21L.004 | Spring 2018 | Undergraduate

Reading Poetry

Assignments

Session 1: Recognizing Patterns

Write up a roughly 300 word introduction of yourself especially as in terms of your relationship with poetry. What is your background: prior knowledge, authors or works you like, don’t like or are curious about, good and bad experiences, things you’d like to learn or talk about in the class, things you know from other disciplines (linguistics!) that might be useful.

Session 2: Making Poetry in English

Print out the readings, mark them up, and bring with you to class next week. The assignment below gives questions to think about as you read the poems.

Assignment: Prose to Poetry

Session 3: From Evidence to Analysis

  • William Shakespeare, “Sonnet 116.” Poetry Foundation.
  •  Vendler, Helen. The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets. Harvard University Press, 1999, pp. 113-115. ISBN: 9780674637122. [Preview with Google Books.]

Read the sonnet (multiple times) and Vendler’s analysis. Come with questions.

Assignment: Informal Essay I

Session 4: Etymologies and Rhythms

Make a copy of the readings, mark them up, and bring with you to class next week. In the process, please glance at the poets’ bios and make a note of where and when they lived and any key facts—just the basics!

Assignment: Poetry Analysis I

Assignment: Etymologies and Rhythms

Session 5: Language as System(s)

Read enough to get an idea about Miyagawa’s two major research projects.

Come up with questions to ask Miyagawa in class about:

  1. The research (points of clarification, but also why these projects, how did they come about, how are they finding evidence—anything is fair game).
  2. Language in general, from a linguist’s point of view (How do you make a sentence out of words? What is a sentence? How do we know where to put stress on words or syllables? Etc.).
  3. Issues with translation between languages. How different are human languages from each other, anyway?

Session 6: The Shape of Sentences and the Shape of Information

We’re going from words to sentences and looking at some more cool poems. Take a look at the class notes for session 6 (PDF - 1.2MB).

Assignment: The Shape of Sentences

Assignment: Informal Essay II

Session 7: Reading Line Breaks

This week, the poems are mostly short and very spare, so that we can really bear down on the phenomenon of what it does to end a line (but not a sentence). Consider this: line breaks affect the rate at which information is delivered. Sometimes (as in the Wordsworth poem) they seem to contain their own information.

There is also some brief prose reading.

  • Eliot’s comments will help you think about how to describe rhythm in poems that are not uniformly metrical, and you should find it useful to hear how a practitioner thinks about it. 
  • Since you’ll be meeting Tyehimba Jess, let’s start hearing what he has to say.
  • Williams’ poems are about as stripped down as Ezra Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro,” so it’s interesting to read an article that fills in what he was seeing and gives us some context. What can we do with the information?

Session 8: Fixed Forms, Rhymed and Otherwise

This week’s poems are fixed forms: forms with tight constraints on variables like number of lines, meter, line-length, rhyme, or line ending words. First, sonnets: by three sixteenth century authors participating in the vogue of writing long sequences of sonnets devoted to (mostly) unrequited love, and then by four twentieth century authors who use the form to different ends. Second, villanelles: another poem by Bishop, and one by Martha Collins (a wonderful poet who lives hear Harvard Square). Finally, a poem that invents a new form, initially as a tribute to Brooks and now used by other writers. Hayes has a weekly column in the NYT Magazine featuring a poem by someone else that he likes with a few sentences about why; if this tickles your fancy, check it out.

Assignment: Poetry Analysis II

Assignment: Sonnets and Rhythm

Assignment: Informal Essay III

Session 9: New Work in Computer-Generated Poetry

  •  Montfort, Nick. Truelist. Counterpath, 2017. ISBN: 9781933996639.

Rather than ask that they read particular section or sections of The Truelist, I’d like to have each person in the class engage with several aspects of the project:

If people want to read it all, of course, or read a few sections, that’s great.

Session 10: Sound Patterns and Sense

Take a look at the class notes for session 10 (PDF - 1.3MB).

You know most of the drill (poems, poets, annotate). In a previous session, we looked at poems characterized by end-rhymes organized in predictable patterns. Today, we’re going to broaden the optic on repeated sounds. I would like you to look hard at either assonance and consonance (repeated vowel or consonant sounds) in the sonnet, or track the pattern of rhyming sounds especially but not exclusively at the end of lines in Herbert. It might be useful to know that Herbert was a clergyman (that is, he would have worn a collar, which becomes a sign of both the religious vocation and its demands for certain kinds of personal sacrifices). “Collar” is also a homonym of (sounds identical to) “choler,” an older word for “anger,” and this other word invoked by sound is also relevant.

Andrew Marvell was a contemporary of Milton’s; this short poem is among a number by this poet written in the persona of a mower (that is, a laborer who cut grass)—for reasons again having to do with poetic traditions of writing in the voice of “simple people” who worked with the natural world. Sylvia Plath is the only 20th poet in the reading. Coincidentally, the New York Times published an obituary for her today, part of a project to redress important and systemic omissions in their record. The bio on Poetry Foundation is probably more relevant for us, but here is the extended NYT piece if it interests you. 

