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Poison Gas

Between the first and second stanzas of the poem, a canister of poison gas lands near the speaker’s unit, sending the men into a fumbling race to put on their life-saving gas masks. The poison gas in the poem is symbolic in two connected but distinct ways. First, the mere presence of the poison gas symbolizes what was new and uniquely devastating about war in the early twentieth century. World War I witnessed the introduction of particularly fatal chemical and mechanical innovations, including chlorine gas, machine guns, and tanks. These weapons dramatically transformed the practice of warfare, and thus marked the beginning of an era when war could no longer be linked to ideals of glory or honor. In addition to symbolizing a specific historical shift, the poison gas also symbolizes the surreal horror of war. Owen evokes this surreal horror in the second stanza (lines 9–14):

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.

After the chaos and confusion described in the first four lines, the speaker offers an image in which chlorine gas spreads out and becomes “a green sea.” This visual effect produces a surreal sense that the choking man who failed to don his gas mask is in fact underwater, drowning.

The Dying Soldier

The soldier who chokes to death in the poison gas attack stands as another important symbol with multiple meanings. On the one hand, the dying soldier functions as a symbolic mirror for the speaker. In this soldier’s death, the speaker sees own mortality reflected back at him. On the other hand, the speaker also sees the dying soldier as a reflection of his own luck in having survived the attack. The trauma of the event, paired with the speaker’s possible sense of survivor’s guilt, make the memory of the dying soldier difficult to shake. Indeed, the image of this man “drowning” in “a green sea” (line 14) of chlorine gas lives on in the speaker, haunting his dreams and contributing to his psychological experience of shell shock. Yet just as the dying soldier mirrors the speaker, he also stands in symbolically for a whole generation of young men who were killed in what, at the time of the poem’s composition, had been the deadliest war in human history.

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