Who is the intended audience of "Dulce et Decorum Est"?

Interestingly, the intended audience for Wilfred Owen's graphic war poem "Dulce et Decorum Est" is other poets, specifically one poet named Jessie Pope. Owen originally entitled this poem, "To Jessie Pope." Owen directly addresses Pope and her ilk on line 25 where he writes, "My friend, you would not tell with such high zest" the old lie, namely, that it is sweet and proper to die for one's country.

So who was Jessie Pope? She was a British author whose work was published in newspapers and magazines in the early 1900s. Some of her poetry was humorous, such as the verses she published in Punch magazine. However, she was one of the leading composers of a genre known as "jingoistic war poetry." Such poems were used to recruit young men into the military and glamorized war. You can read an example of one of these poems, "The Call," at the link below. After experiencing the horrors of war first-hand, Owen obviously took offense to the flippant recruiting verses that made the military seem like an athletic club. Certainly he had no objection to men signing up to fight for their homeland, but he wanted them to go into it with their eyes wide open. 

Although Jessie Pope and others who wrote jingoistic war poems were the primary audience for this poem, the secondary audience was surely young men who were considering enlisting, or current soldiers or veterans who had been tricked into signing up. Those who had not yet joined could think in a more balanced way about their decision, and those who had already succumbed to the bait-and-switch recruitment propaganda could at least feel that someone was expressing their feelings about having been deceived. 

A tertiary audience Owen must have had in mind would be the public at large who, by reading his realistic poetry, would have a better idea of the great sacrifice their fighting men were making for their fellow citizens.

What type of person is the speaker in "Dulce et Decorum Est?"

The speaker in Wilfred Owen's "Dulce et Decorum Est" is a soldier who has experienced shell shock, or as we would now call it, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), after taking part in trench warfare during World War I. Although it is tempting to view the poem as autobiographical because Wilfred Owen himself served as a military officer for the British armed forces, there is no historical indication that Owen experienced the exact scene described in the poem. Nevertheless, Owen experienced nightmares for months when he was hospitalized for shell shock.

The speaker in the poem relates an incident of seeing a fellow soldier succumb to chlorine gas poisoning when he was unable to get his gas mask on in time. In the poem, the speaker was one of the soldiers who was "bent double," coughing and limping, "drunk with fatigue," and generally miserable with the conditions of war. In such a state, almost semi-conscious, he is helpless to assist the man who can't get his helmet on. The experience of watching the man "drown" on "the wagon that we flung him in" is one that severely traumatized the speaker, causing "smothering dreams." 

The speaker turns his bitterness for the incident not at the enemy, nor at the concept of war itself, but at those who recruit young men by holding military service out as some glamorous prospect. He addresses "my friend," a woman who wrote jingoistic war poetry, saying that if she suffered from nightmares like he does, she would not be so quick to spout the "old lie" to young men that it is sweet and fitting to die for one's country.

The fact that the speaker is plagued by having observed the death of a fellow soldier while he stood by helplessly and the fact that he now speaks out against dishonest recruiting methods shows that he is a compassionate person who values truth. He isn't against war, but he wants young men to go into the experience with their eyes open, and he wants society to understand and appreciate the level of sacrifice the soldiers are making for Great Britain.

The speaker in this person is a World War I soldier who witnessed another soldier's horrible death because he did not get his gas mask on in time when the "hooting" gas shells fell. Inhaling the caustic chlorine gas destroys his lungs and causes him to drown in fluid from his own lungs. Other soldiers can only watch helplessly.

Observing this horrid scene after experiencing the exhausting, miserable march that he describes at the beginning of the poem has embittered the speaker. He declares that Horace's adage "it is sweet and fitting to die for one's country," a translation of the title, is wrong. Clearly this speaker strongly disapproves of war, which he depicts as a hellish experience.

Who is the speaker of "Dulce et Decorum Est"?

The speaker of "Dulce et Decorum Est" is a soldier who has fought on the front lines in World War I. He is bitter and disillusioned by all he has seen.

Though Wilfred Owen never attended university, he/the speaker shows some familiarity with the classics by quoting a famous Latin phrase, which also serves as the poem's title: Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori ("it is a sweet and fitting thing to die for one's country"). Yet as Owen's poem shows, the realities of war are anything but "sweet and proper."

Through his position on the front lines, the speaker is able to give an eyewitness account of what the modern battlefield is truly like. Despite what ideas people might have gathered from reading the heroic Greek or Roman accounts of war, the modern reality is that the soldiers are exhausted, limping, and "bent double, like old beggars." Rather than engaging in heroic battles, they are subjected to sneaky and vicious gas attacks which take a terrible toll on people who cannot get their gas masks on in time. The speaker describes one man who breathes in gas as having

white eyes writhing in his face, … at every jolt, the blood Come[s] gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs.