AP Themes
Tompson
Poetry Journal
This semester you will complete a poetry journal for each remaining week, and you will continue this journal through the majority of second semester. Each week you may choose any poem that strikes your fancy, though you will eventually respond to all of the poems in this packet. They are in no particular order. Every Monday (or first day of the week), you will turn in a poetry journal entry. Each entry should be 3/4 to a page long, double-­‐‑spaced. At the top of each journal entry, write the number & title of the poem. What should be in your journal entry? My primary goal is for you to feel more comfortable about your ability to understand the bigger ideas (the meaning) in a poem. This is your opportunity to simply respond to poetry. If you want to make note of literary elements or techniques, that’s great too. Who knows, you may even come to love poetry! ABSOLUTELY, POSITIVELY do NOT consult any outside sources. That will defeat the purpose of the assignment. I will not be evaluating whether you are “correct” about the poems. For this assignment, there is no “correct” analysis. Your ideas are what matter, not those of some random person in cyberspace. Once you’ve written an entry, write the date you turned it in next to the title on the reverse side of this sheet. Keep this record in a safe place, as you may be asked to turn it in at some future date. Tompson
AP Themes
NAME:
Poetry Journal
____________ 1. “Thanatopsis” by William Cullen Bryant ____________ 2. “When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer” by Walt Whitman ____________ 3. “The Red Wheelbarrow” by William Carlos Williams ____________ 4. “Your Little Voice” by e.e. Cummings ____________ 5. “Some keep the Sabbath going to Church” by Emily Dickinson ____________ 6. “The Sick Rose” by William Blake ____________ 7. “The Wild Swans at Coole” by William Butler Years ____________ 8. “The Starry Night” by Anne Sexton ____________ 9. “Incident” by Countee Cullen ____________ 10. “Before the Mirror” by John Updike ____________ 11. “Nude Descending a Staircase” by X. J. Kennedy ____________ 12. “Lost Sister” by Cathy Song ____________ 13. “Tuesday 9/11/01” by Lucille Clifton ____________ 14. “Constantly Risking Absurdity” by Lawrence Ferlinghetti ____________ 15. “To Television” by Robert Pinsky ____________ 16. “Digging” by Seamus Heaney ____________ 17. “When I Read Shakespeare” by D.H. Lawrence ____________ 18. “Song to Celia” by Ben Johnson ____________ 19. “If We Must Die” by Claude McKay ____________ 20. “True Ease in Writing” by Alexander Pope ____________ 21. “Delight in Disorder” by Robert Herrick ____________ 22. “The American Zen Master” by Dick Allen ____________ 23. “The Gift” by Li Young Lee ____________ 24. “The Fish” by Elizabeth Bishop
William Cullen Bryant. 1794–1878
Thanatopsis
TO HIM who in the love of Nature holds
Communion with her visible forms, she speaks
A various language; for his gayer hours
She has a voice of gladness, and a smile
And eloquence of beauty, and she glides
Into his darker musings, with a mild
And healing sympathy, that steals away
Their sharpness, ere he is aware. When thoughts
Of the last bitter hour come like a blight
Over thy spirit, and sad images
Of the stern agony, and shroud, and pall,
And breathless darkness, and the narrow house,
Make thee to shudder, and grow sick at heart;—
Go forth under the open sky, and list
To Nature's teachings, while from all around—
Earth and her waters, and the depths of air—
Comes a still voice—Yet a few days, and thee
The all-beholding sun shall see no more
In all his course; nor yet in the cold ground,
Where thy pale form was laid, with many tears,
Nor in the embrace of ocean, shall exist
Thy image. Earth, that nourished thee, shall claim
Thy growth, to be resolved to earth again,
And, lost each human trace, surrendering up
Thine individual being, shalt thou go
To mix forever with the elements;
To be a brother to the insensible rock,
And to the sluggish clod, which the rude swain
Turns with his share, and treads upon. The oak
Shall send his roots abroad, and pierce thy mould.
