Poetry Assignment: Explication of a Poem – Dulce et Decorum Est by Wilfred Owen

To explicate originally meant to unfold, to expand, to lay open. However, no one really uses it literally anymore. The meaning has become strictly metaphorical, and so the word now means to unfold the meaning or sense of, to explain, to clear up difficulties or obscurity, to interpret.

Your task is to explicate the poem: to unfold its meaning, explain how it is constructed, clear up its obscurities, and only then to interpret, i.e. to draw some conclusions. You will do that by examining the poem in a painstaking manner, performing what literary critics call a “close reading.” That means you go through the poem step by step: sometimes line by line, sometimes phrase by phrase, sometimes image by image, sometimes even word by word. You are writing a kind of guide to the poem, like a guide to a city for travelers. Your goal is to lead your readers through the poem, making sure they understand what they are looking at, do not get lost or miss any of the important sights, and end up at the destination you have in mind. In the process, you construct a persuasive argument not only about the poem’s meaning but also about how the poet conveys that meaning and accomplishes the poem’s effects.

Guidelines:

You should assume your reader has read the poem several times. You should also assume he or she has a college-level vocabulary and has made proper use of a dictionary; thus, you should not bother to define words, unless the meaning the poet intends is not the usual one.
You should have an introduction to the paper in which you establish the issue you are exploring, your thesis. You should not quote the poem in your first paragraph.
The body of the essay should be made up of your close reading. Here is where you need to quote and analyze — in great detail — the poem, using quotations from the poem for support. Cite the quotations by line number only.
Once again, after you have identified the best lines to use, you need both to set them up and comment on them so that they support the thesis. Always set up the point you are making, quote, then comment on the quotation. Remember: the quotations cannot make your argument for you; you need to comment on everything you quote.
Do not automatically quote only whole lines of the poem. Sometimes starting or ending your quotation in the middle of a line is necessary in order for the quotation to make sense. Make sure that your quotations make sense out of context, or that you set them up in a way that makes their meaning clear.
Your analysis should address several aspects of the poem. Your basic goal should be to discuss the message or theme of the poem, but to do that you need to consider some combination of elements such as imagery, figurative language such as metaphors, similes, and symbols, and formal elements such as structure, rhyme, and meter. Note, however, that merely pointing out that any of these things exists in the poem is not by itself interesting; what makes it interesting is how they contribute to the theme.
The conclusion of your paper summarizes your argument and re-connects it to the thesis. Just as you should not quote in your first paragraph, you should probably also not be quoting and analyzing the poem in your conclusion.
You need a Work Cited page. Cite the poem according to MLA guidelines.
Include a title that tells me something about the focus of your paper
How you will be graded:

The clarity and insight of your thesis (35%)
How effectively and thoughtfully you explain the meaning/ theme you see in the poem; your organization and overall persuasiveness (35%)
Your use of quotations to support your ideas (15%)
The quality of your writing, including your grammar and spelling (10%)
Adherence to the rules of citation using MLA format, both in-text and in the works cited page (5%)