Steps for Appreciating, Understanding, and Analyzing Poetry English IV AP 2019-2020 Dr. Vendler, a Harvard professor, suggests a series of questions that students might ask about a poem as they read. The following steps for exploring poetry are an abridged and modified version of “Exploring a Poem—Chapter 4,” Helen Vendler—Poems, Poets, Poetry: An Introduction and Anthology ​

1. Antecedent Scenario—What has been happening before the poem starts? What has disturbed the status quo and set the ​ poem in motion? (This may not be applicable to all poems, but it is helpful to consider.) Remember, we don’t want to assume ​ the poet is the speaker/personal of the poem. So we are considering this scenario from the speaker’s perspective.

2. A Division into Structural Parts—Because small units are more easily handled than big ones, and because the process of a ​ poem, even one as short as a sonnet, can’t be addressed all at once with a single global question like “What’s going on here?” we divide the poem into pieces. Notice the poet’s use of stanza, end stops, caesuras, or enjambment to determine where there are breaks in ideas. Basically, we need to figure out the “paragraph” organization.

3. The Climax—In lyric poems, the various parts tend to cluster around a moment of special significance—which its attendant ​ parts lead up to, lead away from, help to clarify, and so on. The climax usually manifests itself by such things as greater intensity of tone, an especially significant metaphor, a change in rhythm, or a change in person (P.O.V. or speaker)

4. Tone—Read the poem aloud now as if it were your own utterance. This activity will help you to distinguish the various tones ​ of voice it exhibits and to name them. Use the structural parts that you identified to help you make note of tone shifts.

5. Speech Act—When we classify poems by their speech acts, we draw attention to their manner of expression more than to ​ their content. I can apologize for any number of things—my tardiness, or my mistakes, or my clothing—but in each of these cases my speech act (whatever its content) is an apology. Similarly, I can protest about time, or death, or love—but in every case, my speech act is a protest. Since the language of most poems can be thought of as a series of utterances by a speaker, the poem expects you to track the person’s successive speech acts, just as you might do in life when you might say, “First, she criticized me, then she apologized, then she explained why she was upset, and finally she asked if we could still be friends.” A poem’s speech acts need to be followed and identified in the same way. This is how can come to understand the meaning of the poem. Use the structural parts to identify multiple speech acts. Listed below you will find a list of various speech acts (this is not an exhaustive list, but it just meant to give you some ideas). ACKNOWLEDGING EXCLAMATION PRAYER ADMISSION EXHORTATION – conveying QUESTION APOLOGY urgent advice REBUTTAL APOSTROPHE GENERALIZATION REMINISCENCE BANISHING IMPRECATION – a spoken curse REQUEST BOAST INVOCATION – a form of prayer RHETORICAL QUESTION CELEBRATION invoking God’s presence SCORNING – open contempt or CLAIM LAMENT disdain COMMAND NARRATION SELF-BLAME DEFINITION OATH VOW DIALOGUE PLEA

6. Images or Sensory Words—Linked words (referring especially to the senses of sight and hearing) help to structure many ​ poems. These words can be all of one sort (a collection of names of different flowers, for instance in Milton’s “Lycidas”) or they can be of different sorts: that is, a series of specific nouns like “flood,” “earthquake,” “fire,” and “shipwreck” can all help to construct the single abstract category “catastrophe.” There are systematic ways in which the concrete words that some refer to as “images” may be assembled, too: they may be arranged in parallel, or in contrast, or in a ranked hierarchy. What has the poet’s imagination invented that is striking, or memorable, or beautiful?

7. Meaning—How do all of these elements work together to create meaning in the poem? What greater implications does the ​ poet want us to reflect on about society or about ourselves?

Poetry Packet

One Art by Elizabeth Bishop The art of losing isn’t hard to master; so many things seem filled with the intent to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster of lost door keys, the hour badly spent. The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster: places, and names, and where it was you meant to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or next-to-last, of three loved houses went. The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster, some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent. I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.

—Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident the art of losing’s not too hard to master though it may look like (​Write ​ it!) like disaster. Storm Warnings by Adrienne Rich The glass has been falling all the afternoon, And knowing better than the instrument What winds are walking overhead, what zone Of grey unrest is moving across the land, I leave the book upon a pillowed chair And walk from window to closed window, watching Boughs strain against the sky

And think again, as often when the air Moves inward toward a silent core of waiting, How with a single purpose time has traveled By secret currents of the undiscerned Into this polar realm. Weather abroad And weather in the heart alike come on Regardless of prediction. Between foreseeing and averting change Lies all the mastery of elements Which clocks and weatherglasses cannot alter. Time in the hand is not control of time, Nor shattered fragments of an instrument A proof against the wind; the wind will rise, We can only close the shutters.

I draw the curtains as the sky goes black And set a match to candles sheathed in glass Against the keyhole draught, the insistent whine Of weather through the unsealed aperture. This is our sole defense against the season; These are the things we have learned to do Who live in troubled regions.

The Century Quilt by Marilyn Nelson Waniek My sister and I were in love with Meema’s Indian blanket. We fell asleep under army green issued to Daddy by Supply. When Meema came to live with us she brought her medicines, her cane, and the blanket I found on my sister’s bed the last time I visited her. I remembered how I’d planned to inherit that blanket, how we used to wrap ourselves at play in its folds and be chieftains and princesses.

Now I’ve found a quilt I’d like to die under; Six Van Dyke brown squares, two white ones, and one square the yellowbrown of Mama’s cheeks. Each square holds a sweet gum leaf whose fingers I imagine would caress me into the silence.

I think I’d have good dreams for a hundred years under this quilt, as Meema must have, under her blanket, dreamed she was a girl again in Kentucky among her yellow sisters, their grandfather’s white family nodding at them when they met. When their father came home from his store they cranked up the pianola and all of the beautiful sisters giggled and danced. She must have dreamed about Mama when the dancing was over: a lanky girl trailing after her father through his Oklahoma field. Perhaps under this quilt I’d dream of myself, of my childhood of miracles, of my father’s burnt umber pride, my mother’s ochre gentleness. Within the dream of myself perhaps I’d meet my son or my other child, as yet unconceived. I’d call it The Century Quilt, after its pattern of leaves.

John Donne Poetry - Personal Symbols and Conceits

The Flea by John Donne Mark but this flea, and mark in this, How little that which thou deniest me is; It sucked me first, and now sucks thee, And in this flea our two bloods mingled be; Thou know’st that this cannot be said A sin, nor shame, nor loss of maidenhead, Yet this enjoys before it woo, And pampered swells with one blood made of two, And this, alas, is more than we would do.

Oh stay, three lives in one flea spare, Where we almost, nay more than married are. This flea is you and I, and this Our marriage bed, and marriage temple is; Though parents grudge, and you, w'are met, And cloistered in these living walls of jet. Though use make you apt to kill me, Let not to that, self-murder added be, And sacrilege, three sins in killing three.

Cruel and sudden, hast thou since Purpled thy nail, in blood of innocence? Wherein could this flea guilty be, Except in that drop which it sucked from thee? Yet thou triumph’st, and say'st that thou Find’st not thy self, nor me the weaker now; ’Tis true; then learn how false, fears be: Just so much honor, when thou yield’st to me, Will waste, as this flea’s death took life from thee.

SONNETS Sonnet Notes Here:

Death be not proud by John Donne (Holy Sonnets) Death, be not proud, though some have called thee Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so; For those whom thou think'st thou dost overthrow Die not, poor Death, nor yet canst thou kill me. From rest and sleep, which but thy pictures be, Much pleasure; then from thee much more must flow, And soonest our best men with thee do go, Rest of their bones, and soul's delivery. Thou art slave to fate, chance, kings, and desperate men, And dost with poison, war, and sickness dwell, And poppy or charms can make us sleep as well And better than thy stroke; why swell'st thou then? One short sleep past, we wake eternally And death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die.

Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer’s Day - William Shakespeare 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; Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines, And often is his gold complexion dimm'd; And every fair from fair sometime declines, By chance or nature’s changing course untrimm'd; But thy eternal summer shall not fade, Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st; Nor shall death brag thou wander’st 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.

Villanelles Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night – Dylan Thomas Do not go gentle into that good night, Old age should burn and rave at close of day; Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right, Because their words had forked no lightning they Do not go gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay, Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight, And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way, Do not go gentle into that good night.

