In reference to the “tired outstripped five nines that dropped behind,” line. In order to clear up any confusion about my “problem” with this line, or rather with the word “tired” here I’ll post this comment then insert it in the notes. 5.9 inches was the size of the artillery shell, hence the name, but both the rocket launcher and the shells were called five nines. Do you see the five nines mentioned here as the rockets themselves or as the rocket launcher? I see the five nines as the bombs themselves because the bombs “drop behind” the soldiers, which the rocket launchers obviously couldn’t do. Plainly the rocket launchers aren’t crashing to earth just behind the very relieved soldiers. Also the “hoots” would be the sound of the bombs in the air, rather than the boom of the rocket launcher being fired. Fair enough? So, the five nines mentioned here as “tired” are the bombs not the thing that fires the bombs. The rockets, not the rocket launchers. Owen is of course personifying the bombs as "tired" because the have been being fired all day. But here is the problem with “tired”, that once pointed out, (obviously more clearly than I have previously done), may stick with you. Bombs and rockets DON’T FIRE. They ARE FIRED. The device that fires the bombs or rockets, the rocket launcher, can be accurately personified as tired because it has been firing all day. But not the bombs themselves. The bombs themselves can begin to be tired only after they have been fired because before this they are not doing anything. The rocker-launcher can be tired, but the rockets themselves can’t be. See the difference? (Of course this may not bother you, and the last thing I would wish is for it to eclipse the other far more interesting and countless successes of the poem, but the line, or rather that word jarred for me once someone pointed it out to me). To clarify. If you like, think of a gun. A gun can be accurately personified as tired. But can a bullet? Like a rocket, we can imagine a bullet or bomb as tired if it has travelled a long way and has had an arduous journey, but we cannot say that it has been firing all day because each bomb or bullet is only fired once. The next step is to acknowledge that the soldier sees the bombs as tired, so what are we to make of that? if we don’t want to leave the line on the accurate but rather niggling ‘Well, bombs can’t literally be tired,’ (though rocket launchers can be tired), as I just have. I can make three suggestions. 1 One is that the soldier is so tired himself that he projects his tiredness onto everything else in his environment. That seems a highly realistic thing for someone in that situation to do, and would be similar to Thomas Hardy writing “And every spirit upon earth / Seemed fervourless as I,” in The Darkling Thrush. The point is that though the rockets can’t really be personified accurately as tired the soldier sees them as tired and that’s indicative of his state of mind due to his physical exhaustion. 2 Another possibility I quite like, and here I am quoting from the comments page of this video and hope the person who wrote this won’t mind, is that: “the abject brutality of the war has turned the soldiers into animals who look like men, probably fighting more to survive than to kill the enemy. Like animals they run to escape the hunting bombs that are after them to prey upon them. I suppose anyone in this circumstance is reduced to its most basic instincts: run for your life, run from what kills you. If your predator doesn’t reach you it is because you ran faster and he got tired. The fading sound of the bombs is because they didn’t catch you, the beast got tired. I presume hoots is also the sound of the owl, itself a presage of death,” Maria Carvalho. 3 This third one is my favorite and may seem like over-analysis to some but I post it anyway as an interesting way of reading the line if you want to take it this way. Firstly, my other problem with the word “tired” is that it makes us feel sorry for the bombs. We tend to feel sorry whatever is described as tired, do we not? ‘Tired after a hard days work she . . .’ We may hear “tired” here and think, ‘Oh, those poor bombs!’ “Bored, outstripped five nines that dropped behind,” would not have elicited the same sympathy for the bombs that “tired” does. And this sympathy for the thing trying to kill you seems similar to what we now call Stockholm Syndrome. Here a victim, usually a kidnapped victim, begins to feel sympathy for the those who have kidnapped them. Due to constant contact, and a desire for that other not to hurt you, the oppressed feel sympathy for the oppressor. It seems to me that Stockholm Syndrome could accurately illuminate what is happening in this line. The soldier, kidnapped by warfare, feels sympathy for the “tired” weapons trying to kill him. Once again the line is indicative of the soldier’s state of mind. That may seem like over analysis but I like it. And of course I have no way of proving or even knowing if this was Owen’s “poetic intention” or not, or indeed whether or not it was indicative of Owen’s own state of mind, but I do however find it a highly plausible explanation of what may happen to a soldier undergoing what Owen is showing us in this poem. I hope that clears up my problem with the word “tired” and if you wish to see the five nines as the rocket launchers rather than the rockets themselves, then “tired five nines” makes perfect sense, but you’d need to get around “that dropped behind” bit, which you could perhaps do by imagining the rockets and rocket launcher as one thing. I hope that helps, and apologize if I hadn’t explained it clearly before. Andrew Barker

