Readings:
Milton, John. “When I consider how my light is spent (Sonnet 19).” John Milton Reading Room.
Dunbar, Paul. “The Debt.” In The Complete Poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar. CreateSpace, 2017. ISBN: 9781475157574.
Frost, Robert. “Acquainted with the Night.” In The Poetry of Robert Frost. Edited by Edward Lathem. Henry Hold & Company, 1969. ISBN: 9780805005028.
Gay, Ross. “Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude.” In Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude. University of Pittsburgh Press, 2015. ISBN: 9780822963318.
Kirsch, Adam. “Professional Middle-Class Couple, 1927.” Poetry. April, 2003.
Reading Exercises:
After picking out these readings, I realized that all of them (except for the Frost poem) all revolve around ideas of economy: what you owe others, what you are entitled to, what you can or can’t give back. (Not unrelated to “Death of the Hired Man,” actually).
A little background and clarification on the Milton sonnet, the oldest and also the most densely allusive of these readings: Milton writes this sonnet in mid-life. As a young man, he had formed the massively ambitious goal of writing in English a great epic poem comparable to Homer’s Iliad and Virgil’s Aeneid—and later would achieve that goal with Paradise Lost. But at this point, he was middle-aged, had not yet produced the poem, and had lost his vision (like James Joyce, he produced his major work while blind)—thus, “this dark world,” in which “light [is] deny’d,” etc. Another thing to note: line 3 refers to the New Testament parable of the talents (reference given in the online text). “Talent,” in the parable, refers to a unit of money, and the parable concerns what you should properly do with money that has been given to you as a loan. Milton is also playing on the more contemporary meaning of “Talent” as giftedness. What are we obligated to give back, given our talents?
As ever, print out, read, and reread the poems, and bring your marked up copies to class; look particularly for the four things I’ve underlined below.
Another thing that changed when Old English met French/Latin was grammar. A quick and dirty explanation: when we write a sentence like “Jim kicks Jill,” it’s understood that Jim does the kicking (is the subject of the verb) and Jill is the target (is the direct object of the verb). There are all kinds of other rules for adding phrases and qualifiers around those core words, that we learn as we learn to speak. Some other languages do things differently. To show that a word is the direct object, instead of putting after the verb, these languages attach a tag to the word that says “direct object”—and then it can go anywhere. You could write “Jillen Jim kicks” and have it mean the same thing as our original sentence. Some of these case endings persist in pronouns (I/me, he/him), so you can say, “Him I don’t like.” Old English used word endings instead of word order to identify the parts of sentences.
However, in poetry you will see a lot of inverted word order—that’s something to look for both in untangling complicated sentences, and thinking about poetic technique. Syntax is one of the places where poets sometimes push at the boundaries of what language allows to be done while still remaining intelligible.
Another aspect of syntax to think about: delaying delivery of a word or key phrase can leave the whole meaning of the sentence in suspense, another useful effect. (Look for that in the Gay and Kirsch poems).
Two other things to look for in these readings: elision (when readers have to mentally supply words that are necessary for a sentence to be complete—Gay and, especially, Milton do this for concision); any patterns created using phrases (as distinct from patterns of sound or rhythm as such).
