All portfolio exercises should be prepared at home but may be revised or changed or added to in class. Each exercise done on time counts 2 points; if turned in late or only partly done, 1 point, except that four-point portfolios can earn 1-4 points.  Grading: 23-25 points = A; 22 points = B+; 20-21 pts = B, etc.  Minimum D = 15. Note that you can get a perfect grade in this aspect of the course simply by trying your best to do these assignments on time--you don't have to worry about making mistakes, because you can learn from making mistakes.

Exercise 1: Getting the "Story"

Lyric poems always imply a set of relationships; in that sense, there is always a "story" in or behind them,whether or not they also contain explicit narrative.  The situations and events in the poem may be dreamed, remembered, planned or hoped or feared in the future, as well as or instead of actual events within the world of the poem. The events may be very small, from an ordinary point of view. Robert Frost has a poem about a crow knocking some snow off a treelimb--hardly earthshaking.* "Western Wind" is such a poem; so is Wordsworth's famous poem about coming across a bunch of daffodils. Sometimes, as in "My Last Duchess," the trivial events within the poem contrast with major events the poem lets us know about that "happened before" the poem began. Before you can do anything else with poems, it's important to be sure you can "get" the story.

Exercise: retell (in writing) the story implied in one of the poems you have read in this class so far, in your own words, either in your own voice, as if it were something that had happened here (or perhaps in a movie or tv show), or in an assumed voice--as one of the characters, as a newspaper reporter, as a policeman or scientist or other observer expected to record "facts" without emotional response.  Keep it short.  The "story" of a famous love poem, for instance, might be "A woman tells her beloved, who has apparently asked her how much she loves him, 'I can't even count up how much, because I love you in every moment of every day, and, God willing, I expect to love you even more after death.'"

Alternative exercise: bring in the words of a song that tells/implies a story (not just any song).  Prove that this song really does reveal a story, and be prepared to discuss whether the music is essential, useful, or detrimental to the revelation of the story. If you like, bring the music, or sing the tune yourself. Note that quality of singing is not a criterion of success in the exercise! Note: for all assignments involving songs, bear in mind that this is a poetry class, so you should choose a song whose words are effective and well used. For this exercise, avoid songs that simply announce philosophical or political or religious perspectives, unless they also tell a story. For instance, the 23^rd psalm ("The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want. He leads me in green pastures, beside the still waters, etc.) would be acceptable (in song form). But a musical setting of psalm 117, which simply exhorts all people to praise the Lord because His love is everlasting, would not be. Likewise "America the Beautiful," which simply describes America, would not be appropriate, but the "Star-Spangled Banner," which tells about how the flag survived a battle, would be. We will come back to songs of belief later in the term.

*A Dust of Snow

The way a crow
Shook down on me
A dust of snow
From a hemlock tree

Has given my heart
A change of mood
And saved some part
Of a day I had rued.

One of the best ways to appreciate what a poet has accomplished in a particular poem is to perform an experiment. You place yourself imaginatively in the place of the poet, searching for exactly the right words, or the right order for the words, for a particular part of a poem. The concept--the part of the poem that can be translated or paraphrased--is clear to the poet, but s/h is still in the process of discovering the words to embody that concept. The experiment is to replace the words that were actually chosen with words that convey the "same" meaning, and see exactly what has been lost, or rather, what exactly the poem gained by the word choice that the poet actually used. Here, for example, are two versions of the "same" poem, one as it was written by Tennyson, one as it was carefully spoiled by me (not necessarily in that order). For the purpose of this portfolio exercise, I have tried to avoid changing the sound effects of the poem. Instead, you should be able to see how the connotations, images,associations, and tone of Tennyson's version would be less effective if he had found the words I have substituted. In some cases, sound may play a role, but meaning is paramount.

The Eagle--Version One

He clasps the crag with crooked hands;
Close to the sun in lonely lands,
Ringed with the azure world, he stands.

The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls:
He watches from his mountain walls,
And like a thunderbolt, he falls.

The Eagle--Version Two

He clings to the cliff with clawing hands;
High in the hills in empty lands,
Encircled with blue sky, he stands.

The furrowed sea beneath him sprawls:
He looks below from the mountain walls,
And quick as lightning, down he falls.

Alternatively, consider the real and the spoiled versions of the following poem by Emily Dickinson (they are not necessarily presented in that order):

Version One
Thoughts are wider than the sky
When measured side by side,
For thoughts can hold the sky
With ease, and hold you too inside.