These lectures are an absolute boon to students who may be struggling with the language for and themes of the selected poems, which are all classic works. Dr Barker's exposition is illuminating, informative and passionately, but precisely and clearly delivered. His lectures encourage empathy with the poet's subject matter and offer great insight into the feeling as well as the human situations that lie behind the poems. His commentary on Dulce et Decorum Est is a model of lucidity and his close analysis makes you think about every word and phrase and appreciate better than just reading the poem on the page the mood and attitude contained in the work. His commentary also makes us realise what a masterpiece this poem is and how its sentiments are still powerful today, when certain politicians are trying to glorify Britain's engagement in the war and using the centenary for shallow political advantage. Dr Barker's lecture is so interesting because he gives his own insights according to his own sensibilities as a published poet and lecturer and doesn't hesitate to explain images and metaphors in the light of contemporary life experience. When he describes being slumped against the bar at the end of the evening to clarify the kind of drunkenness he is alluding to, one can well imagine he is talking from personal life experience. The subtitles are also extremely helpful to the listener-reader and are the icing on the cake since they make the lecture so accessible to the 2nd language learner student. I particularly like the way he invites students to think about the effectiveness of images by interjecting comments like 'and I really like this line, because....terrific line!' This type of lecture makes reading and listening to poetry a pleasure, even though the subject-matter is sombre. A wonderful introduction to Owen's work and to the other poets he lectures on in this excellent online resource. Unmissable for literature students in my opinion. Mike Ingham, English Literature Professor

Dr Barker helps the reader - and, more importantly, the listener - inhabit the experience of the poem. As Barker says, Owen wants his audience 'to understand the reality of what's going on there' and Owen's direct experience of that reality is powerfully conveyed both in the poem itself and in Dr Barker's delivery of the poem and his commentary on it. 'Dulce et decorum est' has extraordinary acoustic qualities, making the experience come to life in the sound of the poem; and that sound conveys far more than the merely visual. There's a power in Barker's reading and re-reading of sections of the poem, and the viewer's intimacy with the poem intensifies through the aural intensity of the poem's terrifying music. A student might begin to watch this with the expectation of a mechanical explanation of the poem, a sort of vocabulary tour or puzzle key. There is that, of course, but far more than that. Barker illuminates for the viewer the universal context that brings together Horace, Owen's particular experience and the truths that speak from the poem to us today. After this poem, it's impossible to see the idealistic glory of war untarnished by its grim realities, and Barker makes this inescapably clear.

When it comes to this poem, It was like trudging through sludge till I watched this lecture!

Andrew Barker, you're a legend. Thanks for helping me know the poem inside out.

great sir!! that is extremely helpful!!!! i suggest every one to just go through these lectures if they have a trouble in English poetry.

Regarding Owen's use of 'tired', I believe he means to suggest metal fatigue. A 19th C lecturer at the military school of Metz, in France, notably described the process of repeated deformation as 'tiring' the metal; so it likely would have been in common parlance among the soldiers of the First World War. Of course, Owen also means to suffuse the bombs with the exaustion that the soldiers feel, but this literal basis of metal fatigue lends the metaphor more credance. Thanks for another great lecture.

Great explanation. The reason why the five nines are tired out, is that they are loaded with gas and not explosives. This makes them fall slower than otherwise and therefore they fittingly can be described as tired out.

To add to the thoughts on "tired" I'd like to give you the perspective I've held to since studying this as a 14 year old. To me tired ties in with the casual, hum drum regularity of death. Opposed to a keen targeted and purposefully seeker of death, its a shell that's bored and impartial, poorly aimed and indifferent as seen through a lens of personification. I hear outstripped as a reference to the drive band on the shell. This is a band of softer metal around the shell designed to engage with the rifling on the gun's barrel. The gun is worn and tired, the spin on the shell is worn and tired and the shell flies less precisely because of it, hence the whoop. I've heard that soldiers became well accustomed to listening to shells to judge if they might land closel by. The soldiers were too tired to discern this. The gun too stripped of rifling to be discerning in their target, the shell too noisy in the air to be a surprise to attentive troops and the troops too tired to realise. A picture of a tired and wearisome war of casual violence emerges. Gas shells did not explode like other shells but landed more softly then seeped gas. This too seems like a tired shell, unable to explode so violently but also giving quieter warning. Incidentally, the green gas seems to refer to chlorine. This was the first gas used in the war. I don't know how long it was used for as mustard and other gasses were later introduced. A flounder is a fish and we are effectively asked to compare a flounder out of water with a man under water. Chlorine reacts with the moisture in the lungs to produce hydrochloric acid which causes the lungs to fill with fluid so that a sufferer actually drowns in their own fluids. The guttering is the drowning spasms of a mans life leaving him as he fights to survive against the fluids smothering him. This poem speaks about the very depths of horrific suffering for individuals and the witnesses of that suffering in a way that lies slightly hidden to those that are not familiar to these references. It is layered in this way rather like the poems appeal to not simplify the truth to the young, but also spare them the real agony of war still. No person should truly know this experience.

