However, the poem is also a harrowing and vivid account of a poison gas attack, with a number of details which immediately stick in the memory, and haunt our dreams as they haunted Owen’s, showing how naive and damaging outlooks like Jessie Pope’s really were. Indeed, Pope is the ‘friend’ whom Owen addresses directly in the closing lines of the poem.
#LONG WAR 2 BEST CLASSES PRO#
One of the most famous of all war poems, ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’ (the title is a quotation from the Roman poet Horace, Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori or ‘it is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country’) was written in response to the jingoistic pro-war verses being written by people like Jessie Pope. (Tragically, the telegram informing Owen’s mother that her son had been killed in action the week before arrived the day of the Armistice, while everyone else was celebrating the end of the war.)
Sweet! and decorous!’ Although he drafted the poem that October, the surviving drafts of ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’ show that Owen revised and revisited it on several occasions thereafter, before his death the following November – just one week before the Armistice. In October 1917, Wilfred Owen wrote to his mother from Craiglockhart Hospital: ‘Here is a gas poem, done yesterday…….the famous Latin tag (from Horace, Odes) means of course it is sweet and meet to die for one’s country. His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin…
If in some smothering dreams, you too could paceĪnd watch the white eyes writhing in his face,