Welcome back everyone! This is the first post for the new term, so let’s dive right in.

Today we encountered Margaret Atwood’s poetry for the first time with The Woman Who Could Not Live With Her Faulty Heart. One of the things we’ll be doing this term is connecting Atwood’s work on several levels, including thematic concerns and style.

Have a close look at the poem. Atwood uses some vivid colour imagery in describing various things. Pick just ONE image and consider the various thoughts or feelings that the colour (or colours) used invoke in you. How could this image enhance your appreciation of the poem as a whole? Also, how does it help us to figure out the poet’s concerns in the poem?

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Today we looked at three different poems, each about marriage. Two of these poems, A Story Wet As Tears by Marge Piercy and Yet Another Story by an anonymous writer, allude to and are adaptations/re-interpretations of the fairy tale, The Princess and the Frog. The third poem, Dennis Scott’s Marrysong, describes the persona’s quizzical, often frustrating, yet genuine love for his mutable wife/country (take your pick).

In each of these poems:

• How is the man presented?
• How is the woman presented?
• What view of male/female relationships is presented?

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Today we spoke about the various typs of imagery in literature: visual, olfactory, gustatory, auditory, tactile, organic & kinesthetic. We also spoke about the impact or effect of imagery on a reader/audience.

Write a short, descriptive poem or paragraph, using at least one type of imagery to enhance or strengthen your description. You may want to refer to the handout from today for examples of how good imagery is used in poetry.

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The Many Moods of Google Images

Today we talked about setting and mood, and how they are often intertwined (ie, how setting has the potential to influence mood etc.).

The in-class assignment was to use the given sentence as the first line in a story and create six different second sentences, each conveying a different mood.

Here’s the sentence (just as a reminder):

Suzette sat quietly and stared out the window.

For today’s blog assignment, choose one of your six sentence pairs (ie, the given sentence and the one you came up with) and build them into an entire paragraph. Your paragraph should expand on the mood that you initially hinted at in the one sentence. Remember that setting may help convey mood.

Feel free to comment on each others’ paragraphs; try to figure out the various moods that your classmates are trying to convey.

NB: I know that technically the only graded posts are the poetry posts, but since there’s no poetry post this week, I’ll be grading this one!

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We outgrow love…

We outgrow love, like other things
And put it in the drawer,
Till it an antique fashion shows,
Like costumes grandsires wore.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning

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Splinter

The voice of the last cricket
across the first frost
is one kind of goodbye.
It is so thin a splinter of singing.

Carl Sandburg

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Heaven-Haven
A nun takes the veil

I have desired to go
Where springs not fail,
To fields where flies no sharp and sided hail
And a few lilies blow.

And I have asked to be
Where no storms come,
Where the green swell is in the havens dumb,
And out of the swing of the sea.

Gerard Manley Hopkins

Choose any ONE (1) of the poems above and respond to the following question:

How does the central metaphor in the poem help us to understand/appreciate the poet’s thematic concerns?

Hint: Pay attention to the major thematic concerns that we discussed in class, and say how these are exemplified through the poet’s use of one, extended metaphor. Also, remember to quote from the poem in order to support your claims. ______________________________________________________

Naked? Nude? Do we even care?

We’ve discussed Robert Graves’ The Naked and the Nude in class. I think we’ve come to some reasonable understanding of the point that Graves is trying to make.

According to the poem’s speaker, would the woman on the magazine cover presented above be considered “naked” or “nude”? Explain your answer using evidence from the poem itself.

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For, hear me, Hero:
wooing, wedding, and repenting, is as a Scotch jig,
a measure, and a cinque pace: the first suit is hot
and hasty, like a Scotch jig, and full as
fantastical; the wedding, mannerly-modest, as a
measure, full of state and ancientry; and then comes
repentance and, with his bad legs, falls into the
cinque pace faster and faster, till he sink into his grave.

Beatrice | Act II, sc i

Based on the above quote, what do we know about Beatrice’s view of marriage, thus far in the play?

Remember, this post is not mandatory, but the poetry post from Monday is!

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What point (in your opinion) is this poet trying to make? What evidence do you have to support your reading?

The Naked and the Nude

For me, the naked and the nude
(By lexicographers construed
As synonyms that should express
The same deficiency of dress
Or shelter) stand as wide apart
As love from lies, or truth from art.

Lovers without reproach will gaze
On bodies naked and ablaze;
The Hippocratic eye will see
In nakedness, anatomy;
And naked shines the Goddess when
She mounts her lion among men.

The nude are bold, the nude are sly
To hold each treasonable eye.
While draping by a showman’s trick
Their dishabille in rhetoric,
They grin a mock-religious grin
Of scorn at those of naked skin.

The naked, therefore, who compete
Against the nude may know defeat;
Yet when they both together tread
The briary pastures of the dead,
By Gorgons with long whips pursued,
How naked go the sometime nude!

Robert Graves

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If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs…

(lines 20-25)

What do you think draws us to this poem? Why are we so enthralled by it, and why do we, on some level, like it?

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1. Which of these poems do you prefer, and why? OR
2. Point out one thematic similarity between the two poems.
   

Don’t forget the homework for next week Monday: come up with a definition of poetry. The poet doesn’t invent. He listens – Jean Cocteau

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