This particular image in Wilfred Owen's "Dulce Et Decorum Est" is especially potent in its frank depiction of the horrors of World War I. The soldier who fails to put on his gas mask suffers an agonizing death from gas (likely chlorine). The use of poisonous gas was prevalent during the First World War, and Owen equates death by chlorine gas to drowning. The gas suffocates the young soldier, and he chokes as if he's drowning. Additionally, the speaker of the poem sees the cloud of poison like an ocean:
"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"(99-100).
The green mist from the poison resembles a body of water through the speaker's protective mask. The horror of the situation is magnified because the soldiers witness their colleague's death, and can do nothing about it. He was simply too slow in putting on his mask. Owen uses this image of the young soldier dying an agonizing, painful, and prolonged death to illustrate the rampant horrors of the war. The young soldier "drowns" in a sea of poison.
I pulled my textual evidence from The Bloodaxe Book of 20th Century Poetry.
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