When Analyzing a Poem …

9/11s

Nines: You had a double block today and the first part was the HACE lesson on tobacco.  This info is even scarier than figuring out how much time is left for your Poetry Assignment: It was finding out what happens to your body if you smoke a cigarette. My addition to the government’s lesson was the word “cumulative.” Whatever you put into your body has a cumulative effect. You may not see the immediate results when you’re young, but you will as you get older.

After HACE, back to Poetry!

Elevens: I began by creating a calendar on the board showing how much time is left and then gave you a calendar on paper showing your test dates. Then more poetry! I am nothing if not informative and consistent. I also handed back marked assignments and complimented a couple of students whose work was absolutely outstanding. You know who you are. Bravo.

Everybody I teach!

9/10/11: This is my multipurpose blog for you all.

Here’s what’s happening: I write the instructions on the board. I attempt to scare you into realizing it is almost June and your exams are a few short weeks away. I wander around explaining elements of analyzing a poem. I am doing this all day every day in every class. This should explain, at least in part, why I’m so weird. You try repeating this over and over and over and over on a daily basis to people who just want to run away and play in the sun.

If I didn’t see you today and give you a calendar of your life in June, I will tomorrow. The calendar tells you the following:

FOR ENGLISH 9, ENGLISH 10, AND ENGLISH 11, ALL POETRY ASSIGNMENTS ARE DUE FRIDAY JUNE 1st. THE DAY OF GRACE IS MONDAY JUNE 4. NO ASSIGNMENTS WILL BE ACCEPTED AFTER THAT DATE.

ENGLISH 9:

• the Written Component of your Final Exam is Thursday June 7
• the Multiple Choice Component of your Final Exam is Tuesday June 5

ENGLISH 10:

• 1-1: Mock Provincial is Wednesday June 6
• 1-1: Written Component is Friday June 15
• 1-3: Mock Provincial is Monday June 3
• 1-3: Written Component is Friday June 15
• 1-4: Mock Provincial is Friday June 8
• 1-4: Written Component is Friday June 15

ENGLISH 11:

• the Written Component of your Final Exam is Thursday June 7
• the Multiple Choice Component of your Final Exam is Monday June 11

Dissecting a Poem

Tens: Today you just worked and worked and worked. At least that’s what I’m believing you did. If you weren’t actually working, you were doing a good enough imitation that you fooled me.

Here’s a review of everything I wrote on the board, with a few Do’s and Don’ts tacked on for good measure. (For those of you who chose the poem Pied Beauty, the picture at the left is Gerard Manley Hopkins contemplating all things dappled, brinded, and stippled. You should feel pretty smart. You are probably the only people in the room who know what those words mean.)

How to Analyze a Poem:

1. Read the poem.
2. Look up difficult or significant words. Look up the glosses. Look up info about the poet.
3. Read the poem.
4. Find every poetic device in your particular poem.
5. Read the poem.
6. Do point form notes about how the poet uses language to convey the meaning of the poem.
7. Read the poem.
8. Write two paragraphs (8 sentences minimum) analyzing the poem. Include lines from the poem you quote to make your point. First paragraph: How poet uses language. Second paragraph: Overall meaning of the poem.

DO:

• analyze the poem
• dissect the poem
• quote lines from the poem to prove your points
• make sure you understand the time period of the poem
• make sure you understand the background of the poet
• use the example I did for you as a template (Margaret Atwood’s It is Dangerous to Read Newspapers)
• remember to attach the poem to the analysis
• remember to write your name on the assignment

DON’T:

• write about whether you like the poem or the poet
• be vague and wishy washy
• talk “about” the poem with no references to actual lines in the poem!

The Entire World in Under Five Minutes

9/11s

11’s: You had a double block and a chance to really get focussed on your Poetry Assignment. This would have worked much better if someone hadn’t pulled the fire alarm. Although the sunshine was nice and I got to practice my printing skills and Mitch got to practice his message delivering skills, going outside to stare at a fire truck wasn’t really very useful. So I know you know this, but I am going to say it anyway. We have four classes left before the Poetry Assignment is due. This means working on it outside of class might be a good idea.

It is now officially the end of the year.

9’s: You had a single block and you had Maureen and I wandering around ensuring you’d picked your poems and helping you recognize poetic devices.

If you go to Assignments 9, you can see the instructions yet again.

