Dulce et Decorum Est Summary & Analysis
by Wilfred Owen

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The Full Text of “Dulce et Decorum Est”

1Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,

2Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,

3Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs,

4And towards our distant rest began to trudge.

5Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots,

6But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;

7Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots

8Of gas-shells dropping softly behind.

9Gas! GAS! Quick, boys!—An ecstasy of fumbling

10Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time,

11But someone still was yelling out and stumbling

12And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime.—

13Dim through the misty panes and thick green light,

14As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

15In all my dreams before my helpless sight,

16He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

17If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace

18Behind the wagon that we flung him in,

19And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,

20His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;

21If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood

22Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,

23Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud

24Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,—

25My friend, you would not tell with such high zest

26To children ardent for some desperate glory,

27The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est

28Pro patria mori.

  • “Dulce et Decorum Est” Introduction

    • "Dulce et Decorum Est" is a poem by the English poet Wilfred Owen. Like most of Owen's work, it was written between August 1917 and September 1918, while he was fighting in World War 1. Owen is known for his wrenching descriptions of suffering in war. In "Dulce et Decorum Est," he illustrates the brutal everyday struggle of a company of soldiers, focuses on the story of one soldier's agonizing death, and discusses the trauma that this event left behind. He uses a quotation from the Roman poet Horace to highlight the difference between the glorious image of war (spread by those not actually fighting in it) and war's horrifying reality.

  • “Dulce et Decorum Est” Summary

    • The speaker begins with a description of soldiers, bent under the weight of their packs like beggars, their knees unsteady, coughing like poor and sick old women, and struggling miserably through a muddy landscape. They turn away from the light flares (a German tactic of briefly lighting up the area in order to spot and kill British soldiers), and begin to march towards their distant camp. The men are so tired that they seem to be sleeping as they walk. Many have lost their combat boots, yet continue on despite their bare and bleeding feet. The soldiers are so worn out they are essentially disabled; they don't see anything at all. They are tired to the point of feeling drunk, and don't even notice the sound of the dangerous poison gas-shells dropping just behind them.

      Somebody cries out an urgent warning about the poison gas, and the soldiers fumble with their gas masks, getting them on just in time. One man, however, is left yelling and struggling, unable to get his mask on. The speaker describes this man as looking like someone caught in fire or lime (an ancient chemical weapon used to effectively blind opponents). The speaker then compares the scene—through the panes of his gas-mask and with poison gas filling the air — to being underwater, and imagines the soldier is drowning.

      The speaker jumps from the past moment of the gas attack to a present moment sometime afterward, and describes a recurring dream that he can't escape, in which the dying soldier races toward him in agony.

      The speaker directly addresses the audience, suggesting that if readers could experience their own such suffocating dreams (marching behind a wagon in which the other men have placed the dying soldier, seeing the writhing of the dying soldier's eyes in an otherwise slack and wrecked face, and hearing him cough up blood from his ruined lungs at every bump in the path—a sight the speaker compares to the horror of cancer and other diseases that ravage even the innocent), they would not so eagerly tell children, hungry for a sense of heroism, the old lie that "it is sweet and fitting to die for one's country."

  • “Dulce et Decorum Est” Themes

    • Theme The Horror and Trauma of War

      The Horror and Trauma of War

      Wilfred Owen wrote “Dulce et Decorum Est” while he was fighting as a soldier during World War I. The poem graphically and bitterly describes the horrors of that war in particular, although it also implicitly speaks of the horror of all wars. While it is easy to comment on the “horror of war” in the abstract, the poem’s depiction of these horrors is devastating in its specificity, and also in the way that Owen makes clear that such horror permeates all aspects of war. The banal daily life of a soldier is excruciating, the brutal reality of death is unimaginable agony, and even surviving a war after watching others die invites a future of endless trauma. The way Owen uses language to put readers inside the experiences of a soldier helps them begin to understand the horrific experience of all of these awful aspects of war.