Assignment: Poetry Analysis III

Session 11: Reading a Difficult Poem (1)

Assignment: Difficult Poem (Group Project and Presentation)

Assignment: Essay Revision

Session 12: Reading a Difficult Poem (2)

Some takeaways from our discussion of “The Waste Land,” parts 1-3:

  1. The poem links together myth and its own historical moment.

    1. Myth: the Arthurian legend of the Fisher King—guardian of the Holy Grail, wounded and impotent because of a transgression at his court. While the king is wounded, the kingdom is infertile—they are waiting for rescue.

    2. History: the moment is Europe after World War I—recovering not only from the material shocks and losses of a massive war, but the sense that an earlier political and social order was revealed to be bankrupt. No sense of agency for “fixing” the predicament, prospects for renewal not yet evident. Passion is dead, prophecy fraudulent, the living are almost dead, and the reader is also implicated in this situation.

  2. At both high and low levels of society, relations between men and women have been thrown into crisis. In “Game of Chess,” no way out of a room that is stifling and artificial. Traumatized man is unable to use his voice, woman speaks only in imperatives, conversation is repetitive and seems to go nowhere. In the pub, a sense of being trapped, silenced, used up, abandoned. Loss of generative connections between human beings; a toxic environment.

  3. This world is devoid of new meanings, and relies on scavenging scraps from the past. Conventional poetic forms highlight how much the present has declined from the past. Every rule violation is possible, but none are shocking—all is desensitized. Human behavior becomes mechanical while machines take on a threatening agency; language decays almost to the point of meaninglessness. Can the scavenged scraps be used to form a picture? Is there the possibility of a new design?

Assignment: Difficult Poem (Report on “The Waste Land”)

Session 13: How Do Metaphors Work?

We’ll be exploring the territory opened up by (for instance) the “if there were water” passage in Eliot’s “The Waste Land”: imaginative, counterfactual, and figurative language, aka, everything that is not being directly observed or declared to be so, aka, what’s in the poem that would not be in a photograph.

Assignment: Metaphors

Session 14: Guest Lecture: Tyehimba Jess

  •  Jess, Tyehimba. Olio. Wave Books, 2016. pp. 12-29. ISBN: 9781940696201.
  • DuBois, W.E.B. “Of Spiritual Strivings of the Negro People.” Chapter 1, of Souls of Black Folk.  CreateSpace, 2017. ISBN: 9781505223378.

A few weeks ago, we looked briefly at a corona of sonnets from Olio, written in the voice of the Fiske Jubilee Singers. These are distributed throughout the book, and they serve as punctuation between its sections. Each of these sonnets appears on a page with banners above and below listing the names of black churches where violence occurred, with a date.

Now we’ll read two extended sections from Olio, each centered on the historical figure of a particular musician: Thomas Wiggins, a blind pianist who performed while in slavery, and Sissieretta Jones, a soprano whose career took off in the early twentieth century. (Both are in Olio’s character list, and you can discover more at BlackPast.) As you may suspect from reading these two sections as well as the “Double Shovel,” each section of the book does something a little (or a lot) different with form, even while following the career of a historical person.

You’ll see poems in two voices, poems connected to each other by first and last lines, sonnets, free verse, transcripts of archival documents, and prose poems (that may not be an exhaustive list!). But Olio has some unifying interests across this virtuoso display of formal mastery. One is the set of ideas linking masking, persona, double-consciousness, double voices that you’ve seen in “Double Shovel” (and will also see in the two sections for today). Another is the set of ideas associated with freedom and constraint or bondage, as historical facts, artistic choices, imaginative experiences. Like many poets before him, Jess is interested in the conditions of making art, something that never happens in a vacuum. Music—the literal subject of this book—has since ancient times been a metonymy for poetry. So we are reading both a poetic documentary about history and a meditation on how to have, find, and use an authentic voice. Let’s use this class to identify some questions to ask the poet on Friday.

Session 15: How Does Allusion Work? (History)

Assignment: Poetry Analysis IV

Session 16: Guest Lecture: Charles Shadle

Charles Shadle is a prolific and talented American composer who teaches advanced music theory and composition at MIT; he’ll be talking about six short poems by the 19th c. poet Emily Dickinson—a contemporary of Walt Whitman’s (and of the Civil War)—which he scored for soprano and clarinet. Interpretation of poetry takes many forms, and this is one of them—which will focus us quite a bit on sound and on hearing/voicing as interpretation, as well as on ideas about choice of texts and how the composer (and performers) understand them.

Dickinson’s poems may remind you, in some ways, of Shakespeare’s sonnets: they are at the same time general, private, and elliptical—that is, they are focused closer to the level of the self than the level of public or civic discourse, and largely work with vivid figures rather than objective description. At the level of form, they are radically innovative in ways it took decades for audiences to come to terms with, experimenting with syntax, rhyme, and punctuation; at the level of material production, Dickinson worked almost exclusively in manuscript, allowing her to create her own forms of punctuation, provide alternative versions of a line in a single final draft version, and to exert complete control over the appearance, order—and readership—of her work. The paper booklets considered as Dickinson’s final versions are held at Harvard’s Houghton Library. (The 18th century poet William Blake makes for an interesting comparison: Blake’s radical political and artistic vision led him to self-publish books that integrated text and visual art, each hand-colored by the poet).

