the trauma of meter 175
the measure of meter surrounding it. Rather than stammer through the expla-
nation of the aftereffects of the event (the stammer and stumble are, them-
selves, aftereffects), the second sonnet foregrounds the difficulty of expressing
the shocking central action—a man dying in the poisoned air—not only to an
audience that has now become blind and deaf to the realities of war because of
the “Old Lies” of tradition with which they themselves have been poisoned,
but also through the very forum of poetic form. Lines 15 and 16 isolate the
first person—his recurring nightmares, the “helpless sight” of traumatic mem-
ories lurching back toward him. Daniel Hipp notes that Owen shifts the verb
tenses from past in the octave through progressive verbal forms in the sestet
into present tense in these lines and, reading lines 15 and 16 as the completion
of a quatrain, asserts that “the repetition of “drowning” at the expense of con-
ventional rhyme emphasizes the persistence of the visual image within the
poet’s unconscious mind, which like the unfinished “sonnet” has remained
unresolved.”^52 According to Hipp, these two lines signal the mirror image of
the second sonnet, pitting “I saw him drowning” against “before my helpless
sight” as twin feelings, meant to emphasize both the transition of a past mem-
ory into a present nightmare but also to show a dissatisfaction with forms that
save only some.
Meter and movement transform here, after the chaos of gas, from an auto-
matic march back from the front into a different kind of awareness for the
soldiers; the soldiers are marching with the same feet, but their paces occur
with a forced and artificial regularity, symptomatic of the uneven, uncon-
trolled figure who disrupts the regularity in the middle of the poem, and
whose figure now threatens to disrupt it again. The return to a fervent iambic
pentameter in line 17 answers and, in some ways, remedies the chaotic image
jolting in front of the soldiers in the wagon. Lines 17 through 28 are one long,
rambling, accusatory sentence with relatively straightforward syntax. As read-
ers, we are jolted by frequent spondaic substitutions in this second sonnet:
“you too;” “white eyes writhe;” “high zest;” “old Lie.” The only perfectly iam-
bic line of the second sonnet, line 21—“If you could hear, at every jolt, the
blood”—calls our attention to these jolts, this blood, and our own ear’s ability
to hear them in the second sonnet. “Dulce et Decorum Est” does not perform
an upright, decorous form, and it illustrates in its breaking of the Latin meter
in the final line how neither English nor classical meter can withstand the
threats of modern forms of war. The Latin tag from Horace, “’Tis sweet and
mete to die for one’s country,” allows us to rethink the word “mete”; both “just
punishment” to die for one’s country that we are urged “not to tell,” and the
measure of this sacrifice, which, through meter, is “told” in the poem’s stum-
bling prosodic performance. The poem’s formal status, bent-double and at-
tempting to recover from the trauma at its center, gives the reader an awareness
of forms as both possible and impossible emblems of recovery and survival.
But finally, the poem’s own verbs are evidence for the true war poet’s task: