40 Fun Facts About Dulce Et Decorum Est

Which Daily Mail writer of recruiting verse was the first dedicatee of 'Dulce et Decorum Est'?

Jessie Pope was named in the first draft's dedication, which Owen softened to 'a certain Poetess' and then dropped altogether.

What condition was Wilfred Owen in hospital for when he drafted 'Dulce et Decorum Est'?

Shell shock, then diagnosed as neurasthenia, came after a trench mortar blast left Owen unconscious for several days beside the remains of a fellow officer.

The poet of 'Dulce et Decorum Est' was killed in action exactly one week before which event?

The Armistice was signed on 11 November 1918, and the telegram announcing Owen's death reached his family that same day as church bells rang to celebrate.

In the opening line of 'Dulce et Decorum Est', the bent-double soldiers are compared to what?

Old beggars under sacks is the poem's first image, and the next line has the same young soldiers knock-kneed and cursing through sludge.

In 'Dulce et Decorum Est', through what colour of light is the gassed soldier seen floundering?

Green is used twice in two lines, and the speaker sees the scene only dimly, through misty panes.

What does the speaker of 'Dulce et Decorum Est' call the Latin motto quoted in the poem's last lines?

The old Lie is spelled with a capital L, and Owen breaks the Latin motto across the final two lines so the poem ends on a short, blunt half-line.

During the war that 'Dulce et Decorum Est' describes, British women handed men out of uniform which token of cowardice?

A white feather was handed to men in civilian clothes by the Order of the White Feather, which an admiral founded in the first month of the war.

In 'Dulce et Decorum Est', what have many of the limping soldiers lost as they march asleep?

Their boots are gone, yet the men limp on, and the poem calls them blood-shod: feet covered in blood where leather should be.

Which fellow war poet marked up Wilfred Owen's drafts of 'Dulce et Decorum Est' as his mentor?

Siegfried Sassoon left his handwriting on Owen's drafts. He later threatened to stab Owen in the leg rather than see him return to the trenches.

What does the Latin title 'Dulce et Decorum Est' mean, as the first half of a Roman line?

It is sweet and fitting is only half the thought: the line goes on to name the act being praised, which Owen holds back until the poem's final words.

In 'Dulce et Decorum Est', what does one stumbling soldier fail to put on in time?

His gas mask goes on too late. Owen calls the masks clumsy helmets, and early British gas helmets were hoods of chemically treated cloth worn over the whole head.

Which word ends two lines about the dying man in 'Dulce et Decorum Est', rhyming only with itself?

Drowning closes both lines, and the repeat falls in a two-line stanza set apart from the rest, the shortest in the poem.

In 'Dulce et Decorum Est', where do the soldiers fling their gassed comrade before marching on?

Into a wagon he goes, and the speaker asks the reader to pace behind it and watch the eyes writhing in the dying man's face.

The gassed soldier's hanging face in 'Dulce et Decorum Est' is likened to the face of what, sick of sin?

A devil sick of sin is the comparison, and it sits in the long final stanza, which runs to twelve lines as a single sentence.

In the closing lines of 'Dulce et Decorum Est', who is told the Latin motto with such high zest?

Children are the audience Owen names, and he calls them ardent for some desperate glory.

Which former spa turned officers' war hospital is where Wilfred Owen drafted 'Dulce et Decorum Est'?

Craiglockhart took officers only, from 1916 to 1919, and Owen edited its patients' magazine during his stay.

In which Scottish city was Wilfred Owen a hospital patient when he drafted 'Dulce et Decorum Est'?

Edinburgh also gave Owen a brief teaching job at Tynecastle High School, in a poor part of the city, while he was still a patient.

To which person did Wilfred Owen send 'Dulce et Decorum Est' in October 1917, calling it a gas poem?

His mother, Susan, received it with a note calling it a gas poem done the day before, and adding that it was not private but not final.

In the standard text of 'Dulce et Decorum Est', what are the 'Five-Nines' that drop behind the tired men?

German howitzer rounds of 5.9-inch calibre got the nickname from British troops, who named them after the width of the gun barrel.

The two equal halves of 'Dulce et Decorum Est' echo, in broken form, which classic type of poem?

The sonnet has 14 lines, and the poem's 28 split into two parts of that length, the first told as it happens and the second looking back.

