Refresh your teaching of Dulce et Decorum est using Discovering Literature and World War One resources

The British Library’s website has a vast bank of resources useful for anyone interested in language, literature or history. In this guest blog Katie Adams from the library explains how some of these might be used in the teaching of Wilfred Owen’s Dulce et Decorum est, or of war poetry more generally, or as a stimulus for discussion of poetic technique. We are very grateful for this, and for the wider support that the library offers teachers of our qualifications.

Laden with vivid, disturbing images, and driven by a compelling rhythm and alliterative force, ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’ is an unforgettable poem.

By turning to one of Wilfred Owen’s poetry manuscripts on the British Library’s Discovering Literature website, we can find fresh perspectives for exploring ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’ with students. It becomes even richer when paired with a host of other digitised material, placing Owen’s poetry in a wider context.

Portrait of Wilfred Owen from Poems by Wilfred Owen, with an introduction by Siegfried Sassoon (1920). Public Domain.

Take two lines

Take a look at Wilfred Owen’s manuscript draft for ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’– turn to image 6.

What do you notice first? Owen’s legible handwriting, that is soft and curved, and seems to belie the content of the poem? The words crossed out – some more heavily than others? The question marks in the margins – are they written in a different hand? What can we learn from it? On Discovering Literature, Santanu Das draws on the manuscript to illuminate a close reading of the poem. You could pick out some of his fascinating insights and share them with your students.

Here, though, I want to focus on just two lines. Many of us will be drawn to the bottom of the first page, where Owen appears to have particularly struggled over the poem’s composition. These two lines really emphasise the impact of word choice on meaning, tone and effect.

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

These famous lines are violent, disturbing and visceral, describing traumatising ‘dreams’ triggered by witnessing a man ‘drowning’ under ‘a green sea’. In the previous stanza, Owen immerses the reader in the immediate, disorientating chaos of the gas attack: ‘Gas! GAS! Quick, boys!’ We are transported there, feeling the panic of the men, their shock and delayed reactions, the ‘ecstasy of fumbling / Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time’.

Now, in dreams, the man ‘plunges’ at the speaker, as if to pull him under with him. What’s the effect of Owen’s changes here? First, we might ask: why did Owen settle on the word ‘guttering’? Used in this context, the word is now fairly unfamiliar to us – so what does it mean, exactly, and how is it different to his previous choices? One of the definitions given by Oxford Dictionaries for ‘gutter’, as a verb, is: ‘(of a candle or flame) flicker and burn unsteadily’.

It’s incredibly powerful and moving to see Owen deliberating over this second line. From my perspective, the crossings out and repeated attempts to settle on the ‘right’ word evoke a sense of replaying the trauma – a sense of the image stuck on rewind, repeat.

They also suggests how the poet may have felt frustrations with the adequacy of language to truly capture the horrors he had witnessed firsthand. It was not just a visual or physical horror that Owen strove to convey in his poetry; it was a sense and feeling. As Santanu Das brings to light, after three weeks at the front Owen wrote to his mother, ‘I have not seen any dead. I have done worse. In the dank air, I have perceived it, and in the darkness, felt’.

What’s your take on these two draft lines?

Dreams and shell-shock

Like many of his greatest poems, Owen wrote ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’ while being treated for shell-shock at Craiglockhart War Hospital in Edinburgh in 1917. There, he famously met Siegfried Sassoon, and the men became friends. Sassoon provided Owen with crucial support and encouragement for his poetry; this draft manuscript bears some of Sassoon’s notes and edits in the margins. By this time, though, Owen’s confidence as a poet had grown, and he evidently ignored some of Sassoon’s suggestions! For example, Sassoon questioned the phrase ‘an ecstasy of fumbling’, but Owen kept it. See the manuscript for more examples, and discuss the impact of Sassoon’s suggested changes.

Our website includes copies of The Hydra, a magazine that was produced by patients at the hospital. For a time it was edited by Owen. Its front cover features a striking artwork which could form the basis of a comparison activity with the two lines discussed above. Both poem and artwork portray a man ‘helpless’ before a terrifying dream vision that ‘plunges’ towards him.

