Writing About a Poem Refer to your text, pages 1437 - 1453.

Writing About a Poem

Refer to your text, pages 1437 - 1453

Writing About a Poem

• To write about a poem well, you first have to experience it

• It helps to live with the poem for as long as possible

• The poems you spend time writing about will mean more to you than the poems you skimmed over

Two Approaches to Writing About Poetry

• Explication (literally “an unfolding”) explains the poem in detail, unraveling complexities.

• Analysis separates its subject into elements as a means to understand the subject and what composes it.

Explication

• Choose a poem short enough to discuss thoroughly

• Examine and unfold all the details in the poem such as– Figurative language (allusions, metaphors)– Diction (denotation and connotation of words)– Structure– Sound, rhythm, rhyme

"I dwell in possibility" (#657)by Emily Dickinson

I dwell in Possibility-- A fairer House than Prose-- More numerous of Windows-- Superior--for Doors-- Of Chambers as the Cedars-- Impregnable of Eye-- And for an Everlasting Roof The Gambrels of the Sky-- Of Visitors--the fairest-- For Occupation--This-- The spreading wide my narrow Hands To gather Paradise--

Scansion

• Scansion refers to sounding out the poem and indicating the stresses where the poet wishes to place emphasis

• To scan a poem is to make a diagram of the stresses (and absences of stresses) we find in it.

What is Meter?• Meter refers to the rhythm of the poem• All of us speak with a rising and falling

stress somewhat like iambic meter but rarely with absolute consistency

• to – day ∕• Iambic metrical pattern has traditionally

dominated English verse because it probably provides the best symbolic model of our language

Four Common Accentual-Syllabic Meters

• Iambic – unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable– But soft what light through yonder window

breaks (Shakespeare)

• Anapestic – two unstressed syllables followed by a stressed syllables– The Assyrian came down like a wolf on the

fold (Lord Byron)• (sounds like a cantering horse)

Four Common Accentual-Syllabic Meters

• Trochaic – a stressed syllable followed by an unstressed syllable– Double, double, toil and trouble

Fire burn and cauldron bubble

(Shakespeare)• Dactylic – one stressed syllable followed by two

unstressed syllables• Pussycat, pussycat, where have you been?

(Mother Goose)

Classifying meters

• Monometer – one foot• Dimeter – two feet• Trimeter – three feet• Tetrameter – four feet• Pentameter – five feet• Hexameter – six feet• Heptameter – seven feet• Octameter – eight feet

Stopping By Woods on a Snowy EveningBy Robert Frost

Whose woods these are I think I know.His house is in the village though;He will not see me stopping hereTo watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queerTo stop without a farmhouse nearBetween the woods and frozen lakeThe darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shakeTo ask if there is some mistake.The only other sound's the sweepOf easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep.But I have promises to keep,And miles to go before I sleep,And miles to go before I sleep.

11

Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18

Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?

Thou art more lovely and more temperate.

Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,

And summer's lease hath all too short a date;

Sometimes too hot the eye of heaven shines,

And often is his gold complexion dimm'd;

And every fair from fair sometimes declines,By chance or nature's changing course untrimm'd:

12

But thy eternal summer shall not fade

Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow'st;

Nor shall Death brag thou wand'rest in his shade,

When in eternal lines to time thou grow'st;

So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,

So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

13

Richard Wilbur’s “Advice to a Prophet• Advice to a Prophet

• Richard Wilbur

• When you come, as you soon must, to the streets of our city,

• Mad-eyed from stating the obvious,

• Not proclaiming our fall but begging us

• In God’s name to have self-pity,

•  

• Spare us all word of the weapons, their force and range,

• The long numbers that rocket the mind;

• Our slow, unreckoning hearts will be left behind,

• Unable to fear what is too strange.

•  

• Nor shall you scare us with talk of the death of the race.

• How should we dream of this place without us?—

• The sun mere fire, the leaves untroubled about us,

• A stone look on the stone’s face?

