Name ________________________________________
Poetry Assignment #2
1.
Who is the speaker in the poem “Elegy for Jane”?
2.
Identify the metaphor in lines 5 and 6 in the poem “Elegy for Jane.”
3.
Identify an example of personification in lines 7-9 of “Elegy for Jane”.
4.
Identify the simile from the second line of stanza 3 in “Elegy for Jane”.
5.
What is the “sleep” the speaker refers to in the final stanza of “Elegy for Jane”?
6.
Define satire using the glossary of literary terms in your literature book.
7.
What is the point of Dorothy Parker’s satire in “Resume,” the second stanza?
8.
Write the letters for the rhyme scheme of stanzas one and two in “Funeral Blues.”
9.
Identify two (2) examples of internal rhyme in “The World Is a Beautiful Place….”
10.
Find 2 examples of imagery in “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner.”

Poetry Assignment #2 Poems
Elegy for Jane
(My student, thrown by a horse)
By: Theodore Roethke
I remember the neckcurls, limp and damp as tendrils,
And her quick look, a sidelong pickerel smile;
And how, once startled into talk, the light syllables leaped for her,
And she balanced in the delight of her thought,
A wren, happy, tail into the wind,
Her song trembling with twigs and small branches.
The shade sang with her;
The leaves, their whispers turned to kissing,
And the mould sang in the bleached valleys under the rose.
Oh, when she was sad, she cast herself down into such a pure depth,
Even a father could not find her;
Scraping her cheek against straw;
Stirring the clearest water.
My sparrow, you are not here,
Waiting like a fern, making a spiney shadow.
The sides of wet stones cannot console me,
Not the moss, wound with last light.
If only I could nudge you from this sleep,
My maimed darling, my skitter pigeon.
Over this damp grave I speak the words of my love:
I, with no rights in this matter,
Neither father nor lover.
Funeral Blues
By: W.H. Auden
Stop all of the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.
Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling on the sky the message He is Dead.
Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves,
Let the traffic policeman wear black cotton gloves.
He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong.
The stars are not wanted now; put out every one,
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun,
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the woods;
For nothing now can ever come to any good.
Resume
By: Dorothy Parker
Razors pain you;
Rivers are damp;
Acids stain you;
And drugs cause cramp.
Guns aren’t lawful;
Nooses give;
Gas smells awful;
You might as well live.
The World is a Beautiful Place to Be Born Into
By: Lawrence Ferlinghetti
The world is a beautiful place to be born into
If you don’t mind happiness not always being so very much fun
If you don’t mind a touch of hell now and then just when everything is fine because even in heaven they don’t sing
all the time
The world is a beautiful place to be born into
If you don’t mind some people dying
all the time or maybe only starving some of the time which isn’t half so bad if it isn’t you
Oh the world is a beautiful place to be born into if you don’t much mind a few dead minds
in the higher places or a bomb or two now an then in your upturned faces or such other improprieties is prey to
as our Name Brand society with its men of distinction and its men of extinction
and its various segregations and congressional investigations
and other constipations that out fool flesh
is hear to
Yes the world is the best place of all
for a lot of such things as making the fun scene and making the sad scene and making the love scene and singing/low songs and having inspirations and walking around looking at everything and smelling flowers and goosing statutes and even thinking
and kissing people and making babies and wearing pants and waving hats and dancing on picnics and going swimming in rivers in the middle of the summer and just generally
“living it up”
Yes
but then right in the middle of it
comes the smiling mortician
The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner
By: Randall Jarrell
From my mother’s sleep I fell into the State,
And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze.
Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life,
I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters.
When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.