Thoughts are deeper than the sea,
Even though both are blue;
Thoughts can absorb the ocean
As pails and sponges do.

Thoughts weigh as much as God;
They're equal, pound for pound,
Or if they differ, it's no more
Than a syllable from its sound.

Version Two
The Brain--is wider than the Sky--
For--put them side by side--
The one the other will contain
With ease--and You--beside--

The Brain is deeper than the sea--
For--hold them--Blue to Blue--
The one the other will absorb
As Sponges--Buckets--do.

The Brain is just the weight of God--
For--Heft them--Pound for Pound--
And they will differ--if they do--
As Syllable from Sound.

To DO (You must do both A and B to get full credit)
A. Analyze the advantages of one of the real poems above over its spoiled version.  Bear in mind that the purpose of a poem is to communicate not just information, but the whole effect of an experience, which requires, among other things, that the experience should seem fresh and new.
     then
B. "Spoil" a short poem, or a short section of a poem, from among those we have read so far. Try, as I have, to keep the paraphraseable content, sound structure, organization, and metaphors of the original poem, yet to make changes that would seriously damage features of the poem that you consider important. You don't have to make as many changes as I have, but be sure to have at least three or four.

"Direct" or "literal" imagery seeks to evoke a sensory impression by directly referring to it, or to a label, such as a name or the name of a species, that evokes a specific set of sensory impressions. Such imagery may be comparative, but if it is, the two things compared are different items but not different kinds of items. For instance, "Mary Smith is as tall as her mother" is a direct image, but "Mary Smith is a real giraffe" isn't (unless "Mary" IS a giraffe, which is unlikely because we hardly ever say "x is a real y" if x really is a y). Indirect images, aka figurative images or tropes, such as metaphors and similes, always involve a comparison.

Some direct images appeal not to a single sense, but to a combination of senses. For instance, a judgment of nearness/farness may be based on both sound and sight; the name "teddy bear" appeals to sight and touch. Some descriptive terms almost always involve putting together clues from various sensory sources, such as "old" or "frightened." There is also a literary device called "synaesthesia" that describes something that is perceived by one sense in terms of information processed by a different sense, e.g. "the red blare of trumpets." Synaesthesia is not a form of direct imagery.  We'll talk more about it later.

Using the following outline as an aid, find some (at least 10) different varieties of direct imagery in some of the poems we have read in NI.. You may work alone or with another student. If we get to do this in class discussion groups, ask questions out loud, so that everyone can learn from your idea or problem. Remember, everyone gets the same number of points for doing the exercise--this isn't competition. Note that the reader can deduce or guess at descriptive features of something from any concrete statement, but we should not really consider such a statement "descriptive" unless it makes it likely that different readers would get the same sensory information. For instance, "A boy came into the room" is not really descriptive, but "a frightened young boy hurried into the room" is, even though the information is not very much more specific.

Noncomparative direct  imagery

Sight

• color
• light/dark
• contrast (sharp/fuzzy)
• size
• shape
• identity
• motion (including stillness) external to the observer
• see also "compound images," below, because most compound traits combine various forms of visual imagery
• other?

• dynamic (loud/soft)
• timbre (kind of sound)
• pitch (high/low)
• singular/multiple
• dissonant/harmonious
• patterned/random
• continuous/interrupted
• unique/recurrent
• source known/source unknown
• other?

• identified/unidentifed
• subtle/obvious
• pleasant-luxurious, pleasant-commonplace, unpleasant
• other?

• sweet, salt, sour
• subtle/obvious
• identified/unidentified
• pleasant/unpleasant
• other?

• kinetic (speed, smooth/rough, continuous/discontinuous, easy/difficult, means of motion)
• thermal (hot/cold)
• textural (soft/hard, soft/rough, smooth/coarse, light/heavy, sticky/smooth, sharp/blunt, wet/dry)
• other?

• Qualitative--identity "The flower is a rose."
• Qualitative--shared feature(s) "John looks like his brother."
• Quantitative--"Mary is taller than Susan."

