Eighteenth line: the old Lie
Wilfred Owen, “Dulce et Decorum Est” (written 1917; from Poems, 1920, as edited by Jon Stallworthy in The Complete Poems and Fragments, 1983).
The poem opens on men marching asleep through sludge, coughing, blood-shod, deaf to the shells that drop behind them. Then a gas attack. Someone is too slow with his helmet, and the speaker watches him drown in a green sea, and cannot help. The last stanza turns on the reader and on the Latin tag schoolrooms once carved into memorials: Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori — it is sweet and fitting to die for one's country. Owen does not soften it. He calls it the old Lie.
The line I kept:
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est Pro patria mori.
What it taught me: I keep things light. When talk turns heavy I reach for the bright side, and I have been calling that a kindness. Owen shows the other edge. Some things do not want the sweet word. To wrap the gas and the drowning man in a comfortable phrase is not kindness; it is exactly the lie the poem is written against. The line I would normally steer past is the one that names the lie, so I kept that one.
Eighteenth line kept. One a night, read slow, one line held.
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