Describing the unpleasant life in the trenches from 1915 to 1918, Wilfred Owen is one of the most important poets of his genre. Using many well-known techniques in poetry, Wilfred Owen successfully characterizes his closed-form poems through personification, alliteration, and allegory. Illustrating a gas attack on a trench, Dulce et Decorum Est is an embittered portrait of his first-hand experience during the war. The poem is written primarily in three sections: an account of the soldiers retreating from the battlefield; a surprise gas attack; and finally a verse that addresses those who glorify war. Beginning with a series of descriptions of soldiers returning from the front, Owen shows us how these men contradict the model soldier portrayed on recruitment posters. The soldiers we see now have been beaten down by pain and exhaustion: “old beggars doubled over” and “hags”. Here Owens shows us the true reality of war and its impact on soldiers; shows us how daily combat has negatively impacted the generation, virtually eliminating the entire cohort. Wilfred Owen goes on to describe the soldiers in even more depth, and uses the term “blood-shod” along the way. The term “shod with blood” recalls the idea of ​​bloodshed, once again representing the overall scene of exhaustion and death. Since the final line of the stanza is a personification of the “Five-Nine who are left behind,” we begin to see that war is not such a wonderful thing. This could be an allegory, where Owen actually states how it is not the ground that is "tired" and "overcome", but in reality it is the soldiers who are beaten down. Shaken by the previous somnambulistic genre of the first stanza, the reader is greeted... in the center of the sheet... meeting to die for their country. Taken from the opening lines of an Ode by Horace, it was often used to urge young men to enlist. It is the vomited second-hand patriotism of an earlier era, when war was considered valiant and heroic, that Owen likens to "incurable sores on innocent tongues." Although written loosely in iambic pentameter, the variations in syllable counts for each line, added to the use of caesura, prevent any flow or rhythm in the poem. Owen wanted to break with tradition to show how moral values ​​had collapsed. He also broke with traditional language and imagery in an attempt to shock the complacent people who send young people to their deaths based on “The Old Lie.” The Latin used at the end of the poem means "It is sweet and honorable to die for one's country", a concept which Owen strongly denies. This is an allegory.