The great interest of poets such as Owen or Brooke was war because they could experience the honours of the first world war. Owen himself was killed in action in 1918 a week before the end of the war.
While Brooke’s attitude to war regards the honour to die for one’s nation, Owen point of view was quite different. He in fact was the only one, among the war poets who really went beyond simple horror and indignation. He could feel a deep sense of “the Pity of war”. In the preface of his poems, in fact, he said: «… my subject is war, and the pity of war. The poetry is in the pity »⁸.
Generally speaking the war poets had (at first) a sort of enthusiasm for the conflict because to them it represented a sort of new adventure away from the loneliness and alienation of their society. But soon the poets realized after 1916 in particular, the terribly tragical aspect of war and its cruelty. According to Spiazzi and Tavella ⁹: «For the soldier, life in the trenches was hell because of the rain and mud, the decaying bodies the rats feed on, the repeated bombings and the use of poison gas in warfare».
Which is, in other words, the theme of Owen’s “Dulce et decorum est”.

Dulce Et Decorum Est

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 tired, outstripped Five-Nines that dropped behind.

Gas! Gas! Quick, boys!- An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmet 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 someone 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 I could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lugs,
Obscene as a 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.

In the poem “Dulce Et Decorum Est” Owen told about the soldiers’ suffering. Owen uses the description of a typical war scene: the explosion of a toxic bomb and the suffering of a soldier that was poisoned by gas. But the suffering that the poet describes is not only the one caused by that weapon but also the suffering of the soldiers’ march. Where does Owen show his pity for his comrades-in-arms? We can find it when he compares them to “old beggars under sacks […] coughing like hags”. They are marching “asleep”, “all blind”, “drunk with fatigue”, they are going towards “gas”, toward death in other words. They can’t stop, they must inevitably go towards the end of their dreams.
The use of realistic terms makes the war scene even more full of horror and ugliness- the reader feels a sense of alienation and is so involved that he is not simply a spectator but becomes one of the soldiers on the battle field .
The poems ends with bitter irony when the poets asks an imaginary friend if he would still tell “the old lie” to one children waiting for the description of war events., the glory the soldiers had once imagined is now called “desperate”.
The conclusion is that it is not honourable and rewarding to die in battle for the nation’s sake. And the poet feels pity for useless sacrifice and suffering.