Sadness

Tens: Someone you liked and cared about died and it was a sad and horrible day. Many of you were upset and feeling pain, and it was a long, strange day. Anyone who needed to, went down to the Annex to talk to the counsellors and anyone who needed to,  just sat and thought or sat and wrote.

What I will always remember about this day is how you showed such compassion toward one another.

I gave out ten different poems to anyone who wanted them. They’re all appropriate for the Poetry Assignment. You can still find your own if you wish. Scroll down and find the ones I’ve already put on this blog.

Jordan

No man is an island entire of itself; every man 
is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; 
if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe 
is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as 
well as any manner of thy friends or of thine 
own were; any man's death diminishes me, 
because I am involved in mankind. 
And therefore never send to know for whom 
the bell tolls; it tolls for thee. 

by John Donne
MEDITATION XVII
Devotions upon Emergent Occasions

9/11s

11’s: Since it worked so well last time, I read the same poem to you and the 9’s. Only with you, I went into greater depth and gave you an entirely different and significantly harder response to write. The poem was Margaret Atwood’s Boredom, a poem in which she goes into excruciating detail about the minutiae of her childhood. In fact, she uses the word minutiae — and since teaching you this poem I have found at least five specific times when I’ve been able to use the word. It’s my new favourite word, edging out pusillanimous, my old favourite word.

Your written response was to look at one of three things: the theme of death or childhood or growing awareness/maturity in the poem. You were also to remember the cardinal rules of poetry analysis: Your feelings don’t count. Whether you like the poem or the poet doesn’t count. What counts is exactly what is in the poem and how the poet uses language and poetic devices to get meaning across. It’s a harsh world, this poetic analysis. But there you go. No more Shel Silverstein. This is SciencePoetry.

Above, you can see two pictures of Margaret Atwood that are straight out of the poem. She’s about four years old in the first one and seventeen in the second. Doesn’t she look like she’s plotting her escape in the teenage one?

9’s: We looked at exactly the same poem as the 11’s did: Boredom. First of all, you made a list of the things that make a person bored and then considered the elements of boredom. When do we get bored? Why do we get bored?

Then, we looked at the denotation of words (dictionary meaning), and how Atwood uses repetition to show her boredom. We dissected all of the pieces of the poem and then we figured out the meaning. That is exactly what you will be doing when you do the Poem Analysis.

10s

9/11s

9’s: In this class, you considered what tone is and how we can know the tone of a poem. I had you write a list of 25 possible feelings a poem might evoke: feelings like sorrow, melancholy, joy, resignation, resentment, happiness. Then I read you a bunch of poems and you focussed on the tone.

11’s: Well, you’re not going to like I did a similar thing with you … or maybe you will. This was the memorable class where I read poems that exactly matched your current thoughts. How that happened was some strange form of alchemy, but there you go. Who understands the subtle shadings of a class/teacher dynamic?

Back to the War

Tens. The last poem you analyzed (Dulce et Decorum Est) was a depiction of war as experienced by a 23 year old Second Lieutenant. This poem, Easter, 1916, was written by a 51 year old man who wasn’t in the War: William Butler Yeats. Before reading the poem, look at the background of Yeats: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._B._Yeats

Now, do the following:

1. Read the poem.
2. Find every metaphor.
3. Write down every person he writes about in the poem and indicate what he says about them.
4. Read the poem again.
5. Indicate the mood or tone of the poem.
6. Write down differences in how Owen feels about war and how Yeats feels about it.

Easter, 1916

I have met them at close of day
Coming with vivid faces
From counter or desk among grey
Eighteenth-century houses.
I have passed with a nod of the head
Or polite meaningless words,
Or have lingered awhile and said
Polite meaningless words,
And thought before I had done
Of a mocking tale or a gibe
To please a companion
Around the fire at the club,
Being certain that they and I
But lived where motley is worn:
All changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.

That woman’s days were spent
In ignorant good-will,
Her nights in argument
Until her voice grew shrill.
What voice more sweet than hers
When, young and beautiful,
She rode to harriers?
This man had kept a school
And rode our winged horse;
This other his helper and friend
Was coming into his force;
He might have won fame in the end,
So sensitive his nature seemed,
So daring and sweet his thought.
This other man I had dreamed
A drunken, vainglorious lout.
He had done most bitter wrong
To some who are near my heart,
Yet I number him in the song;
He, too, has resigned his part
In the casual comedy;
He, too, has been changed in his turn,
Transformed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.