• Age "The old women continued with their work."
• Distance "Faraway gunfire did not distract them."
• Influenced by an emotion "But when I cleared my throat, they looked up, terrified." Or, "George walked confidently up to the podium."
• Membership in a group (including class/race/gender/ethnicity/occupation-anything that has a uniform, or one or more uniform qualities, or qualities that can be stereotyped as uniform-note that such images are often positive (or sympathetic) and by no means always applied to human beings)
• Health or strength/illness or weakness
• Familiarity/exoticness

In a very funny parody of a critical treatise, Alexander Pope wrote about how to "sink" (instead of rise) in writing poetry. With his tongue firmly in his cheek, he "recommended" many excellently bad tropes, some by other writers, some he himself had written and then rejected, and some he may have invented for the occasion. It is important that you realize he is being sarcastic about what is good vs. bad, but he is still describing what the bad lines really do.  For instance, Pope says if you want to make a storm less impressive, compare it to something like an unmade bed.  That would work!  But of course a poet doesn't really want to make a storm less impressive; rather, he wants to make it at least as impressive as it is in nature.  Here is Pope, altered for your convenience and for brevity.  The curious may want to know that Pope is ironically imitating Longinus "On the Sublime."   When he speaks of the "Profound" he is making a pun; he means "very deep"--but "deep" means "down low," not "insightful."

After Pope's "Of the Art of Sinking in Poetry"

Rule 1. If a poet desires to sink to the Profound, his eyes should be like the wrong end of a telescope:  if you look through them, everything in Nature is made smaller.

For example, if he looks upon a tempest, he shall have the image of a tumbled bed, and describe the succeeding calm in this manner:

The ocean glad to see the tempest fled,
New lays his waves and smoothes his ruffled bed.

Glorious illuminations, made on high
By all the stars and planets of the sky,
In just degrees and shining order placed,
Spectators charmed and the blest dwelling graced.
Through all the enlightened air swift fireworks flew,
Which with repeated shouts glad cherubs threw.

Th'Almighty Chemist does his work prepare,
Pours down his waters on the thirsty plain,
Digests his lightning and distils his rain.
He measures all the drops with wondrous skill,
Which the black clouds, his floating bottles, fill.

Venus beheld her, 'midst her crowd of slaves,
And thought herself just risen from the waves.

Hears his own feet, and thinks they sound like more;
And fears the hind feet will o'ertake the fore.

The liquid burnings dreadful colors show,
Some deeply red, and others faintly blue.

His eye-balls burn, he wounds the smoking plain,
And knots of scarlet ribbon deck his mane.

A waving sea of heads was round me spread,
And still fresh streams the gazing deluge fed.

Amplification may be defined as making the most of a thought. There are Amplifiers who can extend half a dozen thin thoughts over a whole fat book. For instance, an Amplifier found a brief passage in the 104^th Psalm, "God looks on the earth, and it trembles. He touches the hills, and they smoke" and rendered it thus:

The hills forget they're fixed, and in their fright
Cast off their weight, and ease themselves for flight:
The woods, with terror winged, out-fly the wind,
And leave the heavy, panting hills behind.

Rule 4. When you use figures of speech, seek confusion. A master of catachresis will provide meaningless incongruities. This will give the same kind of pleasure we get from a clown trimming his beard with a hatchet, or hewing down a tree with a razor, for example:

Mow the beard,
Shave the grass,
Pin the plank,
Nail my sleeve.

Lac'd in her Cosins new appeared the bride,
And with an air divine her Colmar plyed.
And oh! she cries, what men I round me see!
Here a bright redcoat, there a smart toupee.

The Profound may be sought in synecdoche as well, which consists in the use of a part for a whole: you may call a young woman sometimes pretty-face and pigs-eye, and sometimes snotty-nose and draggle-tail.

When you use a metaphor, draw it from the lowest sources, especially when describing lofty subjects. For instance, when you speak of thunder, say, "The lords above are angry and talk big." Or mix your figures, by raising so many images as to give no image at all, or an idea just opposite to what was meant:

Thy head shall rise, though buried in the dust,
And midst the clouds his glittering turrets thrust.

Antithesis may contribute greatly to confusion, especially if carried to illogical extremes, as for instance

                            His eyes so bright
Let in the object, and let out the light.

All nature felt a reverential shock.
The sea stood still to see the mountains rock.

He roared so loud, and looked so wondrous grim,
His very shadow durst not follow him.

The silver whiteness that adorns thy neck,
Sullies the plate, and makes the napkin black.

Ye gods! annihilate but space and time,
And make two lovers happy.

Under the tropics is our language spoke,
And part of Flanders hath received our yoke.

Nor Death, nor Hell itself can keep them out,
Nor fortified redoubt.

I cannot stifle this gigantic woe,
Or on my raging grief a muzzle throw.

