Short poems

Responses should beat least one paragraph.

22. Revise and finalize your in-class exercise: “Driving to Town to Mail a Letter” by Robert Bly.
1. Write a list of the poem’s images.
2. How do the images lead you through the story of the poem?
3. How do the images affect your interpretation of the poem?
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Respond with higher-order critical thinking to the following prompts about “Pied Beauty” by Gerard Manley Hopkins.
1. What does the word pied mean? (Hint: what does a Pied Piper look like?)
2. According to Hopkins, what do skies, cow, trout, ripe chestnuts, finches’ wings, and landscapes all have in common? What landscapes can the poet have in mind? (Have you ever seen any dappled landscape while looking down from an airplane, or from a mountain or high hill?)
3. What do you make of line 6: what can carpenters’ saws and ditch-diggers’ spades possibly have in common with the dappled things in lines 2–4?
4. Does Hopkins refer only to contrasts that meet the eye? What other kinds of variation interest him?
5. Try to state in your own words the theme of this poem. How essential to our understanding of this theme are Hopkins’s images?
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24. Respond with higher-order critical thinking to the following prompts about “Bright Star: would I were steadfast as thou art” by John Keats.
1. Stars are conventional symbols for love and a loved one. (Love, Shakespeare tells us in a sonnet, “is the star to every wandering bark.”) In this sonnet, why is it not possible for the star to have this meaning? How does Keats use it?
2. What seems concrete and particular in the speaker’s observations?
3. Suppose Keats had said slow and easy instead of tender-taken in line 13. What would have been lost?
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25. Respond with higher-order critical thinking to the following prompts about “It dropped so low – in my Regard” by Emily Dickinson.
1. What is “it”? What two things are compared?
2. How much of the poem develops and amplifies this comparison?
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27. Respond with higher-order critical thinking to the following prompts about “A Martian Sends a Postcard Home” by Craig Raine.
1. Try to recognize everything the Martian describes and translate it back into Earth-based English.
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28. Respond with higher-order critical thinking to the following prompts about “In Memoriam John Coltrane” by Michael Stillman.
1. Read the poem aloud. What devices of sound do you find in the poem? Try to explain what sound contributes to the total effect of the poem and how it reinforces what the poet is saying.