Dulce et Decorum Est

I don't know Latin so I had to track down what it meant. The second part of the quotation is part of Wilfred Own's poem by this name.. I could figure out Dulce means sweet and mori had to do with death. Decorum surprised me. I think of decorum as behaving properly, but it means honor. The whole quotation is Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori. I was thinking father with patria, but it means country. Ah! Patriotic. And the Spanish word for country is pais. So the translation is: It is sweet and honorable to die for one's country.

Wilfred Own's poem is from World War I and recounts a gas atttack. I read it as part of librivox.org's http://www.librivox.org/ weekly poetry project. I haven't been reading of late but it is a small way I can contribute to reading. I am such a big consumer of the spoken word. The weekly poems are short enough to Braille and I feel competent to read. I'm hoping in my new environment to have better recording quality. This is a very noisy environment. Part of it is the clocks, fountain, refrigerator but the large windows which I enjoy so much don't help. Nor does the computer fan. Anyway, when I read the poem to myself I had to work through it as a reader. I had some problems recording, so I read it over and over again aloud. The Old Lie: Dulce et decorum est/Pro patria mori. How do you read an old lie? I spat out the words. Poetry has that affect on me--collapsing words to sharp points of emotion. I read some Scripture this way. I read Plath this way. I am writing this post all run together because of how the poem is written and what it says. If you had been there, you would not speak of glory.

World War I produced poetry like this. It was the first modern war. The gas, the mechanization, the devastation of whole regiments getting wiped out and the introduction of airplanes changed war from being very individualized to something very impersonal and depersonalizing.

Not that any war was ever sweet.

Some have said we don't write poems about war any more. We send emails, snap cell phone pictures and videos, and blog. How will that change things?