Hearts with one purpose alone
Through summer and winter seem
Enchanted to a stone
To trouble the living stream.
The horse that comes from the road.
The rider, the birds that range
From cloud to tumbling cloud,
Minute by minute they change;
A shadow of cloud on the stream
Changes minute by minute;
A horse-hoof slides on the brim,
And a horse plashes within it;
The long-legged moor-hens dive,
And hens to moor-cocks call;
Minute by minute they live:
The stone’s in the midst of all.

Too long a sacrifice
Can make a stone of the heart.
O when may it suffice?
That is Heaven’s part, our part
To murmur name upon name,
As a mother names her child
When sleep at last has come
On limbs that had run wild.
What is it but nightfall?
No, no, not night but death;
Was it needless death after all?
For England may keep faith
For all that is done and said.
We know their dream; enough
To know they dreamed and are dead;
And what if excess of love
Bewildered them till they died?
I write it out in a verse –
MacDonagh and MacBride
And Connolly and pearse
Now and in time to be,
Wherever green is worn,
Are changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.

William Butler Yeats

9/11s

Dulce et Decorum Est

Dulce et Decorum Est is an anti-war poem written, not by a man protesting a war, but a man in the middle of a war, fighting in the trenches. The author is Wilfred Owen, a soldier in World War One. First, look up his background. Then, find the similes, the personification, the metaphors, the onomatopeia. Then write an eight sentence response, describing the tone of the poem.

DULCE ET DECORUM EST(1)

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares(2) we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest(3) began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots(4)
Of tired, outstripped(5) Five-Nines(6) that dropped behind.
Gas!(7) Gas! Quick, boys! – An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets(8) just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling,
And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime(9) . . .
Dim, through the misty panes(10) 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,(11) choking, drowning.
If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud(12)
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest(13)
To children ardent(14) for some desperate glory,
The old Lie; Dulce et Decorum est
Pro patria mori.(15)

Wilfred Owen
8 October 1917 – March, 1918

Notes on Dulce et Decorum Est

1.  DULCE ET DECORUM EST – the first words of a Latin saying (taken from an ode by Horace). The words were widely understood and often quoted at the start of the First World War. They mean “It is sweet and right.” The full saying ends the poem: Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori – it is sweet and right to die for your country. In other words, it is a wonderful and great honour to fight and die for your country.

2.  Flares – rockets which were sent up to burn with a brilliant glare to light up men and other targets in the area between the front lines (See illustration, page 118 of Out in the Dark.)

3.  Distant rest – a camp away from the front line where exhausted soldiers might rest for a few days, or longer

4.  Hoots – the noise made by the shells rushing through the air

5.  Outstripped – outpaced, the soldiers have struggled beyond the reach of these shells which are now falling behind them as they struggle away from the scene of battle

6.  Five-Nines – 5.9 calibre explosive shells

7.  Gas! –  poison gas. From the symptoms it would appear to be chlorine or phosgene gas. The filling of the lungs with fluid had the same effects as when a person drowned

8.  Helmets –  the early name for gas masks

9.  Lime – a white chalky substance which can burn live tissue

10.  Panes – the glass in the eyepieces of the gas masks

11.  Guttering – Owen probably meant flickering out like a candle or gurgling like water draining down a gutter, referring to the sounds in the throat of the choking man, or it might be a sound partly like stuttering and partly like gurgling

12.  Cud – normally the regurgitated grass that cows chew usually green and bubbling. Here a similar looking material was issuing from the soldier’s mouth

13.  High zest – idealistic enthusiasm, keenly believing in the rightness of the idea

14.  ardent – keen

15.  Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori – see note 1 above.

9/11’s

Elevens. So today I learned what a hashtag was and I learned that you can really annoy Mitch by repeating #YOLO over and over. So it was quite an informative class. By the way, #NTIKHTDTIWAYATTBSYOLOOAOA.

After you taught me, I taught you. I probably wasn’t as interesting, but you’ll be too polite to tell me. Won’t you? What did I do and what did you do? I gave you/read the resolution poem to Invictus — Margaritae Sorori —  and told you a bit about the background. (It’s all in my May 1st post if you missed it or are just so fascinated by William Ernest Henley you want to hear it again.) And then I had you go on a Literary Scavenger hunt, looking for alliteration, assonance, consonance, personification, metaphors, and onomatopeia. It was all there and after you found it, I had you write a paragraph of 8 – 10 sentences on the tone of Margaritae Sorori, also indicating the passage of time in the poem.