    Teach me to grieve with bleating moan, my sheep!

Or fill out your description with what is so self-evident as to add nothing at all:

The glories of proud London to survey,
The sun himself shall rise by break of day.

The umbrageous shadow, and the verdant green,
The running current, and odorous fragance,
Cheer my lone solitude with joyous gladness.

In smoother numbers, and in softer verse

Or

Divide and part the severed world in two.

Rule 6. Lastly, we may sometimes seek our goal of sinking, by raising with pompous language what is simple or obvious. Will not every true lover of the Profound be delighted to behold the most vulgar and low actions of life exalted in this manner?

See who is there.

Advance the fringed curtains of thy eyes
And tell me who comes yonder.

The wooden guardian of our privacy
Quick on its axle turn.

Bring me what Nature, tailor to the bear,
To man himself denied.

Yon luminary amputation needs,
Thus shall you save its half-extinguished life.

Set Bacchus from his glassy prison free,
And strip white Ceres of her nut-brown coat.

Example for part A: For instance, had the poem existed when Pope wrote, he might have listed the famous inconsistent metaphor in Joyce Kilmer's "Trees," where the tree's "hungry mouth is pressed/Against the earth's sweet flowing breast" while at the same time it "lifts its arms to pray."  If the roots are its mouth and the branches its arms, the tree is a weirdly shaped monster indeed.   There are several ways to repair these lines. (1)You could eliminate one of Mr. Kilmer's metaphors (perhaps keep the "mouth" metaphor but change the arms back to branches, for instance, "whose branches stretch to heaven like prayer"). (2) You could replace both metaphors with different but mutually consistent metaphors ("whose restless roots no longer roam/when in the earth they find a home; while branches seek eternal life). (3) Or you could perhaps think of a different version of the author's "tree as pious human child" idea--perhaps "a tree whose sturdy knees are pressed/Into the earth's capacious lap."   Note that your repaired figure doesn't have to be great poetry; it just has to avoid making the poet's mistake with the chosen trope, or figurative image.

For part B, a bad example of my own, I might bring up a popular song of World War II in which the author intended to find a symbol of young love which the soldier-speaker in the song might use to urge his girl to wait for him. The lyricist came up with, "Don't sit under the apple tree with anyone else but me." This would be an example of accidentally comparing something you wish to represent as beautiful, even almost sacred, with something that was too commonplace and trivial. People sit under trees together who are not lovers! As Pope and I have done, briefly explain in part B what is bad about your bad examples.

Select any poem we have read for this class so far to analyze how the effects of word choice for sound and word choice for sense are related. (The poem should probably be at least twelve lines long and not much longer than thirty; you may use a portion of a longer poem. You may make a chart as in the diction chapter of Many Worlds, you may pinpoint the poet's good choices by thinking of "spoiled" alternatives, you should mark the rhyme scheme, if any, and look for alliteration, assonance, consonance, , sound and motion imitation, repetition, anaphora (these are explained in Kowit, chapter 7)--any device of sound EXCEPT rhythm and meter, which we'll worry about on another occasion. Then write a description of ten specific ways (i.e., word choices, phrases, sound patterns) in which the sound and meaning of the poem you have chosen interact effectively. This exercise should be in sentence and paragraph form because you will be putting the poem back together after analyzing. It may be expressed very personally--"What I love about x"--or very objectively (apparently!), as in the Many Worlds summary of "The Maldive Shark" or Kowit's account of Emily Dickinson's poem on pp. 58-59. It should not be LONGER than 500 words (roughly two pages if typed). It does not have to be typed, and you should not copy out the poem again-by definition, we already have copies of the poems we have read in the class! IMPORTANT: leave plenty of extra space on the page, especially between lines-so that you can add and change things in class if you want to. In addition, you may--but you don't have to--turn in the charts, notes, marked up lines, etc. you have used in working on the portfolio. That way, if you got stuck or had to leave out some brilliant idea, I'll know and will be able to help/applaud.

Rhythm in poetry is based on the degree of emphasis--"stress"--received by various syllables, and pauses of various length.  It is partially dependent on the individual interpretation or "performance" of the reader, but the writer does many things to encourage the reader to perform his or her line in a desired way.  Of course all the ways in which meaning and other aspects of sound that we have studied are used in the poem affect interpretation, and therefore rhythm.  Also, following or departing from regular sentence patterns in English--for instance, using a question or exclamation--affects rhythm.  Most specifically, the use of an underlying meter or other pattern based on syllables and line length affects rhythm.  In the following exercises, you will practice recognizing meter and other patterns (syllable count; stressed syllable count; cadence), and of course remembering their names, but most importantly, you will try to hear rhythm more precisely than you need to do simply to recognize meters.

