santanu das
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Ofvile, 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.^47Owen here manages to play three central experiences of the war—night march,
a gas attack, and traumatic neurosis—along almost a single, vertical bodily axis,
gradually moving from the bloodied feet to the bloodied mouth. The opening
phrase acts like the lens of the camera, bringing the body into the field of vision:
against the surreal backdrop of the gas flares and the sound of the ‘Five-nines’, the
soldiers limp on with their blood-shod feet, as iambs and trochees straggle within the
pentameter to keep up with the somnambulist rhythm of the march. If the regular
end-rhymes—‘sacks/backs’, ‘sludge/trudge’, ‘boots/hoots’—suggest the crushing
monotony of the routine, there is a more intimate sound pattern that evokes the
body in pain. This is the wail of vowels where language breaks down—the ‘e’, ‘o’,
and ‘u’ sounds (knock-kneed, coughing, cursed, sludge, our, trudge, lost, blood-
shod, even, outstripped, dropped) in the opening stanza—which culminates in the
noises of the retching body in the final lines. Mustard gas corrodes the body from
within. The testimony of the gas attack movesfrom visual impressions to visceral
processes, registering Owen’s difference from his mentor Sassoon: from sounds
produced between the body and the world—fumbling, stumbling, flound’ring,
drowning—to sounds within the body: guttering, choking, writhing, gargling.
Indeed, sound plays a particularly important role in a poem that climaxes on a
savage contrast between tongues: the lacerated tongue of the soldier and the grand
polysyllabic sound of the Latin phrase as he plays on the two meanings of ‘lingua’
(in Latin, it means both tongue and language).
The second stanza hurls the narrator and, with him, the readers into the very
‘thick’ of a gas attack. In Owen’s poem, as in Sargent’s paintingGassed(1918–19),
which was done after witnessing the victims of a gas attack, the light seems to
thicken and congeal; it creates a liquid, almost tactile, space in which the soldier
drowns, the whole drama being witnessed through the thickness of a gas-mask
lens. The moment is at once horrific and uncanny, hovering somewhere between
perception, memory, flashback, and nightmare as the lyric ‘I’ is finally introduced.
But why is there an ‘ecstasy’ of fumbling? Sassoon put a question mark beside the
line. Coming from the Greek wordekstasis, literally meaning ‘a standing outside
of oneself’ (ek—out of,stasis—a position, a standing), does it suggest the sense
of transport inherent in a moment of frenzy, or does the narrator make a quick
shift from participant to an observer over the medial pause in the line? Or is
the distance temporal, inherent in the act of verse making, which explains the
(^47) Owen, ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’, i. 140.