      In the first stanza of “Dulce et Decorum Est,” the speaker thrusts the reader into the mundane drudgery and suffering of the wartime experience, as the speaker’s regiment walks from the front lines back to an undescribed place of “distant rest.” This is not a portrait of men driven by purpose or thrilled by battle. Instead, they are miserable: “coughing like hags,” cursing as they “trudge” through “sludge” with bloody feet. They march “asleep,” suggesting that these soldiers are like a kind of living dead. The terror and brutality of war have deadened them.

      While the speaker is clear that the life of a soldier is painful and demoralizing, he demonstrates in the second stanza—which moves from describing the communal “we” of a regiment to a specific dying man—that death in war is also terrible: barbarous, agonizing, and meaningless. In the first two lines of the second stanza, the speaker captures the terror and dumb confusion of facing a gas attack (a feature of Word War I combat, which had never been used to such a terrible extent before that war), with the movement from the first cry of “Gas!” to the urgent amplification of that cry (“GAS!”), which is then followed by all the men “fumbling” with “clumsy helmets.” The speaker then describes a particular man unable to get his helmet on time, “stumbling” and “flound’ring” like a “man in fire” while the speaker can only watch helplessly from within his own mask. This other soldier's death is mired in confusion and pain. There isn’t even an enemy to face; it is a physically agonizing death offering no ideal or purpose to hold onto.

      The poem’s very short third stanza suddenly plunges into the speaker’s own mind. In doing so, the poem reveals another aspect of the horror of war: that even surviving war offers ceaseless future torment. The surviving speaker describes himself as seeing in “all my dreams” this man dying in agony. The speaker can’t escape this vision, which means he can't ever achieve the "rest" that was the sole positive thing mentioned in the first stanza. The speaker's sleep is permanently haunted by the trauma of the death he has witnessed.

      Since the third stanza is written in the present tense, it indicates that these dreams never fade. The speaker, who has survived—perhaps for a moment, perhaps the entire war—is permanently scarred by this trauma for however long his life will last. The poem’s portrayal of the horror of war, then, is complete and total. It reveals all aspects of war—living through it, dying in it, and surviving it—as being brutal, agonizing, and without meaning.

    • Theme The Enduring Myth that War is Glorious

      The Enduring Myth that War is Glorious

      In its first three stanzas, “Dulce et Decorum Est” presents a vision of war—and World War I in particular—that is entirely brutal, bitter, and pessimistic. The fourth and final stanza marks a shift. While the first stanza focused on the “we” of the regiment, the second focused on the “he” of the dying soldier, and the third on the “I” of the traumatized speaker, the fourth stanza focuses on the “you” of the reader. In this stanza, the speaker directly addresses the reader, trying to make them understand the brutal reality of war. This is an effort to contradict what the speaker describes as the “old Lie,” the commonly held belief—communicated in the lines of Latin from the poet Horace (“it is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country”)—that war, and dying in war, is meaningful and full of glory.

      It is possible to read this last stanza in a hopeful way by imagining that the poem could effectively communicate to non-soldiers the brutality of war. In this view, Owen wrote the poem with the belief that by highlighting the juxtaposition between a sanitized image of honorable death (as described by Horace) versus the messy, horrifying truth of actual war, perhaps the poem’s audience will change its attitude towards war and cease cheerfully sending young men—mere "children"—to die in agony.

      To read the poem in a hopeful way, however, requires readers to believe that empathy is enough to change central beliefs. This is a plausible reading, but it hinges on the speaker’s descriptions being disturbing and evocative enough to counter what Owen describes as a sentimental belief about war that dates back to antiquity—a difficult task for one short poem, no matter how powerful. In light of this, it’s perhaps a more careful reading of the poem to interpret the final stanza with a degree of pessimism. In this reading (while one might still agree that Owen wrote the poem in hopes of changing minds), the speaker is ultimately pessimistic about his ability to change the civilian public’s attitude towards war. As the speaker puts it: If the audience could experience the trauma the speaker describes (“the white eyes writhing,” the “gargling from froth-corrupted lungs”), then they wouldn’t pass their patriotic militarism down to their children. But they don’t experience it, except through the language of the poem, and the poem gives a hint of despair that such language isn’t enough.