Sir, As a non english native speaker with obvious limitations to access the understanding of the poems in the original and a poetry lover, your lectures provide me an inestimable tool and pleasure. My only regret is their exiguity, only 13 lectures is too frugal for my famine. I’ll be watchful for new ones. My impulse to write drift from what suggests to me the “hoots of tired, outstripped Five-nines that dropped behind”. When a bomb is shot it is released with a certain Kinetic energie that allows it to reach a given ascendent distance before it starts to fall. If you imagine the sound of it, it rises to that point and then starts to fade till it hits the ground and explodes. These men are out of the range of the Five-nines, so the sound they would be earing it would might have been the fading of descendant tragectory bombs. As you pointed, the abject brutality of the war had turned them to animals who look like men, probably fighting more to survive than to kill the enemy. Like animals they run to excape the hunting bombs that are after them to prey them. I suppose anyone in this circuntance is reduced to its most basic instincts: run for your life, run from what kills you. If your predator doesn’t reach you is because you runned faster and he got tired. The fading sound of the bombs that didnt catch you, the beast got tired. It seems to me it might be refarable the word “hoots” as the hiss of the bombs. I presume it is also the sound of the owl, itself a presage of death. I apologize for any mistakes i might have done. Thank you very much for reading this and for your wonderful lectures.

Those that knew him said Owen had a "deep, rich and velvety voice" so I always try to imagine that when I read this astounding poem. I wish to God he had written more! Thanks.

Excellent lecture, thank you. I would argue that 'guttering' is a very apt word to use. As a candle burns down to the base, a pool of melted wax forms which will eventually extinguish the flame. I think Owen was comparing the candle flame 'drowning' in this way to his comrade's drowning. I hope you will rethink your view on the use of 'guttering'. :)

Thank you Andrew. This poem has always meant a lot to me and I have always felt I understood it, but you have given me even more insight into it.

When I first heard Dulce Et' it nearly knocked me on my rear end. Stark slap in the face writing.

this lecture was awesome the theme for the poem disavows the belief that fighting on the battlefield is the highest form of service to ones country.It highlights the horrors of war and shows that patriotism is used by some to seduce youth into becoming soldiers

The image of that dying soldier is one that can never leave the narrator. As readers learn in the two lines set off from the rest of the text, the sight of that dying comrade haunts the narrator’s dreams, as the soldier “plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning”.That memory prompts the narrator to offer in the final verse paragraph some bitter advice to readers about the nature of warfare and the outcome of blind patriotism.

Very insightful. He made it possible even for so dim-witted an individual as I am to truly understand the poet's thoughts.

I really like this poem as it fully captured the scenery and the feelings of a soldier being in the First World War. The use of scenery is incredible. By showing exactly how the soldiers walked and how they looked, the first stanza actually dragged the readers into the frontlines with the soldiers. We are like being inside of a soldier and see through his eyes. The poet also used similies to compare the soldiers with the beggars and ugly ladies which generated desperated feelings for us to read. My 2 favourite lines in the whole poem are "As under a green sea, I saw him drowning" and "like a devil's sick of sin". The first line gave such a great impression that the soldier was surrounded by the toxic gas and suffocated to death. It made the poet's nightmare so vivid and we could understand what he was seeing. And the second line showed that horrors of the war that even the devil was sick of that war. Moreover, I also like the simple English that the poet used. It is very easy to understand as I believe that he was trying to make it as simple as possible to provide the news to warn the people who were so eager to join the war after being persuaded by the government propaganda. Unlike Rupert Brooke in "The Soldier", he did not play with words. He was just trying to show the reality of being in a war. This poem was quite different from Jessie Pope's "Who's for the game?". In Jessie Pope's poem, it was like being shouted through a microphone to arouse the people to join the war and she even considered the war to a game. This was definitely a propaganda to recurit the people to join the war like "The Soldier". I have got a question about the end. It was quite bitter and sad that people were being lied to about the horrors of the war under the patriotic line "it is sweet and honorable to die for one's country". As for the shortern last line of the poem, it feels like that the poet had "dropped the mic" annd walked away. But I wonder if he was being convinced or showed that the poetic persona was convinced by the line "Dulce et decorum est. Pro patria mori" at first that only after being in the war he realised he was being lied to and hoped to persuade others not to join the war by showing the realites to them?

Superb tutorial. I would have loved to have you as a teacher.

Thank You Dr Barker! That was an extraordinary lecture that is surely going to help me remember the poem very well.The concepts that were not clear earlier have also been cleared by the comments.So Thank You everyone

These are so helpful for my first year of teaching AP Literature :) Thank you!

i can hear you speaking forever 😍❤️

I think the description of the lazy bomb is actually fine. When I was reading it, I was thinking like the soldiers were feeling so tired and they were glad that the five-nines bomb was lazy that they were out of its target. The poet describes the bomb with a human character, by saying that this trench war was only not making the soldiers feeling tired, even the weapons were feeling tired and they did not to be used. That's why the bomb was being so lazy because it wanted to stop the war.

