Michael Appelt

The bells of war are sounding louder again and yet, have they ever really stopped?

In this episode of Musical Poetry, we present Dulce et Decorum Est by Wilfred Owen, one of the most powerful anti-war poems ever written.

Owen wrote this poem during the First World War, after witnessing combat at close range. Before the war, he was a teacher and a poet. He was killed in action on 4 November 1918, just one week before the war ended. The poem was published after his death, in 1920.

Its final line comes from an old Latin saying: “It is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country.”

Owen called this idea the old lie.

This reading is offered in remembrance of those who suffer today in Sudan, in Ukraine, and wherever the bells of war continue to sound.

It is also a refusal to ask the young to give their lives for the comfort, possessions, or survival of the old.

This is not a call to action.It is an act of witness.

Dulce et Decorum Est by Wilfred Owen

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.

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.

Gas! GAS! Quick, boys!—

An ecstasy of fumbling

Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;

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.

In all my dreams before my helpless sight,

He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

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;

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,—

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.