LITERARY

ANALYSIS
DULCE ET
DECORUM
EST
BY WILFRED OWEN

This packet includes:

● Text of “Dulce Et Decorum Est” by Wilfred Owen single-spaced with
line numbers
● Text of “Dulce Et Decorum Est” by Wilfred Owen, double spaced with
line numbers for annotation
● Worksheet set of eight literary analysis multiple choice questions
derived from Common Core standards (not plot or recall questions)
● Answer key for the multiple choice with explanations
● Literary analysis prompt that can be paired with the poem
● Sample on-level and above-level responses to the literary analysis
prompt

These excerpts are ideal for class discussion, homework assignments, unit
exam prep, state test prep, SAT/AP prep, quizzes and unit tests.
The Literary Common Core
Thank you for checking out this sample text! My goal in this free sample
poem is to give you a sense of what’s in the materials in my store.

Texts
This packet offers two versions of the text of “Dulce Et Decorum Est”. The
first version is single-spaced with line numbers, intended for use for the
multiple-choice questions and literary analysis short response. The second
version is double-spaced with line numbers, intended for annotation--I do this
sometimes as in-class group work and sometimes as part of a project grade.

In the packet, both of these texts appear as images (that is, it’s a screenshot
of the text rather than an editable text). Most people who use these just
want to print and go, so this prevents users from accidentally messing up the
line numbers or otherwise inadvertently making them inaccurate. If you want
to be able to make changes, there’s another .docx file in your download with
an editable version of the text, but be sure to check the line numbers for
correctness if you change anything!

Multiple Choice
This packet contains ten multiple choice questions adapted from previous
NYS Regents exams. NYS has a fully Common Core-aligned curriculum and
these will translate well to any other Common Core state. They are not plot
or recall questions. I’ve included an answer key with a 2-sentence
explanation of why the answer is correct. After I feel my students are pretty
established with questions of this type I will sometimes leave this as
classwork with a sub, and the explanations really help in those situations.

Short Response
This packet contains a literary analysis short response prompt (2-3
paragraphs). The verbiage of the question comes straight off the NYS
Regents exam. It’s a standard literary analysis prompt and does not contain
any information specific to the text--it asks the students to make a claim
about a theme in the text and then to analyze how the author supports it
using ONE literary device (so, students will find multiple examples of the
same device). I use this prompt every time I assign a literary analysis.

There’s also two sample literary analysis responses included. The first one
has all the necessary parts of the literary response and advances a simple
argument with a pretty simplistic understanding of the theme, so it’s an
accessible sample for remediation or teaching it for the first time. The
second advances a much more complex understanding of the text and
analyzes the chosen devices in conversation with one another, making it
useful for teaching upperclassmen, advanced students and/or later in the
year to push students to analyze more precisely.
Name _________________________________________________
Date ____________________
“Dulce Et Decorum Est” literary analysis

Wilfred Owen was a British soldier who fought in World War I. He chose to
enlist in the military but quickly became disillusioned with the violence he
saw.
Name _________________________________________________
Date ____________________
“Dulce Et Decorum Est” literary analysis

Wilfred Owen was a British soldier who fought in World War I. He chose to
enlist in the military but quickly became disillusioned with the violence he
saw.

Dulce Et Decorum Est

Name _________________________________________________
Date ____________________
“Dulce Et Decorum Est” literary analysis

1. The effect of the similes in lines 1-2 is to

(1) stress the economic impact of war
(2) emphasize the physical toll of war
(3) indicate the men’s age
(4) convey a sense of anxiety

2. The primary function of lines 5-8 is to

(1) create an argument
(2) establish a setting
(3) present a characterization
(4) develop a theme

3. In line 9, the word “ecstasy” most nearly means

(1) intoxication
(2) dream
(3) joy
(4) frenzy

4. What shift in focus occurs from the first two stanzas to the third stanza?
(1) from recalling to reliving an experience
(2) from anticipating to embracing the war
(3) from questioning the war to arguing for it
(4) from denying the truth to realizing it

5. The imagery in lines 19-24 primarily convey the speaker’s tone of

(1) horror
(2) humiliation
(3) anxiety
(4) curiosity

6. Which line from the poem best summarizes the central claim made in lines
25-28?
(1) “Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots [. . . ]” (line 5)
(2) “Drunk with fatigue” (line 6)
(3) “Dim through the misty panes and thick green light [. . . ]” (line 13)
(4) “He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.” (line 16)
7. The primary purpose of stanza four is to
(1) dismiss an unusual experience
(2) resolve the problems of war
(3) reject a traditional view of war
(4) lament the death of the soldier

8. What is the function of the quotation in lines 27-28?

(1) demonstrates a change in the narrator’s opinion
(2) provides an example of the perspective he is criticizing
(3) illustrates the outcome of these experiences
(4) clarifies his opinion of the other soldiers’ patriotism
Dulce Et Decorum Est Key

