A number of social as well as historical conditions provoked Thoreau’s thought and resulting essay on the subject of civil disobedience. One of the factors that influenced Thoreau to consider civil disobedience as a method of resistance was the poor treatment of Mexico by the United States. In  “Civil Disobedience”  Thoreau is also disturbed by the way that the United States fails to take care of vulnerable people and why it embraces Christian ideals of sacrifice but “excommunicates Copernicus and Luther, and pronounce[s] Washington and Franklin rebels” (  ). Still more alarming to Thoreau in “Civil Disobedience” Thoreau, however, was the institution of slavery in the South; Thoreau declared in one of the important quotes from “Civil Disobedience” “I cannot for an instant recognize that political organization as my government which is the slave’s government also” ( ). In fact, the practice of slavery in the United States is the single most hypocritical aspect of the government as far as Thoreau is concerned. He remarks  in one of these particularly succinct quotes from “Civil Disobedience”: “[W]hen a sixth of the population…has undertaken to be the refuge of liberty are slaves… I think that it is not too soon for honest men to rebel and revolutionize” ( ). Thoreau considers civil disobedience a moral and social duty of American citizens. He defines civil disobedience as an act of willful resistance, achieved by not obeying laws he considers to be hypocritical. One act of civil disobedience may be not paying taxes. Another act, and one he deems more important still, is to avoid colluding with the government by refusing to play an active role in it. It is important to point out, though, that civil disobedience is, as its name suggests, peaceful. It does not involve taking up arms or using any other methods of violence to achieve its ends.

Thoreau’s essay on civil disobedience is a seminal work in the American literary canon, and it is clear that his treatise on concentrated, thoughtful resistance has been influential in subsequent social and political movements which themselves have been recorded by writers. One of the movements that was marked by its insistence on civil disobedience is the civil rights movement of the 1960s. The man who was considered the leader of this movement, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., advocated the kind of peaceful but assertive resistance defined by Thoreau as civil disobedience. Dr. King’s strategy for political change was to plan, facilitate, and implement as many acts of resistance as possible while avoiding violence at all costs. Even more than Thoreau, it seems, King wanted the actions of civil rights activists to provoke thought, critical evaluation of the government and of society at large, and a radical change in government’s and society’s processes and treatment of marginalized minorities. While Thoreau seems to have been more of an individualist in his essay “Civil Disobedience”, calling upon each citizen who felt so compelled to determine and implement his own act of resistance, which need not necessarily be coordinated with someone else, King mastered the power of civil disobedience by creating a critical mass of individuals to band together as a show of solidarity. In his “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” Martin Luther King  addresses those individuals who criticize him for such a strategy, and what makes this letter so effective and powerful is that his audience, the people he is trying to convince, are eight ministers who criticized Martin Luther Kingfor bringing his movement to Alabama.

King intuits how significant it is that he lacks the support of his fellow clergymen, and he pens this letter in response, saying that he has come to Alabama because “injustice is here” and he considers injustice to be a threat to all people, irrespective of geographical, racial, or other artificially constructed demographic categories that divide people. King effectively traces his notions about civil disobedience all the way back to the Bible, an effective persuasive strategy because it appeals to what the eight clergymen know. He crystallizes his own definition of civil disobedience by explaining the four steps that comprise it in one of the important quotes from “Letter from Birmingham Jail”: “collection of the facts to determine whether injustices exist; negotiation; self- purification; and direct action” (  ). In this way, the reader sees that King has built upon Thoreau’s conceptualization of civil disobedience as a process of becoming right with oneself through an examination of conscience and values and then following up with action. The desired outcome of civil disobedience, King writes, is “to create such a crisis and foster such a tension that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue. It seeks so to dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored” (  ). He, perhaps more than any other individual, understood the power of civil disobedience and wielded it effectively.

Other figures from the civil rights era engaged in civil disobedience as well, though their acts are, perhaps, more subtle. The poet Amiri Baraka, for instance, used his poems as a tool of active, non-violent resistance. While Baraka was considered to be politically radical, his poetry constituted an act of civil disobedience, as it called for attention to be directed to the plight of African Americans, just as Thoreau did more than a century earlier. In his poems “An Agony.As Now” and “A Poem for Willie Best,” among others, Baraka’s voice urges social change. “Give me / Something more / Than what is here,” he says in “A Poem for Willie Best.” Might the “renegade / behind the mask” in this same poem be Baraka behind, or within, his own poem? While there are images of violence in the poem, Baraka does not seem to advocate violence; rather, the discharge of strong emotion through poetry becomes his act of resistance, and one in which the reader can share.

