ENGL 364 Dr. Helen Bittel Study Guide for Owen's "Dulce et Decorum" Instructions: Complete any 4 of the following 8 question clusters. Please note that these questions were designed to accommodate a diverse group with different types and levels of prior experience. Use your best judgment to choose the clusters that seem most likely to enhance your understanding of the poem and to best address your own interests. FYI, the "smaller" questions within each cluster are intended as prompts or suggestions and not as a definitive outline. You are not expected to answer each systematically (or to cover as much ground as the prompts themselves), but only to provide substantive and well-supported responses to the poems, responses that goes beyond "what" and into "why it matters" (i.e. go beyond identifying the rhyme scheme or recurrent imagery and speculate on their significance within the poem). Who? 1. What does the poem directly reveal about the speaker (i.e. through actions, descriptions, and assertions)? Indirectly (i.e. through language choices, style, assumptions, implied attitudes)? Whom does the speaker seem to be addressing? What is the speaker's attitude toward the audience? What assumptions does he make about them? What? 2. Situation/Action What is the "plot" of the poem? What is happening, exactly? 3. Argument. What is the poem's "message" with regard to WWI? How might you paraphrase Owen's main point? Are there any "key lines" which seem to encapsulate the argument? How? 4. Sound and sense. What is the rhyme scheme and what feeling or mood does it create? Does it seem to complement or contradict the content of the poem? Are there places where the author deviates from the established patterns? How might these deviations or disruptions be significant? Where does Owen use punctuation, caesura, enjambment, and the placement of line breaks most dramatically? What are the effects on the reader? 5. Words and Images. Why do you think Owen chose to render his title in Latin? How do the author's word choices throughout the poem establish tone, and what does this contribute to the development of the poem? Are there any words or images that are especially striking? Why might the author have chosen that word and not another? Why? 6. Putting the poem in context. How does Owen's message compare with Brooke's? Sassoon's? Rosenberg's? How does he go about persuading his audience to accept his views, in comparison with the other three poets? Implications for readers today. 7. Is there anything in the poem that you think might speak especially powerfully to people in our own time and culture? What and why? Do you think that it speaks to today's readers for similar reasons and in similar ways, or in different ones? How so? Is there anything in the poem that---due to differences in cultural context---might be especially difficult for contemporary readers to appreciate or sympathize with? What and why? Potpourri 8. Is there any else that you think might be important in understanding how the poem works that we have not covered above? What and why? Contact the English Department at: 570-348-6219. E-mail: English@marywood.edu.

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Last update August 19, 2004
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