Yet not to thine eternal resting-place
Shalt thou retire alone, nor couldst thou wish
Couch more magnificent. Thou shalt lie down
With patriarchs of the infant world,—with kings,
The powerful of the earth,—the wise, the good,
Fair forms, and hoary seers of ages past,
All in one mighty sepulchre. The hills
Rock-ribbed and ancient as the sun; the vales
Stretching in pensive quietness between;
The venerable woods—rivers that move
In majesty, and the complaining brooks
That make the meadows green; and, poured round all,
Old Ocean's gray and melancholy waste,—
Are but the solemn decorations all
Of the great tomb of man! The golden sun,
The planets, all the infinite host of heaven,
Are shining on the sad abodes of death,
Through the still lapse of ages. All that tread
The globe are but a handful to the tribes
That slumber in its bosom.—Take the wings
Of morning, pierce the Barcan wilderness,
Or lose thyself in the continuous woods
Where rolls the Oregon, and hears no sound,
Save his own dashings,—yet the dead are there:
And millions in those solitudes, since first
The flight of years began, have laid them down
In their last sleep—the dead reign there alone.
So shalt thou rest; and what if thou withdraw
In silence from the living, and no friend
Take note of thy departure? All that breathe
Will share thy destiny. The gay will laugh
When thou art gone, the solemn brood of care
Plod on, and each one as before will chase
His favorite phantom; yet all these shall leave
Their mirth and their employments, and shall come
And make their bed with thee. As the long train
Of ages glide away, the sons of men,
The youth in life's green spring, and he who goes
In the full strength of years, matron and maid,
The speechless babe, and the gray-headed man—
Shall one by one be gathered to thy side
By those, who in their turn shall follow them.
So live, that when thy summons comes to join
The innumerable caravan which moves
To that mysterious realm, where each shall take
His chamber in the silent halls of death,
Thou go not, like the quarry-slave at night,
Scourged to his dungeon, but, sustained and soothed
By an unfaltering trust, approach thy grave
Like one who wraps the drapery of his couch
About him, and lies down to pleasant dreams.
When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer
BY WALT WHITMAN
When I heard the learn’d astronomer,
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me,
When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them,
When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,
How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick,
Till rising and gliding out I wander’d off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.
The Red Wheelbarrow
William Carlos Williams
so much depends
upon
a red wheel
!barrow
glazed with rain!
water
beside the white
!chickens.
e. e. cummings (1894 -­‐‑ 1962) Your Little Voice your little voice Over the wires came leaping and i felt suddenly dizzy With the jostling and shouting of merry flowers wee skipping high-­‐‑heeled flames courtesied before my eyes or twinkling over to my side Looked up with impertinently exquisite faces floating hands were laid upon me I was whirled and tossed into delicious dancing up Up with the pale important stars and the Humorous moon dear girl How i was crazy how i cried when i heard over time and tide and death leaping Sweetly your voice
Some keep the Sabbath going to Church – (236)
BY EMILY DICKINSON
Some keep the Sabbath going to Church –
I keep it, staying at Home –
With a Bobolink for a Chorister –
And an Orchard, for a Dome –
Some keep the Sabbath in Surplice –
I, just wear my Wings –
And instead of tolling the Bell, for Church,
Our little Sexton – sings.
God preaches, a noted Clergyman –
And the sermon is never long,
So instead of getting to Heaven, at last –
I’m going, all along.
The Sick Rose
BY WILLIAM BLAKE
O Rose thou art sick.
The invisible worm,
That flies in the night
In the howling storm:
Has found out thy bed
Of crimson joy:
And his dark secret love
Does thy life destroy.
The Wild Swans At Coole
by William Butler Yeats
THE trees are in their autumn beauty,
The woodland paths are dry,
Under the October twilight the water
Mirrors a still sky;
Upon the brimming water among the stones
Are nine-and-fifty Swans.
The nineteenth autumn has come upon me
Since I first made my count;
I saw, before I had well finished,
All suddenly mount
And scatter wheeling in great broken rings
Upon their clamorous wings.
I have looked upon those brilliant creatures,
And now my heart is sore.