Personally, there are definitely principles for which I would consider civil disobedience, although I would want, like King and the civil rights movement activists, to practice this form of resistance not just individually, but in community. I could see myself engaging in civil disobedience in an effort to bring greater attention to serious social problems that cause great debate: the persistence and pervasiveness of poverty and the war are two problems that come to mind immediately. In my opinion, however, I see less of an enthusiasm for civil disobedience today than in this readings from the past, which causes me to wonder whether civil disobedience remains effective as an instrument for social and political change. There are some contemporary examples of civil disobedience that are incredibly inspiring, including the actions of Cindy Sheehan in her one-woman protests against the War in Iraq, but I do not see the kind of widespread support for civil disobedience that there was at one time in this country’s history.

Other essays and articles in the Literature Archives related to this topic include : Narrative, Rhetoric, and Civil Disobedience  in the Speeches of Martin Luther King Jr.  • Transcendentalism and the Poetry of Walt Whitman  • Persistent Themes in the Poetry of W.B. Yeats  •  Summary and Analysis of the Poem “Departmental” by Robert Frost  •  Poem Analysis of “Traveling Through the Dark” by William Stafford  •  Romanticism in Poems by Wordsworth and Coleridge •   An Analysis of Common Themes in Victorian Poetry

Works Cited

Baraka, Amiri. “A Poem for Willie Best.” In The Norton Anthology of American Literature.

Shorter 6th ed. Ed. Nina Baym. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2003.

King, Martin Luther. “Letter from a Birmingham Jail.” In The Norton Anthology of American

Literature. Shorter 6th ed. Ed. Nina Baym. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2003.

Thoreau, Henry David. “Civil Disobedience.” In The Norton Anthology of American Literature. Shorter 6th ed. Ed. Nina Baym. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2003.

The speaker of the poem “Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night” by Dylan Thomas seems to think it is not honorable or befitting for a great or interesting man to die quietly in old age and he encourages the reader to think that death is something that should be fought rather than mutely accepted. Interestingly, this poem can be divided into three parts, the first of which acts as an introduction to the speaker’s message. This is followed by four stanzas that offer examples of what he is expressing followed by the last stanza, the third part, in which the tone becomes far more personal as the speaker talks about his father. In many ways, one could read this poem and provide the suggestion in an analysis of “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night” saying it is as a statement about living a strong life and refusing to go down quietly just as easily as it can be read as a poem about death and the process of dying or aging.

When the speaker of “Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night” by Dylan Thomas states in the second line of the first stanza, “Old age should burn and rave at the close of day; Rage, rage against the dying of that light” he is expressing the idea that moving toward death should not be something we do in a resigned way, but rather that we should fight it and go out in a blaze of glory. When he says, “rage, rage against the dying of the light” it is clear that the dying light is means darkness, which is a metaphor for death and that in old age, we should “burn” with life, which brings to mind images of brightness, light, and life. This first stanza almost acts as something of a thesis statement for the rest of the poem since it clearly defines and outlines the speaker’s beliefs about aging and death.

The second stanza of them poem “Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night” by Dylan Thomas is a departure from the first as it is less broad. At the beginning of this stanza the speaker states, “Though wise men at their end know dark is right” he is telling us that a wise man (presumably an old man) knows that death is approaching and that it should be accepted as a fact. He follows that statement up with, “because their words had forked no lightning they / do not go gentle into that good night” which expresses the speaker’s sentiment that they have a lived a long life but are now powerless, even if words were once their greatest ally. This desire to be known, heard, and understood means that they are likely to fight death, perhaps because they feel there is yet more to do. These ideas are echoed in the next two stanzas as the speaker discusses “good men” who cry “how bright their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay” as well as “Grave men, near death who see with blinding sight / Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay” and how men who lived such full lives still rage against the “dying light” because they see their lives could have been more. Even men who were once wild such as those referred to in the third stanza realize too late the meaning of their lives and as a result should not fade away. The speaker encourages men such as these to rage against death simply because they are too special in one way or another to go gently into the “night” of death, which is the meaning of “Do Not Go Gentle”.

The poem “Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night” by Dylan Thomas becomes intensely personal in the last stanza as the author recalls his father and tells him, “curse, bless me now with your fierce tears, I pray” which means that he wants his father to burn with feeling and emotion while he still can, even if he curses his son—so long as he does not die with putting up a fight. While the poem addresses many types of men, the fact that it ends with his father shows that the speaker thinks of his father not as the grave, wild, or good men discussed previously, but that he is a category by himself. The fact that the speaker is not concerned with whether or not his father curses or blesses him shows that he is not necessarily concerned with what his father had to say, but only that he did not fade quietly into death.

