"Future years will never see the seething hell and the black infernal background, the countless minor scenes and the interiors of the secession...the real war will never get in the books". This Walk Whitman quotes shares a similar theme with Wilfred Owens' poem, "Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori". The ironically titled poem depicts the gruesome truth of engaging battle in war. The poem is a far cry from the glorifying propaganda that a nation uses to lure young men into fighting for their nation, such as the soldier in the poem. Wilfred Owen uses imagery throughout his prose to dramatize the effect of pathos to the reader and to reinforce his negative view on war.
             The fatigue ridden soldiers in Stanza 1 are depicted as stolid characters as the "All went lame; all blind drunk with fatigue". Personifying the artillery shells, "deaf even to the hoots of tired outstripped Five-Nines that dropped behind", shows how flaccid and doleful the war has changed the once zealous soldiers. The similes in Stanza 2 are most aggrieving to the soldiers as they see a fellow soldier "flound'ring like a man in fire or lime...through...thick green light as under a green sea, I saw him drowning". The soldiers ignore the "drowning" man – that could not place his helmet on in time – because of the inhumanity the war has afflicted them with. The "guttering, choking, drowning" of the moribund soldier cloud his dreams and the usage of assonance shows the guilt in his mind and exasperation of the death that has plagued the soldiers.
             In the last Stanza, the author uses alliteration in such lines as, "white eyes writhing", "incurable sores on innocent tongues", and "devils sick of sin" to demoralize the apotheosis of going to war and becoming a hero. Owen Wilson use of the proposition "If" fastidiously illustrates to adults the co...