Sunday, October 8, 2017

First draft of Owen's Dulce et Decorum Est, October 8, 1917.

Today is the anniversary of the first known draft of Wilfred Owen's well known Great War poem, Dulce et Decorum Est.

Dulce et Decorum Est

By Wilfred Owen
 
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.
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 gas-shells dropping softly behind.

Gas! GAS! Quick, boys!—An ecstasy of fumbling
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time,
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And flound’ring 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.

In all my dreams before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

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,
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,—
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.
 I'll be Frank that Owen isn't my favorite Great War poet, in a war that oddly seemed to produce a lot of poets (or did the war just occur in a time when poetry was more common?).  And contrary to what is commonly believed, Owen's fame came posthumously after the war when his work was actually published, not during it. The sort of gloom and despair attributed found in Owen's poems, while not unique to him alone by any means, was also not a common view amongst English veterans of the Great War or even the UK itself until well after it.

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