Critically analyze "Dulce Et Decorum Est" by Robert Owen.

Robert Owen's poem "Dulce Et Decorum Est" is an influential and moving poem about the horrors of World War I, known at the time of the writing as the Great War. The poem marked a departure from traditional poems about war such as Felicia Dorothea Hemans' "Casabiana" and Alfred, Lord Tennyson's "The Charge of the Light Brigade." Such poems glorified war and honored the sacrifice warriors made without focusing on the trauma the soldiers experienced. Owen, who had himself seen battle and was hospitalized for what we would now call post-traumatic stress disorder, began writing a new type of war poetry that was brutally honest. This poem was specifically written as an answer to the jingoistic war poetry of the time that was being written by writers like Jessie Pope, the "my friend" of line 25. The poem describes trench warfare and an attack of mustard or chlorine gas and the death of a soldier who failed to get his gas mask on in time. The poem's format, which uses a very traditional iambic pentameter with alternately rhyming lines, is unorthodox because of its heavy use of enjambment and caesura and a number of places where the rhythm deliberately falters. Enjambment, where there is no punctuation at the end of the line and the thought continues onto the next line, and caesura, where there is a hard stop in the middle of the line, work together to make the poem sound less "poetic." The rhymes are less obvious, and the rhythm becomes less sing-songy. That effect combined with repetition of very hard or harsh, guttural consonants such as "d," "k," and "g" allows the sound of the poem to match the harsh reality that is being described. The emotions evoked by the poem are powerful. Owen uses sparse yet descriptive wording to create unforgettable images in readers' minds. Lines like "He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning," "And watch the white eyes writhing in his face, / His hanging face," and "bitter as the cud/ Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues" are some of the most evocative constructions in all English poetry and can hardly be read without a lump forming in one's throat, tears springing to one's eyes, or a churning sensation arising in one's stomach. The poem ends dramatically by repeating the Latin saying that typified the jingoistic and traditionalist war poetry: "How beautiful and right it is to die for one's country." Owen calls it a "Lie," with irrefutable credibility, and ends the poem with an unfinished line, symbolizing the untimely end of so many of England's finest young men who lost their lives in the war. Unfortunately, Owen himself was one of the men cut off prematurely; he died in action a week before the war ended. We will never know what additional contributions Owen could have made to literature and poetry had he survived, but we are indebted to him for his bravery in both his military service and in his writing.