What are the realities of war? Do you really know or are you just disillusioned into believing what others tell you? No one really know the actualities of war but some authors try to convey reality through their writing to help you, as the civilian, experience what war is really about. Wilfred Owen does this in his poem, Dulce Et Decorum Est. This poem is about war and how it’s not really as amazing of a thing as those in the government would have you believe. War is real. There are people dying and bad things happening around you. These memories haunt your dreams, even years later, and effect you in your daily life. The literary devices of visual imagery, irony, simile, and metaphor are used to illustrate the realities of war for the reader.

There is a dreamy version of war that you get in the story books and then there is the reality of war. You feel like wars are not real, unless you are actually involved in them. Your participation in life gives you the aspect of history behind it. Your lack of participation gives you a kind of fantasy idea about what war actually is. Daniel Moran states that, “Owen’s poem… attacks [that] kind of sentimental [notion] about war”. Wilfred Owen wants the reader to know that war is real and to make them feel things through reading his poems. He does this by “attack[ing]” the positive thoughts about war and giving the reader the truth about war through his visual imagery of the war that is happening around him. In the second stanza of, Dulce Et Decorum Est, the literary device of visual imagery is used to show the urgency involved in war. The following lines describe a gas attack, “Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time; But someone still was yelling out and stumbling,” and show this urgency that is needed in a time of war (Owen). By saying, “fitting the clumsy helmets,” the speaker is telling you how fast they were moving and how scared they were, so you can see the scene as it is taking place. By describing, “someone… yelling out and stumbling,” the speaker tells you that someone did not escape the effect of war. They are now dying because they were not quick enough. This shows the horrors of war. During war, one instant, one fraction of a second could mean the difference between life and death. Death is not pretty and honorable as the old lie tells us.