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 wilting 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
Bitten 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.
4 comments:
Can somone translate the last line for me? =/
"It is sweet and beautiful to die for your country" is the more direct translation. The meaning in this instance is more like "It is heroic and noble to die for your country".
I see. It's a strange dilema this war for peace idea. They say "freedom is never free", and yet it has the word in it FREEdom. Free vrs cost, or consequence...maybe the true staement is "there is no such thing as freedom". If that's true, I reckon harmony is the next best thing.
the last line comes from the 1st century Roman poet Horace, and in the last stanza, when he says "my friend, you would not tell..." etc, he's referring to Jesse Pope, a late 19th century poet who wrote a series of books for children encouraging them in a sort of jingoistic patriotic, fighting and dying for the British Empire, all that stuff.
the poem was originally dedicated to Pope.
Owen, by the way, was killed three weeks before the end of the war.
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