      In the final two lines of "Dulce et Decorum Est," Owen implies this pessimistic view in two main ways. First, and simply, the speaker allows Horace to have the final word. The speaker undercuts Horace’s lines by calling them a lie, but that description comes before the Latin text. That Horace’s words are allowed to end the poem implies a sense that Horace’s words and belief in the glory and honor of war will outweigh the vision of horror described by the poem. Further, by referring to this false story about the glory of war as “the old Lie,” and then quoting a Latin line from the Roman poet Horace, the speaker makes clear that the depiction of war as glorious is not just a simple misconception made by those unfamiliar with war. It is, rather, a lie—a purposefully told falsehood. And it is a lie that has been told for thousands of years in order to inspire young men to willingly give their lives to serve the political needs of their countries.

      “Dulce et Decorum Est” is not, then, simply trying to reveal the horror of war to the unknowing public (though it certainly is trying to do that). The poem is also condemning the historical institutions and political/social structures that have, for time immemorial, sent young men to their deaths based on pretty tales of glory. The poem demands that the reader face the truth and no longer be complicit with that old Lie, but even as it does so, it seems to bitterly perceive that nothing will change, because nothing ever has.

  • Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of “Dulce et Decorum Est”

    • Lines 1-4

      Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
      Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
      Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs,
      And towards our distant rest began to trudge.

      Owen begins the poem with a description of marching soldiers. His focus is on the grimness and misery of the situation, which seems to have rapidly aged the men and zapped them of life. In the first line, the speaker compares the soldiers to "old beggars" bent under their burdens. In line 2, he compares their coughing to that of "hags," a derogatory term for old women, and emphasizes their physical weariness as they struggle through mud. In lines 3 and 4 he clarifies direction, showing the reader that the soldiers are marching away from enemy territory (marked by the "flares") and towards the place where they will be able to rest.

      The first four lines thus set up a scene, helping the reader understand the soldiers' fatigue, their frustration (expressed by cursing), and the constant danger that still surrounds them (represented by the flares). Owen uses consonance to lend a harshness to the sounds of the poem. In the first line, the letter "b" appears in three stressed words ("bent," "double," and "beggars"). This gives way to hard "c" and "k" sounds, with "sacks," "coughing," "cursed," and "backs." Although the "k" sounds of "knock-kneed" are silent, they contribute visually to the hard consonants of this section. The sibilance of "distant rest," meanwhile, makes it stand out from the rest of the landscape, sounding like a whisper, perhaps not entirely real.

      These lines are basically in iambic pentameter, a meter that consists of five iambs per line. This sets up the expectation that the rest of the poem will follow this pattern. Owen does play with stress a little, though. He crams more stressed syllables into the first two lines than belong in iambic pentameter.

      Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,

      Knock-kneed, coughing like hags

      This decision sets the rhythm of the poem rocking. It's over-stressed, unstable, reflecting the instability and roughness of the scene the speaker is describing.

    • Lines 5-8

      Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots,
      But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
      Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
      Of gas-shells dropping softly behind.

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    • Lines 9-10

      Gas! GAS! Quick, boys!—An ecstasy of fumbling
      Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time,

    • Lines 11-14

      But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
      And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime.—
      Dim through the misty panes and thick green light,
      As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

    • Lines 15-16

      In all my dreams before my helpless sight,
      He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

    • Lines 17-20

      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;

    • Lines 21-24

      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,—

    • Lines 25-28

      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
      .

  • “Dulce et Decorum Est” Symbols

    • Symbol The Dying Soldier

      The Dying Soldier

      Although the dying soldier in "Dulce et Decorum Est" is an individual character within the narrative, he also stands in for a generation of young men exposed to the brutality of WWI. The speaker's argument rests on the implicit truth that the dying soldier's experience isn't isolated, and that to the contrary there were many, many deaths like this one. That the soldier is associated with the word "innocent" in line 24 emphasizes the injustice and horror of his death and that of others like him.

      As an innocent, the poem also connects the soldier to the "children" of line 26, who are also, by virtue of being children, "innocent." The dying soldier, and the generation he represents, cannot be saved. Their lives have already been forfeited to war. But the poem makes clear that the next generation—the children—are doomed to repeat the pattern, unless the "old Lie" is finally seen as being the lie it is.

  • “Dulce et Decorum Est” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language

    • Allusion

      In the title and the final two lines of this "Dulce et Decorum Est," Owen alludes to an ode by the Roman poet Horace. Horace's ode encouraged young men to find fulfillment and discipline in military service. The poem criticizes cowardice and weakness, pointing out that everyone dies in the end, whether gloriously or not. Given this, Horace argues that it is best to strive for courage and a steely temperament. The quotation—which in English reads "It is sweet and fitting to die for one's country"—might have been familiar to Owen's original readers, if they were Englishmen with a similar education background. Horace's Odes were a common text in Latin lessons of the era before World War 1, and Horace's ideas of what is and isn't virtuous and honorable were commonly accepted as being correct. In fact, this exact quotation was carved into the wall of a prestigious military academy in England in 1913. The kind of "wisdom" that Horace represents is ingrained, respected, even taken for granted.

      Often, poets include allusions as a way to connect a poem to a traditional event, myth, or idea—to place their own poem into that tradition. But Owen includes the allusion to Horace for exactly the opposite reason. Owen's poem—which is full of brutal, awful death that is marked by only confusion and agony, and to which glory and courage could not even begin to apply—seeks to expose the entire traditional belief in the glory and honor of war as being a lie. That he includes the original lines from Horace, and not a paraphrase or English translation, makes clear that it is the entire tradition, from Roman antiquity to the time of World War I, that he sees as fraudulent and destructive. Put another way: Owen seeks to undermine and refute what he is alluding to.

    • Simile

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    • Metaphor

    • Consonance

    • Enjambment

    • Repetition

    • Apostrophe

    • Hyperbole

    • Imagery

    • Oxymoron

  • “Dulce et Decorum Est” Vocabulary

    Select any word below to get its definition in the context of the poem. The words are listed in the order in which they appear in the poem.

    • Knock-kneed
    • Haunting flares
    • Blood-shod
    • lame
    • gas-shells
    • Ecstasy
    • Helmets
    • Flound'ring
    • Lime
    • Guttering
    • Smothering
    • Writhing
    • Froth-corrupted
    • Cud
    • Zest
    Knock-kneed
    • The term "knock-kneed" actually refers to a medical condition. When someone with knock-knees stands straight up with knees touching, their feet and ankles will stay apart. The term is sometimes used more informally to mean a weakness in the legs which causes the knees to hit one another as the person struggles to stay upright. By using the term, Owen is pointing to the extreme exhaustion that causes the soldiers to walk irregularly and with difficulty.

  • Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “Dulce et Decorum Est”

    • Form

      This poem doesn't follow a specific traditional form. It consists of four stanzas. The first is 8 lines long, the second 6, the third 2, and the fourth 12. There might be a hidden reference to the sonnet in this structure. A sonnet is a poem of 14 lines in iambic pentameter and this poem has 28 lines—exactly twice as many. The first 14 lines of the poem (stanza 1 and 2) tell a story, while the second 14 (stanza 3 and 4) analyze that story from the present tense. These two parts of the poem could be read as a pair of broken sonnets, though their rhyme scheme does not align with the traditional sonnet format.

      The poem as a potential pair of sonnets is not its only interesting structural aspect. Another interesting thing to note is that the second and third stanzas seem like they should be one stanza, since they are linked by their end rhymes (the third stanza finishes the pattern that the second has set up). The break between these two stanzas highlights that the setting of the poem has moved from the past in stanza 2 to the present in stanza 3. At the same time, its unexpected appearance links that present to the past, which makes sense since the third stanza is actually talking about how the speaker can't escape from the trauma of the past (seeing the other soldier die in the gas attack).

