Poetry Response Assignment
Often students cringe when they learn that a major focus of this course is poetry. As children most of you loved poetry,
reciting nursery rhymes and chanting limericks. What happened? I don’t have the answer, but one of my goals this year
will be to rekindle your enthusiasm for and appreciation of poetry.
Laurence Perrine suggests, “People have read poetry or listened to it or recited it because they liked it, because it gave
them enjoyment. But this is not the whole answer. Poetry in all ages has been regarded as important, not simply as one of
several alternative forms of amusement, as one person might choose bowling, another chess, and another poetry. Rather,
it has been regarded as something central to existence, something having unique value to the fully realized life, something
that we are better off for having and without which we are spiritually impoverished.”
John Ciardi writes, “Everyone who has an emotion and a language knows something about poetry. What he knows may
not be much on an absolute scale, and it may not be organized within him in a useful way, but once he discovers the
pleasure of poetry, he is likely to be surprised to discover how much he always knew without knowing he knew it. He
may discover, somewhat as the character in the French play discovered to his amazement that he had been talking prose
all his life, that he had been living poetry. Poetry, after all, is about life. Anyone who is alive and conscious must have
some information about it.”
This year we will approach poetry two ways. We will study some poems in class, learning about the tools and devices
poets use in their craft, talking about what a poem means or how it made you feel, or seeking answers to questions we
raised while reading or studying. We might call this our structured or formal study of poetry. But we will also study
poetry informally through poetry responses.
You will be asked to write a poetry response each week (with some exceptions). Your class period will decide which day
poetry responses are due; these are due weekly on this day unless otherwise noted. You should choose one poem from a
list of poems I have given you and write a response to that poem. These responses should be a minimum of one typed
page. Place the response in the “box” at the beginning of class on the day that I specify for your class. (I do not accept
these late!) You may submit them electronically through Google Drive if you choose.
What should you write on a poetry response? You may approach this assignment several ways. Sometimes students write
an analysis of the poem. They explain what is going on in the poem and relate what they think the theme is. Other
students begin with the theme and elaborate on that, while some apply the poem to themselves by relating a personal
experience. Occasionally a student will write a response on one line from the poem. What you do with the response is up
to you as long as you say something. Do not spend time telling how you could not understand the poem no matter how
you tried. Naturally, I do not expect you to like all the poems, but if you dislike a poem because of its content or style,
then support that with specifics. I have given you some sample responses from students from last year.
Read all the poems from the list every week. Read them at different times, in different places, and in different moods.
You will notice how the poems will reveal themselves to you over the weeks. Although you are only required to respond
on paper to one poem, you should become acquainted with all the poems on the list.
**We may discuss some of the poems from your packet in class. If so, you may not use that specific poem for a poetry
response unless you have already turned in a poetry response for that poem before our discussion.
Praise in Summer
Richard Wilbur
Obscurely yet most surely called to praise,
As sometimes summer calls us all, I said
The hills are heavens full of branching ways
Where star-nosed moles fly overhead the dead;
I said the trees are mines in air. I said
See how the sparrow burrows in the sky!
And then I wondered why this mad instead
Perverts our praise to uncreation, why
Such savor’s in this wrenching things awry.
Does sense so stale that it must needs derange
The world to know it? To a praiseful eye
Should it not be enough of fresh and strange
That trees grow green, and moles can course in clay,
And sparrows sweep the ceiling of our day?
Reading this poem is a trip in itself, and dissecting it adds
a whole new level to its meaning. The poem talks about why
we need to dissect and study it, why “this mad
instead/Perverts our praise to uncreation.” To take something
like this apart, where moles fly and birds burrow, does detract
from the strange newness of the phrasing. Isn’t it just as
strange, asks Richard Wilbur, that “trees grow green, and
moles can course in clay, / And sparrows sweep the ceiling of
our day?” To comment on the strangeness of the poem’s
original wording is then to deny the strangeness of reality and
existence.
In the first half of the poem, Wilbur talks about how trees
are mines in the air. At first I didn’t get it, but I now
understand—it is an inversion of what one would expect.