The key difference is that meters are defined as if there were only two kinds of syllables, unstressed and stressed; in fact, however, we can hear four different levels of stress, as illustrated in the phrase "Telephone booth." We can likewise hear four different kinds of pause, illustrated in writing by the lightest pause, which is the space between words; light pauses such as those marked by commas or places where the voice drops; heavier pauses marked by dashes, semicolons, colons, and parentheses, where we know that the sentence has taken a major turn but we also know it's not complete; and final pauses, which we mark by question marks, periods, or exclamation points.  Note that though we have some conventions requiring punctuation of a particular kind which may not be what we "hear," we can usually get the meaning and the punctuation right by assuming these connections.  But perhaps you are wondering about "telephone booth." The strongest stress in that phrase is on "Tel" and the weakest or lightest is on the "uh" between "tel" and "phone."  The syllable "phone" gets more stress than "e" but less than the separate word, "booth," which gets less emphasis than "tel."  Now suppose you had a rather weird poem containing the following line:  "Telephone booths were scrawled with truths."  Analyzing the meter, you would distinguish just between stressed and unstressed syllables, ignoring pauses (also called caesuras) and forgetting about the fact that some stressed syllables are more stressed than others.   You would "scan" this line more or less like this:  TELephone BOOTHS were SCRAWLED with TRUTHS.  The pattern is ' x x ' x ' x ' (using x for unstressed, ' for stressed). To analyze the rhythm, you might put in 4 1 2 3/ 2 3 /1 4// (using 4 for strongest stress, 1 for weakest; space for weakest pause, /// for final pause--I'm assuming here that the line does not end in a period).

PHYSICAL ANALYSIS OF RHYTHM AND METER IS NOT IMPORTANT IN ITSELF!!!!!  It is useful only to the extent that it helps you read a poem intelligently and therefore appreciate its emotional and intellectual content.  When you are analyzing an actual poem to enjoy and interpret it, then, you need to find out what patterns of syllables and stresses and line lengths it has, and you need to analyze in the actual meter of crucial or confusing or especially interesting lines, but you certainly don't need to go on and on about the rhythm and meter.  This portfolio is like a fire drill--something that, hopefully, you won't have to use too often in real life!

So: (A) Figure out  the METER or other pattern (syllable count, stresses per lines) in each of the following passages.  One is in free verse.  Then figure out the actual RHYTHM--variations of amount of stress and uses of differing kinds of pause--in the lines in bold type (the last 3 of example 1, all of  example 2, the last 6 of example 3, all of example 4, the last word in example 5, l. 3 plus lines 4-7).

1. Because I could not stop for Death--
    He kindly stopped for me--
    The Carriage held but just Ourselves--
    And Immortality.

   We slowly drove--He knew no haste
   And I had put away
   My labor and my leisure too,
   For His Civility--
 

2.  For the angel of Death spread his wings on the blast,
     And breathed in the face of the foe as he passed;
    And the eyes of the sleepers waxed deadly and chill,
    And their hearts but once heaved--and for ever grew still!

3. you have to come back you say
    this is rich and heavy
    like good food
    you say here
    are our poems
    smiling as your next words
    are drowned in tambourines
    and harsh songs of salvation
    blasting from loudspeakers
    lamposted below the window
    for a moment the hymns
    from the corner tabernacle
    outdrum the cadence
    of the parade (tw475)

4. To write a blues song
    is to regiment riots
    and pluck gems from graves (tw264)

5. if there are any heavens my mother will (all by herself) have
    one.  It will not be a pansy heaven nor
    a fragile heaven of lilies-of-the-valley but

   it will be a heaven of blackred roses

   my father will be (deep like a rose
   tall like a rose)

  standing near my

  (swaying over her
   silent)
 

(B) Invent an example of each of the following "feet":

1. anapest

2. dactyl

3. iamb

4. spondee

5. troche
 
 

(C) The following list of prefixes for the word "meter" is in alphabetical order; rearrange it in numerical order: di hepta hexa mono penta tetra tri.
 

