Quote:
Originally posted by MagiK:
Odd that skunk would post works, that show exactly what WoMD can do and what happens when nations sit idly by, talking and appeasing instead of taking action in time to avert the whole disaster in the first place.
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Not so very odd, if you know who Wilfred Owen actually was. Even though he considered himself a pacifist, he enlisted to fight for England in WWI. After suffering shell shock and being brought into hospital, he met Siegfried Sassoon, another WWI poet, and Robert Graves. They encouraged his writing. In August 1918 Owen was declared fit to return to the Western Front. He was killed by machine-gun fire only a week before the Armistice. "Dulce et decorum est" is obviously ironic, even cynical.
What you say about the poem is not what a literary critic would read into it, nor did Owen himself intend them in that way (even though I'm not saying it's explicitly pacifist, mind).