1. (2) The similes demonstrate that these young men have been
physically damaged by the war. They are growing sick (“coughing like
hags”) and physically strained (“bent double”, “knock-kneed”).
2. (4) These lines provide a clear connection between the soldiers’
physical condition and the experience of war, which is a major theme
of the poem. Owen tells us about the pain associated with typical
days--bleeding feet, exhaustion--before going on to develop the theme
more with the more extreme experiences of bombings and gassing.
3. (4) This is an unusual use of the word ‘ecstasy’, but the use here to
mean ‘frenzy’ is clarified by the words ‘fumbling’ and ‘just in time’.
4. (1) In stanzas one and two, the narrator is describing the experiences.
In stanza three, the narrator begins to describe “in all my dreams”
where he is reliving this traumatic experience every night, like what we
would now call PTSD.
5. (1) These lines describe what is happening to the soldier who was
gassed and the physical symptoms of the soldier as he’s dying. The
narrator’s word choice--”writhing”, “blood come gargling”, “obscene”--
show us the horror he experiences watching the man suffer.
6. (4) The claim made in the final lines is essentially that no one who has
experienced the violence of modern warfare would encourage young
men to enlist in the military. (WWI was the first war where gassing,
bombing and such were possible, and the body counts were much
higher and the deaths often more violent.) This claim is best supported
by the description of the dying soldier because the description of his
death illustrates how horrible the war was.
7. (3) The stanza rejects the traditional view of war by undermining it.
Owen addresses the reader and tells them that they would stop saying
“it is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country” if they knew what war
was really like, implying that the people who say it don’t know what
they’re talking about.
8. (2) The use of the Latin quote serves to provide a familiar example of
the perspective that Owen is trying to criticize. He is able to use it as
shorthand for all of the pro-war people and institutions that he views as
responsible for the war and the soldiers’ suffering.
Name ______________________________________________ Date
______________________
Text-Analysis Response

Your Task:

Closely read the text provided and write a well-developed, text-based

response of two to three paragraphs.

In your response, identify a central idea in the text and analyze how
the author’s use of one writing strategy (literary element or literary
technique or rhetorical device) develops this central idea. Use strong and
thorough evidence from the text to support your analysis. Do not simply
summarize the text.

Guidelines:

Be sure to:
● Identify a central idea in the text
● Analyze how the author’s use of one writing strategy (literary element
or literary technique or rhetorical device) develops this central idea.
Examples include: characterization, conflict, denotation/connotation,
metaphor, simile, irony, language use, point-of-view, setting, structure,
symbolism, theme, tone, etc.
● Use strong and thorough evidence from the text to support your
analysis
● Organize your ideas in a cohesive and coherent manner
● Maintain a formal style of writing
● Follow the conventions of standard written English
“Dulce Et Decorum Est” literary analysis sample 1

Wilfred Owen’s 1917 poem “Dulce Et Decorum Est” describes the

experiences of the soldiers who fought in World War I. Specifically, the
poem’s narrator recalls seeing a fellow soldier gassed to death and then
talks about the various physical pains of war. He discusses this to develop
his theme, which is that war is terrible and takes a horrible physical toll on
the soldiers. Owen uses similes in order to illustrate the physical injuries and
the physical consequences of the violence of war.

The poem opens with a simile that describes the soldiers as “like old
beggars under sacks” who were “coughing like hags” (lines 1-2). These
similes are showing that just doing their regular jobs as soldiers is making
them really weak and sick. Calling the soldiers old beggars under sacks helps
the reader picture the soldiers hunched over from marching and carrying
heavy things, and the description of the coughing introduces the idea in the
poem that they are also getting sick from the bad conditions. Even when
they are not in battle the soldiers are physically suffering.

Other places in the poem use similes to describe the physical

consequence of the violence of war. The narrator describes the soldier that
doesn’t get his helmet on in time as “flound’ring like a man in fire or lime”
(line 12). The man is in so much pain from inhaling the gas that he’s
squirming around like he’s on fire or has lime, a chemical that burns the skin,
on him. Describing the man later, after the gas attack, the narrator uses
another simile and calls the sound of the man choking on his own blood
“obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud/of vile, incurable sores on innocent
tongues” (lines 24-25). These two similes show us how horrible the effects of
the gas are on the dying man and shows us that the dying man is ‘innocent’
but attacked brutally in the context of the war. All of these similes are used
to develop Owen’s point that war causes horrible physical maladies.
“Dulce Et Decorum Est” literary analysis sample 2

Wilfred Owen’s 1917 poem “Dulce Et Decorum Est” was written in

reaction to the poet’s experiences in World War I, the first modern war. He
describes the brutality of modern tactics like gassing in excruciating detail to
emphasize the unique horrors that technology made possible. In addition, he
criticizes people who romanticize war without understanding the realities of
World War I and how different it was from previous wars. Owen uses the
rhetorical device contrast to develop his argument; he contrasts the horrors
that the narrator personally experienced with a quote from ancient Rome to
show that any pro-war perspectives are hopelessly dated and wrong.

In the first three and a half stanzas of the poem, Owen describes a
narrator’s experiences in World War I. He starts with the more day-to-day
experiences of soldiers marching until their boots wore through and their
backs began to hunch, and then escalates into the modern wartime
experience of an enemy gassing the soldiers. While most of the men get
their helmets on, one does not and suffers a horrible death in which he is
“drowning” as the gas fills his lungs (14). Owen gives many violent, sensory
details of the soldier’s suffering to illustrate to the reader how horrible the
experience of being gassed, or seeing a colleague gassed. He provides all
these images to show the reader the new horrors of the first modern war.

All this is contrasted in the final lines with what the narrator calls “the
old Lie” (line 27). He quotes an old Latin quote that translates to “[i]t is
sweet and fitting to die for one’s country”. Owen no doubt could have chosen
from many quotes that support war, including ones that would have been
specifically about World War I, but he instead selected a quote that was
2,000 years old. In choosing this quote, Owen is characterizing the
perspective as ancient and not relevant to current experiences. He sets up a
contrast between the horrors of a brand new type of war and a romanticized
perspective of war that might have been true in ancient Rome but is
certainly not true in 1917. Even the title advances this purpose: Owen clips
the quote down to “[i]t is sweet and fitting” for the title, then contrasts it
with the first few stanzas that describe a situation that is anything but sweet
or fitting. In using this ancient quote to represent the opposing perspective,
he is able to imply that all pro-war perspectives are callous, dated and
ignorant to the realities of World War I.