Other essays and articles in the Literature Archives related to this topic include : Analytical Essay on the Poem “Air and Angels” by John Donne •  Summary and Analysis of the Poem “Departmental” by Robert Frost  •   Poem Analysis of “Traveling Through the Dark” by William Stafford  •     Analysis of the Poem “Daddy” by Sylvia Plath   •  Persistent Themes in the Poetry of W.B. Yeats

History is an important factor when attempting to perform an analysis that gets to the heart of the meaning of “Dolce et Decorum Est” by Wilfred Owen. As one critical source puts it, “To calculate the total losses caused by the war are impossible. About 10 million dead and 20 million wounded is a conservative estimate. Starvation and epidemics raised the total in the immediate postwar years” (Liddell 12). Up until this point, this First World War was seen by many as a vital effort to control the spread of dangerous imperialism but it seems quite to fair to posit the idea that no party would have any idea of the complete devastation caused by the conflict from 1914-1918. “The shock of trench warfare–the appalling, almost suicidal requirements of going over the top against emplaced machine guns, mass slaughter of long-range artillery fired by unseen opponents, the huge scale on which war was being waged–was mind-searing. As the western front settled into a condition of bloody stalemate, the conditions under which men were made to live and to fight seemed the antithesis of what civilized existence was supposed to be” (Rubin 137). The beginning of the twentieth century was marked by one of the most brutal wars in history.

The poem “Dolce et Decorum Est” by Wilfred Owen reflects many of the horrors experienced in the war. Termed the “Great War” World War I brought about a great change in the minds of Westerners who had grown accustomed to the rosy pictures painted by Romantic and Victorian authors, poets, and painters. The gruesome nature of the Great War, however, shattered these visions of civility and no poem or document from that era reflects the disgust and disillusionment felt by some many during and after the war than Wilfred Owen’s 1918 poem from the trenches, “Dolce et Decorum Est.” Shortly before penning the poem, Owen wrote, “Above all, I am not concerned with Poetry. My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity” (Stallworthy 16). Although one cannot deny that his suggestion regarding “Dolce et Decorum Est” that he was not “concerned with poetry” may have been a humble statement, the fact that he explores the dark side of war allows his poetry, in terms of traditional structure, to take a back seat to the images he wishes to convey.

            The high number of deaths caused by the Great War, the “inhumane” nature of trench warfare as well the introduction of new deadly chemical weapons such as mustard gas all contributed to the sense that humanity had become “uncivilized” since for the first time in history, photographs reinforced the large scale destruction both in terms of property and lives. Instead of seeming like a noble endeavor, war had now been tainted by the impressions left from harsh combat and the Western Victorian notions of what it meant to civilized were proven to be an illusion. “There is a commonly voiced Whiggish version of this ‘loss’, which has it that the Victorians were rejected after the First World War. That war, many historical commentators argue, crystallized the growing anti-Victorian mood to be found before 1914 in the plays of Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw, and the novels of H.G.Wells and Samuel Butler” (Gardiner 19). Perhaps then the time was ripe for a large-scale rejection of the ideas of the Victorian age with its polished veneer of civility and propriety. It is a telling exercise to look at the literature from the mid- to late Victorian period and contrast it with that which was being produced during the Great War and especially after it as there a strange sense that the authors are attempting to portray the reality that Victorian literature and art lacks, yet they seem so stunned by the ultimate absurdity of the devastating war that even their efforts at presenting reality are skewed. This disillusionment with the Victorian age and Romantic periods during and after the Great War would eventually be the foundations for modernism, but it is worth looking at a literary precursor to this period—most notably one that was written at the height of the action by Wilfred Owen, a man directly involved and witness to the horrors presented by the trench warfare of the War. Before embarking on a study on his most famous poem, “Dolce et Decorum Est” however, it seems vital to place his work even further into the literary setting.

Wilfred Owen, in part because of this famous poem “Dolce et Decorum Est” is established in the modern canon as one of the seminal war poets of the past century, however, even with such a status it is unfair to attempt to hold him up as symbolic of all war poets.  “Most American and British anthologies require at least three poets to chart this trajectory from pro-war romanticism to anti-war protest: the romantic Rupert Brooke, followed by the Angry Siegfried Sassoon, and completed in the passionate Wilfred Own. Yet not a single one of these most anthologized voices fit the War Poet model themselves. Wilfred Owen’s ambiguous relationship to the war in 1915 is well documented and Sassoon’s early war poetry (what little he wrote before reporting to the front) celebrates not heroic nationalism but manly camaraderie—a quality he not only continued to value in the war but which also formed the very basis of his protest” (Sychterz 9). If there can be any defining factor among such poets—any common point that relates them to one another aside from the surface connections such as holding strong sentiments about the war, it would be that they were all suffering from disillusionment, albeit to different degrees and in different ways. “Scholars studying twentieth-century war memoirs have reached the almost unanimous conclusion that in the twentieth century, at least in the Wes, soldiers have become disillusioned with war, and their own image has partly changed from that of heroes to that of victims” (Harari 43). Surely, the main focus of Owens’ poem is that of a victim, the man who has been asphyxiated by the gas but the larger picture is that all of the soldiers were victims; not just of their foreign enemy, but of their own delusions of what war would be life.

