[Newspoetry] from poetry daily

[William at Spineless Books]

Martín Espada's Poetry Month Pick, April 13, 2007

"Dulce et Decorum Est"
  by Wilfred Owen (1893-1918)

  Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
  Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
  Till on the haunting flares we turned 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; all 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 patria mori.

 
Martín Espada Comments:

Wilfred Owen is a "Cassandra poet:" a neglected prophet. This World War 
I poem is still relevant today, as we mark another anniversary of the 
war in Iraq. "Dulce et Decorum Est" is a  well-known work, yet its 
warnings continue to be ignored. Like Cassandra, Owen has been heard, 
but not heeded. Thus, the poem bears repeating here and everywhere.

Occasionally, a poem takes shape as an argument with another poet. This 
poem began as an argument with two other poets. The Latin title comes 
from the phrase, "Dulce et Decorum Est Pro Patria Mori"—how sweet and 
decorous it is to die for one’s country—which, in turn, comes from an 
ode by the Roman poet Horace. Owen's poem was originally addressed to 
Jessie Pope, or a "certain poetess;" on the most literal level, she is 
the "you" in the last stanza.

Pope produced several books of patriotic doggerel in England during the 
Great War. Jon Stallworthy, in his definitive biography of Wilfred 
Owen,  cites Pope's poem, "The Call," as a possible provocation for 
Owen. This is the first stanza of the poem, which Stallworthy calls a 
"disturbing variation of the 'Who's for tennis' formula:"

Who's for the trench?—
     Are you, my laddie?
  Who'll follow the French—
     Will you, my laddie?
  Who's fretting to begin,
  Who's going to win?
  And who wants to save his skin—
     Do you, my laddie?

An officer in the British Army and a veteran of the trenches, Owen 
developed shell-shock and was sent to Craiglockhart War Hospital in 
Edinburgh, Scotland. There  he was famously befriended and mentored by 
another soldier-poet, Siegfried Sassoon; and there, in October 1917,  
he wrote the first known draft of "Dulce et Decorum Est."

Owen revised the poem relentlessly. His message was urgent, but Owen 
was as committed to his craft as he was to the message. The passage 
dealing with shelling and poison gas was originally longer; the poet 
deftly deleted some onomatopoeic language ("fup, fop, fup") that failed 
to adequately evoke the bombardment for him. He tried several "g" 
words—"gargling," "gurgling," "goggling"—before he settled on the word, 
"guttering." Owen subjected his battlefield trauma to the demands of 
his poet's ear.

The poet bases his appeal to reason on an appeal to the senses. The 
images are terribly vivid, the diction chiseled and exact. Soldiers 
march, "blood-shod;" they wrestle with their gas masks in "an ecstasy 
of fumbling;" a dying man's "white eyes" are "writhing in his face." 
The word "gargling," previously rejected in favor of the word 
"guttering," returns in the last stanza when "the blood/ comes gargling 
from the froth-corrupted lungs." Words like "ecstasy" and "cud" are 
startling in this context, yet apt. Writing of unbearable brutality, 
witnessed first-hand, Owen is as meticulous as a bird feathering a 
nest.

According to Geoff Dyer, author of The Missing of the Somme, "the anger 
in (Owen’s) poems always comes from this: from the fact of having 
witnessed what civilians at home could never conceive of seeing." At 
the same time, this is a controlled anger, channeled into art.

After the barrage of metaphors and similes, Owen distills his language 
to its essence, and calls "the old Lie" by its name. The simplicity of 
these three words stand in sharp contrast to the ornate Latin phrase 
they condemn. Indeed, Dyer writes, "the Latin has been so Owenized as 
to render further satirical twisting superfluous."  (Of course, a 
specialized vocabulary of warmongering still exists.)

This is a poet's wrath: He is outraged at the corruption of language 
itself, by Jessie Pope but also by a ruling elite inciting the majority 
to cooperate in their own destruction. Instead, as Owen said in the 
preface to his collection of poems, "the true Poets must be truthful."

That collection was published posthumously in 1920. Owen was killed in 
France on November 4, 1918, a week before the Armistice. The telegram 
announcing his death was delivered to his family home as the Armistice 
bells were ringing. He was twenty-five years old.

Last fall I visited the English Faculty Library at Oxford University in 
the company of professor Jon Stallworthy. There I had the opportunity 
to hold the first known draft of this poem in my hands.

For further reading, I highly recommend the biography by Stallworthy, 
called Wilfred Owen (Oxford University Press/ Chatto and Windus, 1974), 
and The Poems of Wilfred Owen, edited by Stallworthy (Chatto and 
Windus, 1990).  See also  The Missing of the Somme by Geoff Dyer 
(Phoenix Press, 1994).


About Martín Espada:
Martín Espada was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1957. He has published 
numerous books as a poet, editor, and translator. His most recent 
collection is The Republic of Poetry. Alabanza: New and Selected Poems 
1982-2002, received the Paterson Award for Sustained Literary 
Achievement and was named an American Library Association Notable Book 
of the Year. An earlier collection, Imagine the Angels of Bread, won an 
American Book Award and was a finalist for the National Book Critics 
Circle Award. The recipient of a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial 
Foundation Fellowship as well as the PEN/Revson Fellowship, Espada is a 
professor in the English Department at the University of 
Massachusetts-Amherst, where he teaches creative writing and the work 
of Pablo Neruda.