By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
Let’s begin this week with a nice 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 or so, but we owe the line to a much older, very different poet.
Meaning
Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori is Latin for ‘it is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country’ (patria is where we get our word ‘patriotic’ from: it literally means ‘fatherland’, and is thus linked to the Latin noun pater, meaning ‘father’).
Sometimes ‘decorum’ is translated as ‘honourable’ or ‘noble’ (or another adjective conveying a similar sentiment): after all, even in modern English, if someone’s behaviour is ‘decorous’ it is fitting or appropriate for a particular occasion.
The word ‘decorate’, meanwhile, may more often be used to describe painting or wallpapering a room or something similar, but the words more specialised meaning – such as to decorate a soldier with medals for their honourable conduct or bravery in the line of duty – bears witness to this verb’s origins in the Latin for ‘honour’. If you ‘decorate’ someone with awards, you honour them with grace.
Origins
The phrase originated in the Roman poet Horace, in his Odes. The ode in question calls upon Roman citizens to develop military skills that will cause the enemies of Rome to throw up their weapons in sheer terror.
Specifically, it’s Rome’s enemy the Parthians whom Horace has in mind. Roman citizens should put themselves through the strict ordeal of learning warfare and military discipline so that the Parthians will dread the mere sight of them.
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!’
Although he drafted the poem that October, the surviving drafts of ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’ show that Owen revised and revisited it on several occasions thereafter, before his death the following November – one week before the Armistice.
The Old Lie
Owen’s poem ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’ describes in harrowing detail a poison-gas attack on a group of soldiers, with one man – unable to fasten his gas-mask in time – dying when he inhales the mustard gas used by the enemy.
Owen’s poem ends with the moving words:
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 that final stanza, Owen responds with brilliant irony to the patriotic poets such as Jessie Pope (whom Owen specifically has in mind here), who wrote jingoistic doggerel that encouraged young men to enlist and ‘do their bit for king and country’.
If people like Pope, Owen argues, could witness what he has witnessed, and were forced to relive it in their dreams and waking thoughts every day and night, they would not in all good conscience be able to write such pro-war poetry, knowing they were encouraging more men to share the horrific fate of the soldier Owen had seen killed.
Jessie Pope and her ilk would not be able to feed the ‘Old Lie’, Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori, to impressionable young men (some of them so young they are still ‘children’: it’s worth remembering that some boys lied about their age so they could join up) who are ‘ardent for some desperate glory’.
Beyond Owen
Owen was not the only modern poet to take Horace’s jingoistic words and invert them. Just three years after Owen drafted ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’, the modernist poet Ezra Pound (1885-1972) wrote Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (1920), a remarkable long poem which anticipates T. S. Eliot’s more famous The Waste Land in a number of interesting ways. (Eliot’s poem would appear in 1922, with Pound helping him to edit the original drafts.)
Pound’s poem is partly a raking-over of the 1890s and the dead-end of English Aestheticism, embodied by Lionel Johnson, the Rhymers’ Club, and the other late Victorian poets whose work couldn’t bring forth a modern style.
But it’s also a poem that expresses great anger over the wasteful deaths in the First World War, with Pound declaring that some of those who perished in the war died ‘patria, non dulce non et décor’. There was nothing sweet or honourable about the industrial slaughter of young men on the Western Front.