Nines. And what did you do, my little munchkins? You edited those never ending, we’ll keep writing them ’til we’re all dead and gone, stories for THE LAST TIME. I explained how to brutally clear cut unnecessary prose and you listened and I explained it again and again and some of you actually did it! I also read the Best Grade Nine Sentence Ever and used that particular paragraph as an example of how to show and not tell.

Your individual chapters are due THIS WEDNESDAY. Please being them to class fully edited. Read them to your mother, your father, your aunt, your uncle, your grandparents, your brother, your sister, your neighbours, the guy who works at the 7/11 — anyone who will be able to give you an opinion. Maybe forget the guy at the 7/11 — unless it’s your uncle. Just get someone else to read your chapter. They might see what you don’t see. Writing isn’t the hard part. Editing is.

Look What I Found

Something New for You

Tens: If you look at the Pages at the top, you’ll see a new one: Poem Analysis: How To. I’ve put the sample analysis there and step by step instructions of how to analyze a poem.

Oddly enough, the same day I taught you the poem, a woman appeared in The Vancouver Sun, talking about Robert Kennedy’s assassination. Her name is Nina Rhodes-Hughes and that day, she was standing near Robert Kennedy, the man many assumed would become the next president of the United States. If you watch the video, around 1:55, she talks about iconic images. That is exactly what Margaret Atwood is referring to: the newspaper images that stayed in people’s minds, the images they couldn’t erase. I’ve put the pictures Atwood is talking about on a separate Page called Images. They’re pretty shocking. Be forewarned. These are the pictures that were in the newspapers in 1968 when she wrote the poem.

Here’s a key thing. To really understand a poem, you must understand the poet’s time period. The way people see the world changes. Margaret Atwood wrote It is Dangerous to Read Newspapers in a time when people believed in hope. That’s one of the underlying messages of the poem, the idea that if you look at the bad news in the newspapers, it will erode you; it will diminish your ability to have hope. You will be altered. You will become passive at the sheer magnitude of the horrors occurring in the world you live in.

Ironically, the Vancouver Sun readers commenting under the Rhodes-Hughes video just prove Atwood’s point. Almost all of the writers are snarky and disbelieving, assuming Nina Rhodes-Hughes has an ulterior motive. Their version of being passive isn’t to sit “like an unlit fuse.” Their version is the norm for today: sarcasm. In our time period, if we’re uncomfortable or disbelieving, we mock.

I would love to know how Margaret Atwood’s initial beliefs have evolved. In 1968, she was protesting the media’s power to put images in her head. No one could have ever envisioned the absolute power the media has now. Most people just absorb what the media tells them without thinking. We are super saturated in images and beliefs and assumptions. It takes a major effort to think for yourself in today’s world. You have to question things, use your critical thinking skills, determine what is true and what isn’t, what is drivel and what isn’t.

What you are dealing with is much different than what Atwood ever envisioned. You have to pick through a daily dump of information to determine what has importance. In Atwood’s day, if it was in the news it had already been screened. You have to pick through multiple stories on Beyonce’s baby and who won on Dancing with the Stars and whether coffee is good for you or isn’t and who’s saying what where …  and then, whether what you’re reading will all be refuted a day later. You have to find the news before you even determine what it is!

Last thing: Here’s how you know when you’ve read a good poem: You’re still thinking about it days later, still making connections. Read this poem in twenty years and let me know what you think.

Nina Rhodes-Hughes Interview

1968: Where has all the rage gone?

Making Margaret Atwood Mad

Tens. So you know who Margaret Atwood is, right? Most famous writer in Canada. Wins every award that exists in this country. Has flocks of pilgrims arriving on her doorstep, genuflecting and asking how they, too, might become the Great Canadian Writer. Maybe slight exaggeration on the genuflecting… but she’s really famous in literary circles and she is, indeed, Number One. The other thing about her is that she is One Feisty Environmentalist.

So … It’s a good thing she doesn’t know about the small rainforest I decimated to create all the handouts I used to show you how to analyze one of her poems. But … whatever. After you read the handouts (and put them in a safe place so that you can pass them down to your children and grandchildren and great grandchildren; paper is expensive!) you will need no other poetry handout for the remainder of your lives. And if you don’t know how to recognize poetic devices and analyze a poem after today, I give up. I have given you a template, an example, a format; there’s nothing more I can do to teach you!

