Hello everybody and a warm welcome to today's lesson.

My name is Miss Halliday and I will be teaching you today.

Thank you so much for joining me.

I'm really looking forward to today's lesson as we're going to be reading and discussing one of the most moving and impactful poems in the whole of the anthology, which is Wilfred Owen's "Dulce et Decorum est." I'm really looking forward to hearing your personal responses to this poem and discussing some of its key themes and moments in more detail.

So let's get started.

So today's lesson is called "Understanding 'Dulce et Decorum est'" and by the end of today's lesson you will be able to understand how Owen presents the bleak reality of war.

But first, here are some keywords that you will need to unlock today's learning, starting with the word bleak, which means not very hopeful or encouraging.

Now the next word we're going to be looking at today is the word to dismantle, and that means to take something apart or to destroy the integrity of something.

Now a disparity is a significant difference between two things.

We're also going to be talking a lot about propaganda and the way that that was used in the First World War, and propaganda is any biassed or misleading information that is used to influence public opinion.

And often, the propaganda that was used during World War I glorified war, and the word glorify means to unjustifiably or wrongfully represent something as admirable.

So if you'd like to take a moment to pause the video and jot down any of these keyword definitions, then please feel free to do so at your leisure.

Here's today's lesson outline.

We're going to begin by reading the poem and then we're going to move on to looking at Wilfred Owen's life in more detail and examining the context that inspired the writing of this poem.

But let's start first of all by reading the poem.

So we know that the title of this poem is "Dulce et Decorum est" and this is taken from a Latin phrase by the Roman poet Horace, and the phrase was, "Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori," which translates to, "It is sweet and fitting to die for one's country." I'd like you to consider now in what situation or circumstance might a person die for their country.

So what I'm going to invite you to do now is pause the video while you discuss that question, either with the people around you if you have access to other people or just thinking about that question independently if you're working on your own today.

Either is absolutely fine.

Pause the video and off you go to consider that question now.

Brilliant discussions and a really, really good start to the lesson.

And as Lucas points out, well, "A person might die for their country if they were fighting in a war." And I heard many of you saying exactly the same thing, so really well done there, brilliant discussions.

Now, Wilfred Owen, the poet of this poem, was a soldier in World War I, as I mentioned earlier.

Now based on the poem's title, what do you think that he might have thought of war? And what do you think that he thought of being a soldier? And again, I would like you to discuss this with the people around you if possible, so pause the video and do that now.

Fantastic discussions and many of you are saying that you think he would've really enjoyed being a soldier because of the Roman phrase that inspired the title of his poem, and that's a really interesting idea that we're going to explore in just a moment and see whether or not you are right.

So let's read the poem together in full.

Then we are going to move on to discussing some key ideas and moments in more detail.

Can you please open up your anthologies and make sure that you are ready to read "Dulce et Decorum est" with me.

I'll read and you follow along.

Here we go.

"Dulce et Decorum est." "Bent double, like old beggars under sacks.

Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge.

Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs, and towards our distant rest began to trudge.

Men marched asleep.

Many had lost their boots, but limped on, blood-shod.

All went lame, all blind.

Drunk with fatigue.

Deaf even to the hoots of gas-shells dropping softly behind.

Gas! Gas! Quick, boys! An ecstasy of fumbling fitting the clumsy helmets just in time, but someone still was yelling out and stumbling and flound'ring like a man in fire or lime.

Dim through the misty panes and thick green light, as under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams before my helpless sight he plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams you too could pace behind the waggon that we flung him in, and watch the white eyes writhing in his face, his hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin.

If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs, obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues.

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.

'" Wow, what a fantastic and really moving poem there.

So what I would like you to do now that we've read it together for the first time is think, well, what are your first impressions of the poem? Do you like it? Why or why not.

How did the poem make you feel? Again, why? And what might the story of the poem be, so what might the poem be about? And these are all really useful questions to ask yourself when you read a poem for the first time so that you can establish a basic level of understanding.