All's changed since I, hearing at twilight,
The first time on this shore,
The bell-beat of their wings above my head,
Trod with a lighter tread.
Unwearied still, lover by lover,
They paddle in the cold
Companionable streams or climb the air;
Their hearts have not grown old;
Passion or conquest, wander where they will,
Attend upon them still.
But now they drift on the still water,
Mysterious, beautiful;
Among what rushes will they build,
By what lake's edge or pool
Delight men's eyes when I awake some day
To find they have flown away?
The Starry Night
BY ANNE SEXTON
That does not keep me from having a terrible need of—shall I say the word—religion.
Then I go out at night to paint the stars.
-Vincent Van Gogh in a letter to his brother
The town does not exist
except where one black-haired tree slips
up like a drowned woman into the hot sky.
The town is silent. The night boils with eleven stars.
Oh starry starry night! This is how
I want to die.
It moves. They are all alive.
Even the moon bulges in its orange irons
to push children, like a god, from its eye.
The old unseen serpent swallows up the stars.
Oh starry starry night! This is how
I want to die:
into that rushing beast of the night,
sucked up by that great dragon, to split
from my life with no flag,
no belly,
no cry.
Incident
-Countee Cullen (1903-1946)
Once riding in old Baltimore
Heart-filled, head-filled with glee,
I saw a Baltimorean
Keep looking straight at me.
Now I was eight and very small,
And he was no whit bigger,
And so I smiled, but he poked out
His tongue, and called me, “Nigger.”
I saw the whole of Baltimore
From May until December;
Of all the things that happened there
That’s all that I remember.
5
10
Before the Mirror John Updike (1996)
How many of us still remember
when Picasso’s “Girl Before a Mirror” hung
at the turning of the stairs in the preexpansion Museum of Modern Art?
Millions of us, probably, but we form
a dwindling population. Garish
and brush-slashed and yet as balanced
as a cardboard Queen in a deck of giant cards,
the painting proclaimed, “Enter here
and abandon preconception.” She bounced
the erotic balls of herself back and forth
between reflection and reality.
Now I discover, in the recent retrospective at the establishment,
that the vivid painting dates
from March of 1932, the very month which I first saw light,
squinting nostalgia for the womb.
I bend closer, inspecting. The blacks,
the stripy cyanide greens are still uncracked,
I note with satisfaction; the cherry reds
and lemon yellows full of childish juice.
No sag, no wrinkle. Fresh as paint. Back then
they knew how, I reflect, to lay it on.
Nude Descending a Staircase
-X. J. Kennedy (1961)
Toe upon toe, a snowing flesh, !
A gold of lemon, root and rind,
!She sifts in sunlight down the stairs !
With nothing on. Nor on her mind.
We spy beneath the banister !
A constant thresh of thigh on thigh-- !
Her lips imprint the swinging air !
That parts to let her parts go by.
One-woman waterfall, she wears !
Her slow descent like a long cape !
And pausing, on the final stair !
Collects her motions into shape.
Cathy Song
Lost Sister
1
In China,
even the peasants
named their first daughters
Jade―
the stone that in the far fields
could moisten the dry season,
could make men move mountains
for the healing green of the inner hills
glistening like slices of winter melon.
And the daughters were grateful:
They never left home.
To move freely was a luxury
stolen from them at birth.
Instead, they gathered patience;
learning to walk in shoes
the size of teacups,
without breaking―
the arc of their movements
as dormant as the rooted willow,
as redundant as the farmyard hens.
But they traveled far
in surviving,
learning to stretch the family rice,
to quiet the demons,
the noisy stomachs.
2
There is a sister
across the ocean,
who relinquished her name,
diluting jade green
with the blue of the Pacific.
Rising with a tide of locusts,
she swarmed with others
to inundate another shore.
In America,
there are many roads
and women can stride along with men.
But in another wilderness,
the possibilities,
the loneliness,
can strangulate like jungle vines.
The meager provisions and sentiments
of once belonging―
fermented roots, Mah-Jong tiles and firecrackers―set but
a flimsy household
in a forest of nightless cities.
