soldier crawling on hands and knees through a trench under a cloud of poisonous gas with dead soldiers in the foreground and background

Dulce et Decorum Est

by Wilfred Owen

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Student Question

Is "Dulce et Decorum Est" written in iambic pentameter?

Quick answer:

"Dulce et Decorum Est" is in iambic pentameter. This means that the iamb is the dominant metrical foot in the poem, and it consists of two syllables, one unstressed followed by one stressed. This also means that there are five (penta) of these iambs per line.

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"Dulce et Decorum Est” is written in iambic pentameter. It is not perfectly regular, and there are substitutions of other kinds of metrical feet, but the rhythm is consistent enough to be called iambic, and there are five feet per line.

An “iamb” is a kind of metrical “foot” consisting of one unstressed syllable followed by one stressed syllable. An example of an iamb would be the word “delay.” We emphasize the second syllable in this word and not the first syllable, pronouncing it de-LAY and not DE-lay. The word “pentameter” means that there are five of these metrical feet per line, because the prefix penta- means five. Thus, most lines in the poem have ten syllables total.

Let’s look at the first four lines of the poem. I usually begin the process of figuring out a poem’s meter by starting with the words that have more than...

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one syllable. Then, I fill in from there. I will put each stressed syllable below in bold, and I will separate the feet from one another with a “|” mark.

Bent dou | ble like | old beg | gars un | der sacksKnock kneed | cough ing | like hags | we cursed | through sludge
Till on | the haun | ting flares | we turned | our backs

And towards | our dis | tant rest | be gan | to trudge

We can see that lines 1, 3, and 4 are regular and do not deviate from the iambic metrical pattern; however, line 2 is different. The first two syllables are stressed, and this metrical foot is called a spondee, which consists of two stressed syllables in a row. This spondee is substituted for the first iamb, and the second foot in the line is called a trochee, which consists of one stressed syllable followed by one unstressed. These substitutions, or metrical variations, draw our attention to these words via their sound, emphasizing how very old and weak these youthful soldiers seem as a result of the way war has ravaged their bodies.

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Is "Dulce et Decorum Est" a sonnet?

"Dulce et Decorum Est" is not a sonnet. A sonnet is a particular type of poem which must demonstrate certain key features. Sonnets are fourteen lines long and adhere to a particular meter and rhyme scheme. Examples of sonnets would be Shakespeare's sonnet cycle. While the sonnet form has been widely used by many writers in different eras, and indeed by several poets of the First World War, it is not the form or structure Wilfred Owen is using here.

The structure and form of this poem do bear certain resemblances to a sonnet. Owen does use a rhyme scheme which runs ABABCDCD, and the first stanza has eight lines which mostly adhere to iambic pentameter, loosely speaking. One could argue that this is an octave, and that it, in conjunction with the following stanza, could be considered a sort of sonnet, as these two stanzas between them have fourteen lines. However, the poem continues on after this, and the first two stanzas do not culminate, as we might expect a sonnet to do, in a rhyming couplet. So, while it is possible that Owen had the meter and general sound of a sonnet in mind when he began writing, the sonnet form is one which is very rule-bound. While we sometimes find a double sonnet in poetry, where a poet has used two fourteen-line sets to convey an idea, that is not what Owen has done here.

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