    • Meter

      The overarching meter of "Dulce et Decorum Est" is iambic pentameter, a line consisting of five "feet," each of which contains an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed one (da-dum). Owen regularly diverges from this meter in many subtle ways, however. Some of the lines fall perfectly within the meter:

      In all my dreams before my helpless sight

      But most of the lines in the poem are metrically imperfect, and even the variations that Owen makes to the meter are inconsistent. Take, for instance, this line:

      Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge

      This line contains two trochees (a stressed syllable followed by an unstressed) before falling back into the iambic pattern. But line 7 seems to break out of the meter entirely:

      Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots

      With these variations, Owen keeps the music of the poem from falling into anticipated patterns. This has the effect of keeping readers on their toes, and echoing the unpredictability of the soldiers' situation.

    • Rhyme Scheme

      In contrast to its complexity of meter, this poem follows a very simple rhyme scheme. Sequences of four lines are end-rhymed alternately. The full rhyme scheme is:

      ABABCDCD EFEFGH GH IJIJKLKLMNMN

      Owen does not use any end rhyme sounds more than twice. He also chooses very simple words for his rhymes. All of them are perfect rhymes, meaning that their stressed syllables (and any following syllables) share identical sounds. Most of them are no more than one syllable, with a couple of exceptions.

      The most remarkable use of rhyme in the poem is the rhyming of "drowning" with itself in lines 14 and 16. Sometimes called "identical rhyme," rhyming a word with itself is unusual in poetry. In this poem, it has a deadening effect on the rhythm, dragging readers back to what's already been said as they attempt to move forward. This, in turn, echoes the way that the image of the dying soldier endlessly repeats in the speaker's dreams.

  • “Dulce et Decorum Est” Speaker

    • The speaker of this poem is a soldier, traumatized by an experience he has had in war. He is educated, as shown by his familiarity with Latin poetry. What he wants, within the poem, is to communicate to his readers the horror of his experience and make them question their attitude towards war.

      Over the course of the poem, the speaker develops from someone within a group (the marching "we" of the soldiers in his story) to an individual who witnesses a fellow soldier's death. In the third stanza, the reader then moves with the speaker out of his story and into his present life, in which he is haunted by nightmares. In the final stanza, the speaker becomes a rhetorician, using the images from his experience to make an argument.

      Wilfred Owen was an educated young Englishman who fought and died in World War 1, and who was outspoken about his anti-war feelings. Given these facts, one can read the poet and the speaker of the poem as being closely related, if not the same person. In fact, one of Owen's letters to his mother in January of 1917 tells a similar story to that of this poem. Because the speaker's visible aim is to make a point to his audience, it makes sense that Owen would write the poem for publication with the same intent.

  • “Dulce et Decorum Est” Setting

    • While the setting of the poem is not explicitly named, it likely takes place in France during the winter of 1917. This connection can be made by using the context of Wilfred Owen's actual war experience, and the match between his personal letters and the story of the dying soldier. Even without those, the poem offers clues as to time and place.

      • The use of "flares" and "gas-shells" are specific to World War I, since they had not been used in combat before this time.
      • The majority of British troops in WWI were deployed to France. (This is certainly true in Owen's case.)
      • Chlorine gas, with its distinctive green color, was first deployed by the German army in Belgium in 1915.
      • The "clumsy helmets," or gas masks, were developed in response to the introduction of gas. By January 1917, the time of Owen's letter to his mother in which this story appears, gas masks had become standard issue.

      One can also think of the setting in terms of the speaker's past and present. The first two stanzas describe an experience from the speaker's past. The third stanza, though, shifts into the speaker's present, some indeterminate time after that war experience. In this way, the poem can both show the horror of directly experiencing the war, and also shows how those traumas continued to haunt those who survived.