A giant snake rattles above,
spewing black clouds into your kitchen.
Dough-faced landlords
slip in and out of your keyholes,
making claims you don't understand,
tapping into your communication systems
of laundry lines and restaurant chains.
You find you need China:
your one fragile identification,
a jade link
handcuffed to your wrist.
You remember your mother
who walked for centuries,
footless―
and like her,
you have left no footprints,
but only because
there is an ocean in between,
the unremitting space of your rebellion.
tuesday 9/11/01
Lucille Clifton
Thunder and lighting and our world
Is another place no day
Will ever be the same no blood
Untouched
They know this storm in otherwheres
israel ireland palestine
but God has blessed America
we sing
and God has blessed America
to learn that no one is exempt
the world is one all fear
is one all life all death
all one
Constantly Risking Absurdity - Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Constantly risking absurdity
and death
whenever he performs
above the heads
of his audience
the poet like an acrobat
climbs on rime
to a high wire of his own making
and balancing on eyebeams
above a sea of faces
paces his way
to the other side of the day
performing entrachats
and sleight-of-foot tricks
and other high theatrics
and all without mistaking
any thing
for what it may not be
For he's the super realist
who must perforce perceive
taut truth
before the taking of each stance or step
in his supposed advance
toward that still higher perch
where Beauty stands and waits
with gravity
to start her death-defying leap
And he
a little charleychaplin man
who may or may not catch
her fair eternal form
spreadeagled in the empty air
of existence
Robert Pinsky
To Television
Not a "window on the world"
But as we call you,
A box a tube
Terrarium of dreams and wonders.
Coffer of shades, ordained
Cotillion of phosphors
Or liquid crystal
Homey miracle, tub
Of acquiescence, vein of defiance.
Your patron in the pantheon would be Hermes
Raster dance,
Quick one, little thief, escort
Of the dying and comfort of the sick,
In a blue glow my father and little sister sat
Snuggled in one chair watching you
Their wife and mother was sick in the head
I scorned you and them as I scorned so much
Now I like you best in a hotel room,
Maybe minutes
Before I have to face an audience: behind
The doors of the armoire, box
Within a box--Tom & Jerry, or also brilliant
And reassuring, Oprah Winfrey.
Thank you, for I watched, I watched
Sid Caesar speaking French and Japanese not
Through knowledge but imagination,
His quickness, and Thank You, I watched live
Jackie Robinson stealing
Home, the image--O strung shell--enduring
Fleeter than light like these words we
Remember in, they too winged
At the helmet and ankles.
Digging
BY SEAMUS HEANEY
Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.
Under my window, a clean rasping sound
When the spade sinks into gravelly ground:
My father, digging. I look down
Till his straining rump among the flowerbeds
Bends low, comes up twenty years away
Stooping in rhythm through potato drills
Where he was digging.
The coarse boot nestled on the lug, the shaft
Against the inside knee was levered firmly.
He rooted out tall tops, buried the bright edge deep
To scatter new potatoes that we picked,
Loving their cool hardness in our hands.
By God, the old man could handle a spade.
Just like his old man.
My grandfather cut more turf in a day
Than any other man on Toner’s bog.
Once I carried him milk in a bottle
Corked sloppily with paper. He straightened up
To drink it, then fell to right away
Nicking and slicing neatly, heaving sods
Over his shoulder, going down and down
For the good turf. Digging.
The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap
Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge
Through living roots awaken in my head.
But I’ve no spade to follow men like them.
Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests.
I’ll dig with it.
When I Read Shakespeare –D.H. Lawrence
When I read Shakespeare I am struck with wonder
that such trivial people should muse and thunder
in such lovely language.
Lear, the old buffer, you wonder his daughters
5
didn't treat him rougher,
the old chough, the old chuffer!
And Hamlet, how boring, how boring to live with,
so mean and self-conscious, blowing and snoring
his wonderful speeches, full of other folks' whoring!
10
And Macbeth and his Lady, who should have been choring,
such suburban ambition, so messily goring
old Duncan with daggers!
How boring, how small Shakespeare's people are!
