Wilfred Owen chose the title "Dulce et Decorum Est" to disapprove its lie and reveal the sarcasm and irony. Calling the readers "my friend," Owen discourages the "children's" beliefs in the old lie. Experiencing the devastation of war, Owen got inspired by the intense feelings and emotions to write it out. As a former teacher Owen was completely terrified when he saw the terrible things happening to his young comrades, no different to the children Owen once taught. His use of rhymes, vivid language and imagery phrases point out his expression. The poem describes the fatigue, blindness, death, sufferings, and horrors of war. It shows the everlasting painful conditions of a soldier "bent double", "trudging" through mud with bloody feet and blind eyes, cautious to every second, aware of the death beyond death. Moreover worse, ill with fatal wounds and poisoned lungs. This poem gives a big lead to criticisms to those who would influence war as time for glory.
As a poem with an anti-war subject, Owen creates a serious tone with both slow emotional trudging and hasty action. He writes with a battlefield rhythm. This affects the extreme portrayal of war as horrid and dreadful. Owen wanted the reader to take out of the poem the feelings he had placed in it writing. In stanza one Owen wrote with a flowing tone including commas and full stops and separating different lines to make the reader feel it out line by line. It described the daily situation for the soldiers in trenches. For the last stanza Owen used the present continuous tense, omitting full stops to give the sense to the reader that this is happening right now next to them. Finally he added rhyme like any other poem to give it a poetic tone.
Starting off with the line, "Bent double, like old beggars under sacks," tells us how the glorious uniforms of the proud soldiers turned into dirty, torn up sacks similar to the ones a beggar wear. Line 20, "His hanging face like a devil's sick of sin," conveys how untruthful it is to die for country this way and that the war is worse than the devil itself.