Owen’s poem, “Dolce et Decorum Est” stands out among others because of how poignantly he expresses, particularly at the end, this disillusionment when he concludes (after detailing a grisly event in which he has watched a fellow soldier die after a gas attack) “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” (Owen 1918). The maxim of “Dolce Decorum Est is essence means that it is honorable, glorious and “decorous” to die for one’s country and obviously, instead of confirming such a notion—one that has been ingrained in Western thought since the time of Euripides and Aeschylus (and likely well before)—he blatantly rejects it and puts out a warning to others that may be prone to the same sort of disillusionment he suffered when he entered the war. One scholar puts it rather prosaically and aptly when he states, “From out of his death-world, Owen wrote a rebuke to the fathers that had wooed them, asked too much of them and then, apparently abandoned them” (Knox 48). The use in this analysis of the poem of the words “death-world” hearken back to the type of language used in medieval epics such as Beowulf (with the compounded words) as well as the idea of “rebuking the fathers” which is just like saying that all the hundreds of centuries of men have been utterly wrong and are in need of admonishing after their act of deception—whether it was unwitting deception or not. I

In a more generalized way, the poem “Dolce et Decorum Est” by Wilfred Owen represents a massive shift of course for the whole of Western literature from the time of Caesar until the assassination of the Archduke that sparked the onset of the Great War. For the first time, a poet is not describing war in grandiose and epic terms with a readily identifiable set of male heroes, but rather is showing in grisly realistic detail the kind of horror and senseless death war causes. It seems strange to think that the whole course of the epic war narrative would be erased forever (at least in its most traditional and blindly masculine and heroic way) as the result of poets like Owen bluntly detailing the ravages of war on a society that considered itself to be the model of civilization. When confronted with such wartime realities, it is no wonder the Romantic and Victorian ideals were almost instantly shattered. “After it became obvious that there would be no quick solution to the ordeal, the moral and ethical assumptions developed during generations of peace and of seeming material and social progress received an abrupt check. The ensuing disillusionment, coming as it did so swiftly and catastrophically, called into question the validity of the basic ideals under which the western world had supposedly been functioning. The gap between belief and actuality, between patriotic faith and the requirements of trench warfare, took on the dimensions of an abyss” (Rubin 140).

During the time Wilfred Owen was writing “Dolce et Decorum Est” in 1917-1918, England and her allies, despite the heavy causalities were entering into a period of rampant nationalism that would suddenly disappear after the war—after the full effects of the poverty and misery it caused had to time to be felt on a wide scale. In some ways this seems like the “last hurrah” of the Victorian age, as though England and other Western nations heavily influenced by Victorian and Romantic era ideals were trying to savor the last vestiges of their way of life before it was to be replaced by something new and perhaps dangerous. That “something new” would be modernism and this paper, among other arguments, attempts to convey the idea that Owen’s poem was, in fact, a revolutionary work, and one that was just enough so to spring modernism forward. Considering that until the time of Owen and “Dolce et Decorum Est” there was widespread fear and depression among citizens of all countries on both sides of the fight but it remained, for the most part, unspoken. One must wonder if people were afraid to speak against the war and the notions about civility that had been so firmly entrench for over one hundred years by Western art and literature—that perhaps by speaking their fears it would bring everything to collapse around them.

Tales of soldiers being shot, quite literally, to pieces by giant new machine guns appalled the whole idea about a genteel and educated society that was firmly rooted in propriety and tradition. It was horrifying for people to imagine that in such a “proper” society that men would be holed up in trenches, buried in the dirt and suffering from an number of filth-borne diseases. Worse yet, it seemed as though the ideas of the Romantic era about the beauty and wisdom of nature were being turned upside down with new inventions specific to the First World War such as chemical weapons, tanks, and the giant machine guns mentioned above. In the space of four short years, 1914-1918, all of these ideas about the inherent “good” inside of human beings had been destroyed and what was remaining to replace this? Only the grotesque and twistedwords of a war-ravaged poet who finally understands that all of the literature, art, and knowledge in the course of Western history was a sham—that it was an elaborate farce and that by no means should young men be instructed in the idea that it is truly “decorous” to die for one’s country. Rather, the deaths he depicts are far from the ideas of heroes like Agamemnon or Achilles, far even from those represented in novels where the young gallant hero goes off to fight a war and never returns. The man that is the victim of the gas attack in Owen’s poem suffers like hell, “