Yet the language so lovely! like the dyes from gas-tar.
Song to Celia
BY BEN JONSON
Drink to me only with thine eyes,
And I will pledge with mine;
Or leave a kiss but in the cup,
And I’ll not look for wine.
The thirst that from the soul doth rise
Doth ask a drink divine;
But might I of Jove’s nectar sup,
I would not change for thine.
I sent thee late a rosy wreath,
Not so much honouring thee
As giving it a hope, that there
It could not withered be.
But thou thereon didst only breathe,
And sent’st it back to me;
Since when it grows, and smells, I swear,
Not of itself, but thee.
If We Must Die
Claude McKay
If we must die, let it not be like hogs
Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot,
While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs,
Making their mock at our accursed lot.
If we muyst die, O let us nobly die,
So that our precious blood may not be shed
In vain; then even the monsters we defy
Shall be constrained to honor us though dead!
O kinsman! we must meet the common foe!
Though far outnumbered let us show us brave,
And for their thousand blows deal one deathblow!
What though before us lies the open grave?
Like men we’ll face the murderous, cowardly pack,
Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!
True Ease in Writing
True ease in writing comes from art, not chance,
As those move easiest who have learned to dance.
‘Tis not enough no harshness gives offense,
The sound nmust seem as Echo to the sense:
Soft is the strain when Zephyr gently blows
And the smooth stream in smoother numbers flows;
But when loud surges lash the sounding shore,
The harse, rough verse should like the torrent roar:
When Ajax strives some rock’s vast weight to throw,
The line too labors, and the words move slow;
Not so, when swift Camilla scours the plain,
Flies o’er the unbending corn, and skims along the main.
the west wind
legendary Greek hero famous for his strength
legendary woman warrior
--Alexander Pope
Delight in Disorder
-Robert Herrick
A sweet disorder in the dress
Kindels in clothes a wantonness
A lawn* about the shoulders thrown
Into a fine distraction;
An erring lace, which here and there
Enthralls the crimson stomacher;
A cuff neglected, and thereby
Ribbons to flow confusedly;
A winning wave, deserving note,
In the tempestuous petticoat;
A careless shoestring, in whose tie
I see a wild civility;
Do more bewitch me than when art
Is too precise in every part.
linen scarf
5
10
The American Zen Master
-Dick Allen
Zen also is to be found, he tried to instruct us,
in a car dealer's showroom, and in shoelaces. . . . Also, in America,
you don't sit at the feet of the Zen Master
but you have coffee with him, preferably at Starbucks,
next to one of those outsized suburban malls where everyone looks half dressed,
half dazed and half dead. "The secret of Zen," the Master said,
may come halfway through a Yankee Candle store
when you realize you can smell nothing,
or from reading Hallmark Cards backwards,
or choosing nothing from an overstuffed refrigerator. But it isn't a secret."
As for our questions,
instead of smiting us around the shoulders with a bamboo cane,
he'd hand us little writing-intensive packets of Equal and Sweet 'N Low,
then lean back, smiling like a sushi plate. Sometimes, he'd babble:
"Tums, drive-up windows, ATM machines.
Checkout-line scanners, 1000 Megahertz,
the industrial landscapes so remarkable." Often
we'd catch him staring at the intricate face
of a digital wristwatch, or contemplating
a simple button-down shirt on a white shelf in a Wal-Mart.
All things. "Throw your computers into the eyes of children,
he loved to tell us. "Work for the Federal administration,
if that's what you must.
Wear last year's fashions, re-endure the 8os.
Take the last train to Clarksville.
If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill her." We'd come to Zen
because everything else seemed about the mystery, not of it,
and all we could think about for days was money,
Internet cable, huge pasta dishes. Our pain is real, we said.
The only words we have to describe our lives
are "Please wake us!" Our Zen Master
was patient. Our Zen Master assigned us these exercises: "Tie your shoes.
Open doors. Close them. Gaze
into the heart of a microwave. Fold a piece of paper eight times into halves.
Present yourself with the present." Still, we puzzled.