Great lecture and many thanks. English and German soldiers didnt "charge" across No Mans Land. They walked at a marching pace, with the officer keeping them in line and at a walking pace. Running, or charging, was seen as cowardly behavior as was ducking from shell hole to shell hole. There was a reported incident where a unit of Canadians actually charged a position at a run, and despite the fact they took the position with relatively few casualties as a result were censured for cowardly behavior in the face of the enemy. It was only relatively late in the war when csharging and running from shell hole to shell hole became common, and the German storm-troopers (specialists in crossing no mans land through the wire and taking trenches and positions) were the first to formally be trained in the new and improved tactics. When Owen talks about being bent double and trudging through mud he is describing a unit pulling back from the front line trenches through the relief trenches towards rest stations in the rear trenches, probably after their allotted duty time on the front line was over. The relief trenches were not as deep, and so stray shot and shrapnel was a risk. If artillery (the five nines) were flying then the men would instinctively bend down to avoid the chance of getting hit by stray shot.

When I first read the poem, I immediately relate the image of the soldiers to Gollum from Lord of the Rings. The tired soldiers (both mentally and physically) were acting upon their subconsciousness without any clear directions. I feel like they are acting on orders throughout the first and second stanza of the poem, as in they were ordered to bend and cough by someone who has no rights to. Also the soldiers were addressed as “boys”, which makes readers empathise the young kids more. Owen has depicted the confusions during the war very well with blurred images like using the green sea to describe the gas attack. The whole scene of the war is like a scene from a movie with demonised soldiers to me. The way Owen engages our sense in this poem is impressive in demonstrating the horrors of warfare, in addition to the carefully chosen metaphors and personifications he used highly contrasted with Jesse Pope’s comparison between war and a sports game. It is also a big fight back to “The Soldiers” as rather than dying with images of heaven soldiers are likely to die with haunting dreams after warfare if not dying in the actual combat.

Thank you for this fantastic lesson. I found it clear, involving and detailed .As a teacher I am really interested in your lessons and I will continue to follow you .It’s excellent!

Thank you so much for this video. I love the way you explain poems. I could listen to you explain and read poems all day. Thank you again!💕

Tired because gas shells don’t really explode with the same power as other ordinance of the time; they seeped their contents too. That’s why they are tired. Trust me, Professor, Owen understood his other craft: warfare.

In my opinion, I think the bombs that Owen explores as 'tired' in the first stanza, are not present to represent the bombs but the German soldiers, who are in the same state as the British soldiers. This allows one to achieve the understanding that all soldier were faced with these horrible conditions.

And it wasn't mustard gas, and it wasn't phosgene. It was chlorine, that green cloud that turns the moisture in the lungs in hydrochloric acid.

By looking up his biography, it is not surprised to find out that Wilfred Owen is not only a poet but also an experiencer of the horrors of gas warfare in WWI. Owen has a vivid use of imagery throughout the whole poem, while he tries to express his feelings as images in designated metaphors. These kind of images are just well presented through different layers of graphic languages how the narrator in this poem sees it and never gets away from it. Just like what the narrator describes his memory of a man who dies of poisoning from the gas with phrases like “the white eyes writhing in his face”(line 19), “the blood””Come Gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs”(line 21-22). On the other hand, by telling what he dreams about is just another reminiscence of his experience in the warfare, apparently the most horrific moment he might have been seeing is the face of those dead soldiers, which he thinks that's just “like a devil’s sick of sin”(line 20). Doubtlessly, these images are just a series of terrific distorted renditions people can hardly imagine. Not so sure about this but speaking of the title of this poem “Dulce et decorum eat”, it reminds me of Ezra Pound’s poem Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, in which Pound also tries to allude his outrage of the WWi by applying the exact same line from the Horace’s Odes into the poem IV of his poetry, just as what Owen does in this poem. It is quite convincing to say that by alluding the lines Owen is trying to mock those who encourages youngsters getting to the warfare and sacrifice as a glory for himself and the kingdom, maybe not only a reply for Jessie Pope but also those who push the youngsters towards the inferno in the world. By constructing the image of the dream that Owen describes in the poem, I guess it is kind of related to Sigmund Freud's ideas of Hysteria and Dream and also the great psychoanalysis. Moreover, by applying to the idea of modernist literature, Owen, by alluding Horace’s line, is a conscious desire to overturn traditional modes of representation and express the new sensibilities of their time. Owen overturns the idea of the glorious death for the kingdom, which often happens when we talk about heroic ideas or images to the realistic images(realism?) of the horrific warfare. I guess it is the reason why Owen and Pound both use this to express their outrage on the god damn WWI.