So what I'd like you to do now is discuss these questions again either with the people around you or just consider them independently if you're working on your own.

Pause the video and off you go to do just that now.

Fantastic discussions and really well done.

It was lovely to hear all your opinions about this poem and hear your personal responses to your first reading of it, so thank you for those discussions and let's move on.

We're going to have a look at different sections of the poem in more detail now, so what I'm going to ask you to do is reread the first stanza using the glossary at the bottom of the screen to help you clarify words that you may not be familiar with.

Once you have reread the first stanza, I would like you to consider the following questions.

First of all, where do you think that the poem is set? Secondly, who is the we in the poem? And thirdly, how do you think that the speaker is feeling and why? So as I said, I'm going to invite you now to pause the video while you consider those three questions in relation to the first stanza of the poem.

This can be done in groups or it can be done independently, but feel free to annotate your anthologies as you discuss these questions.

So pause the video and off you go.

Fantastic discussions and some really, really insightful suggestions there.

It was absolutely lovely to see so many of you referring back to the poem as you were discussing those three questions, which is exactly what you should be doing when talking about poetry, is always returning back to the poem to look for evidence and to try and unpick the poet's message.

So in terms of where we think the poem might be set, well, it's set in a filthy landscape in the middle of a war.

Now, in the poem, the word we is used quite frequently and that we is the platoon that the speaker belongs to, so we can infer that the speaker is a soldier.

And thirdly, the speaker and his fellow soldiers are exhausted both physically and mentally from the conflict.

A gas attack wages on behind them and they try to continue with their journey despite the fact that they are exhausted and in many cases injured.

So really well done if you managed to pull that out of the first stanza, great comprehension.

So now we're going to move on to looking at the second and third standards in more detail now.

Again, I'll encourage you to reread the stanza and use the glossary at the bottom of the screen to help you understand any words that you're not sure about.

So with regards to the second and third stanzas, I'd like you to consider the following set of questions.

Whose voice might the first line be? The "Gas! Gas! Quick, boys!".

What is happening to the soldiers at this moment in time? And what does the speaker witness here? So again, I'm going invite you to pause the video while you consider those questions either independently or with people around you.

Please remember to make notes in your anthology if you want to.

These will be really useful for you when you come onto writing about this poem or making comparisons.

So pause the video and off you go to consider those questions now.

I can't wait to hear all your ideas and suggestions.

Fantastic, really, really good comprehension work there and I can see that many of you are really understanding what's going on in this poem and what the story is and that's really lovely to see, so a massive well done to you.

So in terms of the "Gas! Gas! Quick, boys!" this sounds like it might be the voice of another soldier crying out about the gas attack, so trying to warn his fellow soldiers of the kind of threat that is present in this moment.

And here we hear the speaker's account of his experience watching another one of his comrades die and it's described in a really, really vivid way for us, we almost feel as if we are there watching it with him because the description is so vivid and so graphic.

So really well done if you've got those ideas in your conversations.

Brilliant work, I'm really impressed.

So what I've done here is because stanza four is a little bit longer, I've split it into two for you 'cause there's lots to talk about and lots to digest here.

So I'd like you to read the first half of the fourth stanza again that I've put on screen for you, and again I've given you a glossary to clarify some pieces of vocabulary that you might not be so familiar with, so please feel free to use that.

Once you have reread the first half of the fourth stanza, I would like you to consider the following questions.

How has war affected the speaker? Who is the speaker addressing in this stanza? And finally, what is the poet trying to show us about war when he uses the verb flung on the second line? So what I'm going to invite to do now again is pause the video while you consider those questions, and as I said earlier, please continue to make notes in your anthology if you would like to.

Pause the video and consider those questions either independently or with the people around you now.

Fantastic discussions and some really perceptive answers, especially to the last question, which I'm really looking forward to exploring with you in just a moment.

But first, in terms of how war has affected the speaker.