Instead of gold and silver being the veins and mines in the
earth, the tree is a mine in the sky, and the sky is the ground. I
almost have to mentally stand on my head to understand it that
way—but it is beautiful.
The poem is not about how that is unusual though.
Richard Wilbur deliberately picked an unusual way of looking
at things to underscore not that, but how unusual normality is.
I think the poem is about the extreme luck we have that the
world is how it is. That birds fly, moles burrow, and trees are
green is so unusual and unlikely, but we have grown used to it
and expect it. We should rejoice in reality—thank God for the
day in sudden bursts of appreciation and joy.
—Liz Carter
Blackberries for Amelia
Richard Wilbur
Fringing the woods, the stone walls, and the lanes,
Old thickets everywhere have come alive,
Their new leaves reaching out in fans of five
From tangles overarched by this year’s canes.
They have their flowers, too, it being June,
And here or there in brambled dark-and-light
Are small, five-petalled blooms of chalky white,
As random-clustered and as loosely strewn
As the far stars, of which we now are told
That ever faster do they bolt away,
And that a night may come in which, some say,
We shall have only blackness to behold.
I have no time for any change so great,
But I shall see the August weather spur
Berries to ripen where the flowers were—
Dark berries, savage-sweet and worth the wait—
And there will come the moment to be quick
And save some from the birds, and I shall need
Two pails, old clothes in which to stain and bleed,
And a grandchild to talk with while we pick.
When I first read this poem, I thought it was simply about
a person fighting off birds to pick blackberries. Reading it for
the second time made me realize that is was much different. I
love the way the speaker uses something as simple as
collecting berries to bring across such a strong, uplifting
message.
In the first part of the poem, when the speaker talks about
the look of the woods, it reminds me of my grandmother’s
house in the mountains of NC. The way the speaker describes
the old thickets, the idea of new leaves reaching out in fans of
five, I can see that picture in my memory. I can smell the
sweet aroma of the berry blossom, right before it is about to
produce its fruit. What is most amazing to me is that these
descriptions are not even the purpose of the poem; they are
just used to suck the reader in so that they get exposed to the
full meaning of what the speaker says.
In the third stanza, the speaker talks of a time in the
future where there are not stars left in the night sky. However,
instead of worrying about this happening, the speaker takes a
different route. This is what makes the fourth stanza my
favorite. I love the way the author says, “I have no time for
any change so great.” When I read this line, I have this
powerful, passive feeling go through my body. It says to me,
things are going to change—but instead of thinking about it
all the time, take advantage of your life and don’t think too
much about the future. And when that time does come where
the world changes—don’t panic. Spend the last minutes you
have doing something that you enjoy and spending time with
someone you love.
Because I try to live my life with this philosophy, I really
connected to what the speaker suggests. I think this is a
brilliant poem. I am seriously considering making a copy of it
to give to those who worry about the future. Its message
calms my nerves, but at the same time, leaves me with a sense
of power.
—Meghan Kearns
Tableau*
Countee Cullen
Locked arm in arm they cross the way,
The black boy and the white,
The golden splendor of the day,
The sable pride of night.
From lowered blinds the dark folk stare,
And here the fair folk talk,
Indignant that these two should dare
In unison to walk.
Oblivious to look and word
They pass, and see no wonder
That lightning brilliant as a sword
Should blaze the path of thunder.
* a striking dramatic scene or picture
Even though Countee Cullen wrote this poem in the early
1900s, it is unfortunate that some people still make a ‘tableau’
out of black boy and a white boy walking beside each other in
the 21st century. Black people still call their own stuck up if
they have white friends, and some white people still look down
on other whites if they associate themselves with blacks. The
rest of my response won’t necessarily focus on the poem.
Even though I like it and the message it sends, I’m going to
take it another way and run with it.
