to five-page explication of a poem that begins with a b, Study notes of Poetry

Download to five-page explication of a poem that begins with a b and more Study notes Poetry in PDF only on Docsity! PARAPHRASE AND ANALYSIS EXERCISE In this exercise you will write a four- to five-page explication of a poem that begins with a brief (three to five sentences maxiumum) paraphrase of the poem. (In the examples below, the paraphrase is underlined.) You should choose a poem we have not discussed in class (and please don’t write on either of the two poems below). The rest of the paper should develop an argument about, or “reading” of the poem (the argument, or thesis in the example below is boldfaced) that is based on things in the poem that cannot be paraphrased easily (imagery, metaphor, meter, alliteration, syntax, rhetorical figures, diction, allusions to myth and history, symbolism, irony, etc.). Many of the handouts on my web page will be useful to you, especially the Poetry Explication Checklist. You should also consult the Oxford English Dictionary (second ed.) on matters diction, and a standard glossary of literary terms if you have questions about any of the terms on the Poetry Explication Checklist. If you write about a translation or adaptation of a Petrarchan poem (or other poem that is a translation or adaptation), you may want to consult the original poem (preferably in the Durling translation). If your poem is the length of a sonnet, or shorter, please preface your paper with a transcription of the text. Please do not consult secondary literature or Internet commentaries on your poem as you work on your analysis. The purpose of this exercise is for you to show that you can use the basic tools of literary interpretation and analysis. Feel free to consult dictionaries and general reference works for help in tracking down historical references and literary allusions, but do not consult monographs, journal articles, or web sites on your poem. Feel free to use information in the footnotes and editorial headnotes of our anthology. Do not, under any circumstances, consult a sparknotes.com analysis of your poem. Please note my formatting notes (boldfaced, in brackets) in the examples below. For other formatting questions, please consult the MLA Handbook. You do not need to underline the paraphrase and boldface the thesis in your own paper. [Note: Quotation marks are not required when referring to Shakespeare’s sonnets, though they1 are required for titles of most short poems, such as Tennyson’s “Ulysses.” The titles of long poems are italicized, as in T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land.] [Note: The biographical, contextual, and historical information necessary for reading a poem2 should be stated as briefly as possible—preferably in a single sentence. You are not writing an encyclopedia entry on Shakespeare—you’re analyzing one of his poems, and that should be your central focus.] Example 1 [The poem is quoted here in block quotation format, which should be used any time you quote more than three lines of text. Note that the quotation is indented and justified left (not centered on the page)—it appears exactly as it appears in the book. Because it is a block quotation, quotation marks are not required around the poem. Quotations are not italicized. (If the poem has line numbers or footnotes in your book, you don’t need to reproduce them in the Harry Le Roi Dr. Johnson English 150-07 15 November 2003 The Rejection of Metaphor in Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18 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 dimmed; And every fair from fair sometime declines, By chance or nature’s changing course untrimmed. 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. Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18 follows the so-called “procreation sonnets,” in which the1 poet urges his young friend to marry and have children so that his beauty will be preserved in his offspring. In Sonnet 18, the poem’s speaker responds to the young man’s refusal to2 procreate by declaring that he, as a poet, will set himself to the task of immortalizing the The poem’s use of anaphora in lines 5-6, 10-11, and 13-14 also contributes a linguistic and rhetorical, rather than a figurative and metaphorical, effect to the poem. The first anaphora (“And often is his gold complexion dimmed; / And every fair from fair sometime declines,” 6-7) emphasizes the fact that all temporal beauty will fade (“every fair from fair declines”), and suggests an eternal, and ominous cycle of “ands” from which beauty cannot escape, as one of Macbeth’s final speeches suggests: “Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow / Creeps in this petty pace from day to day / To the last syllable of recorded time” (5.5.19-21). The second anaphora (“Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st, / Nor