# Dulce et Decorum est
**Dulce et Decorum est** is a war poem by the British soldier-poet [Wilfred Owen](https://www.edgepedia.org/wilfred-owen) (1893–1918), drafted at Craiglockhart War Hospital in October 1917 and published posthumously in *Poems* (1920), the collection edited by [Siegfried Sassoon](https://www.edgepedia.org/siegfried-sassoon)[1](https://wilfredowen.org.uk/poetry/dulce-et-decorum-est) • [2](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/wilfred-owen). Its title and closing lines quote the Latin tag from the Roman poet Horace, *dulce et decorum est pro patria mori* ("It is sweet and fitting to die for one's country"), which Owen brands "the old Lie" after describing a soldier dying in a gas attack[3](https://englicist.com/topics/dulce-et-decorum-est) • [4](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/148250/no-case-of-petty-right-or-wrong). The [Poetry Foundation](https://www.edgepedia.org/poetry-foundation) calls it one of the most famous poems to refute that patriotic formula directly[4](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/148250/no-case-of-petty-right-or-wrong).
| Key fact | Detail |
|---|---|
| Author | Wilfred Owen, British Army lieutenant, killed in action in November 1918 one week before the Armistice[2](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/wilfred-owen) |
| Written | Drafted at Craiglockhart War Hospital, Edinburgh; earliest surviving draft dated 8 October 1917; revised at Scarborough or Ripon between January and March 1918[1](https://wilfredowen.org.uk/poetry/dulce-et-decorum-est) • [5](https://www.britishlibrary.cn/en/articles/a-close-reading-of-dulce-et-decorum-est/) |
| Title source | Horace, *Odes* III.ii.13: "Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori"[3](https://englicist.com/topics/dulce-et-decorum-est) |
| Structure | Four unequal stanzas; the first two in sonnet form, the last two looser in structure[1](https://wilfredowen.org.uk/poetry/dulce-et-decorum-est) |
| Subject | A night march, a gas attack in which one man fails to fit his helmet in time, and the survivor's recurring nightmare of the dying soldier[6](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46560/dulce-et-decorum-est?trk=article-ssr-frontend-pulse_little-text-block) |
| First publication | Posthumously in *Poems*, edited by Siegfried Sassoon; the New York Viking Press printing is dated 1921[2](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/wilfred-owen) • [6](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46560/dulce-et-decorum-est?trk=article-ssr-frontend-pulse_little-text-block) |
| Draft dedication | "To Jessie Pope etc," crossed out and revised to "To a certain Poetess"[5](https://www.britishlibrary.cn/en/articles/a-close-reading-of-dulce-et-decorum-est/) |
## Composition
Owen wrote to his mother on 16 October 1917 from Craiglockhart War Hospital in Edinburgh, where he was recovering from shell shock: "Here is a gas poem, done yesterday, (which is not private, but not final). The famous Latin tag [from Horace, Odes, III, ii. 13] means of course It is sweet and meet to die for one's country. Sweet! and decorous!"[5](https://www.britishlibrary.cn/en/articles/a-close-reading-of-dulce-et-decorum-est/). The earliest surviving draft is dated 8 October 1917, and Owen revised the poem at [Scarborough](https://www.edgepedia.org/scarborough) or Ripon between January and March 1918, going through several drafts[1](https://wilfredowen.org.uk/poetry/dulce-et-decorum-est) • [5](https://www.britishlibrary.cn/en/articles/a-close-reading-of-dulce-et-decorum-est/).
The writing had roots in Owen's own service. On 19 January 1917 he wrote to his mother that, while scouting, he had "got overtaken by GAS"[5](https://www.britishlibrary.cn/en/articles/a-close-reading-of-dulce-et-decorum-est/). The Poetry Foundation's biography traces the poem's origins to Owen's experiences of January 1917, describing explicitly the horror of a gas attack and the death of a wounded man flung into a wagon[2](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/wilfred-owen).
The manuscript records a collaboration. Owen met the established officer-poet Siegfried Sassoon at Craiglockhart in 1917, and the surviving draft bears traces of Sassoon's hand, pencilling in suggestions beside Owen's revisions; on reading the manuscript Sassoon put a question mark beside the word "ecstasy," which Owen kept[5](https://www.britishlibrary.cn/en/articles/a-close-reading-of-dulce-et-decorum-est/). At one point Owen replaced the word "clawing" with "haunting"[5](https://www.britishlibrary.cn/en/articles/a-close-reading-of-dulce-et-decorum-est/).
## The poem's movement
The poem runs through three linked scenes. It opens in medias res on a column of soldiers trudging away from the front, "Bent double, like old beggars under sacks," many having lost their boots and marching "blood-shod," deaf even to the gas shells dropping behind them[6](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46560/dulce-et-decorum-est?trk=article-ssr-frontend-pulse_little-text-block). The second scene is the gas attack: "Gas! GAS! Quick, boys!" and the frantic fitting of clumsy helmets, too late for one man, whom the speaker sees drowning "as under a green sea"[6](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46560/dulce-et-decorum-est?trk=article-ssr-frontend-pulse_little-text-block). The final movement turns to dreams in which the dying man plunges at the speaker, "guttering, choking, drowning," and then to the direct address: if the reader could watch the man behind the wagon and hear the blood "come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs," he "would not tell with such high zest / To children ardent for some desperate glory, / The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est / Pro patria mori"[6](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46560/dulce-et-decorum-est?trk=article-ssr-frontend-pulse_little-text-block).
