Formal Writing Assignment II: Annotation on Sound
In this class, we have carefully parsed lines of individual poems by various poets to determine
how the poetic device of sound is used to convey changes in the emotional tone or attitude of the
speaker or narrator toward the subject of the poem.
In an annotation of five, double spaced, typed pages in Times New Roman 11, discuss the
following in AI’s poem Twenty-year Marriage with exact, quoted lines from the poem’s text.
In the beginning of your annotation, be sure to establish (with exact, textual evidence)
working definitions and use specific vocabulary via Mary Oliver’s A Poetry Handbook.
In a line by line analysis, pay careful attention to what sound each line of the poem ends on,
as well as corresponding sounds within the line. For example, In the first two lines the
speaker’s anger toward her husband is evident in the hard, unequivocal mute of truck, which
stops the breath, and has the obvious slant rhyme to the common expletive, and finds its internal
rhyme with stuck, in the following line, which ends with the ch of ditch, and suggests a slant
rhyme to the derogatory bitch.
What sounds are predominant in the beginning of the poem, and what they reveal about the
speaker’s emotional tone?
On the other hand, what sounds are in the minority and what do they reveal about the
complexity of the speaker’s emotional tone?
At what point exactly (line) do sounds shift from one predominant sound to another?
What does this reveal about the change in speaker’s attitude until the end of the poem?
How does this tone contrast with that of the poem’s beginning?