But you’ll get it. The trees will not have sacrificed their lives in vain.

Oh, here’s a picture of Ms. Atwood, showing how wide the tree was. That would be the tree that was cut down to make the handout to explain her poem — the poem which has irony as the main poetic device. If you read a lot of Margaret Atwood (as I do), you’ll notice that she uses irony a lot.

Update: This is the paragraph that was due at the end of the period. If you didn’t finish it, you can give it to me at the beginning of next class.

Some poems age. They are no longer relevant. Is It is Dangerous to Read Newspapers still a “true” poem? Give two examples from the news now to prove your point. Your paragraph should be 8 – 12 sentences long.

If you still haven’t chosen …

Elevens. Here are some poems you might consider for your Poetry Assignment. Any of these would work. You might want to go here and look:   PoemHunter

• Sigfried Sassoon: Aftermath
• Rupert Brooke: And love has changed to kindliness
• Wilfred Owen: Anthem for Doomed Youth;    Dulce et Decorum Est
• Dylan Thomas: Fern Hill;    Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night
• Wallace Stevens: A Postcard from the Volcano
• Alfred, Lord Tennyson: Break, Break, Break
• Matthew Arnold: Dover Beach
• William Wordsworth: The World is Too Much With Us
• Leonard Cohen: Hallilujah
• Anne Sexton: After Auschwitz
• Thomas Hardy: A Commonplace Day
• Rainer Maria Rilke: Before Summer Rain
• Sarah Teasdale: “What Do I Care?”
• Keats: Ode to a Nightingale
• D. H. Lawrence: Ballad of Another Ophelia;  Afternoon in School The Last Lesson
• William Ernest Henley: England, My England
• Margaret Atwood:Variations on the Word Love;  Variation on the Word Sleep
• Shelley: Ode to the West Wind
• Edna St. Vincent Millay: An Ancient Gesture
• Henry Wadsworth Longfellow: A Psalm of Life
• Alan Ginsberg: Supermarket in California

Mirror Poems

Tens. Today you did a quick introductory paragraph: When was the last time you learned something new? How did you learn it? How did you know you learned it? What was it you learned?

Then I taught you how to analyze a poem, using two poems, Crossing the Bar and Invictus.

Click on the link for info on William Ernest Henley and for Alfred, Lord Tennyson.

Above  is a picture of Tennyson’s library in Farringford on the Isle of Wight. The desk has been moved but it was right in front of the fireplace. That is where he wrote Crossing the Bar. When I was there, the room was painted white. I don’t know what colour it was when Tennyson was there.

Below is the poem William Ernest Henley wrote after Invictus. It’s called Margaritae Sorori and is named after his daughter, Margaret. Ironically, it’s even more mellow than Crossing the Bar. Where did the angry man go? How did he get so mellow and accepting? He wrote Invictus in 1875 and Margaritae Soroni after his daughter’s death in 1888.

Something I forgot to tell you: Henley’s daughter was the inspiration for Wendy in Peter Pan. J.M. Barrie, who wrote the play, was a friend of Henley’s. When J.M. Barrie used to visit, the little girl (who was so little she could barely talk) used to call him “Fwendy-wendy.” So the character “Wendy” was born. That is also the first time that the name Wendy was ever used. Here’s a picture of Margaret Henley.

Carrying associations even further, here’s a painting by the Victorian symbolist artist Edward Hughes. It’s called Night with Her Train of Stars and Her Great Gift of Sleep and he took the title and theme from Henley’s poetry. Where do you think Night is taking the babies and small children? That’s another poem.

Margaritae Sorori

A late lark twitters from the quiet skies:
And from the west,
Where the sun, his day’s work ended,
Lingers as in content,
There falls on the old, gray city
An influence luminous and serene,
A shining peace.

The smoke ascends
In a rosy-and-golden haze. The spires
Shine and are changed. In the valley
Shadows rise. The lark sings on. The sun,
Closing his benediction,
Sinks, and the darkening air
Thrills with a sense of the triumphing night–
Night with her train of stars
And her great gift of sleep.

So be my passing!
My task accomplish’d and the long day done,
My wages taken, and in my heart
Some late lark singing,
Let me be gather’d to the quiet west,
The sundown splendid and serene,
Death.