Well, we realise in this moment here that the speaker is really traumatised by this experience of watching this man die and that it clearly haunts his dreams. He's telling us, the reader, so he's speaking to us in the stanza, about his recurring nightmares because he has PTSD, which is post-traumatic stress disorder, from his experiences at war.

Now post-traumatic stress disorder is a mental illness that is caused when a person experiences extreme trauma, and some of the symptoms that that can cause are deep anxiety, flashbacks, hallucinations, substance abuse and insomnia.

So it's a very, very challenging mental illness to try and come to terms with and it's one that many soldiers did and still do suffer with to this day.

So it's a very, very serious mental illness that we can tell that the soldier speaker is suffering from in this poem.

Now, the poet's use of the verb flung, I heard some fantastic suggestions about why the poet might have chosen this verb to use.

And the one that I liked the most was this suggestion that actually the verb flung shows us how brutal war is.

The soldiers have absolutely no time to comfort or care for this soldier in his last moments.

They unfortunately just have to throw him half dead into the body waggon, and this seems to deeply upset the speaker and he seems to feel quite guilty about this as well, even though I'm sure there was nothing else he could have done in that moment.

And what I think is really important to understand at this moment is that the soldier that has been thrown into the, you know, the dead body waggon isn't actually dead yet.

He's very much still alive and he's choking on his own blood in the most unpleasant manner and unfortunately he's already been treated like a dead body because he's definitely going to die and the soldiers don't have time to kind of nurse him or carry him with them until he passes away, they just have to throw his body into the dead body waggon, and that's really kind of treating him with no dignity whatsoever.

But you know, it's not the fault of the soldiers, it's the fault of the war, because the very nature of war means that the soldiers, that they don't have the time and they don't have the space to dedicate to treating the dead respectfully, and that is something that really seems to bother the speaker in this poem and it's one of the things that he mentions and he describes really graphically and vividly, possibly to try and show us the brutal way in which these, you know, dead men and indeed almost-dead men were being treated at war.

So well done if you got the idea in your discussion, really perceptive ideas there and well done.

So let's check for understanding before we move on.

True or false, "The man's death described in the poem was just a nightmare that the speaker had." I'm going to give you a moment to pause the video while you decide whether you think that is true or false, so off you go.

And well done if you correctly identified it is in fact false.

What I'm going to ask you to do now is the hard part, and I'm going to ask you to justify your answer using one of the two responses below.

So take a moment to pause the video, read the two justifications, and decide which you think is the correct reason for the above statement being false.

Off you go.

And a massive well done and congratulations if you correctly selected justification A, "The speaker witnessed the man die in real life, but then he witnesses the event again and again in his nightmares because he is traumatised and he has PTSD." So really well done if you remembered that, great work.

So we're now going to have a look at the second half of the fourth stanza.

And again, please use the glossary at the bottom of the screen to clarify any vocabulary that you might not be sure of.

So once you have reread the second half of the fourth stanza, I'd like you to consider the following questions.

How does the speaker feel in this stanza? Why does the poet use such gruesome imagery in the stanza? Why does the poet end with Horace's phrase? And finally, how do you feel at the end of the poem and why? So four questions there that I'd like you to consider either independently or in groups if that's possible for you today.

So pause the video and off you go to consider those questions now.

Let's come back together as a group and share some ideas, thank you very much.

It's so lovely to hear so many of you talking with such enthusiasm and passion for this poem because it's such a fantastic and very, very important poem, so really well done and thank you for that.

So in terms of how the speaker feels, well, the speaker feels a great deal of shame and guilt about the way that the half-dead soldier was treated as well as a lot of anger towards the war.

Now in terms of the gruesome imagery that the poet uses, well, perhaps he uses this to illustrate the brutality of war.

Now the poet wants us to feel as if we are there with the speaker witnessing this man dying in the most horrible way so that we can have empathy not only for this man but also for the speaker having to witness this.