Session 17: Guest Lecture: Kimberly Brown

  •  Clifton, Lucille. The Book of Light. Copper Canyon Press, 1992. pp. 11-13, 44-47. ISBN: 9781556590528.

Emily Dickinson lived in Amherst, MA, and attended the precursor of Mt. Holyoke. Our guest speaker, Kimberly Brown, is a professor of English and Africana Studies at Mt. Holyoke, as well as an MLK Fellow in Literature and WGS at MIT. Lucille Clifton (1936-2010) is her favorite poet. The NYT review of Clifton’s collected works comments that “[h]er verse was spare, plainspoken and shorn of rhyme, so much so that when she placed the words “salt” and “fault” together in one poem in the late 1980s, she was moved to warn readers of this potential speed bump by titling it “Poem With Rhyme in It.” Those qualities may have led one anonymous reader on Amazon to comment that she was “our modern-day Emily Dickinson.”

Session 18: Guest Lecture: Martha Collins, Translating Poetry

  • Collins, Marth and Kevin Prufer, eds. Into English: Poems, Translations, Commentaries. Graywolf Press, 2017. pp. 71–75, 163–167. ISBN: 9781555877824. 

Assignment: Analytic Essay

Sessions 19–23: Student Presentations 

Assignment: Final Presentation Report

Analytic Essay

Your best work for this class has combined close observation of evidence with a coherent narrative about how the poem works and produces meaning; anyone could read such an essay and feel they have heard new layers of meaning that give the work more resonance and make experiencing it more satisfying and engaging. That’s really how to think about the work of writing about poetry: be a welcoming and trustworthy guide to other readers.

This essay focuses on one of the poems we’ve read this month—your choice—with one additional element.

For essays on either flavor of this assignment, please provide a title that is not the title of the poem, but gives some idea of your interpretation, the questions you address, or what you find most interesting about the work.

The essay should be 4 pages (roughly 1000 words).

A: Frost, “Birches”; Hughes, “Harlem”; Cohen, “Lit”; Pardlo, “Double Dutch”; Jess, work from “Olio”; Trethewey, “Incident.”

For essays about the poems in A, I’d like you to incorporate something that the poet has said about poetry in general, or his or her work in particular, that seems useful or relevant to you in understanding the poem. If you’re working on Olio, you may have notes of your own. For the other poets, try these resources:

Frost

Hughes

Jess

Pardlo

Cohen

Clifton

Trethewey

B: Lowell, “For the Union Dead”; Pardlo, “For Which It Stands.”

For essays about the two poems above, I’d like you to incorporate information about a couple of the poem’s important allusions (condensed references to external places, events, texts, and so on), for which a more complete understanding of something briefly referenced in the poem expands our understanding of what it says. This is one of the only times I will encourage you to use Google, at least as a place to start!

Reading

Read T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land.” We have linked to a hypertext edition of the text that comes with notes.

Eliot, T.S. The Waste Land. W.W. Norton & Company, 2000. ISBN: 9780393974997.

Group Project and Essay

The assignment for each group will be to take one assigned section of the poem, identify some passages that seem of particular interest or importance, and prepare to lead a discussion centered on those passages for 20–30 minutes of next class. We will look together at the last two sections of the poem and each group should be prepared to make an argument (claims backed up by evidence, perhaps related to the sections you worked on) about how these concluding sections should be understood.

Begin by reading the whole poem, preferably without stopping to look anything up, maybe even out loud—just hear it. If anything strikes you, highlight it as something to come back to. Look up the things you need to look up or check on the second or third reading. (And notice that some of the footnotes in the annotated version will be Eliot’s own.)

I would suggest that each group member pick a passage that interests you (say, 10–20 lines, more if you want, but not much more). Share with your group, comment on each other’s passages—questions, thoughts, votes—and try to converge around the passages you would like to bring into class. Whatever your process, you should memorize at least five lines from your section of the poem.

Come into class prepared to talk about your ideas, raise questions, and lead a discussion. Use (or don’t use!) any kinds of presentation tools you think will be helpful, but that shouldn’t be the point of the exercise. This is your time, and your chance at working together with the tools we’ve developed and your own analytic skills on a famously difficult and memorable and compelling poem. It’s not necessary to explain or claim to understand everything about “The Waste Land.” Sometimes simply describing an opaque passage can prove very helpful; ditto asking the kinds of questions about syntax, lexical levels, sound, rhythm, and other irregularities and irregularities that we’ve been talking about over the last few weeks. These are areas where I’m very confident you can come up with some truly interesting and original insights; the same is not true for the poets’ biography or historical context. (Sorry, but that kind of work has its own challenges and it’s not what we’re setting up to do at this moment).

Finally, keep your notes as the basis for a five page essay to be worked up in the future (and after an expansion and revision of one of your three short papers).