This past weekend commemorates the 21st weekend that
my family and another have gone to the beach over Martin
Luther King, Jr. holiday. My parents went to college with the
other parents, my sister is the same age as their daughter, and
my brother is the same age as their son. We have a wonderful
friendship. Now, most resorts and restaurants in the Myrtle
Beach area are occupied with middle to upper class whites,
especially in the middle of January. And you wonder, “Why is
this significant?” Well, we started this tradition ever since
there was a Martin Luther King Weekend to celebrate one of
the biggest advocates of civil rights who made it able for us to
stay at a resort. Had it not been for Martin Luther King, two
African-American families would have never been able to set
foot in a resort in Myrtle Beach. When I was younger, I
remember getting nervous looks from the waiters and
waitresses when they saw ten black people walk into a nice
restaurant, and even though the looks have declined, they still
happen unfortunately. And when we drop the guys off at one
of the many golf courses they play, we get looks from the old
white men in their golf cars. It’s as if their face is saying,
“What are they doing here?” It’s just as Cullen described. It
is a tableau for blacks to be successful and take advantage of
their success for some. It is a tableau for black men to use the
same golf courses as white men for some. And the sad part
about it is, both blacks and whites think that. Now I’m not
saying that ALL white people give us nervous looks, in fact
some are quite friendly. But why should be get looks at all?
Why should other blacks think that we are stuck up? I don’t
get it!
This morning as I was packing up my stuff, I watched
Good Morning, America and an author, I cannot remember
his name, wrote this book called Beyond the Color Line. And
he did a survey on what urban black teenagers consider
‘white’. Some of the things listed were getting straight A’s,
taking harder classes, listening to certain music, and wearing
certain clothes. He and other viewers were surprised and
upset that getting straight A’s was considered being white.
Since when was getting a good education and making good
grades considered the white thing to do? My parents were
saying that when they were growing up, black kids demanded
a fair chance to make the same grades as their classmates and
getting a quality education was admired. It’s sad to know that
some African-Americans have gone from dreaming of getting
straight A’s to not even wanting them. I wish Doctor King
were still alive so he could speak to everybody and continue to
preach the principles America needs to hear. I wish he could
tell those kids that getting straight A’s is what they should
want, not avoid. And I wish he could speak to those who see a
black boy and a white boy walking down the street as a
tableau. Racially, America has come a long way, but we still
have such a long way to go.
—Angela Crocker
The Secret
Denise Levertov
Two girls discover
the secret of life
in a sudden line of
poetry.
I who don’t know the
secret wrote
the line. They
told me
(through a third person)
they had found it
but not what it was,
not even
what line it was. No doubt
by now, more than a week
later, they have forgotten
the secret,
the line, the name of
the poem. I love them
for finding what
I can’t find,
and for loving me
for the line I wrote,
and for forgetting it
so that
a thousand times, till death
finds them, they may
discover it again, in other
lines,
in other
happenings. And for
wanting to know it,
for
assuming there is
such a secret, yes,
for that
most of all.
I loved this poem. I especially enjoyed the easy natural
progression Levertov took from the first reason for loving her
readers, to the final reason. She builds gradually in
importance of the reasons for her love but without making the
poem seem structured. It’s like Kant written with water
colors. I also enjoy her conclusion and I must say that I agree
with it entirely. The closing thought, “. . . for assuming there
is such a secret, yes, for that most of all” reminds me of The
Shawshank Redemption. At this point you’re expecting me to
talk about the closing scene of the film when Thomas
Newman’s soundtrack perfectly completes the reunion of Red
and Andy Dufresne on the shores of Zijihuatanejo, but I’m not.
At that point in the film, they didn’t have to believe any more.
Hope no longer required anything of them.
The scene I am going to talk about is when Andy locks
himself in the intercom room and plays Mozart’s Berlin Opera
for the entire prison. When Red retells the incident as
narrator he has this to say, “I have no idea to this day what
those two Italian Ladies were singing about. Truth is, I don’t
want to know. Some things are best left unsaid. I’d like to
think they were singing about something so beautiful, it can’t
be expressed in words, and makes your heart ache because of
it. I tell you, those voices soared higher and farther than
anybody in a gray place dares to dream. It was like some
beautiful bird flapped into our drab little cage and made those
walls dissolve away, and for the briefest of moments, every
last man in Shawshank felt free.”
That is what I think of when I read Levertov’s poem. The
idea that music, art, expression, etc., give us something
intangible, Melville would call it “the ungraspable phantom of
life,” that gives us hope and passion and makes us feel as
though we know “the secret of life,” if only for a little while.