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay, Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And you, my father, there on the sad height, Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray. Do not go gentle into that good night. Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Elegies Elegy for My Father, Who is Not Dead – Andrew Hudgins One day I’ll lift the telephone and be told my father’s dead. He’s ready. In the sureness of his faith, he talks about the world beyond this world as though his reservations have been made. I am not. I can’t just say goodbye as cheerfully as if he were embarking on a trip to make my later trip go well. I see myself on deck, convinced his ship’s gone down, while he’s convinced I’ll see him standing on the dock and waving, shouting, Welcome back.

Midterm Break - Seamus Heaney I sat all morning in the college sick bay Counting bells knelling classes to a close. At two o'clock our neighbours drove me home.

In the porch I met my father crying— He had always taken funerals in his stride— And Big Jim Evans saying it was a hard blow.

The baby cooed and laughed and rocked the pram When I came in, and I was embarrassed By old men standing up to shake my hand

And tell me they were 'sorry for my trouble'. Whispers informed strangers I was the eldest, Away at school, as my mother held my hand

In hers and coughed out angry tearless sighs. At ten o'clock the ambulance arrived With the corpse, stanched and bandaged by the nurses.

Next morning I went up into the room. Snowdrops And candles soothed the bedside; I saw him For the first time in six weeks. Paler now,

Wearing a poppy bruise on his left temple, He lay in the four-foot box as in his cot. No gaudy scars, the bumper knocked him clear.

A four-foot box, a foot for every year.

Home Movies: A Sort of Ode - Mary Jo Salter Because it hadn't seemed enough, after a while, to catalogue more Christmases, the three-layer cakes ablaze with birthday candles, the blizzard Billy took a shovel to, Phil's lawnmower tour of the yard, the tree forts, the shoot-'em-ups between the boys in new string ties and cowboy hats and holsters, or Mother sticking a bow as big as Mouseketeer ears in my hair, my father sometimes turned the gaze of his camera to subjects more artistic or universal: long closeups of a rose's face; a real-time sunset (nearly an hour); what surely were some brilliant autumn leaves before their colors faded to dry beige on the aging film; a great deal of pacing, at the zoo, by polar bears and tigers caged, he seemed to say, like him.

What happened between him and her is another story. And just as well we have no movie of it, only some unforgiving scowls she gave through terrifying, ticking silence when he must have asked her (no sound track) for a smile. Still, what I keep yearning for isn't those generic cherry blossoms at their peak, or the brave daffodil after a snowfall, it's the re-run surprise of the unshuttered, prefab blanks of windows at the back of the house, and how the lines of aluminum siding are scribbled on with meaning only for us who lived there; it's the pair of elephant bookends I'd forgotten, with the upraised trunks like handles, and the books they meant to carry in one block to a future that scattered all of us.

And look: it's the stoneware mixing bowl figured with hand-holding dancers handed down so many years ago to my own kitchen, still valueless, unbroken. Here she's happy, teaching us to dye the Easter eggs in it, a Grecian urn of sorts near which—a foster child of silence and slow time myself—I smile because she does and patiently await my turn.

For the Union Dead - Robert Lowell (1964)

The old South Boston Aquarium stands in a Sahara of snow now. Its broken windows are He has an angry wrenlike vigilance, boarded. a greyhound's gentle tautness; The bronze weathervane cod has lost half its he seems to wince at pleasure, scales. and suffocate for privacy. The airy tanks are dry. He is out of bounds now. He rejoices in man's Once my nose crawled like a snail on the glass; lovely, my hand tingled peculiar power to choose life and die— to burst the bubbles when he leads his black soldiers to death, drifting from the noses of the cowed, compliant he cannot bend his back. fish. On a thousand small town New England greens, My hand draws back. I often sigh still the old white churches hold their air for the dark downward and vegetating kingdom of sparse, sincere rebellion; frayed flags of the fish and reptile. One morning last March, quilt the graveyards of the Grand Army of the I pressed against the new barbed and galvanized Republic. fence on the Boston Common. Behind their cage, The stone statues of the abstract Union Soldier yellow dinosaur steamshovels were grunting grow slimmer and younger each year— as they cropped up tons of mush and grass wasp-waisted, they doze over muskets to gouge their underworld garage. and muse through their sideburns . . .

