How one poem changed the way I see language
Posting this on Remembrance Day feels right, because my introduction to Wilfred Owen happened long before I had any real sense of the day’s significance. I first encountered him at Wellington School during English GCSE with Mr Norman, whose lessons made literature feel far more immediate than the curriculum ever hinted. At the same time, in History, Dr Culver was leading us through the First World War with a clarity that left little room for the soft-focus mythology that sometimes settles over that era. Because Dulce et Decorum Est arrived from both directions at once, it never felt like a poem to analyse. It felt like a piece of truth breaking into the school timetable.
A poem that arrived like truth
The moment was shaped too by the culture around us. Blackadder Goes Forth still sat firmly in the national imagination, that uneasy blend of humour, futility and grief. That contrast prepared me for Owen more than I realised. Moving from the final scene of Blackadder to the opening lines of the poem was like someone turning the volume down so you could finally hear what had always been there underneath.
Those first images of men “bent double” and “knock kneed” instantly stripped away every romantic notion we had absorbed from textbooks. Then came the awful intimacy of “guttering, choking, drowning”, a line that felt less like poetry and more like someone bearing witness. And finally, the quiet dismantling of the old lie, delivered so plainly it left no room for argument. It showed me that English, handled with purpose, can cut through inherited myth without ever raising its voice.
Echoes in modern culture
As I grew older, I began noticing how that instinct echoed quietly through modern culture. The Libertines, in their brief and chaotic brilliance, often quoted Owen and other war poets, their rawness and romantic fatalism carrying unmistakable traces of the same emotional charge. Roger Waters explored similar territory from a different angle, wrestling with the psychological aftershocks of conflict for decades. I would not claim they were channelling Owen directly, yet the connection always felt present. It was not a lineage so much as a shared recognition that language can confront difficult truth when it refuses to be decorative.
What stayed with me was not just the content of the poem but the revelation it delivered. I am certainly not comparing myself to Owen, nor my writing to his. What I am acknowledging is the moment he made the power of words impossible to ignore. He showed me that clarity can be devastating. He proved that simple language, placed with precision, can carry more emotional and moral force than anything ornate. That understanding became a quiet foundation for the way I read, write and listen.
These anthems of doomed youth, whether written in the trenches or echoed by later generations, remind us to look harder at the stories we inherit. They encourage us to question the easy versions. They show us that language, when used honestly, can reveal rather than conceal, illuminate rather than reassure.
On Remembrance Day, when memory and responsibility sit closely together, it feels right to return to that first encounter in a classroom. A single poem, barely a page long, opened a door that has never quite closed.
Dulce et Decorum Est, Wilfred Owen, 1917
Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs,
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots,
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of gas-shells dropping softly behind.
Gas! GAS! Quick, boys!—An ecstasy of fumbling
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime.—
Dim through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.
If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,—
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.