Now the poet repeats Horace's famous lines at the end of the poem to highlight the disparity, so the great difference, between the depiction of war in the media and the reality of it on the actual battlefield.

The speaker contradicts propaganda that depicted fighting in the war as glorious and noble, and that is why he kind of contradicts this form of propaganda that was being spread at the time that stated that, you know, war was something, it was an adventure and it was super glorious, because the speaker actually wants to present us with the reality and the real brutality of war on the front line.

So a massive well done if you got those ideas in your discussions.

Really, really great reading of the poem there.

So I'd like you to discuss now, well, why do you think that Owen called the poem "Dulce et Decorum est", "It is sweet and fitting to die for one's country"? Why didn't he call it "There is nothing glamorous or glorious about war"? And what does he achieve by giving it a misleading title? Some really important and thought-provoking questions there for you, and I'm really excited to see what you come up with for these, so I'm going to invite you to pause the video while you consider those questions again, either independently or with the people around you.

Off you go.

Fantastic discussions and we asked our Oak pupils the same set of questions and here's the answer that Lucas wanted to share with you.

So he said, "Owen is highlighting the naivety and foolishness of anyone who believed the propaganda that glorified war.

He's dismantling," so he's taking apart, he's questioning the credibility, "of widespread beliefs about war that were being promoted by propaganda at the time and trying to show how inaccurate these beliefs were." So in using this misleading title, he is dismantling this kind of propaganda and idea that was inspiring so many young men to sign up for the war and was making them think that they were going on some kind of adventure, because Wilfred Owen really wanted to tell the truth about war and show people actually how brutal and how dehumanising it actually was.

So well done if you got those ideas and fantastic work.

So onto the first task of the lesson now where I would like you to find me a line in the poem that shows the following ideas.

First of all, find me a line that shows the gruelling physical conditions of war.

Find me a line that shows the dangerous nature of war.

The trauma that the speaker suffers as a result of war.

I'd like you to find me a line that shows the poet's disgust with the way that soldiers die in war.

And finally, I'd like you to find me a line that shows the poet's anger with people who glorify war.

And when you're finding these lines, I'd like you to think really carefully about the exact lines that you're choosing.

Don't just choose the first line that you find, choose the best line that really exemplifies that idea.

So you will need to be evaluating here which line you think best showcases these different ideas.

You can do this by highlighting the line or you can write the line down or you can just hold the line in your head or you can put a little star next to the line in your anthology.

It's totally up to you how you want to do this task, just have a go at it.

So pause the video and off you go to find me those lines from the poem.

Fantastic work, and here's some of the lines that you might have selected.

So this quotation here, "Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge," really shows us the gruelling physical conditions of war.

Now in terms of the dangerous nature of war, you might have chosen this quotation here.

"An ecstasy of fumbling fitting the clumsy helmets just in time." And it's that phrase there, "just in time," that shows us how dangerous war actually was.

In terms of the trauma that the speaker has suffered as a result of war, well, the fact that he tells us that "in all his dreams before his helpless sight, the man plunges at him, guttering, choking, drowning" shows us that even when he's asleep he can't escape the trauma and the flashbacks of the horror of war.

In terms of the poet's disgust with the way that soldiers die, you could have chosen this quotation.

"If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs." Again, he's saying he almost wishes that we could hear it so that we could understand the brutal and dehumanising way in which these men are dying.

And finally, in terms of the poet's anger with people who glorify war, Owen writes, "My friend, you would not tell with such high zest to children ardent for some desperate glory, the old lie, 'Dulce et decorum est.

'" And again, that really shows us his frustration with people who are spreading this propaganda that is portraying war as an adventure and in some way glamorous.

So those are just some suggestions of lines that you might have chosen.

Well done for completing that activity and let's move on.

So now we're going to move on to examining some of the context that inspired the writing of this poem and learning a little bit more about Owen himself.

So Wilfred Owen was a British soldier and poet who served in World War I.