shall death brag thou wand’rest in his shade,” 10-11) emphasizes (especially tied to the “not” in line 9) the poet’s powerful negation of death, which is presented here as a personified figure, or another metaphor that is being turned away. The second anaphora is also a kind of negation of the first anaphora, and constitutes the second part of the poet’s pseudo-logical progression: All beauty fades, but your beauty will not, because it will live in my verse. The third anaphora, which repeats the phrase “So long” in the final couplet, provides a final, emphatic declaration of immortality, not only because the young’s man’s beauty will live as long as people can read this poem, but because that period of time, as the poet defines will be very long (if we read “so” as an intensifier). The words themselves, though very short, contain the same long “o” vowel that forces the reader to slow down, and to give a greater amount of time to repeating two words that represent a sort of linguistic eternity within themselves. The poet’s rejection of metaphor heightens the reader’s awareness of his poetic prowess, because it shows us how many other tools this poet has to express his love for the young man. But because this is only one sonnet in a series of 127 on this topic, Shakespeare will have plenty of time to pursue metaphor elsewhere. But Sonnet 18 is a reminder that the poem itself is the ultimate metaphor for the people and ideas it reflects. WORKS CITED Shakespeare, William. The Riverside Shakespeare. G. Wilson Knight, ed. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1974. Example 2 Richard M. Nixon Dr. Johnson English 150-07 15 November 2003 Rethinking Petrarch’s White Doe: Wyatt’s “Whoso list to hunt” Whoso list to hunt, I know where is an hind, But as for me, alas, I may no more, The vain travail hath wearied me so sore. I am of them that farthest cometh behind; Yet may I by no means my wearied mind Draw from the deer: but as she fleeth afore, Fainting I follow. I leave off therefore, Since in a net I seek to hold the wind. Who list her hunt, I put him out of doubt, As well as I may spend his time in vain; And, graven with diamonds, in letters plain There is written her fair neck round about: Noli me tangere, for Caesar’s I am; And wild for to hold, though I seem tame. Sir Thomas Wyatt’s “Whoso list to hunt,” which is often described as a translation of Petrarch’s Canzoniere 190, depicts a speaker informing his friends (or anyone within earshot) that he knows where to find a deer if they are interested in hunting it. He declares that he has exhausted himself in pursuit of this game, and suspects that any efforts to subdue it will be futile, especially because the deer wears a necklace identifying her as the property of Caesar, and indicating that she is wild, even though she seems tame. The poem is more an adaptation than a translation of the Petrarch sonnet, and Wyatt’s changes considerably amplify the tensions inherent in the traditional Petrarchan theme of the unapproachable object of desire. In the Wyatt poem, the speaker reflects not only a definition refuses to return the lover’s affections in order to preserve her chastity, the lady in Wyatt’s poem might actually love him in return, but cannot act on it, or will not act on it. Wyatt offers us, then, not the dream vision of Petrarch, but a dramatic realization of the futility of pursuing a love object at court: “sethens in a nett I seke to hold the wynde” (8). The image may refer to the speaker’s inability to catch the deer—he ends up with only wind in his net. But the force of “I seke” also suggests a continued effort of vain pursuit—he is doggedly chasing not the deer, but the wind, because experience has shown him that they are equally impossible to catch. Why does the speaker continue the hunt? Why doesn’t he just put the net away? In the middle of the poem the speaker indicates that he wants to “leve of” (“leave off”) (7), or not participate in the hunt any longer, but the rest of the poem continues the speaker’s contemplation of the deer and the futility of pursing her. As a courtier, leaving the court, and leaving the pursuit is perhaps not an option. He must remain, and continue to engage in activities that he is beginning to view not only as futile and unsatisfying, but dangerous. Ultimately, the poem serves as a message of counsel to his fellow courtiers. If he cannot leave this dangerous environment, he can at least warn others about the dangers he perceives there. WORKS CITED Petrarch, Francesco. Petrarch’s Lyric Poems. Robert Durling, trans. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1976. Woudhuysen, H. R. The Penguin Book of Renaissance Verse. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992. Wyatt, Thomas. “Whoso list to hunt.” Great Sonnets. Paul Negri, ed. New York: Dover, 1994.