  • Literary and Historical Context of “Dulce et Decorum Est”

      Literary Context

      Wilfred Owen's early literary influences included John Keats and Percy Bysse Shelley, whose poems Owen read as an adolescent in the early 1900s. By the time he began to write poetry seriously, his reading background included William Butler Yeats, A.E. Housman, and Rupert Brooke. Owen wrote nearly all of his mature poems between August 1917 and September 1918. During this time, he was hospitalized in Edinburgh, suffering from shell-shock following his participation in World War I. While hospitalized, Owen formed a friendship with the established poet Siegfried Sassoon.

      Sassoon's first published book, The Old Huntsman (1917), had been widely read at the time. He had also courted controversy with public anti-war acts. Initially, Owen was shy to approach the older poet. Some of his earlier poems imitate Sassoon's satirical, epigrammatic style. However, as Sassoon would later point out, Owen quickly developed his own innovative style. Sassoon considered his encouragement of Owen as simply coming at the right time to stimulate a talent already present.

      Sassoon gave Owen Henri Barbusse's Le Feu, a war novel notable for its intense realism concerning death and the conditions soldiers lived in. This kind of brutal honesty appealed to both poets. It certainly affected the way Owen talks about the details of war in "Dulce et Decorum Est."

      As Owen and Sassoon worked on and talked about pacifist literature, they put themselves up against a canon of pro-war poetry. Rupert Brooke, who had died in combat in 1915, was acclaimed for his idealistic sonnets about war. In the poem "The Soldier," he writes:

      If I should die, think only this of me,
      That there's some corner of a foreign field
      That is forever England.

      This glorified vision of war echoes the earlier treatment of the theme by poets like A.E. Housman, whose poems often uphold the beauty of dying young and for a cause. It also chimes with popular verse like that of Jessie Pope, who wrote prolifically to encourage young men to enlist. Her 1915 poem "The Call" includes these lines:

      Who’ll earn the Empire’s thanks—
      Will you, my laddie?
      Who’ll swell the victor’s ranks—
      Will you, my laddie?

      Pope's work clearly struck a chord with Owen, whose original draft of "Dulce et Decorum Est" bears an ironic dedication to her (he later revised this to read "To a certain Poetess," and later dropped the dedication entirely).

      Sassoon arranged for Owen to meet the literary editor Robert Ross, an old friend and agent of Oscar Wilde. In turn, Ross introduced Owen to several important writers, including Edith Sitwell, Thomas Hardy, and Robert Graves. Owen began to feel himself part of the wider English literary conversation. In the spring of 1918, he began working to publish his first book, which would not be released until after he had returned to the front and died in November of that year.

      In terms both of political content and literary style, Owen's poems influence the work of W.H. Auden, Christopher Isherwood, Stephen Spender, Dylan Thomas, and many others. His work speaks to the disillusionment and questioning evident in the Modernist movement in literature, as well as an interest in playing with the structure of traditional forms.

      Historical Context

      "Dulce et Decorum Est" was written during the course of World War I, as part of a longer series of poems that address war and specifically the lives of soldiers. Wilfred Owen was hospitalized while writing these poems, recovering from shell-shock. "Dulce et Decorum Est" frankly discusses the brutality of war, focusing on the introduction of poison gas, which was relatively new to military use (the first effective use of chlorine gas came in 1915).

      Owen and his associates were convinced that the war must be ended, since it was taking a massive toll on the lives of soldiers. This was a controversial stance. Conscientious objectors were reviled and even imprisoned. In 1918, the same year "Dulce et Decorum Est" was written, the philosopher Bertrand Russell was jailed for pacifist agitation. Social pressure was intense. Young men who failed to enlist were frequently confronted by women and given white feathers, a mark of cowardice. For Owen as a poet, it was paramount to counteract this kind of pro-war sentiment in two ways: by giving honest, detailed accounts of the kind of horror it condoned, and by making clear that he himself lacked no bravery.

      Shortly after writing the bulk of his poems, Owen returned to combat in France. He died in November 1918, one week before Armistice.

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