Essay #2:
What to do: The same thing as the last time: Look very closely at a poem and explain, in a detailed top-to-bottom analysis, what the poet has done to create an emotional experience for you. In doing this, state what the content is, and then explain in detail how that content is electrified through word choices, figurative language, sounds—and any other tricks that a poet has at his disposal. Think of the spring water called “Crystal Geyser,” and think of how the sound and the meaning and the suggestions of those words create a poetic experience for you. Now just do that for an entire poem. (A good approach is to consider some alternative words that weren’t used, like “gory” instead of “bloody” and “flung” instead of “throw.”)
Pay more attention this time to the music and sounds of a poem. Specifically, how does the music of a poem—the sounds of words, the pace of punctuation, the rhythms and rhymes—reinforce the meaning of the poem? I’ll teach you more about this in class.
Your choices:
1. “Love Song: I and Thou,” by Alan Dugan (p. 302)
2. Sonnet #29 (“When in disgrace”) by Shakespeare (p. 67)
3. Holy Sonnet 14 (“Batter my Heart”) by John Donne (p. 75)
4. “Frederick Douglas,” by Robert Hayden (on the back)
For the wildly ambitious:
5. “The Second Coming,” by William Butler Yeats (p. 200)
6. “Ode to a Nightingale,” by John Keats (p. 134)
7. “Fern Hill,” by Dylan Thomas (p. 278)
8. “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” by T.S. Eliot (p.239)
9. “Ulysses,” by Alfred, Lord Tennyson (p. 154)
Remember: None of this is magic. It’s just black stuff on white stuff—a poem!—that has the power to knock you to your knees and change your hearts forever.
· Monday, February 14th: Choose your poem and analyze it very closely. Write lots of notes that you’ll share with your group.
· Wednesday, February 16th: A quizlet on sound techniques (plus all the other terms we learned). On this day you’ll also receive essay #1 back and the first cassette. Write a transcript of that tape (I’ll explain in class) and apply to your second essay all the lessons I say on the tape.
· Wednesday, February 23rd (no class on Monday):
o Typed draft of essay #2 due, along with copies for your group
· Monday, February 28th: Essay #2 due; put it in a two-pocket portfolio with essay #1, transcript from essay #1, and your cassette tape that is all cued up to fresh tape.
o Note: I want you to memorize your poem, so come to my office by 5pm on Monday and recite it to me.
o Double note: I will also assign a large chunk of reading for this day, too, so get as much of this done ahead of time as you can.
Frederick Douglas
-by Robert Hayden
When it is finally ours, this freedom, this liberty, this beautiful
and terrible thing, needful to man as air,
usable as earth; when it belongs at last to all,
when it is truly instinct, brain matter, diastole, systole,
reflex action; when it is finally won; when it is more
than the gaudy mumbo jumbo of politicians:
this man, this Douglass, this former slave, this Negro
beaten to his knees, exiled, visioning a world
where none is lonely, none hunted, alien,
this man, superb in love and logic, this man
shall be remembered. Oh, not with statues’ rhetoric,
not with legends and poems and wreaths of bronze alone,
but with the lives grown out of his life, the lives
fleshing his dream of the beautiful, needful thing.