Nature and Seasons
Poetry Analysis & Oral Interpretation
English Language Arts A30
I.
Oral Interpretation
Prepare and present an oral interpretation of one of the following poems:
o “Fear of the Landscape” by Ian Young
o “Heat” by Archibald Lampman
o “The Camp of Souls” by Isabella Valancy Crawford
o “Hailstorm” by Peter Christensen
o “Angels of Snow” by Lorna Crozier
o “Temagami” by Archibald Lampan
o “Solitude” by Archibald Lampman
o “Bushed” by Earle Birney
o “Snow Tunnels” by Glen Sorestad
o “Coteau" by Barbara Sapergia
Instructions
1. Write an introduction that includes the name of the poem and poet, and a brief overview of the
poem. (Refer to Example #1)
2. Prepare a paraphrase of the poem beginning with - “In this poem, the poet (describes, explains,
reports, etc.) that… (Refer to Example #2)
3. Develop the interpretation – Two/Three Elements -Structure, figurative language, theme,
literary devices (i.e., imagery, symbolism, and allusions) and diction (word choice).
o What are the poet’s feelings about the topic of this poem?
Whenever possible, always provide proof to back up your interpretation.
Example
“The poet uses the word…to emphasize the sorrow felt by the speaker.” (Refer to Example #3)
4. Conclude by giving your own personal response/reaction to this poem. (Refer to Example #4)
Example #1
The poem “……….” by ………….. is about a winter’s night in Saskatchewan. In this poem, the poet
describes the sky, and the land he can see while standing in his yard on a winter night. The poet feels
very connected to his land and wishes that this moment could last forever.
Example #2
A paraphrase is a re-stating of the poem in one’s own words. It must include all the main ideas of the
poem in a simplified form. A paraphrase is not necessarily shorter than the original, but it does maintain
the same point of view.
Example
“Solitude” by Archibald Lampman
How still it is here in the woods. The trees
Stand motionless, as if they did not dare
To stir, lest it should break the spell. The air
Hangs quiet as spaces in a marble frieze.
In the woods, absolutely nothing is moving. The trees appear to be afraid to move in case they break
the peaceful mood. The whole scene looks like a painting.
Example #3
In this poem, the poet’s feelings about the land are emphasized. The poet feels tremendous “…….”
The poet’s father’s death is emphasized in this poem. This is evident by the use of the words “…….”
Example #4
I really liked this poem. It reminded me of a time when my sister and I made snow angels after a fresh
snow many years ago. I can still remember the feel of the cold “frothy” snow against my hands and
face. I can identify with the poet’s comment that this moment became “frozen” in time for her, as the
exact same thing happened to me. When I look back on my childhood, this moment was certainly one
of the high lights of my childhood. It is interesting to learn that this occurrence is a common one for
young people in Canada. I hope that my children also have this experience some day.
Name: ___________________________
Date: ____________________________
Speaking Evaluation
Voice
 Volume (quiet/loud)
 Rate (slow/fast)
2
2
1
1
0
0
Diction
 Pronunciation (proper)
 Enunciation (clear)
2
2
1
1
0
0
Body Language
 Eye Contact
 Gestures
 Posture
2
2
2
1
1
1
0
0
0
3
2
1
0
3
2
1
0
4
4
3
3
2
2
1
1
0
0
4
3
2
1
0
4
3
2
1
0
Content Evaluation
Introduction
Interpretation
 Poet’s feelings about the topic
 Structure, Figurative Language,
Theme, Literary Devices and/or Diction
 Supporting Details (evidence)
5
Personal Response/Reaction
Formal Cover Page
5
Total:
_____
38
Fear of the Landscape
by Ian Young
On a hot morning
walking through rough thicket,
bushes and rocks
close to the bluffs
I was uneasy and clung to things.
The sound of a cricket
or the calls of birds were shrill
lesions in the quiet air
around me, sweltering and still.
The leaves hung from the trees
dangling on thin stems.
I am walking quickly and the land
stops. The ground
drops to a beach of stones
where a silent boat leans at the shore
into a sandy mound,
its stiff poled oars
outstretched.
The lake gulls circling it
cry out in the heat.
The sound of dry breath clings to me.
I hear the sun's core burn.
Have I been too long in cities
that I have such fear
of the landscape?
Heat
by Archibald Lampman
From plains that reel to southward, dim,
The road runs by me white and bare;
Up the steep hill it seems to swim
Beyond, and melt into the glare.
Upward half-way, or it may be
Nearer the summit, slowly steals
A hay-cart, moving dustily
With idly clacking wheels.
By his cart's side the wagoner
Is slouching slowly at his ease,
Half-hidden in the windless blur
Of white dust puffiing to his knees.
This wagon on the height above,
From sky to sky on either hand,
Is the sole thing that seems to move
In all the heat-held land.
