Dulce et Decorum Est
"Gas! GAS! Quick, boys!"
Dulce et Decorum Est, by Wilfred Owen is a powerful poem using a lot of figurative language such as similes , metaphors and imagery of sight which helps to serve the big idea. The big idea of this poem is that dying for your country is not sweet and beautiful. This sentence is a great example of both simile and metaphor from the poem "As under a green sea, I saw him drowning". The simile in this sentence is the bit that says "As under a green sea" and the metaphor bit in this sentence is "I saw him drowning" this is a metaphor because his friend isn't actually drowning but it is as if he is drowning in all the gas, which he is surrounded by. A great bit of imagery of sight from the poem is "He plunges at me, guttering, chocking, drowning". This imagery of sight makes you get this picture in your mind, of a man full of fear and as if he is drowning in gas, just a picture of fear. Dulce et Decorum Est means sweet and beautiful in Latin, this means that the author is trying to say that dying for your country is sweet and beautiful. But in the end of the poem it says "The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est Pro patria mori" meaning the conclusion of this whole poem is that dying for your country is not sweet and beautiful but in reality it is terrifying and just like a brutal nightmare to be apart of a war.