Thanks a lot for a great lecture! You are so good at making the tiny details visible and important! :-) :-)

Thank you Dr Andrew - this poem was on my o level syllabus in the early 80s. It had a great impression on me back then and your analysis now has opened up so much more meaning for me. Thank you.

Contrasting to The Soldier, this poem reflects more of the hellish reality the soldiers truly faced. Before learning Jessica Pope, I thought the addressee is the public, or more particularly, those in higher class/government who encouraged innocent young men going off to war, which is why he addressed them as "friend", as he was in the same social class. About the word "guttering", you mentioned that it is used more for its sound, but I think it is more for to the imagery. If it is for the sound, there are more words that are connotation of "choking" and "drowning", such as gagging for instance? In imagery, although it alone is serene, but after reading about a man dying as if in fire, and reading it with "choking" and "drowning": him surrounded by death, blood, fire, the image of a candle goes out is not as serene as before. We often describe a man losing his life as "the light goes out", so maybe that's the imagery Owen trying to bring out. The candle doesn't have a peaceful death, but is snuffed out by someone: short, quick, merciless. Also, it's strange that when I think about how a devil's sick of sin looks like, I think of the painting "Saturn Devouring His Son". Not that it was related.

I agree to some commenters on the use of 'tired', which to me means that the bombs are too weak to have aimed at opponents, because they fall behind the running soldiers. In the poem, I particularly like how he describes the wounded men and how he experiences the loss of his friend during the gas attack. It is very personal but impressive. You can really picture the image from your perspective, seeing a friend dies in such pain would definitely makes you suffer for a lifetime. The poem is better to be named this way than how it was named (To Jessie Pope etc.). I think what Owen tries to tell is not the hatred for Pope, and is not totally promoting his idea of anti-war because it would not be enough to urge for an end to war by just stating how horrifying it is. He just objects the idea that the idealists held towards war and how they actually encourage teens to fight in wars.

Simple yet complex how brilliant

Thank you for this lecture. This video helped me tremendously with an explication I wrote for my English class last semester. As far as the "tired out-stripped Five Nines" are concerned, I have one thought. As the shells are fired from a cannon, they are full of energy on their upward ascent. After they reach their peak, they obviously start to fall thus losing their upward energy. Perhaps Owen is referring to this loss of upward energy when he describes the Five Nines as being tired. I'm not sure how valid this claim is, and I could be wrong, but it is certainly something to think about.

Great poem. Great lecture. Why is this poem not taught to everybody the world over? These are sentiments the world has great need to know. You are right, it IS the greatest anti war poem ever written.

Fantastic loved your explanation. Strongly recommend to anyone studying English literature..

You're the best sir ! Thank you

I think Dr. Barker would have a winning bedside manner. I also happen to think his curtain hair is extremely sexy. But, though I admire his rendering accessible complex pieces of poetry, I do feel he could delve a little further into some of the poem's deeper signifieds. He could, for example, have highlighted the negative signified of "an ecstasy of fumbling", rather than just speaking about "adrenalin". Yes, the adrenalin rush causes the soldiers to be "beside themselves". Ecstasy is just this. Be it in pleasure or in pain. Sometimes, his glosses are way too superficial.

A great lecture. I love to read this poem with The Soldier- to taste the contrast.

Brilliant Analysis of the poem, Thanks a lot sir...

Watching all these again! Brilliant!

Brilliant analysis. Helped very much. Thanks :-)

Thank you for uploading this analysis, it was very informative

We live in a fucked up world. When Kim kardashian throws a party. It gets 20 million hits in hours. But when we get free high quality education like this It is largely missed. Not cared for.

this is great in helping me understand this poem for my english gcse

Thank you very much Dr. Barker for you very clear explanation of this poem.

Brilliant analysis! Very detailed. I've analyzed 30-something poems on my channel for my own students (mainly Caribbean). This is one of the two or three poems (I believe) that we have both covered.

Avery moving lecture....these words sill hurt when I listen to them ,I learned hem under duress, but now I return to hem,

I much enjoyed this powerful analysis. My only thought is about the criticism of the word 'tired' in reference to the 5,9s which Dr Barker takes a referring to the 'bombs' (shells). I think Owen, when he talks of the 5,9s, is referring to the artillery guns which are firing the shells. These guns are of course 'tired' - used constantly with tired crews and worn out barrels. I this sense the use of the word 'tired' is completely appropriate, in my view.

I find "tired" in "...tired, outstripped Five-Nines..." as a way of expressing the Five-Nines' metaphorical enthusiasm towards war. The bombs, as a collective, are tired of being overused in combat. They could also be tired of war itself, relating to Wilfred Owen's own exprerience as you suggested.

"tired bombs" is brilliant. It is anthropomorphism as a rhetoric device. Everyone is tired of the war, even the bombs. It is projection just like the "clumsy helmets"

Very helpful lecture..this lecture has hepled me alot....and I have scored 18 out of 20 in my class in this poem....Sir can you do a lecture for "Five Ways To kill A Man".....it will be a great help.....and I have gone through the lecture of"do not go gentle into that good night".....waiting for your reply.....

