A DELUDING IDEOLOGY: DULCE ET DECORUM EST PRO PATRIA MORI

Christine Satter, 3823431 23 April 2012 1013 words, quotes excluded. Wilfred Owen was a poet who lived during the period of the first World War. He enlisted in the army in 1915 and was sent to France as a lieutenant. He got injured in the trenches and was sent to a military hospital for fourteen months to recover, suffering from a shell shock. There, he started writing poems about the war. In September 1918, Owen was sent back to France and there he died, one week before the war ended. His poems were later collected and published by his friend and fellow war poet Siegfried Sassoon (Damrosch et al., 2009). Owen was one of the first poets to write about the war in a clearly negative and deromanticizing way. Owens poetry clearly reflects and reacts to the dominant ideology with regard to the war, that was at work in England during his lifetime. Thus, it can be analyzed from an ideological political perspective. The poem Dulce et Decorum Est, written during his convalescence, is among Owens most well-known poems. In order to analyze it from an ideological perspective, first the relevant concepts and literary theory will be discussed. Then will be elaborated on the poem itself: its form, what it says and what message is being communicated. Finally, the content of the poem will be connected to the theory. The concept of ideology was first introduced in Marxist political theory. According to this theory, the way we think is either wholly or largely conditioned by the way the economy is organized (Bertens, 2008, p. 63). The organization of the economy is called the base of a society and it determines the superstructure, which refers to everything that may belong to culture, such as education, law, religion, philosophy, politics and arts. The resulting superstructure of an economic system, such as capitalism, can be characterized by unequal class relations. However, we are blind to this state of affairs, for we are deluded by ideology. As Bertens states, Marxist ideology is that which makes us experience our life in a certain way and makes us believe that that way of seeing ourselves and the world is natural (p. 66). The way we see the world, is thus not the true picture of how it is, but an ideologically colored version. Moreover, ideology is omnipresent in what we do, and therefore also in our literature. Marxists may differ on the extent to which the cultural superstructure is determined by the socio-economic base. This means that according to some, there is some room for agency and self-reflection, and artists may sometimes purposefully go against the grain of ideology. Wilfred Owens poem Dulce et Decorum Est is divided in four distinct stanzas that have their own purpose in the poem. It starts with an octet, followed by a sestet and a distichon and finishes with a stanza of twelve lines. The first sixteen lines tell a story and the last twelve lines draw the conclusion out of it. The poem starts with the description of a situation in a war. In the first paragraph, he draws a picture of a group of soldiers that is

making its way over a battlefield. They struggle through the landscape to return towards shelter and rest. They are very tired and weary. They lost their personal belongings and are deaf even to the hoots, because of the shells that dropped behind them: 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. (5) 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. Next, a bomb of gas was thrown near them, and the soldiers hurry to get away from it and put on respirators. However, one of them was not on time and got stuck somewhere in the gas. They see him drown in a sea of gas and dying a cruel death. Gas! Gas! Quick, boys! An ecstasy of fumbling, (10) Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time; But someone still was yelling out and stumbling And floundring 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. The narrator subsequently tells us how he can still see the picture of the dying man in his dreams: (15) In all my dreams, before my helpless sight, He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning. In the last stanza, he gives an account of the experience of walking behind the wagon that carried the dead man and of the looks of the man. Also, he describes the sounds that the blood in his lungs make when the wagon jolts. Finally, in the last four lines, the narrator tells us that no one would speak high to children of the war and would not say that it is sweet and fitting to die for your fatherland, if they had experienced those same things in the war as he has. 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, (20) 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,-(25) 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.
(Owen, Dulce et Decorum Est. In: Damrosch et al., 2009, p. 390)

The poem starts out very organized, with a stanza of eight lines following a strict pentameter and the alternating rhyme scheme ABABCDCD. Every line has ten syllables, but a consistent rhythm cannot be detected. The second stanza has six lines, again following the pentameter, but the rhyme scheme is broken off after the sixth line, EFEFGH, only to continue in the third stanza, a distichon with rhyme scheme GH. This can be interpreted as emphasizing the reflection of the narrator in these two lines, that stands apart from the rest of the poem. The last stanza of twelve lines follows the alternating rhyme scheme again: IJIJKLKLMNMN. However, in the final line, the rules concerning meter seem to be forgotten, making the message stand out more powerfully. It is in these last four lines that the ideology of Englishmen regarding the first World War is expressed: it is an honor to go to war and fight and die for your fatherland. In the period before and during the war, all young men were more or less expected to enlist, as that was the decent and honorable thing to do, according to the ideology. In the same lines the narrator expresses his dissent with this ideology. In the first half of the poem, he illustrates a situation in war, where a man dies an undeserved death about which nothing is sweet and fitting. This illustration he uses for his argument in the last twelve lines: nobody should think it is honorable to die for the fatherland, because the reality is not honorable at all, but cruel, disgusting and unworthy. This makes clear how ideology can delude us and make us do things that are not beneficial for ourselves, such as going to war and die in battle. Owen, being awakened to see a truer picture of the reality of war, shows his dissent with this ideology and resists it in his poem.

References Bertens, H. (2008). Literary theory: the basics (2nd ed.). New York, NY: Routledge. Damrosch, D. et al. (Eds.) (2009). The Longman Anthology of World Literature: Volume F, the twentieth century. Pearson Longman. Owen, W. (1918). Dulce et Decorum Est (publ. 1920). In Damrosch, D. et al. (Eds.) (2009). The Longman Anthology of World Literature: Volume F, the twentieth century (p. 390). Pearson Longman.