Report on “The Waste Land”

This paper should have two parts (which don’t have to be rhetorically unified—just draw a line!): 1–1.5 pp. report of process of your presentations (how your group approached working on the poem, what you yourself did and tried to do with the poem, anything you might do differently); 3.5–5 pp. on your findings. (The essay as a whole should be roughly 5 pages or 1300–1700 words).

The second part of the paper should look more like the revision you just completed than like the short reports. How does your section of the poem work (give an overview), and what kinds of conclusions can you how reach about it? With those insights in hand, what kinds of larger observations, questions, or arguments are you led to about the poem more broadly? It’s appropriate to register your level of certainty or uncertainty about any conclusions; and as always, to credit others in your group or the class (etc.) whose ideas helped advance your thinking, as well as to footnote outside sources.

General quality control: when you are writing about a piece of literature, imagine that what you writing should make sense to someone who has also read the poem but does not have the text in front of them. So you will need to quote text that you want the reader to think about or notice things about, and you should also give enough context that the reader can place the quotation—both locally (what’s happening, who’s speaking, etc.) and more generally (where are we in the section—early, late, in a long para, a single line fragment—etc.). Best practice is usually to quote a phrase rather than isolated words (esp. words of different kinds), and make sure the grammar of that phrase is clear.

Example:

Here I’m quoting an entire line, but in a way that’s unclear and confusing because the syntax is incomplete—and context is missing:

     “In section 1, it says ‘My cousin’s, he took me out on a sled.’”

This would be better:

     “Early in section 1, a cosmopolitan aristocrat named ‘Marie’ recalls a visit to ’the archduke’s, my cousin’s’ house, when ‘he took me out on a sled, and I was frightened.’”

I’m adding in the next line, about her reaction, because it begins to suggest the emotional tone of the memory and thus why it is significant to the character and thus the poem.

Take one of your three short papers, on the formal patterns and other objective features of the poem your chose, and shape it into a more formal, 1500 word essay.

A good literature essay asks, and attempts to answer, some interesting questions about the text, and does so using ample textual evidence. Textual evidence is the term of art for the kinds of observations we’ve been making over the last several weeks about our poems: what the poem says and doesn’t say, its patterns of sound, rhythm, and syntax (along with the way these may or may not synchronize with each other), lineation, word choice and lexical levels, verb forms, things that are made present vs. things whose ideas are invoked by figurative language, and so on. Now you get to think about what it all means, what it adds up to, for what kinds of conclusions can it serve as evidence, how it might be useful in talking about a “big picture” view of the poem. From the other direction, you could think of your job as framing an interesting question about the poem for which the evidence you have helps to provide an answer. I think of this process as making a mosaic—finding a way to place the different pieces I have such that the outline of something can emerge.

Now that I’ve said “outline,” a few words about structure. I would highly recommend two practices: outline your draft as you go, and be willing to reconsider, if necessary, the sequence in which you make your points. The first will help in doing the second, and is also good practice for disciplines in which “reading an article” really means, scanning the section headings.

As you work, continue to pay close attention to what the poem says, both directly and by inference. Please stay away from generalizations (“throughout history, human beings have…,” “Shakespeare is one of the greatest writers in English”), from information I can find for myself on Wikipedia, and from subjective observations that can’t be solidly linked to evidence in the poem. Consider, if only provisionally, the hypothesis that poets say exactly what they mean to say, rather than trying to say something obscurely in verse that might be said more clearly and effectively in prose. (Prose may shape our reading habits, and create certain kinds of expectations that might lead us to feel that way). It’s always worth trying to paraphrase especially difficult or mystifying sections, as a discovery exercise.

In going from “report” to “essay,” you should cut back on the first person and on narrative about your own process (of course, you can walk the reader through a process of coming to understand the poem but you should know where it’s heading). So for instance, a report might very legitimately have content like this: “I don’t see a rhyme scheme… Actually, now I can see the poem does have one.” In the essay, you’d want to do something like this: “the poem’s regular rhyme is subtle enough that we may not hear it at first.” Also be prepared to prune evidence observed in version one that ends up not being critical to the analysis (e.g., “like other sonnets, this one is written in iambic pentameter.”)

A quick word on introductions and conclusions: the job of the conclusion is to step back, review the questions, the evidence, and the argument, and say, “what do I now know? How confident am I? And what do I not know?” The introduction should be the last thing you write. It should be written from the perspective of already knowing everything the essay will say, which is simply not possible until you have said it. It can do some basic orientation about what the poem is and is about, very briefly; and it should set up for the reader the kind of direction you’re going to take in the essay. Without giving away your most interesting conclusions, make the reader curious about what they will be.

Readings

 Steele, Timothy. All the Fun’s in How You Say a Thing: An Explanation of Meter & Versification. Ohio University Press, 1999. pp. 1–51.  ISBN: 9780821412602.

