“Dulce Et Decorum Est” is a poem by Wilfred Owen that showed the British what war was like when it first came out during World War I. People back then had an illusion in their minds of what war was really like and how their soldiers died, and this poem changed that. Owen uses poetic devices like imagery and metaphor to show the reader how terrible deaths in World War I were and how not every man could die a hero. “Dulce Et Decorum Est” shows that not all of the deaths in war are glorious. The quote this poem is named for, “dulce et decorum est pro patria mori,” can roughly be translated to, “how honorable it is to die for your country,” (Owen). Owen calls this an old lie that society would tell the soldiers as they were shipped off to battle.
