Let’s begin this week with a straightforward poetry question. Which poet gave us the quotation, ‘dulce et decorum est pro patria mori’?
The war poet Wilfred Owen has made these words resonate with new meaning in the last century, but we owe the line to a much older, very different poet.
Meaning
‘Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori’ is a Latin phrase that translates to ‘it is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country’. The word patria is the root of our term patriotic, literally meaning ‘fatherland’, derived from the Latin word pater, meaning ‘father’.
The word ‘decorum’ is sometimes translated as ‘honourable’ or ‘noble’, suggesting behaviour that is appropriate for a given situation. In modern English, something described as decorous is fitting or proper for the occasion.
Interestingly, the verb decorate, though often associated with home improvements, also carries a more specialized meaning – to decorate someone with medals for honourable conduct. This usage underscores the connection to the Latin meaning of ‘honour’.
Origins
The phrase originates from the Roman poet Horace, specifically in his Odes. In the ode, Horace urges Roman citizens to develop military skills, enabling them to instill fear in the hearts of their enemies – particularly the Parthians. He encourages the Roman people to embrace the discipline of warfare, so that the mere sight of them would cause their enemies to surrender in terror.
Wilfred Owen’s Poem
In October 1917, Wilfred Owen wrote to his mother from Craiglockhart Hospital: ‘Here is a gas poem, done yesterday … the famous Latin tag (from Horace, Odes) means, of course, it is sweet and meet to die for one’s country. Sweet! and decorous!’
Owen wrote the poem that October, and though he drafted it then, the surviving versions of ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’ reveal that Owen revised and revisited the poem multiple times. Tragically, he died just one week before the Armistice in November of 1918.
The Old Lie
Owen’s poem ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’ vividly describes a horrific gas attack on soldiers, highlighting the brutal death of a soldier who cannot fasten his gas mask in time. The soldier succumbs to the mustard gas, a weapon used by the enemy.
The poem ends with the poignant lines:
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.
But who is ‘my friend’ here?
In this final stanza, Owen brilliantly uses irony to criticize patriotic poets like Jessie Pope, who wrote jingoistic poetry encouraging young men to enlist and fight for king and country. Owen argues that if these poets could witness the horrors he experienced firsthand, they would be unable to write such pro-war poetry. Instead, they would be haunted by the brutal reality of war, knowing they were encouraging more young men to face the same tragic fate.
Owen suggests that figures like Jessie Pope, who fed the ‘old lie’ of dulce et decorum est pro patria mori, would not be able to convince impressionable youth – some of whom were so young they lied about their age to enlist – that dying for their country was a sweet and honourable sacrifice.
Beyond Owen
Wilfred Owen was not the only modern poet to challenge Horace’s idealized words. Just three years after Owen wrote his famous poem, Ezra Pound (1885–1972) penned ‘Hugh Selwyn Mauberley’ (1920), a significant long poem that anticipates T.S. Eliot’s ‘The Waste Land’ (1922). Pound’s poem critiques the wasteful deaths of young men in the First World War, calling out the ‘patria’ but rejecting the idea that such deaths were ‘sweet’ or ‘honourable’.
In ‘Hugh Selwyn Mauberley’, Pound declares that the deaths of soldiers during the war were anything but sweet or noble: ‘patria, non dulce non et décor’. This powerful statement aligns with the modernist rejection of the glorified image of war, replacing it with the stark reality of industrial slaughter on the Western Front.