The phrase 'coughing like hags' in 'Dulce et Decorum Est' is an example of which figure of speech?

Simile is a comparison made openly with 'like' or 'as', and Owen uses two in the poem's first two lines before any alarm is raised.

Which poet's patriotic 'The Soldier' is the classic contrast to Owen's 'Dulce et Decorum Est'?

Rupert Brooke died in April 1915 of an infected mosquito bite, aboard a hospital ship off the Greek island of Skyros on his way to Gallipoli.

The closing words 'pro patria mori' in 'Dulce et Decorum Est' translate into English as what?

To die for one's country is praised in a Roman poem urging citizens to become warriors so fierce that enemies such as the Parthians would not dare resist.

Which Roman poet wrote the line that Wilfred Owen borrowed for the title of 'Dulce et Decorum Est'?

Horace was no model warrior himself: he recorded that he fled the Battle of Philippi without his shield.

Which metre does Wilfred Owen set up and then disrupt in 'Dulce et Decorum Est'?

Iambic pentameter gives ten syllables a line, but Owen breaks it with heavy double stresses called spondees and cuts the final line to three Latin words.

Which gallantry medal did Wilfred Owen win for turning a captured machine gun on the enemy?

The Military Cross was an award Owen had long wanted, to justify himself as a war poet, but it was not announced until months after his death.

Which composer wove nine Wilfred Owen war poems into the Latin Mass for the Dead in his War Requiem?

Benjamin Britten wrote it for the consecration of the new Coventry Cathedral, built after bombs destroyed the medieval one in the Second World War.

Which novelist's Regeneration Trilogy dramatises Wilfred Owen's hospital stay and his death?

Pat Barker won the 1995 Booker Prize for the trilogy's final book, The Ghost Road.

Wilfred Owen is one of sixteen Great War poets named on a slate memorial in which church?

Westminster Abbey set the stone in Poets' Corner, and of the sixteen poets named it is Owen whose words were chosen for the inscription.

Where does the speaker of 'Dulce et Decorum Est' say the dying soldier still plunges at him?

In his dreams, all of them, the speaker stays helpless, and Owen's own doctor had urged him to turn his recurring nightmares into poetry as therapy.

In 'Dulce et Decorum Est', which word describes the men's fumbling when the gas alarm is raised?

Ecstasy is the word, and the fumbling works for all but one man, who is still yelling and stumbling when the others are safe.

Which Wilfred Owen lament for soldiers denied funeral bells was drafted alongside 'Dulce et Decorum Est'?

Anthem for Doomed Youth got its title from Owen's mentor, who suggested 'anthem' and replaced the draft's 'dead' with 'doomed'.

In the unfinished preface to his poems, Wilfred Owen wrote that the poetry is in what?

The pity of war was his whole subject, Owen wrote, and the same sentences are now cut into the war poets' memorial stone.

Which hospital magazine did Wilfred Owen edit in 1917, the year he drafted 'Dulce et Decorum Est'?

The Hydra printed two of only five Owen poems published in his lifetime; the other three appeared in The Nation.

Which unusual rhyming technique is Wilfred Owen known for, as in his 1918 poem 'Strange Meeting'?

Pararhyme keeps the consonants and changes the vowel, so that 'hall' is paired with 'Hell' near the opening of 'Strange Meeting'.

Which poet, editing The Oxford Book of Modern Verse, left Wilfred Owen out and dismissed his war poems?

W. B. Yeats defended the snub by calling Owen's work all blood and dirt, though Owen had counted him among his major influences.

The author of 'Dulce et Decorum Est' was killed while his battalion crossed which French waterway?

The Sambre–Oise Canal runs past the village of Ors, where Owen is buried and the forester's house where he spent his last night is now a memorial to him.

Into which unit was Wilfred Owen commissioned as a second lieutenant in June 1916, after training in Essex?

The Manchester Regiment gave Owen his commission, though at first he held his own men in contempt and called them expressionless lumps in a letter home.

Which writer, editor of the Wheels anthologies, helped bring Wilfred Owen's Poems to print in 1920?

Edith Sitwell had already printed seven of Owen's poems in Wheels in 1919, the year before the book that first carried 'Dulce et Decorum Est'.

With which two words does the speaker of 'Dulce et Decorum Est' address the reader in the final stanza?

My friend comes four lines from the end, and early drafts aimed the address at one named poet rather than at readers in general.