Reading Exercises

  1. Steele alludes a couple of times in the introduction to how the English language has changed over time, and we’ll talk this week about a few relevant consequences. Basic fact—an earlier Germanic language (Old English, aka Anglo-Saxon) got mashed up with French at the time of the Norman conquest, 1066. By the 1300s these had merged into a new language—Middle English—by time of Shakespeare in 1500s, things had settled down into modern English. Why do we care? Because the two largest sources of English words, Old English and French/Latin, provide us with words that sound different, have different rhythms, and just feel different even when they mean the same things. If you want to pin down the particular sound or tone of a given poem, looking at the sources of its words gives you something objective to go on.
  2. So you can see what I mean, please go listen to audio of some Old English poetry being read out loud—either a passage from Beowulf, or “Caedmon’s Dream”—with the original and modern texts in front of you. Notice the rhythm! Then have a look at the original and find two words that also exist, in some form, in modern English. If you’re interested, the second part of Seamus Heaney’s introduction to his translation of Beowulf is well worth reading. You might also be curious to listen to the audio/read the text from the beginning of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, to get a feel for how middle English sounded.
    1. Beowulf opening lines in Old English | Beowulf text
    2. Seamus Heaney’s Beowulf text | Seamus Heaney reading Beowulf | Intro to Beowulf (read part 2)
    3. Chaucer’s Prologue to the Canterbury Tales read aloud | General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales, Lines 1-18 
  3. To build on our conversation about meter, you have “meter exercises” that will ask you to make two lists and write two sentences in different metrical patterns with the components suggested. Meter Exercises (PDF)

Final Presentation Report

Your final essay, like the previous “report on a difficult poem” assignment, should be based on your work for the group presentation, and has three elements. You can separate them with lines, or try to integrate; probably 1 should be the longest, then 2, then 3.

1. Analysis

You’ve had some experience now with writing detailed observations and analysis of texts, and I’ll expect these to play some role in your report. This report is also an opportunity to incorporate insights developed in class into a more organized form of argument, or to be more expansive about things you didn’t have the chance to talk about in the presentation. It is up to you how you balance between overview (“Dylan as an artist”) and close analysis of text (“the closing lines of OCD”); but think carefully about the most compelling mix, and make sure that your claims and observations about the specifics of the works you discuss are carefully linked to lines/moments that can serve as evidence and give some precision and focus to what you say. (Quote the text; reference video clips with minute:second; make sure to provide the particular AV material you’re referencing). Put the reading, question-asking, and synthesizing skills you developed to work on this material that you picked out.

2. So what?

This time, you don’t need to offer an account of the group’s process, although feel free to add any observations that occur in the context of talking about the material; what I’d like to ask instead is that you give a sense of why this group of works attracted your group’s attention, and merited the attention of the class. I’m not asking for a defense of aesthetic value (“these poems are as good as Shakespeare’s/ should be on the syllabus of every literature class/etc.”) but rather for your take on what we learn about when we learn about this work.

3. Your work.

You’ll have a chance in subject evaluations to rate the class and say (anonymously) what did and didn’t work—this feedback is almost always useful, and always read, at least by me. Here, though, let’s get celebratory: what would you give yourself credit for learning over the course of this semester? What was the thing you understood that you would be most excited to teach or pass on to someone else?

5–6 pp., 1500–1800 words.

There are three informal essays due throughout the term. They should be 3 pages. See the calendar for details on dates.

Here’s what I’m looking for in the short paper. In these first few weeks of the class, we’re focusing on various objective features of poems:

  • patterns of rhythm
  • patterns of sound
  • patterns of syntax (the grammar of sentences)
  • kinds of words
  • kinds of images
  • kinds of lines

Ultimately, this kind of examination of the poem as a formally shaped linguistic artifact underpins larger understandings of what it says, what it does, and the aesthetic or emotional effects it produces. But right now, I want you to stay in information-gathering mode.

Pick one of the poems that we will have read by the due date of this paper, and record everything you are able to observe about the poem—from class discussion and your own examination. It’s fine to have intuitions and responses, and good to record them, even to transform them into questions (“there is something strange about this line—what makes it stand out?”). But try not to have a thesis—as Bunk says on “The Wire,” have “soft eyes.” Detail and precise description are more important.

Obviously, this is not a formal essay; think of it as a combination of a blog and a lab report. You’re writing up the results of questions you have asked about the poem. You’ll need to make sure that you have a way to describe clearly and precisely what you’re observing, and you’ll need to find some kind of shape for what you write. (For instance, a sequence of questions that you’ve asked). A final sentence or paragraph detailing the 3–5 most interesting things you noticed would be a plus, but since you aren’t making an argument, you won’t need a conclusion!

Readings

Frost, Robert. “Birches.” In The Poetry of Rober Frost. Henry Holt and Co., 1979. ISBN: 9780805005028.

Hughes, Langston. “Harlem.” In Selected Poems of Langston Hughes. Vintage Classics, 1990. ISBN: 9780679728184.

Pardlo, Gregory. “Double Dutch.” In Totem. The American Poetry Review, 2007. ISBN: 9780977639533.

Cohen, Andrea. “Lit.” The New Yorker. February 16, 2015.

Dunbar, Paul “We Wear the Mask.” In The Complete Poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar. Dodd, CreateSpace, 2017. ISBN: 9781475157574.

 Jess, Tyehimba. “Booker-Washington Double Shovel.” In Olio. Wave Books, 2016. ISBN: 9781940696201.