Songs often appear within dramatic or even narrative forms as elements of the action, or just as pleasant relaxations. Choose a scene from a story, drama (including musicals, operas, operettas, or oratorios, as well as plays), or film in which a song plays a prominent role. Bring in a copy of the words of the song, and summarize the scene in which it occurs. List at least three specific ways in which the song contributes to the action of the play, or, if the song is NOT contributing to the action of the play, explain why it is there. Be sure to comment if the song itself would have a different effect on listeners if it were heard outside the context of the play, or at least the audience's knowledge of that context. As usual, the song should have interesting words, or, if the words are silly or uninteresting, there should be a dramatic reason for the use of a "bad" poem for a song.

Example:

In a certain hit musical, a group of girls dressed in very short checked gingham dresses sing the following:

I love you, a bushel and a peck,
A bushel and a peck and a hug around the neck,
A hug around the neck and a barrel and a heap,
A barrel and a heap and I'm talking in my sleep
About you, about you.
Cause I love you, a bushel and a peck,
You bet your purty neck I do.
A doodle oodle oodle, doodle oodle oodle,
Bet your purty neck I do.

Why on earth would anyone perpetrate this song? Because the scene is a cheap nightclub in the big city, and the girls are the members of the chorus, doing their act. This is the sort of garbage they have to put up with to practice their "art"! The song is a parody, and it quickly characterizes the girls' situation without boring the audience. Also, the act makes it very clear that the on-stage audience neither knows nor cares anything about farms.  The tune, though also far from elevated, is lively, and the girls dance as well as sing.

If you don't want to find a song on your own, bear in mind that there are songs in all of Shakespeare's plays, several of which are included in SC.  All you would need to do is look up the scene in which the selected song occurs.

This is a song workshop, but please notice that once again the words of the song are crucial.  Your assignment is to find a song whose lyrics constitute a good poem about some emotion, but whose effect is enhanced or supported--i.e., not interfered with--by its musical setting. This song must be in English, and it should not be a setting of a pre-existing poem, that is, the lyrics of the song must have been written to be sung.  If a poet wrote a poem to be read and a composer later set it to music, that's not what we're looking for.  Bring the words of the song and a short (1/2 page) comment about (1) why these words are, in your view, a good poem about the emotion and (2) (briefly) what the music contributes.  Note that the poem can tell a story, or describe a mood or scene or problem, but it should not be primarily narrative or argumentative.  For instance, a song about love should make us share the speaker/singer's emotions, not just familiar with his/her story. Be sure to reflect on Kowit's chapter 23 before and while doing this assignment.

In the following portfolio, there are three real poems and three spoiled versions of them.  The spoiled versions are there to call your attention to desirable features of the structure--the ways the meaning is organized and presented--of the real poems.  Structure includes the order, interest, and emotional impact of the actual happenings in the poem--what Drachler and Terris call "plot." And/or it includes the order and presentation of the thesis of the poem and the evidence, examples, etc. that support that thesis.  And/or it includes the choices of grammatical forms (for instance, tenses, questions versus statements, singular vs. plural) and sentence order in the poem.  Your job is not to say, "the poem has a good plot" or "the real poem uses questions where the spoiled poem uses statements."  You need to be much more specific.  And you should make at least one comment on each poem, and a total of 5 comments.

Example. Suppose I were doing this assignment, and my teacher had handed me the following "spoiled" version of the beginning of Dickinson's "Because I could not stop for Death":

When Death comes calling, you're alone
Except for Immortality--
If I don't have the time to die
Death still has time to come for me.

These are the kinds of comments I'd like you to make about the poems below.  Extra credit opportunities: you can earn one point for each 2 extra comments you make, up to 3 extra cred it points.  Or you can earn 2 points per poem for doing your own job of spoiling a poem so as to reveal features of its structure, up to four points.  No extra credit, though, till you've done the actual portfolio!  Also, for a two-point extra credit project, you get two points only if you actually succeed; if you try, but fail, you get one point.

REAL POEMS:

Eight O'clock (A.E. Houseman)

He stood and heard the steeple
Sprinkle the quarters on the morning town.
One, two, three, four, to market-place and people
It tossed them down.

Strapped, noosed, nighing his hour,
He stood and counted them and cursed his luck;
And then the clock collected in the tower
Its strength, and struck.

Adventurous bird walking upon the air,
Like a schoolboy running and loitering, leaping and springing,
Pensively pausing, suddenly changing your mind
To turn at ease on the heel of a wing-tip.  Where
In all the crystalline world was there to find
For your so delicate walking and airy winging
A floor so perfect, so firm and so fair
And where a ceiling and walls so sweetly ringing,
Whenever you sing, to your clear singing?

