked, uncredited exclamation drags the reader bodily into his setting, inducing us to hear his cry through deafened ears, and to feel the rising sense of panic. It is a direct address and as such it becomes a sound. In the twenty-first century, we are not used to hearing literature, so this is particularly unnerving; almost one hundred years ago, most information was transmitted orally, and to 'hear' something from a poem would have had less power. Incidentally, the chance reference to “boys” also reinforces the horror of sending children to war. Although many of the soldiers may have been adults, Owen references the large numbers of teenagers who signed up to fight for Britain, and suggests that even adults should not have been put into such a mistakenly glorified situation. Finally, Owen's ironic juxtaposition of conflicting concepts makes this poem truly memorable. From the description of soldiers as “old beggars under sacks” in the first line, to the final couplet and its subversion of patriotism as a lie, Owen pairs together ideas which do not usually go together. This discord that this produces is reflective of the wartime experience of many people who went to France and other European countries to battle Germany. Part of the shock of “Dulce Et Decorum Est” comes from its depiction of soldiers' uncaring attitude towards legitimately terrifying events, such as the “haunting flares” on which “we turned our backs” (3). The normalization of such horror is unimaginable to anyone who has not experienced it, and Owen spotlights it by making it such a small and anticlimactic part of the poem. Another shocking phrase is the “ecstasy of fumbling” (9), which refers to the soldiers donning their “clumsy helmets” (10) in response to the poison gas. The irony of using the word 'ecstasy' in this situation, which has connotations of joy and happiness, initially surprises the reader before inducing us to remember its original meaning of frenzy and of senselessness. In compelling a momentary pause, this brief phrase resounds with implications both ancient and new. Through the verbal irony of using words which suggest the opposite of what the speaker actually means, Owen saturates “Dulce Et Decorum Est” with shock. His hatred of war bubbles over, unimpeded, by use of both obvious and subtle literary devices. In conclusion, the sensory imagery of “Dulce Et Decorum Est” reveals a particular horror of war beyond the obvious gore: that a soldier in World War I was ensnared in a double trap, stuck inside both one's own damaged, treacherous head, and in a dangerous, continuously traumatic war zone. As the world around filled with “shells” (8) and “gas” (9), one could not trust one's own senses to be on alert – and the reader is effectively dragged into this very setting, in Owen's most powerful attempt at persuasion. The raw statement of first-hand events is equally as effective as his beautifully-written descriptions of them, which call upon the unknowable – the “devil's [face] sick of sin” (20) – to portray the unimaginable – a young man coughing his lungs out just because he dropped his gas mask at the wrong moment. The central event of the poem – the death around which all else turns – is not something for which the young man in question can be blamed. Owen intended that the futility of his character's commonplace death would spark debate and end not only the war, but war itself. At the time of its publication in 1920, “Dulce Et Decorum Est” was a shockingly visual piece of poetry, an obvious and gory tract which touched on an issue very close to people's hearts and prominent in their minds; now that people are less shocked by bloodshed, and have come to expect such carnage in warfare, the poem has become more subtle, evoking the lost sense of hearing in a visual world. Works Cited Owen, Wilfred. “Dulce Et Decorum Est.” 1920. Emory, n.d. Web. 3 May 2011. Read More