The Wilfred Owen Association notes that the intention was "not so much to induce pity as to shock, especially civilians at home who believed war was noble and glorious"[1](https://wilfredowen.org.uk/poetry/dulce-et-decorum-est). In the first stanza the men's wretched condition is expressed through simile and metaphor, comparisons to old beggars and hags applied to soldiers who were, in fact, young[1](https://wilfredowen.org.uk/poetry/dulce-et-decorum-est).
Santanu Das, author of *Touch and Intimacy in First World War Literature* (Cambridge, 2005), describes the poem as tracing pain along a bodily axis from exposed feet in the first stanza to exposed nerves in the last. In his reading the sound patterns act out the imagery: the heavy monosyllabic rhymes of the opening (sacks/backs, sludge/trudge) recall Sassoon's war realism, while the closing sequence "guttering, choking, drowning" suggests the trauma victim who, as Freud noted in *Beyond the Pleasure Principle* (1920), is forced to relive the past experience as perpetual present[5](https://www.britishlibrary.cn/en/articles/a-close-reading-of-dulce-et-decorum-est/). Das also warns that to read the text as "history," a transcript of trench horrors, is to ignore its singularity as poetry; he calls it one of the primal moments in world poetry when lyric form bears the trauma of modern industrial warfare[5](https://www.britishlibrary.cn/en/articles/a-close-reading-of-dulce-et-decorum-est/).
## The Horatian allusion and Jessie Pope
The title phrase is the first words of a saying from Horace's *Odes* (Ode 3.2), a text commonly taught in Latin lessons before the First World War, when Horace's ideas of honorable conduct were widely accepted[3](https://englicist.com/topics/dulce-et-decorum-est) • [7](https://www.litcharts.com/poetry/wilfred-owen/dulce-et-decorum-est). The line carried real cultural weight: in *The Times* in 1918 [Rudyard Kipling](https://www.edgepedia.org/rudyard-kipling) called it "the best-known line of war poetry in all the world"[8](https://ssu.elearning.unipd.it/mod/resource/view.php?id=226597). Modern readers are now more likely to associate the words with Owen than with Horace, even though Owen was never fully proficient in Latin[9](https://blog.oup.com/2024/05/classical-allusions-in-owen-and-rosenbergs-war-poems/).
In draft the poem was dedicated, with what the [British Library](https://www.edgepedia.org/british-library) describes as bitter irony, to "Jessie Pope etc," crossed out and revised to "To a certain Poetess"[5](https://www.britishlibrary.cn/en/articles/a-close-reading-of-dulce-et-decorum-est/). Pope was a popular Home Front poet and journalist, well known for patriotic verse urging enlistment; her *War Poems* appeared in 1915[10](https://academic.oup.com/edited-volume/43655/chapter-abstract/365290591). She is possibly the addressee ("My friend") of the final stanza, though Owen may have meant writers of heroic war verse more generally[5](https://www.britishlibrary.cn/en/articles/a-close-reading-of-dulce-et-decorum-est/). The Wilfred Owen Association identifies "my friend" with Pope, "whose patriotic poems epitomised the glorification of war that Owen so despised"[1](https://wilfredowen.org.uk/poetry/dulce-et-decorum-est). A comparative study by Anderson D. Araujo published in *Media, War & Conflict* (2014) reads Owen's drafts of 1917–1920 against Pope's 1915 jingoist ballad "The Lads of the Maple Leaf," arguing that the two politically opposed poems converge on Horace's slogan[11](https://openurl.ebsco.com/contentitem/gcd%3A99825262?crl=f&id=ebsco%3Agcd%3A99825262&jrnl=17506352&sid=ebsco%3Aplink%3Acrawler-gcd).
## Gas warfare behind the poem
The attack the poem depicts belongs to a weapon introduced in Owen's lifetime. On 22 April 1915, German specialist troops released a wave of chlorine gas from cylinders embedded in the ground at the northern end of the Ypres salient, forcing two French colonial divisions from their positions and creating a 5-mile gap in the Allied line; this was the first effective use of poison gas on the [Western Front](https://www.edgepedia.org/western-front-world-war-i), and at the time no operational gas mask existed, so Allied soldiers improvised with linen masks soaked in water and respirators made from lint and tape[12](https://www.theworldwar.org/learn/about-wwi/spotlight-first-usage-poison-gas). By 1916 issued equipment included the British Large Box Respirator and Small Box Respirator, the French M2 mask, and the Russian Zelinsky-Kumant Helmet, so masks of the kind Owen's soldiers "fumble" into place had become standard trench equipment[13](https://encyclopedia.1914-1918-online.net/article/gas-warfare/?format=pdf).