Beyond me in the fields the sun
Soaks in the grass and hath his will;
I count the marguerites one by one;
Even the buttercups are still.
On the brook yonder not a breath
Disturbs the spider or the midge.
The water-bugs draw close beneath
The cool gloom of the bridge.
Where the far elm-tree shadows flood
Dark patches in the burning grass,
The cows, each with her peaceful cud,
Lie waiting for the heat to pass.
From somewhere on the slope near by
Into the pale depth of the noon
A wandering thrush slides leisurely
His thin revolving tune.
In intervals of dreams I hear
The cricket from the droughty ground;
The grasshoppers spin into mine ear
A small innumerable sound.
I lift mine eyes sometimes to gaze:
The burning sky-line blinds my sight:
The woods far off are blue with haze:
The hills are drenched in light.
And yet to me not this or that
Is always sharp or always sweet;
In the sloped shadow of my hat
I lean at rest, and drain the heat;
Nay more, I think some blessèd power
Hath brought me wandering idly here:
In the full furnace of this hour
My thoughts grow keen and clear.
“The Camp of Souls” by Isabella Valancy Crawford
My white canoe, like the silvery air
O'er the River of Death that darkly rolls
When the moons of the world are round and fair,
I paddle back from the "Camp of Souls."
When the wishton-wish in the low swamp grieves
Come the dark plumes of red "Singing Leaves."
Two hundred times have the moons of spring
Rolled over the bright bay's azure breath
Since they decked me with plumes of an eagle's wing,
And painted my face with the "paint of death,"
And from their pipes o'er my corpse there broke
The solemn rings of the blue "last smoke."
Two hundred times have the wintry moons
Wrapped the dead earth in a blanket white;
Two hundred times have the wild sky loons
Shrieked in the flush of the golden light
Of the first sweet dawn, when the summer weaves
Her dusky wigwam of perfect leaves.
Two hundred moons of the falling leaf
Since they laid my bow in my dead right hand
And chanted above me the "song of grief"
As I took my way to the spirit land;
Yet when the swallow the blue air cleaves
Come the dark plumes of red "Singing Leaves."
White are the wigwams in that far camp,
And the star-eyed deer on the plains are found;
No bitter marshes or tangled swamp
In the Manitou's happy hunting-ground!
And the moon of summer forever rolls
Above the red men in their "Camp of Souls."
Blue are its lakes as the wild dove's breast,
And their murmurs soft as her gentle note;
As the calm, large stars in the deep sky rest,
The yellow lilies upon them float;
And canoes, like flakes of the silvery snow,
Thro' the tall, rustling rice-beds come and go.
Green are its forests; no warrior wind
Rushes on war trail the dusk grove through,
With leaf-scalps of tall trees mourning behind;
But South Wind, heart friend of Great Manitou,
When ferns and leaves with cool dews are wet,
Bows flowery breaths from his red calumet.
Never upon them the white frosts lie,
Nor glow their green boughs with the "paint of death";
Manitou smiles in the crystal sky,
Close breathing above them His life-strong breath;
And He speaks no more in fierce thunder sound,
So near is His happy hunting-ground.
Yet often I love, in my white canoe,
To come to the forests and camps of earth:
'Twas there death's black arrow pierced me through;
'Twas there my red-browed mother gave me birth;
There I, in the light of a young man's dawn,
Won the lily heart of dusk "Springing Fawn."
And love is a cord woven out of life,
And dyed in the red of the living heart;
And time is the hunter's rusty knife,
That cannot cut the red strands apart:
And I sail from the spirit shore to scan
Where the weaving of that strong cord began.
But I may not come with a giftless hand,
So richly I pile, in my white canoe,
Flowers that bloom in the spirit land,
Immortal smiles of Great Manitou.
When I paddle back to the shores of earth
I scatter them over the white man's hearth.
For love is the breath of the soul set free;
So I cross the river that darkly rolls,
That my spirit may whisper soft to thee
Of thine who wait in the "Camp of Souls."
When the bright day laughs, or the wan night grieves,
Come the dusky plumes of red "Singing Leaves."
“Hailstorm”
by Peter Christensen
I remember the hailstorm
of 1952
as if I were a man then
My memory thickens
with each story
my father tells
of those hard years
I see him standing
in a ripened barley field
adrift in this garden
of winds and clouds
and grain
all ready for harvest
The sky goes grey and black
The barley heads begin
to sway their beards
caught in a desperate wind
Then there is a silence in the land
It smells of false truce
and my father’s figure
transforms from farmer
to scarecrow
White stones
come running towards him
hail prancing
like horses’ hooves
beating the yellow-kernelled stalks
flatly to the ground
I watch his heart
follow the hailstones
to the rich black earth
where side by side
lies the naked seed
and the melting winter
“Angels of Snow”
by Lorna Crozier
Wherever it falls, it is different.