In 1915, Owen enlisted in the British Army.

He served in Serre and St.

Quentin in 1917 and was returned to Britain the same year with shell-shock, which is what we now know to be PTSD.

I'd like you to just recap for a moment, well, what is PTSD and how did it affect soldiers? So pause the video and discuss that with the people around you now.

Fantastic discussions and really well remembered to those of you that said something similar to Lucas, which is that "post-traumatic stress disorder is a mental illness caused by a person's exposure to trauma.

In the case of soldiers, seeing their friends die or being responsible for the deaths of others traumatised them.

This led many soldiers to experience flashbacks, anxiety, depression, sweating, hallucinations, and substance abuse." So thank you to Lucas for that concise definition and well done 'cause I heard many of you saying something very similar.

Now whilst undergoing treatment, Owen met another famous war poet, Siegfried Sassoon, who encouraged him to speak about his experience at war in his poetry because Owen had always been really passionate about poetry.

Owen then returned to the Western Front when he had recovered in 1918 and was awarded the Military Cross for his bravery and leadership.

Unfortunately, and this is really sad and unfortunate, Owen was actually killed on the 4th of November, 1918 in battle and "Dulce et Decorum est" was published in 1920.

And what makes Wilfred Owen's death so, so sad is the fact that he actually died just a week before the war was over, so it's really, really tragic that he didn't manage to make it through to the end of the war, because the war actually ended on the 11th of November and he died on the 4th, which is just utterly tragic.

So Jacob wanted to share a fun fact with you.

He says, "Did you know that only four of Owen's poems were published during his lifetime, but he is now regarded as one of the greatest voices of the First World War?" What an impact this man, this poet has had on our understanding of war, so impressive.

So I'm going to check your understanding now with a quick true or false.

"Owen's poems were mostly written after World War I to raise awareness about the true horrors of war." I'm going to leave you a moment to decide whether you think that's true or false.

Pause the video and make your decision now.

Fantastic and well done to those of you that identified that it was in fact false.

What I'd like you to do now is tell me why that is false using one of the two justifications below.

So pause the video, read the justifications, and decide which one you think is the correct reason for the statement being false.

And a massive congratulations if you correctly selected A, "Owen's war poems were written during World War I.

Four were published before the war ended and the rest were published after the war had ended and unfortunately Owen had died." So well done if you remembered that, brilliant recall.

So a preface is the introduction to a text in which the writer states their aims. Now here you are going to read Owen's preface to a collection of poems that he wrote about war, and he had this to say.

"I am not concerned with poetry.

My subject is war and the pity of war.

The poetry is in the pity.

Yet these elegies are to this generation in no sense conciliatory.

They may be to the next.

All a poet can do today is warn, and that is why the true poets must be truthful." Now just to clarify, an elegy is a poem of serious reflection that is usually used to mourn the loss of someone who has died.

And conciliatory means intended to reduce anger.

So what I'd like you to consider now is, well, what do you think Owen's aim was in writing these poems and what do you think that Owen is warning readers against? I'd like you to pause the video while you discuss these questions again, either with the people around you or consider them independently if that's how you're working today.

Pause the video and off you go.

Brilliant discussions and great to see so many of you really understanding what it was that Owen was trying to achieve in writing these poems. And that was basically to expose the bleak truth about and the reality of war and to contradict its glorification in the media.

Owen warns readers of the futility or the pointlessness, the foolishness, inhumanity and horror of war in his poetry.

He considered telling the truth as something that he must do because he considered his aim and his duty to be to tell the truth about the way that war actually was to contradict the glorification of it in the propaganda and in the media.

So again, a really well done if you managed to identify that from his preface, brilliant comprehension skills.

So another discussion that I'd like you to have is the following two questions.

Why did Owen feel the need to have to be truthful? Who or what was glorifying war? And we've touched on this already, but I'd like you to explore this in a bit more detail and impress me with what you already know about the media in World War I.