The wide-winged soul itself can ask no more
Than such a pure, resilient and endless floor
For its strong-pinioned plunging and soar-
ing and upward and upward springing.

This one was put in a jacket,
This one was sent home,
This one was given bread and meat
But would eat none,
And this one cried No No No No
All day long.

This one looked at the window
As though it were a wall,
This one saw things that were not there,
This one things that were,
And this one cried No No No No
All day long.

This one thought himself a bird,
This one a dog,
And this one thought himself a man
An ordinary man,
And cried and cried No No No No
All day long.

Not Houseman

In the market-place the people
Heard the church clock in the  steeple
Dropping quarter hours on the town;
His time was running down.

The clock in the church tower
Reached eight o'clock and struck;
Strapped, noosed, reaching his hour,
He counted eight and cursed his luck.

Not Muir

Adventurous bird, you walk upon the air,
And like a boy, you run, stop, leap, and spring,
Pause a while, then change your mind, there
Where you easily turn with a flick of your wing.

The soul is such a wide-winged bird
Seeking a floor that's resilient, endless, and pure,
A floor that's perfect, firm, and fair
For its soaring and plunging and upward springing.
And a ceiling and walls to echo its sweet singing.

This one saw things that were not there,
This one was sent home,
This saw things that were,
This one would not eat
And this one cried No No No No
All day long.

This one was put in a jacket,
This one thought himself a bird,
This one a dog;
This one was given bread and meat
And all day long he cried
No No No No.

All day long
This one thought himself a man
An ordinary man;
No No No No.
And this one looked at the window
As though it were a wall,
And cried and cried.

To describe the tone  of a poem is to describe the emotional state of the author as it can be inferred from that poem, with, as we discussed in class, attention not just to the general kind of emotion (positive, negative, neutral), but to its particular nature, intensity, and occasion.  In English there are many words to describe emotional states.  It may be useful to think of these concepts in groups, in order to identify the specific nuance of feeling each one names, and also to understand different ways in which words with the same general denotation can differ from each other.

We could call this a band or orchestra of terms.  Just as an orchestra has different families of instruments, which differ among themselves in different ways, so our concepts of emotional states occur in related groups, and the specific meaning we have in mind when we use one word or another for these tones or moods is often clearer when we realize what other related terms are less appropriate for that meaning.

For instance, a neutral emotional state might be called "acceptance" or "contentment" or "resignation"--with "acceptance" as the term that gives away the least hint of pleasure or displeasure, "resignation" suggesting that a negative feeling would have been possible, "contentment" moving in the direction of such mildly happy terms as "comfortable," "pleased," etc. Terms for a state can also differ depending on whether the emotion in question is related to the way things are now or to ideas about what they may be in the future; for instance, "anticipation" is the name for expecting what may be either good or bad; "hope" is the name for expecting better things.

For this exercise, try to complete the outline of our tonal "orchestra" by distinguishing the different concepts within each general state of feeling, words that identify the same concept but with different connotative value, and different ways in which words and concepts can differ.  Example: "complacency" is another term that might be used to describe an emotional state that could be called "contentment"; using "complacency" to describe the tone of a poem would suggest that the critic disapproved of the poet's contentment.  (Note that if a poet presents a character as complacent and invites us to condemn the character, the tone of the poem would be described as ironic, angry, bitter, etc.--not complacent.)

Below  I have tried to list  the basic categories: think of and discriminate among as many different subcategories and varieties as you can, using different English words.

Don't cite as different categories the same term differently modified, e.g., don't list "happy" and "very happy" or "happy" and "undeservedly happy." But if we have different words for different degrees of an emotion, do list them--for instance, the word that comes to mind for the greatest degree of happiness would be, I suspect, "ecstacy" or "exaltation."  In some cases we may agree to disagree about the placement of a term: for instance, is "peacefulness" a kind of happiness or a kind of neutrality, or perhaps both with different shades of meaning?  Incidentally, you cannot finish your outline right here on this page--you'll need more space.

A. Happiness
B. Acceptance
C. Anger
D. Sadness
E. Fear
G. Irony (=recognition of discrepancy between the way things are and the way things should be)
H. Ambiguity (inability on the part of the poet to define feeling and/or the way things are; indecision between two or more possibilities)
I. ?  (Have I left something out?)

