Depicting the unsightly life of the trenches from 1915 to 1918, Wilfred Owen is one of the most eminent poets of his genre. Using many well-known poetic techniques, Wilfred Owen successfully characterizes his closed-form poems through personification, alliteration, and allegory. Depicting a gas attack on a trench, Dulce et Decorum Est is a bitter portrait of his first-hand experience during the war. The poem is primarily written in three sections: an account of the soldiers retreating from the battlefield; a surprise gas attack; and finally a verse confronting those who exalt war. Beginning with a series of descriptions of soldiers returning from the front, Owen shows us how these men contradict the model soldier depicted on recruitment posters. The soldiers we see today are overcome with pain and exhaustion: “old beggars bent double” and “witches”. Here, Owens shows us the true reality of war and its impact on soldiers. shows us how the daily struggle took its toll on the generation, virtually wiping out the entire cohort. Wilfred Owen goes on to describe the soldiers in even greater depth, and along the way he uses the term "blood-shod." The term “Blood-Shod” evokes the idea of ​​bloodshed, again representing the overall scene of weariness and death. With the last line of the stanza being a personification of the “Five-Nine Behind,” we begin to see that war is not such a wonderful thing. This may be an allegory, where Owen is actually stating that it is not the field that is "weary" and "outstripped", but rather the soldiers who are defeated. Shocked by the previous somnambulant genre of the first stanza, the reader is greeted... middle of paper ...... comes together to die for his country. Taken from the opening lines of an Ode by Horace, it was frequently used to encourage young men to enlist. It is the second-hand patriotism spat out from an earlier era, when war was seen as valiant and heroic, that Owen likens to "incurable sores on innocent tongues." Although loosely written in iambic pentameter, the variations in the syllable counts for each line, coupled with the use of caesura, prevent any flow or rhythm in the poem. Owen wanted to break with tradition to show how moral values ​​had collapsed. He also broke with traditional language and imagery in an attempt to shock the complacent who send young men to their deaths based on the "old lie." The Latin used at the end of the poem means "It is sweet and honorable to die for one's country", a concept that Owen strongly denies. It's an allegory.