Explore "Poems: Dulce et Decorum est" by Wilfred Owen on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
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 / 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.