Reading Exercises

  1. Andrea Cohen’s poem explores the possibilities of a single metaphor. You should begin by asking yourself what the tenor of that metaphor is.
    1. The two parts of metaphor are generally designated as tenor, or thing meant (“I”), and vehicle, or thing identified with (“the walrus”).
  2. Langston Hughes’ poem (not unlike Shakespeare’s “Shall I compare thee…”) considers a series of different similes for understanding of how a temporal process will unfold: think about what each one offers and the domains from which the vehicles of these comparisons are drawn. (These are both tight, short poems that are also worth thinking about in light of many of the formal questions we’ve been exploring—but I’ll focus on their figures of speech).
  3. Gregory Pardlo’s and Robert Frost’s slightly longer poems both describe with great attention and affection games played by children. You might find it useful to google video of double dutch competitions, or of birch trees if you’ve never seen them.
    1. To notice in Pardlo’s poem: domains from which comparisons are drawn (and what do these tell us about the object described); when he uses simile, and when metaphor (mark these up on your copy!).
    2. To notice in Frost’s poem: all this and when the poem shifts from describing something observed to describing something not observed, but imagined.
  4. Finally, Jess’s poem builds on Dunbar’s metaphor of wearing a mask as a way of talking about double consciousness (and this idea of doubleness is important in his book as a whole). There is more complexity in this poem and its multiple versions than I find easy to talk about here, but let’s at least begin exploring.

Readings

Bishop, Elizabeth “At the Fishhouses.” In The Complete Poems, 1927-1979. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1983. ISBN: 978037451872.

Heaney, Seamus. “Digging.” In Death of a Naturalist. Faber and Faber, 2006. ISBN: 9780571230872.

Moore, Marianne. “The Fish.” Poets.org.

Things to mark up/questions to ask when you read a poem:

  1. Are there regularities in line length?
  2. What controls or motivates the end of a line?
  3. Is there an organized rhythm?
    1. If yes, are there places of important variation in pattern or emphasis?
  4. Are units of meaning (phrases and sentences) aligned with units of meter, so lines end with punctuation—or not?
  5. Are there places that stand out as different?
  6. What places and times exist in the poem?
  7. Who is in it? Where and when are they?
    1. Where? “offstage”, near/far in Frost.
    2. When: remembered past, Yeats; past + ongoing present, Whitman.
  8. Who is speaking? Pronouns: I, we, they.
  9. Are there key terms (“home”) being evaluated and/or vocabularies of words grouped under related concepts (worth and value)?

These are questions to ask about a poem: if they seem boring/trivial OR too hard/confusing to answer, they might not be the most revealing questions about a given poem. But all are worth trying!

Readings

Shakespeare, William. “Sonnet 18”, “Sonnet 60”, “Sonnet 65.” Poetry Foundation.

Spenser, Edmund. “Amoretti LXXV”, “Amoretti LXXXI.” Poetry Foundation.

Sidney, Philip. “Astrophil and Stella 1”, “Astrophil and Stella 31.” Poetry Foundation.

Larkin, Philip. “Sad Steps.” In Collected Poems. Farrar, Straus and Grioux, 2004. ISBN: 9780374529208.

Brooks, Gwendolyn. “my dreams, my works, must wait till after hell.” In Selected Poems. Harper & Row, 1963. ISBN: 9780060909895.

Brooks, Gwendolyn. “the rites for Cousin Vit.” In The Norton Anthology of Poetry Fifth Edition. W.W. Norton and Company, 2005. ISBN: 9780393979206.

Johnson, James. “Lift Every Voice and Sing.” In Complete Poems. Penguin Classics, 2000. ISBN: 9780374518172.

Bishop, Elizabeth. “One Art.” In The Complete Poems 1926-1979. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1983. ISBN: 9780374518172.

Collins, Martha. “The Story We Know.” Poetry. December, 1980.

Hayes, Terence. “The Golden Shovel.” In Lighthead. Penguin Books, 2010. ISBN: 9780143116967.

Things to mark up/questions to ask when you read a poem (a running list):

This is an expansion of the questions in the first poetry analysis.

  1. Are there repetitions, exact (“cold dark deep and absolutely clear”) or with variation (“the squat pen rests [, snug as a gun.][. I’ll dig with it]”)? Pay attention to them!
  2. Are there regularities in line length?
    1. What controls or motivates the end of a line?
    2. If the lines aren’t all the same number of syllables (aka, in a regular meter), does variation in line length correlate to anything in the poem?
  3. Ask the same question about stanzas—if there is not a regular stanza form (as in Heaney, “Digging”), where do verse paragraphs get longer or shorter?
    1. If there is (as in Moore, “The Fish,” e.g.), how do topics (and sometimes sentences) get distributed in and across stanzas?
  4. Is there an organized rhythm?
    1. If yes, are there places of important variation in pattern or emphasis?
    2. Think also about repeated patterns of syntax as contributing to rhythm (e.g., 3x “Adjective was the noun I verbed,” in Dunbar), and notice where these patterns of syntax change (as in the last line of that poem).
  5. Are units of meaning (phrases and sentences) aligned with units of meter, so lines end with punctuation—or not?
    1. Are there places that stand out as different, as in, the only end-stopped line or enjambment or caesuras?
    2. Or does the general “habit” of the poem (e.g., to end each line with punctuation) change at some point?
  6. What places and times exist in the poem?
    1. Does the verb tense or mood shift (e.g. from past to present, from declarative—“I saw”—to conditional—“I would have seen”)?
  7. Who is in it? Where and when are they?
    1. Where: “offstage”, near/far in Frost.
    2. When: remembered past, Yeats; past + ongoing present, Whitman.
  8. Who is speaking and being spoken to or about? Pronouns: I, we, they, you (who?), one (so formal and impersonal!).
  9. Are there key terms (“home”) being evaluated and/or vocabularies of words grouped under related concepts (worth and value)?