A masterpiece by the great Wilfrid Owen. Thank you . 'Insensibility' by Wilfrid Owen is another great work.

Thank you Dr. Barker, excellent analysis as always. I do want to say a point about the helmets. Owens references “a clumsy helmet" Normally a helmet cannot be clumsy”. Funny enough, British helms of that time were in fact clumsy. Not in the sense of a person putting on the helmet but in the sense that the helmet was not properly fitted and was much like that of an upside down bowl that clumsily fit your head. Couple this with having a gas mask attached to it and it makes an already more awkward helmet all the more difficult to wear. This is not to be confused with wearing the modern military helmet. Which by the way is quite comfortable. Which these were not designed to be.

Thank you for this wonderful explanation!

The poet have witnessed the horror, violent, and evil side of the warfare. The events he described in the poem are certainly based on his actual experience of the WWI. Thus, the poet vividly describes the awful scenes of the wartime, presents the truth about the war, and demonstrates the actual horror reality that the soldiers have to face in the warfare. The poet attempts to illustrate as graphically as possible the blood-soaked details of the war and the soldier’s sufferings. For example, by using the phrase “like old beggar”, the poet reflects the truth that the soldiers are deprived of their dignity and health like the dispossessed, who were reduced to begging for a living. In the poem “the soldier”, it is in some sense was quite successful for recruiting young men to warfare by claiming that fighting for their own country is the most glories things to do. However, Owen has the first-hand experience of the war and witnessed the violent and evil side of the warfare. He realizes the actual pictures of the war are as not completely same as other poets depict in their poems and they have beautified the process of the fight in the warfare. As a result, Owen depicts the obscenity of the war at a level that is unequaled in other poems, which might use their poem as the propaganda and encourage the youth who really don’t know about the actual side of side to fight for the country. Added, the phrase “my friend” sounds so ironic and sarcastic, saying that those poets who have never engaged in the war should not blindly encourage their nationals to fight for their own country and promote the idea of glorious death for the kingdom. “It is sweet and meet to die for one’s country”, the poet also expostulates sarcastically, “Sweet and decorous!” since they actually don't know the what is really happening in the warfare.

omg this make me understand the poem so well i have to write an essay on this tomorrow

This is so helpful for my essay on WWI. Thank you so much!

used this in quarantine whist doing my english work

This is so well-explained. Thank you so much!

Hi Joe and Marcus.Keep up the good work I'm proud of you both.

Amazing poem and a very nice analysis of it.

Thank you very much Dr. I have got my exam paper tomorrow and this was super helpfull:)

Now that I have seen how Jessie Pope’s Who’s for the game encourage men to join the war makes me understand more the last line of the poem. As you suggest, the three stress shows the persona of the poem has turn his back on the old lie, I also think the three stresses may relate to the sound of bombs regularly drops on the trenches. The last line points out that there are horrific sacrifices that those warmongering poets are not known of. The ignorance disappoints and enrages the persona of the poem to turn his back on the glorify ideal to die for your country.

You have great delivery. Thanks !

'like beggars bent double under sacks', The lads would be carrying their heavy packs as they left the front.

thxx man, helped me for my literature exams :)

Makes me miss school!!

very helpful for school assignment--Thankyou

sir I wish if I could have tutorial with you . you are awesome . every explanation is so thoughtful .

The one thing I disagree with Dr. Barker is when he explains the bombs being tired through the air. He describes the bomb as moving tiredly through the air. In my interpretation of the poem, the tiredness relates to the timing of the bomb detonating. The bomb could have struck the earth with a delayed explosion, thus being 'tired'. This is, in my opinion, what Wilfred Owen was explaining.

There is such a great contrast between reality and imagination when comparing this poem to "The Soldier" written by Rupert Brooke. I am curious if Wilfred Owen is influenced by the war-promoting propaganda and went to the battlefield. When he was actually at the war zone, he realized the reality of warfare. The way Wilfred Owen describes the scenes of a war gives me a sarcastic feeling, as if he is trying to say to those who writes the propaganda "this is the bloody truth, you liar" when he addresses to other poet using "my friend".

thank you, sir, this was extremely helpful!!