So pause the video and off you go to discuss those questions now.

Fantastic discussions.

Now, as Lucas points out, "Propaganda was being used to recruit soldiers into the army to fight in the war.

Therefore, the public opinion about war was really important.

The government wanted men to go to war.

If men knew the brutal reality of war, they might not want to sign up, so public support for the armed forces was also really key.

Thus, propaganda that glorified war by making it look really exciting was circulated.

Some propaganda presented war as an adventure, whilst others presented not going to war as being cowardly." Thank you very much to Lucas for that really clear explanation there of exactly who was glorifying war, so it's basically the propaganda that was put out by the government.

I'd like you to think about this in a little bit more detail now and think about the morality of that.

Do you think that using propaganda like this to get men to enlist in the armed forces was the right thing to do or not? And I'd like you to justify your opinion, so give me a reason as to why you think what you think.

Again, I'm going to invite you to pause the video while you consider that question, either independently or with the people around you, so off you go.

Fantastic discussions and some really interesting perspectives there, thank you very much.

So what was war really like, then? What was the reality of war? Well, World War I was largely fought in the trenches, as you can see from the picture here.

Conditions in the trenches were really poor, with mud disease and flooding often causing more damage than the enemy.

World War I also saw the introduction of new weapons such as machine guns and mustard gas, and soldiers unfortunately were really not prepared or equipped to deal with many of the gruelling challenges that life at war presented both on and off the battlefield.

So as I'm sure you can see there from the picture, contrary to the depiction of war that was portrayed in the media through the use of propaganda, war was certainly not glamorous and it was certainly not an adventure.

It was a very, very challenging set of circumstances to be in.

It was very dangerous and it was very destructive.

So onto the last task of the lesson now where I'd like to test your understanding of why Wilfred Owen wrote this poem.

So I would like you to use these images on screen to explain why Owen might have written the poem and what it was that he wanted to show through his writing.

So the first image you're going to be using is an image of some World War I propaganda.

And the second image I'd like you to use is a real picture from World War I.

So I'd like you to explain the relationship between these two images with regards to the poem "Dulce et Decorum est" and then link it back to explaining why Wilfred Owen wrote this poem and what he was trying to achieve.

I'm really looking forward to seeing your responses to this task, so I'd like you to pause the video and go off and complete it now.

Wow, I'm absolutely blown away by your effort and your understanding of everything that you've learned this lesson.

There's been an awful lot to take in this lesson and I'm so impressed by how much you've remembered and how much you've understood, so a massive pat on the back for you today, really well done.

Now I'd like you to reread your answer now and I'd like you to check whether you've included any of the following vocabulary.

If you have, brilliant, really well done, because you have likely written an absolutely fantastic explanation of why Owen wrote this poem.

So here's the vocabulary that you might have used.

We've got brutal, reality, disparity, condemnation, bleak, propaganda, dismantle, glorify, and futility.

Now, if you didn't use any of these words or if you didn't use that many, you might want to take a moment to pause the video and have a go at redrafting your response to include more of the useful vocabulary above and to make your answer more specific.

I'm going to invite you now to pause the video while you reread your answer, identify which vocabulary you used, and make any changes if necessary.

Off you go.

Fantastic, really well done, great reflection work.

So to summarise the learning from today, well, first of all, Wilfred Owen was a soldier who fought and died in World War I.

Secondly, there was a huge disparity in the glorified perception of war versus the bleak reality of it.

The poem dismantles the perception of war being promoted by propaganda.

And in the poem, Owen depicts a gas attack and the brutal death of one of his comrades.

Furthermore, Owen used his poetry as a means of exposing the true futility and horror of war because he felt it was his duty to tell the truth about war.

Thank you so much for coming to today's lesson.

It's been fantastic to read and discuss this poem with you and I'm so glad that so many of you loved it as much as I do and found it as moving and as impactful as I do.

Thank you very much for your contributions and engagement, and I look forward to seeing you next time.

See you later.