Download Explicating Poems Assignment: Analyzing Formality in 'His Next Ex-Wife' and Other Poems and more Assignments Poetry in PDF only on Docsity! Explication Essay Assignment One of the main goals of ENGL 231 is to teach you how to read poems carefully and closely, especially with an eye towards formal aspects of poetry. In this essay I want you to do just that: explicate one of the attached poems. Specifically, you should argue for a clear reading of the poem that is supported by an analysis of the formal elements. Address as many of the terms and as much of the critical lexicon as you can in support of your thesis. Your essay should be 4-5 pages, 12 pt Times New Roman font with 1” margins. It is due in class 11/14/06. from “His Next Ex-Wife” When we were married I would think about that study with the monkeys everyone learns about in school. The baby monkey yearns for food and love. A fur surrogate without milk sits next to a wire frame holding a bottle in the cage — and scientists watch him starve to prove — what? Even when false, love reigns? It was hard to understand why the monkey couldn’t shuttle between the two, let go for his dear life’s sake. In fact I was always sure that’s what I’d do — to leave off clinging for a drink or two and scuttle his whole experiment secretly while he was out, getting a bite to eat — outside, where any desperate thirst could be slaked. The Handsome Dentist Files Your Teeth with a tender-brutal hand probes your slippery orifice, sees the tongue, the spurting glands that lubricate your words, your kiss, the teeth where your skull’s showing through, the only part to be the same when you’re clean bone. This real you is just his job. He’ll lose your name when you walk out. And while he’s grinding your teeth like a balky mule’s (his shy smile, like his spotlight, blinding, blinding, too, his silver tools) perhaps he’s thinking of his wife or mistress, or of wet bright moss along a stream, where all the teeth belong to trout, and need no floss. Perhaps, while probes clink in his dish, his cheek is pricked by misty rain; he’s reeling up a thrashing fish. You look away. Spit down the drain. Audit The time has come he never thought would come when he sees her see in him just defects. As if his love is what has kept her down, what once she thought was perfect she rejects. She takes an audit of his qualities, subtracts affection, multiplies distress, and so, in sum, she takes his sum and sees the countless reasons she should need him less. She knows him better than he knows himself so if she finds his love to be oppression, and reads these years of joy as years of lies, then he must turn his mind against himself and see, laid out in infinite regression, his net and gross failure in her eyes. My Autumn Leaves I watch the woods for deer as if I’m armed. I watch the woods for deer who never come. I know the hes and shes in autumn rendezvous in orchards stained with fallen apples’ scent. I drive my car this way to work so I may let the crows in corn believe it’s me their caws are meant to warn, and snakes who turn in warm and secret caves they know me too. They know the boy who lives inside me still won’t go away. The deer are ghosts who slip between the light through trees, so you may only hear the snap of branches in the thicket beyond hope. I watch the woods for deer, as if I’m armed.