—David Verga
The Fly
William Blake
Little Fly,
Thy summer’s play
My thoughtless hand
Has brush’d away.
Am not I
A fly like thee?
Or art not thou
A man like me?
For I dance,
And drink, & sing,
Till some blind hand
Shall brush my wing.
If thought is life
And strength & breath,
And the want
Of thought is death;
Then am I
A happy fly,
If I live
Or if I die.
This poem has opened my eyes. When I read the lines in
William Shakespeare’s King Lear about how “flies to wanton
boys are we to th’ gods;/They kill us for their sport,” I didn’t
think much about the words beyond the context of the play,
(IV.i.36-37). Blake’s poem, however, made me consider the
idea that I might be just another fly, living at the whim of a
higher power.
Blake begins “The Fly” by acknowledging that he used to
play with flies during the summers of his childhood. Blake
recalls his “thoughtless hand [that]/Has brushed away” the
flies, lines 3-4. I personally never played with flies or tortured
them, but I do view them as being insignificant. I think that
Blake feels the same way about the tiny creatures, at least
initially. In the next stanza, Blake transitions into the present,
and he wonders if he is “A fly like thee,” line 6. Blake is
realizing that he may be a fly as well, controlled by someone
above him. Blake provides a parallel idea when he asks the
hypothetical fly if he is “a man like [Blake],” line 8.
After proposing those two questions, Blake explains his
reasoning behind his idea that he may be just another fly.
Blake addresses “some blind hand [that] shall brush [his]
wing,” lines 11-12. If Blake were truly like a fly, then the
invisible hand that comes into his life at a whim would exert
ultimate control over him. It is strange to consider the
possibility of being a fly, controlled completely by someone
else. I suppose that this thought corresponds with the concept
of fate. I have never believed in fate, because I feel like we all
have the ultimate control over our actions and futures. If I do
not subscribe to the idea of fate, then shouldn’t that mean that
I don’t believe in Shakespeare’s “flies to wanton boys”
concept. I think so.
The final two stanzas of Blake’s poem explain his
reasoning. Blake says that if we desire something or wish to
think for ourselves, we will die. Believing someone else’s
thought, however, provides us with “life/And strength &
breath,” lines 13-14. Blake accepts his logic, and says that if
it is true, then he is “A happy fly,” no matter if he lives or
dies, line 18. Blake accepts the fact that he may be a simple
fly, but he is content with that idea.
I enjoyed reading Blake’s viewpoint of the
aforementioned lines in King Lear. Blake encouraged me to
consider the idea that I may be a fly controlled by something
greater than me. I thought about the idea, and I have decided
that I do not agree with it. No one knows if there is truth in
what Shakespeare proposed, and I do not know ho anyone
could prove it true or false.
—Amanda Lehnberg
Inoculation
Susan Donnelly
Cotton Mather studied small pox for a while,
instead of sin. Boston was rife with it.
Not being ill himself, thank Providence,
but one day asking his slave, Onesimus,
if he’d ever had the pox. To which Onesimus replied,
“Yes and No.” Not insubordinate
or anything of the kind, but playful, or perhaps
musing, as one saying to another:
“Consider how a man
can take inside all manner of disease
and still survive.”
Then, graciously, when Mather asked again:
My mother bore me in the southern wild.
She scratched my skin and I got sick, but lived
to come here, free of smallpox, as your slave.
As a student of the past, the historical content of
“Inoculation” instantly drew me to the poem. The poem
recounts a typical incident of Puritan hypocrisy in the New
World, but it still makes an interesting story. As usual, the
white, fervently Christian minister has turned a blind eye to
his own sin by keeping human chattel in his possession.
However, the slave in this poem was particularly important.
While Cotton Mather was out marketing “his” idea for a
small pox inoculation, he never mentioned that he got the idea
from his slave Onesimus. Boston, at the time, was suffering
both from a small pox epidemic and the witch crisis. Mather
led the fight against both as an “upstanding” member of the
clergy. He single-handedly declared several innocent people
guilty, casting down only the Lord’s judgment. High fight on
small pox was less successful, partly because most people
didn’t jump at the chance to inject themselves with the disease.
