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Readings for Composition Compiled, Annotated, and Edited by Rhonda L Readings for Composition Compiled, annotated, and edited by Rhonda L. Kelley Table of Contents Short Fiction ................................................................................................................................... 3 A Rose for Emily by William Faulkner ........................................................................................ 4 The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman ................................................................. 12 The Open Window by H. H. Munro (Saki) ............................................................................... 27 Miss Brill by Katherine Mansfield ............................................................................................ 30 Guy de Maupassant, The Necklace ........................................................................................... 34 Edgar Allan Poe, The Tell-Tale Heart ........................................................................................ 41 Edgar Allan Poe, Cask of Amontillado ...................................................................................... 45 Edgar Allan Poe, The Masque of the Red Death ........................................................................ 51 Nathaniel Hawthorne, Young Goodman Brown ....................................................................... 56 Rappaccini's Daughter by Nathaniel Hawthorne ..................................................................... 68 Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Adventure of the Speckled Band ................................................ 88 Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Adventure of the Copper Beeches ............................................ 108 Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Adventure of the Red-Headed League ...................................... 127 Lyrical Poetry .............................................................................................................................. 145 John Keats ................................................................................................................................146 On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer by John Keats .................................................... 146 Ode on a Grecian Urn by John Keats ................................................................................... 147 Bright Star by John Keats .....................................................................................................148 Alfred, Lord Tennyson ............................................................................................................. 149 Break, Break, Break by Alfred, Lord Tennyson .................................................................... 149 Tears, Idle Tears by Alfred, Lord Tennyson ......................................................................... 149 The Charge of the Light Brigade by Alfred, Lord Tennyson ................................................ 150 Edna St. Vincent Millay ............................................................................................................ 152 Sonnets by Edna St. Vincent Millay ..................................................................................... 152 William Blake ........................................................................................................................... 155 The Sick Rose by William Blake ........................................................................................... 155 A Poison Tree by William Blake ........................................................................................... 155 The Tyger by William Blake ................................................................................................. 156 London by William Blake ..................................................................................................... 156 George Gordon, Lord Byron ..................................................................................................... 158 She Walks in Beauty by Lord Byron ..................................................................................... 158 When We Two Parted by Lord Byron ................................................................................... 159 Remember Thee! Remember Thee! by Lord Byron ............................................................. 159 My Soul Is Dark by Lord Byron ........................................................................................... 160 William Shakespeare ................................................................................................................ 161 Sonnets ................................................................................................................................. 161 Narrative Poetry ........................................................................................................................... 165 Adonais: An Elegy on the Death of John Keats by Percy Bysshe Shelley ................................ 166 Alexander Pope, The Rape of the Lock .................................................................................... 173 Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Ulysses .............................................................................................. 206 Christina Rossetti, Goblin Market .......................................................................................... 209 Edgar Allan Poe, Annabel Lee ................................................................................................. 223 Robert Browning, My Last Duchess ........................................................................................ 225 T. S. Eliot, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock...................................................................... 227 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner ................................................... 231 Bibliography ................................................................................................................................ 247 Short Fiction A Rose for Emily by William Faulkner Introduction1 “A Rose for Emily" is a short story by American author William Faulkner first published in the April 30, 1930 issue of The Forum. The story takes place in the fictional city, Jefferson, Mississippi. It was Faulkner's first short story published in a national magazine. Faulkner described the title as "allegorical,” saying “the meaning was, here was a woman who had had a tragedy, an irrevocable tragedy and nothing could be done about it, and I pitied her and this was a salute . to a woman you would hand a rose."2 I WHEN Miss Emily Grierson died, our whole town went to her funeral: the men through a sort of respectful affection for a fallen monument, the women mostly out of curiosity to see the inside of her house, which no one save an old man-servant--a combined gardener and cook--had seen in at least ten years. It was a big, squarish frame house that had once been white, decorated with cupolas and spires and scrolled balconies in the heavily lightsome style of the seventies, set on what had once been our most select street. But garages and cotton gins had encroached and obliterated even the august names of that neighborhood; only Miss Emily's house was left, lifting its stubborn and coquettish decay above the cotton wagons and the gasoline pumps-an eyesore among eyesores. And now Miss Emily had gone to join the representatives of those august names where they lay in the cedar-bemused cemetery among the ranked and anonymous graves of Union and Confederate soldiers who fell at the battle of Jefferson. Alive, Miss Emily had been a tradition, a duty, and a care; a sort of hereditary obligation upon the town, dating from that day in 1894 when Colonel Sartoris, the mayor--he who fathered the edict that no Negro woman should appear on the streets without an apron-remitted her taxes, the dispensation dating from the death of her father on into perpetuity. Not that Miss Emily would have accepted charity. Colonel Sartoris invented an involved tale to the effect that Miss Emily's father had loaned money to the town, which the town, as a matter of business, preferred this way of repaying. Only a man of Colonel Sartoris' generation and thought could have invented it, and only a woman could have believed it. When the next generation, with its more modern ideas, became mayors and aldermen, this arrangement created some little dissatisfaction. On the first of the year they mailed her a tax notice. February came, and there was no reply. They wrote her a formal letter, asking her to call at the sheriff's office at her convenience. A week later the mayor wrote her himself, offering to call or to send his car for her, and received in reply a note on paper of an archaic shape, in a thin, flowing calligraphy in faded ink, to the effect that she no longer went out at all. The tax notice was also enclosed, without comment. 1 Wikipedia contributors. "A Rose for Emily." Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, 3 Oct. 2015. Web. 4 Nov. 2015. 2 Faulkner at Nagano, ed. Robert Jelliffe (Tokyo: Kenkyusha Ltd., 1956), pp. 70–71. They called a special meeting of the Board of Aldermen. A deputation waited upon her, knocked at the door through which no visitor had passed since she ceased giving china-painting lessons eight or ten years earlier. They were admitted by the old Negro into a dim hall from which a stairway mounted into still more shadow. It smelled of dust and disuse--a close, dank smell. The Negro led them into the parlor. It was furnished in
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