This is very inspirational and i feel very decorum est

thank you very much for this, absolutely great help for students but one thing, I think it was chlorine gas not mustard gas he refers to

Lastly, I really like the whole description of the soldier drowning part. In trying to portray what it’s like to watch someone die from chemical warfare, a concept that no one had experienced until now, it is very hard for you to imagine it. When you think of melting you thing of fire, such as how a candle melts as it burns. You cannot imagine that air would quite literally burn and dissolve you or melt you somehow. It is so shocking that he uses words such as fire or lime because fire alone is not enough. The notion of acids and dissolving in acids had not been properly understood by most at the time, it would be hard to imagine it unless you see it. When you do it’s quite shocking and this is why the use of lime, in an attempt to portray the kind of burning that this does to you. The scariest reference of all is of how he is dry drowning. You typically think of drowning as something that happens when you are immersed in water. That is already described by survivors as the worst pain that you will ever experience hence waterboarding as torture. He is trying to explain the horror of drowning without the ability to get out of the water our be rescued. The man is floundering, as if he was a fish and now the very air he is breathing, that is all around him and he cannot get away from it is the reason he is drowning. The idea that breathing in air drowns you is so scary and shocking that you have to imagine you are a fish out of water, helpless unable to do anything but flounder and die. Lime does not typically burn you but using it instead of lemon is to explain what he was seeing, he saw a sea of green, and now that generally harmless “lime” (green air) has suddenly become burning poison that the soldier is drowning in. The guttering I actually quite like because that is exactly what makes it scary, associating candle guttering with what they were going through shows you the horror of the seemingly serene scene of green mist with them almost deaf and having poor visibility, you would think of it as quite peaceful. The idea that the gas took them by surprise further amplifies the horrror. Just as with a candle guttering, they were in a relatively peaceful trudge back to rest, deaf to even the bombing, and then out of nowhere this happens. The candle reference is not only apt in the whole “dry drowning in fire” concept, but also to the melting concept, to me the face “hanging” is about the effect of the gas, not that it literally melted the face per say but that it posses that quality. In the description of his dream the use of smothering is not just about his fear of the nightmare, it is that the dream is so vivid that he almost shares the suffocation of his choking comrade. He not only sees him, but actually feels him. This is perhaps to me either imagined but also maybe somewhat actually happening since the poets lungs are probably not pristine themselves and he was still in the battlefield. Additionally the description of the taste of the bitter blood perhaps hints at that. How does he know it is bitter? Finally, I love how he also references certain body parts as belonging to his friend “his face” but most of the horribly disfigured and damaged ones are not. “The eyes” “the blood” and “the lungs” are all now so mangled that they don’t even belong to the soldier, perhaps due to them being unrecognizable, or being offensive. Indeed, the offensive idea is perhaps more accurate since he is trying to paint the picture from the perspective not of someone who is dead, but him. The obscenity of the blood, while seemingly harsh, especially when likened to cancer, is his perspective. If you ever think of a burn victim, especially a chemical burn, the horrible disfigurement that they go through is jarring. You really will find it obscene and wouldn’t wanna look at it. The cancer part to me, while controversial is very fitting because the notion that this horribly disfigured, useless, mangled thing growing in you is actually your own cells, coming from your body and simultaneously being disfiguring (if visible) ugly and killing you is quite obscene! In much the same way as he had to watch the obscenity unfold infront of him while carrying their comrade back even though he will certainly die and they have to live with that image. It somehow softens the idea that they flung him in the wagon. The have to watch that blood, likened to cud which is disgusting in and of its own, if you imagine that the cow will regurgitate something and then further chew it and eat it, you think eww. Well this is happening to his friend as his lungs gargle up blood into his mouth, which he subsequently cannot help but aspirate again and even swallow some as he gasp for air, it is just sickening.

Thank you for your detailed and exhaustive analysis. It is very useful indeed

probably shouldn't have saved it to the last day to study for the exam, but we're gonna work with it.

Utterly stunning! Thank you!

That was absolutely wonderful! Thank you, Dr. Barker for this analysis. I can’t read poetry and get very much out of it on my own, yet this kind of analysis gives me the chance to experience the sublime with help. Now I need to find some good analysis of The Waste Land. Care to do that one?

I luved it!!...thank you so much for this!!

Love the poem and love your presentation, it helped a lot. Thanks a lot.