At Craiglockhart, Owen and Sassoon received treatment by W H R Rivers, a pioneering psychologist. Read Dr Tracey Loughran’s article on ‘shell-shock’ to explore the context of ‘shell-shock’ and the psychological wounds of war, and for details about the encounter between the three men.

You could then explore ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’ in comparison with the contents of a medical article by Rivers. Here, Rivers describes two cases of ‘shell-shock’, where both men experience psychological and emotional trauma connected to warfare and are afflicted with troubling dreams and disrupted sleep. One man ‘reported that it always took him long to get to sleep at night and that when he succeeded he had vivid dreams of warfare. He could not sleep without a light in his room because in the dark his attention was attracted by every sound’ (p. 174).

Putting the poem in context

Here are some other digitised sources that we recommend using to place Owen and ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’ in a wider context.

Artworks

Explore visually creative responses to the war. Show students a range of artworks, and encourage them to ask: What are these war artists’ subjects? What atmosphere, message or impression do you think they convey, and what techniques do they use to achieve this? What comparisons can be drawn between these artworks and Owen’s poetry?

• ''Drawing of the Battle of the Somme’ by Muirhead Bone, Britain’s first official War Artist
• British Artists at the Front, with artworks by Paul Nash, who enlisted in 1914 and became an official War Artist in 1917
• Modern War Paintings by C R W Nevinson, a Futurist artist who served as a motor mechanic, ambulance driver and hospital orderly
• ‘Trench guards’ and ‘The Bloody Cortège’ by the Belgian symbolist painter and sculptor Henry de Groux, who was greatly disturbed by the reports that filled the newspapers.

Artwork by Paul Nash, from British Artists at the Front. © Crown Copyright. This material has been published under an Open Government Licence.

Poetry

A range of poetry books that Owen was influenced by, or which offer an interesting comparison. This is material to widen students’ reading – with some more unfamiliar examples – and to place Owen within a literary network. Many more are available via our dedicated page on ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’.

• Battle, a collection of poetry by Wilfrid Wilson Gibson which Owen read at Craiglockhart before he wrote ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’. Interestingly, Gibson never served on the frontline.
• Images of War – a collection of striking modernist poems by soldier and poet Richard Aldington, with illustrations by Paul Nash
• Marlborough, and other poems by Charles Hamilton Sorley, who is often considered a forerunner to Wilfred Owen. Sassoon introduced Owen to Sorley’s poetry.
• More Songs by the Fighting Men. In September 1918 Owen was given a copy of this book. The anthology includes a poem entitled ‘Dulce et Decorum est Pro Patria Mori’, which is a patriotic hymn to England.
• Manuscript of 'Break of Day in the Trenches' by Isaac Rosenberg, who wrote his poetry whilst in the army on whatever scraps of paper he could find and then sent them to friends and family in England for safekeeping.

Manuscript of 'Break of Day in the Trenches' by Isaac Rosenberg. © Bernard Wynick and Shelley Swade (Joint Literary Executors and Copyright Holders). Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial licence.

Sassoon’s and Owen’s feelings about the war

Explore Wilfred Owen’s draft editorial for the September 1917 edition of The Hydra and Siegfried Sassoon’s statement of protest against the war. Identify what these texts reveal about their authors’ feelings about the war and select key extracts that convey these feelings particularly powerfully. (This activity is from our teaching resource on ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’).

Useful Links

• To explore all of the British Library’s material relating to Wilfred Owen, visit our dedicated page on the poet
  Includes a short biography and links to articles by leading experts, including a close reading by Santanu Das.
• To explore all of the British Library’s material relating to ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’, visit our dedicated page on the poem
• Discovering Literature: 20th century
• World War One

Explore over 500 historical sources on our World War One website, alongside expert articles.

Copyright and usage

The images shown here are a mixture of public domain and rights-cleared. Please check the British Library website for further details.

Public domain images may be freely used. Where material is in copyright, permission has been cleared for use by the British Library. Further use may require permission from the rights holders. Please check the image on our website for further information on the rights status of the works.