Note: you may work with someone else on this, and we will work in groups in class.

Today we are going to look at variations on a single form, the sonnet. You have three jobs. First, read the poems. Second, for two or three of  the poems, determine these four things: 1)Is the poem generally in iambic pentameter and are there fourteen lines? If not, what liberties did the poet take (different number of lines? different number of feet per line? different kind of feet?) 2. Is the poem presented with physical subdivisions (space between parts) or as one block? If the former, what are the subdivisions? 3. What is the rhyme scheme of the poem? 4. Is there a turn of thought in the poem, the kind of change that might be marked with a "but" or "yet" or perhaps a colon (:) to indicate that all the rest of the poem just led up to the part that follows the colon? If so, where?   Please note that these questions should not take you very long to answer.  The poem is in iambic pentameter if most of the lines have approximately ten syllables with a predominant preference, within each pair of syllables, for emphasis on the second of the two syllables.  Read it aloud; don't agonize over every syllable.   Determining the metrical PATTERN (as opposed to the precise rhythm of a particular line) should be as simple and straightforward as counting the number of lines.  Even counting lines can be confusing occasionally, however, because sometimes poets arrange one line in two subdivisions, for instance if a new paragraph starts in the middle of the (metrical) line.  Two such half-lines make a whole.

All the poems listed were consciously related to the traditional sonnet form by the poets who wrote them, even when the poet chose not "obey" all the expected patterns. After you have answered the (possibly) boring questions above, your third and MOST IMPORTANT job is to write out the answer this one, for ONE of the poems (your choice): what does the poet get from associating his/her poem with the sonnet tradition, in this particular instance? In other words, the poet who chooses to write a sonnet knows that most readers will be familiar with other sonnets. Why would s/he want you to remember them while reading her/his poem?

Something to think about: although the very word "sonnet" means "little song," relatively few poems in the sonnet form have been set to music.  Any ideas about why?  Do you know of any exceptions?

In Portfolio 12 we are considering a poetic form defined by subject matter, the elegy, which, as Kowit tells you, is a poem in a memory of the dead (Kowit 217) However, historically the elegy in English has had many more specific elements. Here is a list:

1. the poem (a)starts with an explanation of why or when it is being written, and (b)ends with a return to the speaker's situation.

2. the poem expresses not merely grief, but a sense of shock and anger because (a) the death was premature, pointless, or otherwise "unnatural" and/or (b) the person who died was so special

3. the speaker establishes a relationship with the person being mourned, usually by telling about their time together. In traditional English elegies, the conventions of the pastoral are often used for this purpose, that is, both speaker and subject are said to be shepherds, etc.

4. the speaker indicates how the person died and uses the material of the means of death, e.g., drowning, as a source of imagery in the poem.

5. the speaker tries to reject the fact of the death or to seek supernatural aid to bring the dead person back to life, but realizes that these efforts are futile.

6a. the speaker sees or imagines that nature itself is negatively affected by this death, or
6b. the speaker is amazed or outraged that nature is not affected by this death, or
6c. both (paradoxically or seriatim)

7. the speaker sees or recollects other mourners for the last person, in a literal or figurative procession

8. the speaker digresses into a criticism of some fault of society, related to what the lost person did or might have done

9. the speaker meditates on the nature of death, especially in comparison or contrast to the nature of life

10. the speaker finds some kind of consolation or acceptance of the death, often in the belief of some kind of immortality for the lost one.
 

You can find practically all of these characteristics in Milton's Lycidas. Read the poem and make a note of what page and lines (first three and last three words of passage) you can associate with each of these parts or characteristics. Although it is not at all necessary that a poem have all these qualities to be a powerful elegy, Milton's poem is useful for giving us examples of each of the features used extremely well. Milton also illustrates a frequent characteristic of the elegy that Kowit treats as a distinct kind of poem, the recognition and contemplation of the poet's own mortality, especially the possibility of premature death.

Then choose one of the  elegies in the poem list and outline it briefly, considering which of the "elegiac" characteristics it has and whether some of its characteristics are not allowed for in the traditional list.  You don't have to read all these poems, though they are all well worth reading; you can select one by topic or sample them till you find one that particularly appeals to you. Two main questions: how does the poet convince the reader of the value of the person who died, and how does the poet make the controlled, intellectual act of writing a poem seem compatible with genuine grief, or if s/he doesn't, what happens to the poem?