There are multiple ways of perceiving the poem and the tensions between man and technology it presents. One viewpoint, as expressed by Judith Kitchen in her book “Writing the World: Understanding William Stafford“, suggests that the poem by Stafford, “Traveling Through the Dark” demonstrates “the encroachment of mechanized society on the wilderness” (Kitchen). For Kitchen, this poem deceptively simple and straightforward title of the poem by William Stafford, “Travelling Through the Dark” and its conversational style belie an incredibly deep sense of pain and guilt that the narrator suffers through. By examining the way the poem uses language to express these emotions, particularly by looking at the way certain objects take on a life (the car, for instance, which itself “aims” and swerves” as though it is the embodiment of man and technology) Kitchen expresses how the poem by Stafford “Traveling Through the Dark” hides a complex message about man and nature behind deceptively simple phrasing, syntax, and tone. She points out ways in which some very simple word choices in the poem by William Stafford, “Traveling Through the Dark” take on monumental importance, stating, for example, that when the poet refers to the “group” witnessing this event,  “The group appears to be the man, the deer, the unborn fawn, and by extension, all of nature” (Kitchen). In short, Judith Kitchen assists the casual reader of this poem to see past the conversational style and into the more metaphorical and implicit meanings of what seem like blunt word and image choices on the part of Stafford.

Kitchen is not alone in her perception of this poem as a statement about the collision of man and technology. In his article, “Traveling Through the Dark: The Wilderness Surrealism of the Far West” by William Young, the images and sounds of machines and nature are at the apex of its meaning. As he points out, “In Stanza Four, we have the juxtaposition of machine and wilderness, complicated by the animal ‘purr’ of the motor and the human listening of the wilderness” (Young 193). While his article examines the role of surrealism in this poem, this lending of human characteristics to nature and machines (and the reverse as well) is part of the surreal quality of the poem. Young is interested in the way the sounds of machines are like those in nature and how some of the same images one finds in nature are part of both humanity and technology simultaneously. In short, Young presents a very broad scope in his discussion of this poem and he looks at the vast nature of the message he suggests Stafford is trying to convey.

As both articles suggest, there is a clear message in the poem about the intersection of man, nature, and technology. The narrator’s car itself is like a character in the poem and as Young suggests, it “purrs” and seems to make its own decisions to swerve. It is careless and driven by something mindless—something not in touch with the more gently representation of nature. It is worth noting that the deer is a doe that is pregnant and is thus nature at its weakest and most vulnerable. The opposition between a motor and a man-made road and the natural world is obvious and the man must push the deer into the river, which is back into the circulation of the natural world.  There is a tension here and the poem’s aim is to make the reader see this as a negative encounter. The speaker, as Kitchen suggests, is almost afraid to utter strong words and he skirts around things he might otherwise say in a more blunt fashion, as would fit with the conversational tone of the poem. For instance, instead of saying the deer was pregnant, he says, “I dragged her off, she was large in the belly.” The sense is that it would be too difficult—to human—to suggest she was pregnant. Instead, the narrator puts it in a way we can digest. He cannot come out and discuss the impact of car (technology) on the natural world, but skirts around it and discusses the deer as something entirely different and alien from the man-made elements surrounding her.

The uncomfortable way the narrator describes the event, along with interesting choices of words and phrasing, makes the reader aware that this poem is meant to reflect the idea that this was a negative experience and that man and technology are encroaching on the wilderness and causing harm. The fact that it was not just a deer but a pregnant female deer is important because it shows nature at its most vulnerable. It also shows the way that technology and man feel obligated to “do something” in nature, even if it is a service (like removing a dead deer from the road) and presents the way this is an uncomfortable task as it highlights the tensions between man and nature.

Other essays and articles in the Literature Archives related to this topic include : Persistent Themes in the Poetry of W.B. Yeats   •   Analysis of the Poem “Daddy” by Sylvia Plath  •  Poem Analysis of “Do Not Go Gently into That Good Night” by Dylan Thomas  •  Analysis of the Poem “Pit Pony” by William Greenway

Source Cited

Young, William. “Traveling through the Dark: The Wilderness Surrealism of the Far West.” Midwest Quarterly 39.2 (1998), 187-201