## Reception
The poem appeared after Owen's death. Only five poems were published in his lifetime, and almost all of his work appeared posthumously, importantly in the bestselling collection *Poems* (1920), edited by Sassoon with the assistance of [Edith Sitwell](https://www.edgepedia.org/edith-sitwell), which contains 23 poems[2](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/wilfred-owen). [Benjamin Britten](https://www.edgepedia.org/benjamin-britten), the British composer who set nine of Owen's works as the text of his *War Requiem*, called Owen "by far our greatest war poet, and one of the most original poets of this century"; in the same introduction he named "Dulce et Decorum est" the poem he considers Owen's best and one of his most quoted[14](https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1034/old/1034-h/1034-h.htm).
**Critical standing.** The Poetry Foundation notes that the fist-shaking conclusions of "Insensibility" and "Dulce et Decorum Est" have been models for generations of writers[15](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/70211/wilfred-owen-insensibility). Not all judgment has been favorable: [W. B. Yeats](https://www.edgepedia.org/w-b-yeats), who objected to war poetry on the grounds that "passive suffering is not a theme for poetry," attacked Owen's verse as "all blood, dirt & sugar stick," and his remark about somebody's "worst & most famous poem" in a glass-case in the British Museum may, as Das suggests, well have referred to the "Dulce" manuscript[5](https://www.britishlibrary.cn/en/articles/a-close-reading-of-dulce-et-decorum-est/).
A century on, the poem has moved into general cultural memory. Das records, citing the critic Jon Stallworthy, that the whole British tradition of anti-war poetry, built on poems such as "Dulce Et Decorum Est," may have played a part in the protest marches in London against the Iraq war in 2003[5](https://www.britishlibrary.cn/en/articles/a-close-reading-of-dulce-et-decorum-est/). In a draft preface Owen had stated the stance behind the poem: "all a poet can do today is warn. That is why the true poets must be truthful"[4](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/148250/no-case-of-petty-right-or-wrong).
## References
1. [Poetry Critique: Dulce Et Decorum Est, The Wilfred Owen Association](https://wilfredowen.org.uk/poetry/dulce-et-decorum-est)
2. [Wilfred Owen (poet biography), The Poetry Foundation](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/wilfred-owen)
3. ["Dulce et Decorum Est" – Summary & Analysis, Englicist](https://englicist.com/topics/dulce-et-decorum-est)
4. ["No Case of Petty Right or Wrong," The Poetry Foundation](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/148250/no-case-of-petty-right-or-wrong)
5. [Santanu Das, "A close reading of 'Dulce Et Decorum Est'," The British Library](https://www.britishlibrary.cn/en/articles/a-close-reading-of-dulce-et-decorum-est/)
6. [Wilfred Owen, "Dulce et Decorum Est," full text and notes, The Poetry Foundation](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46560/dulce-et-decorum-est?trk=article-ssr-frontend-pulse_little-text-block)
7. ["Dulce et Decorum Est" Poem Summary and Analysis, LitCharts](https://www.litcharts.com/poetry/wilfred-owen/dulce-et-decorum-est)
8. ["The Poet as Rhetor: A Reading of Wilfred Owen's 'Dulce et Decorum Est'," University of Padova course resource](https://ssu.elearning.unipd.it/mod/resource/view.php?id=226597)
9. ["Classical allusions in Owen and Rosenberg's war poems," OUPblog (2024)](https://blog.oup.com/2024/05/classical-allusions-in-owen-and-rosenbergs-war-poems/)
10. [Reading Dickinson through Wilfred Owen, The Oxford Handbook of Emily Dickinson, Oxford Academic](https://academic.oup.com/edited-volume/43655/chapter-abstract/365290591)
11. [Anderson D. Araujo, "Jessie Pope, Wilfred Owen, and the politics of pro patria mori in World War I poetry," Media, War & Conflict 7(3), 2014](https://openurl.ebsco.com/contentitem/gcd%3A99825262?crl=f&id=ebsco%3Agcd%3A99825262&jrnl=17506352&sid=ebsco%3Aplink%3Acrawler-gcd)
12. [First Usage of Poison Gas, National WWI Museum and Memorial](https://www.theworldwar.org/learn/about-wwi/spotlight-first-usage-poison-gas)
13. ["Gas Warfare," 1914-1918-online, International Encyclopedia of the First World War](https://encyclopedia.1914-1918-online.net/article/gas-warfare/?format=pdf)
14. [The Project Gutenberg eBook of Poems, by Wilfred Owen](https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1034/old/1034-h/1034-h.htm)
15. [Wilfred Owen: "Insensibility," The Poetry Foundation](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/70211/wilfred-owen-insensibility)
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*Topic: Encyclopedia › Society and history › Conflict and security › Wars, campaigns, and incidents › Wars and campaigns (whole-conflict histories) › World War I › World War I participation, home fronts, and personnel › World War I poets, wartime press, and correspondents*
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