Questions to ask about a poem: if they seem boring/trivial OR too hard/confusing to answer, they might not be the most revealing questions about a given poem. But all are worth trying!

Punctuation Examples

[1] Cold dark deep and absolutely clear,

[2] element bearable to no mortal,

[3] to fish and to seals . . . One seal particularly

[4] I have seen here evening after evening.

Lines 1, 2, and 4 are end-stopped: they conclude with punctuation. Line 3 has a midline pause (any kind of punctuation): that’s a caesura. The sentence that begins after “…” continues across the line ending with no pause: that’s enjambment.

Readings

Shakespeare, William. “Sonnet 12.” Poetry Foundation.

Herbert, George. “The Collar.” Poetry Foundation.

Stevens, Wallace. “Poetry is a Destructive Force.” In The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens. Vintage, 2015.

Marvell, Andrew. “The Mower to the Glow-worms.” Poetry Foundation.

Plath, Sylvia. “Daddy” and “Morning Song.” In Collected Poems. Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2018.

Things to mark up/questions to ask when you read a poem (a running list):

This is a continuation of the previous two poetry analysis pages.

  1. Mise-en-scene: what does the writer make visibly present in the scene(s) of the poem? If you were to draw the poem, what would or could be shown in that drawing?
  2. Imagery: what is present in the language of the poem that would not be shown? (Things in the second category, present as concept, are “imagery”, or more exactly, “figurative language”). E.g.  “Between my finger and my thumb, the squat pen rests, snug as a gun”: “finger,” “thumb,” and “pen” would be present in a visual representation of the poem, “gun” would not—it’s a simile.
  3. Literal language: love is a powerful emotion. Trimming rose bushes will produce more roses to pick.
  4. Figurative language: love is a rose and you better not pick it. Those thorns will hurt you.
    1. Similes are figures of comparison: a is like b, a is as x as b, etc.
    2. Metaphors are figures of identity: a is b. Or, I say “b,” meaning “a.”

Vocabulary

  1. Assonance: same vowel sounds repeated. Breeze/wheel
  2. Consonance: same consonant sounds repeated (including inside words) bright/zebra
  3. Alliteration: repeated sounds at the beginning of words. bright/breeze, eel/easy
  4. Chiasmus: repetition and reversal (can be applied to syllables, words and clauses as well as sounds). Breeze/zebra
  5. Rhyme: same sounds repeated at the end of words.
    1. Masculine rhyme: 1 vowel, or vowel + consonant. E.g.: be/me, breeze/freeze
    2. Feminine rhyme: 2 syllables, - initial consonant). E.g.: breezy/easy
    3. End-rhyme: words at the end of the line rhyme with the end of another nearby line.
    4. Internal rhyme: words anywhere in the line rhyme with words anywhere in another nearby line.

Readings

 Jess, Tyehimba. Olio. Wave Books, 2016. pp. 12–29. ISBN: 9781940696201.

DuBois, W.E.B. “Of Spiritual Strivings of the Negro People.” Chapter 1, of Souls of Black Folk.  CreateSpace, 2017. ISBN: 9781505223378.

Things to mark as you read:

  1. Simile: the figure of speech that asserts a resemblance between two things that goes beyond their membership in a common class: “I was like a ship adrift on the ocean,” as distinct from “I am, like Arthur Bahr, a professor of Literature.” Generally signaled by “A is like B” or “A is as B.”
  2. Metaphor: the figure of speech that asserts identity between two non-identical things: “I am the walrus,” as distinct from “I am a professor.”
  3. Metonymy: the figure of speech that identifies a thing by a term closely related to it: “What does Building 14 think about instituting a requirement in computational thinking?” as distinct from, “What do faculty in GSL, CMS/W, and Literature think about…?”
  4. Synecdoche: the figure of speech that identifies a thing by naming something that is a smaller part of it

Our ordinary speech is full of metonymies and synecdoches, many of which are conventional to the point that they don’t stand out as non-literal, much less poetic. (Actually, the same is true for some metaphors: e.g., the “face” of a clock). So these may require some active attention to identify. Always a possibility, too, is that something literally described (e.g., Williams’ cat) may additionally function as a synecdoche for a larger class of things (e.g. agents in a narrative with a rising and falling trajectory). Tests of plausibility and explanatory value always apply—does a conjecture of this kind make better and more consistent sense of the poem? But the typical compression of (especially) shorter poems makes appealing the possibilities of layering literal (it’s a cat) and figurative (that cat typifies a larger class of agents) meanings in the same space.

