THE TITLE:
The narrator chooses to give the poem a latin title. Maybe the narrator’s interlocutors were literate people or (more likely) the interlocutors were soldiers and common people, since the title is easy to translate and it might be a quotation known by the people. In both cases, the title draws the reader’s attention since it is not written in English. The use of latin seems to give power and prestige to the poem. So the intelligent reader may wonder why the narrator uses a magnifying language in order to refer to war. He/she may think that this choice is useful to create a juxtaposition between the pre-war idealism and the real war.

THE SUBJECT OF THE POEM:
In the poem, Wilfred Owen presents the real war to an interlocutor that has an ideal perception of it (“my friend, you would not tell with such high zest [..] dulce et decorum est pro patria mori”). Indeed he minutely represents a gas attack at the frontline, paying particular attention to the description of the soldiers’s physical and psychological situation.