The tone of Wilfred Owen's poem is ironic and horrific. "Dulce et Decorum est pro para mia" is a Latin quotation by Horace, the great Roman poet. It means, "It is sweet and becoming to die for one's country."
Owens begins disabusing the reader of this notion from the very first line. The picture the speaker creates of the soldiers "Bent double, like old beggars sacks, / Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge" (1-2). To this day, many young men and women are enchanted by romantic ideas of war, which has never been pretty in reality.
But World War I brought horrors never known and an enemy, mustard gas, that was unseen. The speaker describes the frantic haste to don protective gear but the insidious cloud is fast moving. He describes watching a fellow solider be overcome "under a green sea," the gas, under which "I saw him drowning" (14) Death by mustard gas was hideously painful: this is why the man is "flound'ring like a man in fire or lime" (11).
In death, the living watch the dying man's "gargling from the froth corrupted blood" (22).
Finally, the speaker realizes the "old lie." It is not sweet or becoming to die in this way.
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