Sometimes too white, too loud.
Sometimes an angel’s wing
Reflected in an open eye,
A phone call at three a.m.—
No one at the end of the line.
Snow can be hard as a slap.
Take the coldest wind you know
And make it deeper.
A taxidermist, it stiffens
The slow and unwitting. A scale,
It measures, calculates
As surreptitiously as light.
Snow has the taste of whatever
Fell before: autumn leaves, feathers,
Pollen from the bright leg of a bee.
It is a lesson in restfulness.
The quiet space left for you
At the end of the day, a memory
You never quite remember,
A cat licking your ear
In the middle of the night.
Snow can be bitter.
It smells like birth should smell.
It tells you, “Start over,”
And when you touch it,
It disappears.
Temagami
by Archibald Lampman
Far in the grim Northwest beyond the lines
That turn the rivers eastward to the sea,
Set with a thousand islands, crowned with pines,
Lies the deep water, wild Temagami:
Wild for the hunter's roving, and the use
Of trappers in its dark and trackless vales,
Wild with the trampling of the giant moose,
And the weird magic of old Indian tales.
All day with steady paddles toward the west
Our heavy-laden long canoe we pressed:
All day we saw the thunder-travelled sky
Purpled with storm in many a trailing tress,
And saw at eve the broken sunset die
In crimson on the silent wilderness.
Solitude
by Archibald Lampman
How still it is here in the woods. The trees
Stand motionless, as if they do not dare
To stir, lest it should break the spell. The air
Hangs quiet as spaces in a marble frieze.
Even this little brook, that runs at ease,
Whispering and gurgling in its knotted bed,
Seems but to deepen with its curling thread
Of sound the shadowy sun-pierced silences.
Sometimes a hawk screams or a woodpecker
Startles the stillness from its fixèd mood
With his loud careless tap. Sometimes I hear
The dreamy white-throat from some far-off tree
Pipe slowly on the listening solitude
His five pure notes succeeding pensively.
Bushed
by Earle Birney
He invented a rainbow but lightning struck it
shattered it into the lake-lap of a mountain
so big his mind slowed when he looked at it
Yet he built a shack on the shore
learned to roast porcupine belly and
wore the quills on his hatband
At first he was out with the dawn
whether it yellowed bright as wood-columbine
or was only a fuzzed moth in a flannel of storm
But he found the mountain was clearly alive
sent messages whizzing down every hot morning
boomed proclamations at noon and spread out
a white guard of goat
before falling asleep on its feet at sundown
When he tried his eyes on the lake ospreys
would fall like valkyries
choosing the cut-throat
He took then to waiting
till the night smoke rose from the boil of the sunset
But the moon carved unknown totems
out of the lakeshore
owls in the beardusky woods derided him
moosehorned cedars circled his swamps and tossed
their antlers up to the stars
then he knew though the mountain slept the winds
were shaping its peak to an arrowhead
poised
And now he could only
bar himself in and wait
for the great flint to come singing into his heart
“Snow Tunnels”
by Glen Sorestad
We burrowed hard-packed snow
like frenetic Richardson ground squirrels
awakened mid-hibernation to find
a strange world of white,
crystals of ice the only medium,
and now transformed into tunnellers
crazed with snow blindness.
If there was an unsullied
snow bank we claimed it for our own
and into it we dug to create
below a surface glazed hard
and within the insulating warmth
a warren of passages, snow caves
we traversed on hands and knees,
overgrown wool-clad field mice.
In this long looking back, what still
lingers on the fringes of recall is
how joyous we were—freed from
looming drudgery to claim snow
as our own world, too small for adults,
a Lilliputian winter world where
all that existed was what we
brought to it. It was whatever
we deemed it to be.
Like today’s parking lot Bobcats
we moved snow, but below the skin
of the world, claustrophobia unknown,
in search of perfect snow, the perfect
grainy drift that would allow a room
we all could gather in, out of sight,
and never be summoned by the bell.
Coteau"
by Barbara Sapergia
from Tombstone Hill
Old Wives Lake shimmers under punding sun
i think of the Bible & the Dead Sea
but i stand in a circle of stones
in this country
you are never alone
wind always with you
even rocks alive
with rust & gold lichens
in the sun
warm rock yields
a hawk hangs on a curve of air
searching for meat
& not to please my eye
in the coulee wolf willow flares silver
these hills feel old, brown backs
like sleeping buffalo
big as hills
i lie on rock
feel the throb
of ten thousand hooves
drum against grass
against warm & yielding earth
in this country
you are never alone
wind all around you
& the piercing odour
of sage rubbed in the hand
hot sky skimming the land
long grass dancing