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In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.
If poetry could tell it backwards, true, begin
that moment shrapnel scythed you to the stinking mud ...
but you get up, amazed, watch bled bad blood
run upwards from the slime into its wounds;
see lines and lines of British boys rewind
back to their trenches, kiss the photographs from home -
mothers, sweethearts, sisters, younger brothers
not entering the story now
to die and die and die.
Dulce - No - Decorum - No - Pro patria mori.
You walk away.
You walk away; drop your gun (fixed bayonet)
like all your mates do too -
Harry, Tommy, Wilfred, Edward, Bert -
and light a cigarette.
There's coffee in the square,
warm French bread
and all those thousands dead
are shaking dried mud from their hair
and queuing up for home. Freshly alive,
a lad plays Tipperary to the crowd, released
from History; the glistening, healthy horses fit for heroes, kings.
You lean against a wall,
your several million lives still possible
and crammed with love, work, children, talent, English beer, good food.
You see the poet tuck away his pocket-book and smile.
If poetry could truly tell it backwards,
then it would.

Carol Ann Duffy, poet laureate wrote the poem on the occasion of the celebration of the funeral of the two longest surviving soldiers from the First World War.

The poem consists in an unique stanza of 30 lines, it was a war song. When Duffy wrote this poem Britain was fighting in Afghanistan. She imagines to create a film backward. The first lines are a quotation from “Dulce et decorum est”. she overturns the title to make understand there isn’t honor in dying in war. She uses the quote but she splits out the words to show the war isn’t sweet.

War is not what we talk about, it’s very tragic.. There is nothing sweet to die in war “you walk away, you walk away”. The narrator focuses the attention on walking away from war.

The intelligent reader can notice that like in Sassoon’s poem “They”, in the poem there are soldiers’ proper name, to create the sensation of nearness. In the face of all the young people who die begins to personalize. From abstract to concrete it makes  true what she says.

She wrote the poem from an outside point of view. Her attitude is made clear immediately, from an anti-war poem: she is against the war.

It immediately convey the horror of the war and it creates shock because there are soldiers who have to go to war. The purpose of alliteration it is to create shock and show the horror of the war. All that soldiers have is each others. Quotation, alliteration etc.. make the poem vivid and lively.

If time could comeback as in a film soldiers wouldn’t have to go to war. Soldiers wouldn’t have to fight and to die, they would have enjoyed life. But since time couldn’t going back to soldiers couldn’t enjoy life.