the trauma of meter 173
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; 20
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 25
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.The form of Owen’s poem is itself “bent double,” like the soldiers it describes.
Many critics have noted the poem’s similarity to the Shakespearean sonnet
form as well as its implicit reference to Wordsworth’s “Leech-Gatherer”:
“Such seemed this Man, not all alive nor dead, / Nor all asleep — in his ex-
treme old age: / His body was bent double, feet and head / Coming together
in life’s pilgrimage.”^50 The poem is, in fact, two sonnets, bent and doubled in
the middle at lines 13 and 14, where the lines that would normally form the
final couplet in a Shakespearean sonnet simply begin a new rhyme: “light” and
“drowning.” Despite the formal buckling or juxtaposition with the second
sonnet, the formless figure of the dying man provides a perfect thematic coda
to the first octave, in which the men’s marching is subdued in a sort of sleep.
Indeed, in the sestet, the man’s figure is obscured and shapeless as if underwa-
ter, his image seen through dim, thick, green light. The verbs and adjectives in
the first sonnet—trudge, lame, blind, drunk, deaf—subdue the imagined ac-
tivity into an embalmed slumber (these verbs reminiscent of what one would
witness in the halls of Craiglockhart) Even the flares become part of a hazy
backdrop, and the menacing shells drop “softly,” like petals.^51 Likewise, the sol-
dier’s movements are calm and imperceptibly shuffling to a failed attempt at
iambic pentameter, as if the spondaic opening of “Bént dóuble” and “Knóck
knéed” of lines 1 and 2 show the extra step each man must take. When the
lines settle into five stresses, in lines 3, 4, 5, 7, and 8, the iambs are consistently
irregular, alliterations causing frequent trochaic and spondaic substitutions.
The iambic pentameter seems perceptible enough, but the fact that these steps
are complicated suggests that Owen, here, is lulling us into an expressive read-
ing of regular accentual-syllabic meter. We might imagine that we think we
know what kinds of steps the soldiers should be able to take, but are unable.
Only line 4, of these beginning lines, adheres to the perfect five-beat iambic
pentameter line: “And towárds our dístant rést begán to trudge.” The meter
marches asleep here, stumbling through a rhythm that is ruled by sound