My teacher got a few things wrong, now I can prove him wrong with a PHD

‘My subject is war, and the pity of war.’ These are the words written by Wilfred Owen in the preface of a volume that he was planning to publish before his untimely death on 4th Nov 1918 - precisely one week before the First World War ended. And I think this pity of war, this great sadness of war that Owen spoke of refers to what he saw as the powerlessness and helplessness of the soldiers in the War; and it is best exemplified in ‘Dulce Et Decorum Est’. The imperialists might still be chanting the slogan ‘Dulce et decorum est Pro patria mori’ at home during WWI, but the reality of war spoke otherwise - the War was horrifying and never-ending; it had rendered the soldiers disenchanted. They had lost the meaning of going to war and yet they could do absolutely nothing about it. They couldn’t end the war because it’s not in their power to do so. All they could do, as reflected in the poem, was to ‘cursed through sludge’ and ‘marched asleep’; and to wait for the politicians and war generals to call for an end to the War - and their sufferings. As a means to emphasise the powerless position of the soldiers, Owen compared them to ‘hags’ and ‘beggars’ - those at the lowest end of the social spectrum; and to animals (‘blood-shod’ and ‘lame’) -waiting for slaughter. And to highlight just how pointless and absurd the lengthy War had become, Owen personified the weaponry and war equipment in the poem, and wrote that even the non-living things, namely the deadly artillery shells and the worn-out helmets - have become ‘tired’ and ‘clumsy’. That being said, war must go on, as long as the warmongers willed it. Apparently for Owen similes and personification did not suffice to display the horrors of war. And so he transported the readers to the battlefield - by means of our imagination and empathy. We then become soldiers and ‘involuntary’ witness to not just the death, but also the dying process of a soldier, a comrade. Owen had narrated it in such vivid detail that I felt suffocated when reading of the lines about which the soldier ‘plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning’. And what’s most unsettling is that the War and the killings are before our eyes, and yet neither we, nor the poetic persona (a soldier) could do anything to stop it. As readers that is naturally the case. But we are also soldiers in some sense as we’re placed to be one by Owen. Yet that doesn’t changed anything, which only highlights how vulnerable, powerless and helpless the soldiers were positioned in the War. It is also significant that Owen should ask readers to be the witness to rather than the victim of this gas attack, for I think the former tends to suffer more than the latter in the sense that death, however painful, is quick; whereas to live on as a survivor means a life-long trauma that will continue to haunt him 'in all my dreams.' Owen returned to the battlefield shortly before the War ended. And I am inclined to think the last two lines to be his reason for doing so: ‘The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est Pro patria mori.’ Owen had been on the front line for a long time and he obviously knew that the notion of ‘to die for your country is right and honourable’ was merely a big fat lie told by the cunning imperialists to jive soldiers. Of course even the arch-imperialist poet Kipling changed his mind after losing his beloved son and conceded that the notion was a blatant lie: ‘If any question why we died, tell them, because our fathers lied.’ But many of his contemporaries were yet to learnt of this truth. By returning to the War, he’s become not just a solider fulfilling his duties, but also a rightful pleader who spoke a soldier’s tongue - someone who's earned himself the right to expose the public to the powerless position held by soldiers in wars. And I think this is why his poems such as this one are so loved by soldiers now and then.

His poetry was written before / as he was growing into the war in the end he loved it and was happy in it.

I have always thought that the use of "tired" for the bomb referred to the ones throwing the bomb. They are as tired of that war as the soldiers in the poem are. Anyway, great lecture. Thanks!

I thought the bombs were called tired because they eventually fall/strike the ground, losing momentum

when it comes to the word Tired, to my mind the 'tired out striped five nines' was literally worn out overused weapons.

excellent lecture. thank you

what fine explanation I'm in awe

Well I always liked to go and see photo exhibition because I thought that one picture can best show the reality. But I think this Dulce Et Decorum Est shows how a piece of writing can be much more powerful than a picture. By describing the incident, I could imagine and see how it is to be in a 'real warfare'. When the poet was using 'devil's sick of sin' to describe the soldier on the wagon with eyes writhing, I thought that 'devil' shows 2 things. First, it can literally be the face of the soldier who's almost dying on the wagon. The soldier who's almost facing the death, covered with blood all over his body and face. At the same time, it seemed like the poet was describing the horror of the warfare by using the devil. Devil is the one which is considered to be relevant with all sins, but by saying that devil which is sick of sin, I could see how the reality is awful because even the devil can't stand it. It shows that the war was too horrible and gruesome that even devil will be nauseous. Since the poem is so different to the previous poem 'The Soldier' which was 'telling with such high zest to children ardent for some desperate glory that dying for the country is glorious thing' and 'The Soldier' was beloved and made the guys fight in the war, how was the reaction when 'Dulce Et Decorum Est' was written? We have some people, actually a lot, who still think fighting in a war for their countries is the most glorious thing that nationals can do and I'm just curious whether people at that time especially soldiers or people who were moved by the propaganda that the government used would felt offended or considered this poem as an insult or they acknowledged the horror of the war fare.

Tired shells - they lack the momentum to reach their intended target.

Awesome stuff

Great lecture. Im curious if too much attention is being paid to '5 nines ' as rocket launches. Flamethrowers and tanks were the great innovations used in the trenches. And rockets were primarily used to bring down zeppelins and observation balloons. But they were not commonly handled as they were highly volatile. I believe the 5 nines were therefore artillery shells. Rockets came into their own , and indeed surprised the Germans on the eastern front in world war 2. 'Stalins organs'.

Michael Caine is trying to escape....

absolutely brilliant

Your interpretation of the piece is quite impressive Dr. Barker. If I may suggest, in regard to the "tired out 5.9s" Wouldn't it be possible to tire out bombs by tiring the proximity of their reach? They have tired out their ability to effectively devastate their troop? Maybe.. Lol maybe not.