Parking spaces luxuriate like civic Shaw's father wanted no monument sandpiles in the heart of Boston. except the ditch, A girdle of orange, Puritan-pumpkin colored where his son's body was thrown girders and lost with his "niggers." braces the tingling Statehouse, The ditch is nearer. shaking over the excavations, as it faces Colonel There are no statues for the last war here; Shaw on Boylston Street, a commercial photograph and his bell-cheeked Negro infantry shows Hiroshima boiling on St. Gaudens' shaking Civil War relief, propped by a plank splint against the garage's over a Mosler Safe, the "Rock of Ages" earthquake. that survived the blast. Space is nearer. When I crouch to my television set, Two months after marching through Boston, the drained faces of Negro school-children rise half the regiment was dead; like balloons. at the dedication, William James could almost hear the bronze Colonel Shaw Negroes breathe. is riding on his bubble, he waits Their monument sticks like a fishbone for the blessèd break. in the city's throat. Its Colonel is as lean The Aquarium is gone. Everywhere, as a compass-needle. giant finned cars nose forward like fish; a savage servility slides by on grease .

Robert Frost Poetry: Nature, Seasons, Time, Weather, Life and Death Out- Out- - Robert Frost The buzz saw snarled and rattled in the yard And made dust and dropped stove-length sticks of wood, Sweet-scented stuff when the breeze drew across it. And from there those that lifted eyes could count Five mountain ranges one behind the other Under the sunset far into Vermont. And the saw snarled and rattled, snarled and rattled, As it ran light, or had to bear a load. And nothing happened: day was all but done. Call it a day, I wish they might have said To please the boy by giving him the half hour That a boy counts so much when saved from work. His sister stood beside him in her apron To tell them ‘Supper.’ At the word, the saw, As if to prove saws knew what supper meant, Leaped out at the boy’s hand, or seemed to leap— He must have given the hand. However it was, Neither refused the meeting. But the hand! The boy’s first outcry was a rueful laugh, As he swung toward them holding up the hand Half in appeal, but half as if to keep The life from spilling. Then the boy saw all— Since he was old enough to know, big boy Doing a man’s work, though a child at heart— He saw all spoiled. ‘Don’t let him cut my hand off— The doctor, when he comes. Don’t let him, sister!’ So. But the hand was gone already. The doctor put him in the dark of ether. He lay and puffed his lips out with his breath. And then—the watcher at his pulse took fright. No one believed. They listened at his heart. Little—less—nothing!—and that ended it. No more to build on there. And they, since they Were not the one dead, turned to their affairs.

Nothing Gold Can Stay - Robert Frost Nature’s first green is gold, Her hardest hue to hold. Her early leaf’s a flower; But only so an hour. Then leaf subsides to leaf. So Eden sank to grief, So dawn goes down to day. Nothing gold can stay.

“After Apple Picking” - Robert Frost My long two-pointed ladder's sticking through a tree Toward heaven still, And there's a barrel that I didn't fill Beside it, and there may be two or three Apples I didn't pick upon some bough. But I am done with apple-picking now. Essence of winter sleep is on the night, The scent of apples: I am drowsing off. I cannot rub the strangeness from my sight I got from looking through a pane of glass I skimmed this morning from the drinking trough And held against the world of hoary grass. It melted, and I let it fall and break. But I was well Upon my way to sleep before it fell, And I could tell What form my dreaming was about to take. Magnified apples appear and disappear, Stem end and blossom end, And every fleck of russet showing clear. My instep arch not only keeps the ache, It keeps the pressure of a ladder-round. I feel the ladder sway as the boughs bend. And I keep hearing from the cellar bin The rumbling sound Of load on load of apples coming in. For I have had too much Of apple-picking: I am overtired Of the great harvest I myself desired. There were ten thousand thousand fruit to touch, Cherish in hand, lift down, and not let fall. For all That struck the earth, No matter if not bruised or spiked with stubble, Went surely to the cider-apple heap As of no worth. One can see what will trouble This sleep of mine, whatever sleep it is. Were he not gone, The woodchuck could say whether it's like his Long sleep, as I describe its coming on, Or just some human sleep.