The two parts of metaphor are generally designated as tenor, or thing meant (“I”), and vehicle, or thing identified with (“the walrus”). It can be useful to think about the larger domain from which the vehicle is drawn (the sea, the Arctic, creatures that swim, the natural world in general, things that are out of place in Kendall Square…).

Readings

Whitman, Walt. “A March in the Ranks Hard-Pressed.” In Walt Whitman: Complete Poetry and Selected Prose. Houghton Mifflin Company, 1959.

Harned, Thomas Biggs, and Walt Whitman. Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman: Recovered Cardboard Butterfly and Notebooks, 1847-Circa 1863 to 1864; Notebooks; Circa 1863 to 1864, Washington Hospital Notebook. 1863.

Whitman, Walt. “The Artilleryman’s Vision.” In Leaves of Grass. Digireads, 2016.

Yeats, W.B. “Easter 1916.” In The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats. Digireads, 2018.

Frost, Robert. “The Death of the Hired Man.” In North of Boston. CreateSpace, 2012.

Questions

  1. Look at Whitman’s journal entry and the poem “A March in the Ranks…” side by side, and note three things you’ve noticed that change between journal and poem. It’s a prose-y poem in the sense that it doesn’t rhyme, have a defined line-length, metre, or stanza form. So what does make it poem-like? Let’s gather some evidence of specific things that Whitman has changed (added, left out, rearranged, rephrased, etc.) in making a poem out of the prose text: try to find three, describe them as tightly as you can.
    1. One of the macro features that distinguishes poem from prose is lineation—the text of the journal entry wraps across the whole page just as this text does, but the text of the poem is broken into lines. We should also think about—given that this poem isn’t generated using the metrical “rule” of a ten-syllable, five-beat lines (like “The Death of the Hired Man” is)—how does Whitman decide it’s time to end a line? Is it possible to identify and articulate the rules of the game he’s decided to work with in this poem? If you have an intuition, add it—but let’s also discuss in class.
  2. Read the Frost poem and record the sound of your voice reading about a 10-line chunk of this poem. Does it seem right that, although the poem is in iambic pentameter, Frost was working with “natural spoken speech” as Pound says? Some background may help explain what’s going on. The setting is a moment of transition between different ways of hiring farm workers.
    1. Old way: workers were compensated with room and board and a share of the harvest proceeds, so that they lived on the farm year-round, and were paid in case only once a year.
    2. New way: workers are paid “fixed wages” daily or weekly, and employment is more transient. Also pertinent: farm workers had been more like apprentices, learning the trade and saving up to become farmers themselves. This kind of upward mobility (“bettering” yourself) was sensitive to factors like declining prices for agricultural goods, increasing land prices, and increased mechanization of agriculture, which raised the cost associated with going from laborer to farmer.
  3. Read the Yeats poem commemorating an unsuccessful and violently punished uprising against British rule in Ireland (there’s a nice Poem Guide that gives helpful background). I’ve included it in part for contrast: the short lines and end-rhymes make it more obviously “poem-like.” My question for you: what do you think is the dominant rhythm of this poem, in terms of stressed/unstressed syllables? Can you single out a line that makes a good example? This question I’ll ask in class!

Readings

Shakespeare, William. “Sonnet 18”, “Sonnet 60”, “Sonnet 65.” Poetry Foundation.

Spenser, Edmund. “Amoretti LXXV”, “Amoretti LXXXI.” Poetry Foundation.

Sidney, Philip. “Astrophil and Stella 1”, “Astrophil and Stella 31.” Poetry Foundation.

Brooks, Gwendolyn. “my dreams, my works, must wait till after hell.” In Selected Poems. Harper & Row, 1963.

Brooks, Gwendolyn. “the rites for Cousin Vit.” In The Norton Anthology of Poetry Fifth Edition. W.W. Norton and Company, 2005.

Reading Exercises

You can see what it looks like if we assign color to the lines of a sonnet to show their end rhymes.

In other words, instead of writing the rhyme pattern as ABBA ABBA … (for instance), we can show it using different font colors:

When I consider how my light is spent,
Ere half my days, in this dark world and wide,
And that one Talent which is death to hide,
Lodged with me useless, though my Soul more bent,
To serve therewith my Maker, and present,
My true account, lest he returning chide;
“Doth God exact day-labour, light denied?”
I fondly ask. But Patience to prevent
That murmur, soon replies, “God doth not need
Either man’s work or His own gifts. Who best
Bear His mild yoke, they serve Him best. His state
Is kingly: thousands at His bidding speed,
And post o’er land and ocean without rest;
They also serve who only stand and wait.”

Pick one author and one sonnet; copy the poem, and use color to indicate the rhyme scheme. Before class, look at all the sonnets to see what kinds of changes get rung on the form, and what kinds of line groups within the 14 line whole get defined by rhyme.

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).

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