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My friend, you would not tell with such high zest To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est Pro patria mori.
'My friend'.
We'll come back to who that 'my friend' is later.
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest'
'Zest' is keenness, enthusiasm. 'My friend, you would be so keen to tell'
children ardent for some desperate glory,
Children who want to be heroes, that's what 'ardent for some desperate glory' means.
Keen to be a hero.
Owen is saying, 'if you have seen what I have seen,'
'you would not be so keen to tell young men, kids, who want to be heroes,'
'"it is sweet and fitting, glorious, right, to die for your country."'
Because, I have seen those young men dying for our country,
and there is nothing fitting, right, or glorious about it.'
It's worth noting what Owen actually asks you to do here,
in this final stanza, which is one sentence, incidentally.
In that final stanza, he doesn't ask you to
imagine what it is like to be the soldier who breathes the mustard gas.
He doesn't ask you what it is like to be one of those soldiers who is dying for his country.
All he asks you to do is be him, is be the person who has
watched one of his friends dying for his country.
Be the person who has 'heard the blood coming gargling
'from the froth-corrupted lungs'.
He doesn't say, 'see the blood coming gargling'
'from the froth-corrupted lungs' in that line either.
He says, if you could hear, at every jolt, the blood Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
In the act of attempting to hear it, we inevitably see it as well.
What Owen asks the addressee of the poem to do here,
it shows a lot of integrity.
He's not asking the person he addresses the poem to
to do anything that he hasn't done himself.
So of course, the question now must be raised: who is he addressing the poem to?