As the poem suggests, however, Mather did actually question
his slaves about the pox.
Donnelly’s opinion shines vibrantly through the poem.
She is clearly disgusted by both Mather and slavery in
general. She does a good job of conveying the wretchedness
of human ownership, a system where a man is denied credit
for his achievements and is forced to work without the fruits of
his labor. She quotes Onesimus saying that people can take
inside all manner of disease and still survive. This quote
alludes, of course, to slavery as being a disease. Donnelly
suggests that the slaves were remarkable for their
perseverance in the face of all the odds against them.
After doing some research, I discovered that the first
Onesimus was a Roman slave liberated by the missionary
Paul. Paul liberated the slave because he felt it was wrong for
a Christian, especially one who had helped him, to be in
fetters. I think that Donnelly is challenging the beliefs of
Mather because he did not follow the disciple Paul’s example
and free his version of Onesimus.
However, as bad as his life might seem, it should be noted
that Onesimus was actually very lucky for a slave. Slaves in
the Northern part of the US were usually restricted to house
labor, due to poor crop growing conditions. In the South, the
slaves toiled in fields from dawn until dusk and often suffered
under the lash. On the other hand, Onesimus’ speech seems to
indicate a good education, as does his medical knowledge.
For a slave, education was the greatest indicator of quality of
life; it prevented at least some abuse at the hands of whites. I
don’t think Mather deserves as much blame as Donnelly seems
to want to heap on him. Yes, he is as guilty as anybody is for
condoning slavery, but he lived before the time of abolition
and only did was the norm.
After mulling over the poem, I decided that, despite its
paucity of fancy words or confusing construction, I enjoyed it.
The simple words help elucidate the ills of American society.
The only problem is that, if only 90% of Americans can
identify a Supreme Court justice, I’m sure the 99% would not
understand the inferences of the poem, if they even know who
Cotton Mather was.
—Jeremy Marshall
Disillusionment at Ten O’Clock
Wallace Stevens
The houses are haunted
By white night-gowns.
None are green.
Or purple with green rings,
Or green with yellow rings,
Or yellow with blue rings,
None of them are strange
With socks of lace
And beaded ceintures.
People are not going
To dream of baboons and periwinkles.
Only, here and there, an old sailor,
Drunk and asleep in his boots,
Catches tigers
In red weather.
Wallace Stevens, as I understand, often came upon his
best poems and poetic ideas while taking a walk, so I can see
him quite easily strolling through the suburban streets of
Hartford or who-knows-where at the titular hour, coming
across exactly what he describes. Every wardrobe is the
same; every person is bland; only a few old journeymen still
have a speck of fantasy alive. It calls to mind, albeit in a
slightly different context, Eliot’s “This is the way the world
ends/Not with a bang but with a whimper,” or better yet,
Huxley’s Brave New World. There, caste hierarchies are the
only features that really differentiate most men and women
(never mind the freemartins), and they all go see their feelies
and pass the time when they don’t work in lukewarm soma
comas. 1984 is in a similar milieu, but Orwell works more on
using the stage to dismantle communism—since Huxley makes
it rather clear that this vast sea of unvarying white is the only
viable way that such a government can be). Either way, these
dystopias both show a lack of ambition and an overall lack of
meaningful variety that appears to dishearten Stevens so
strongly.
What I’m frightened over, however, the thought that there
might be more than there might be more than a few people
reading this poem and not seeing the problem with it. Not to
say that they wouldn’t understand the symbolism, but that they
wouldn’t find it a bad thing. Though the rest of us may almost
take a small bit of comfort in the fact that the last lines reveal
hope, but even this is hollow, as such mold-breaking is derived
only from the effects of alcohol. I know that not nearly all the
world is mild enough to paint such a pessimistic picture of;
you only need to look around your 0 period English room to
see that nonconformity, in both its denotative and connotative
sense, is still alive and well. Still…from the time in which
Steven lived, it seems as if this poem was written before the
end of WWII, before Levittown and suburbization, before the
advent of trash television (an adjective describing a
subcategory, not a nominative) and boy band after boy band
after boy band. If it was that bad to him then, I wouldn’t even
want to think about what the author would feel now.
—Brice Russ