•  

• Speak of the world’s own change. Though we cannot conceive

• Of an undreamt thing, we know to our cost

• How the dreamt cloud crumbles, the vines are blackened by frost,

• How the view alters. We could believe,

• If you told us so, that the white-tailed deer will slip

• Into perfect shade, grown perfectly shy,

• The lark avoid the reaches of our eye,

• The jack-pine lose its knuckled grip

• On the cold ledge, and every torrent burn

• As Xanthus* once, its gliding trout

• Stunned in a twinkling. What should we be without

• The dolphin’s arc, the dove’s return,

•  

• These things in which we have seen ourselves and spoken?

• Ask us, prophet, how we shall call

• Our natures forth when that live tongue is all

• Dispelled, that glass obscured or broken

•  

•  

• In which we have said the rose of our love and the clean

• Horse of our courage, in which beheld

• The singing locust of the soul unshelled,

• And all we mean or wish to mean.

•  

• Ask us, ask us whether with the worldless rose

• Our hearts shall fail us; come demanding

• Whether there shall be lofty or long standing

• When the bronze annals of the oak-tree close.

Organizing an Explication

• An explication is easy to organize– Start with the first line and keep working

straight through– Not to be confused with paraphrase (the

literal meaning of the poem) but your explication may certainly contain paraphrase

Organizing an Explication

• Proceed sequentially through the poem from the title to the last line, but you may take up some points out of order so that you can make necessary connections.

• Demonstrate good manuscript form. You need a Works Cited for the poem itself. You do not need outside sources for the explication however.

• Read sample X.J. Kennedy (1447-1450)

Analysis

• Structure your analysis as you would a formal essay.

• Begin with an introduction and a thesis which presents your central argument about how the poem uses language to convey meaning

• Find several outside sources which you either support or refute in your essay.

Organizing an Analysis

• Organize the body paragraphs of your analysis around the central elements of your poem which are most central to its meaning.

• “Focus on a single, manageable element of a poem” (Kennedy 1451)

• “Show how this element . . . Contributes to the meaning of the whole” (1451)

• “Read sample X.J. Kennedy (1452-1453)

Organizing an Analysis

• “Long analyses of metrical feet, rhyme schemes, and indentations tend to make ponderous reading.”(1451)

• Yet, “formal analysis can be interesting and can cast light on a poem in its entirety”(1451).

Accentual Meter

• With accentual meter, the poet does not write in feet but instead counts accents (stresses).

• The stresses may come anywhere in the line and include practically any number of unstressed syllables– An axe angles

From my neighbor’s ash can

(Richard Wilbur’s “Junk”)

Accentual Verse

• A B C D E F G (7)• H I J K LM NO P (7)• Q R S (3)• T U V (3)• W X (3)• Y and Z (3)• Now I know my A B Cs. (7)• Next time will you sing with me. (7)

Accentual Verse

• Star light Star bright (4) (4 syllables)

• First star I see tonight (4) (six syllables)

• I wish I may I wish I might (4) (eight syllables)

• Have the wish I wish tonight (4) (seven syllables)

Accentual Syllabic

Prayer of a the Selfish Child

By Shel Silverstein

Now I lay me down to sleep,

I pray the lord my soul to keep,

And if I die before I wake,

I pray the Lord my toys to break.

So none of the other kids can use’em . . . .

Amen

Imitations of Horace by Alexander Pope

Time was, a sober Englishman wou’d knock

His servants up, and rise by five o clock,

Instruct his Family in ev’ry rule,

And send his Wife to Church, his Son to school.

To worship like his Fathers was his care;

To teach their frugal Virtues to his Heir;

To prove, that Luxury could never hold;

And place, on good Security, his gold.

“Design” by Robert Frost

I found a dimpled spider, fat and white,

On a white heal-all, holding up a moth

Like a white piece of rigid satin cloth –

Assorted characters of death and blight

Mixed ready to begin the morning right, (5)

Like the ingredients of a witches’ broth –

A snow-drop spider, a flower like a froth,

And dead wings carried like a paper kite.

What had that flower to do with being white,

The wayside blue and innocent heal-all? (10)

What brought the kindred spider to that height,

Then steered the white moth thither in the night?

What but design of darkness to appall? –

If design govern in a thing so small.