Riding Chevrolets into the dark, we'd turn around to find
only a series of accidents strewn behind us,
our dead mothers, our dead fathers, our dead friends.
And when he'd say "Focus on what's in store windows," we could see the Obvious,
and where the Obvious came from, and beyond the Obvious,
but the Obvious eluded us. I thought it was William James,
our love of Marilyn Monroe. He said it was the Suburu of Wiltshire Boulevard
and to give it more time. He didn't care. We shouldn't care.
No one should care. One evening,
he mentioned the greatest work is not to work at all.
So difficult. So difficult to do nothing
but gaze at the Momentum. The small boats upon the Momentum. We didn't get it.
We'd spread our wings and all they'd brushed was air.
He laughed at our earnestness. Finally,
when a man in a business suit, after only one interview,
grasped "the koan of the singing microphone without a voice behind it,"
smote his forehead and burst into spacious skies,
we became jealous. "Here's your own koan," the Master whispered.
"Don't expect anything of it but itself:
'Why is the Statue of Liberty invisible as the scent of cherry blossoms?'"
then smiled his enlightened smile, and bowed off into Satori
or was that the Food Court, at the end of a path of blue tiles.
The Gift
-Li Young Lee
To pull the metal splinter from my palm
my father recited a story in a low voice.
I watched his lovely face and not the blade.
Before the story ended, he'd removed
the iron sliver I thought I'd die from.
I can't remember the tale,
but hear his voice still, a well
of dark water, a prayer.
And I recall his hands,
two measures of tenderness
he laid against my face,
the flames of discipline
he raised above my head.
Had you entered that afternoon
you would have thought you saw a man
planting something in a boy's palm,
a silver tear, a tiny flame.
Had you followed that boy
you would have arrived here,
where I bend over my wife's right hand.
Look how I shave her thumbnail down
so carefully she feels no pain.
Watch as I lift the splinter out.
I was seven when my father
took my hand like this,
and I did not hold that shard
between my fingers and think,
Metal that will bury me,
christen it Little Assassin,
Ore Going Deep for My Heart.
And I did not lift up my wound and cry,
Death visited here!
I did what a child does
when he's given something to keep.
I kissed my father.
The Fish
by Elizabeth Bishop
I caught a tremendous fish
and held him beside the boat
half out of water, with my hook
fast in a corner of his mouth.
He didn't fight.
He hadn't fought at all.
He hung a grunting weight,
battered and venerable
and homely. Here and there
his brown skin hung in strips
like ancient wallpaper,
and its pattern of darker brown
was like wallpaper:
shapes like full-blown roses
stained and lost through age.
He was speckled with barnacles,
fine rosettes of lime,
and infested
with tiny white sea-lice,
and underneath two or three
rags of green weed hung down.
While his gills were breathing in
the terrible oxygen
—the frightening gills,
fresh and crisp with blood,
that can cut so badly—
I thought of the coarse white flesh
packed in like feathers,
the big bones and the little bones,
the dramatic reds and blacks
of his shiny entrails,
and the pink swim-bladder
like a big peony.
I looked into his eyes
which were far larger than mine
but shallower, and yellowed,
the irises backed and packed
with tarnished tinfoil
seen through the lenses
of old scratched isinglass.
They shifted a little, but not
to return my stare.
—It was more like the tipping
of an object toward the light.
I admired his sullen face,
the mechanism of his jaw,
and then I saw
that from his lower lip
—if you could call it a lip—
grim, wet, and weaponlike,
hung five old pieces of fish-line,
or four and a wire leader
with the swivel still attached,
with all their five big hooks
grown firmly in his mouth.
A green line, frayed at the end
where he broke it, two heavier lines,
and a fine black thread
still crimped from the strain and snap
when it broke and he got away.
Like medals with their ribbons
frayed and wavering,
a five-haired beard of wisdom
trailing from his aching jaw.
I stared and stared
and victory filled up
the little rented boat,
from the pool of bilge
where oil had spread a rainbow
around the rusted engine
to the bailer rusted orange,
the sun-cracked thwarts,
the oarlocks on their strings,
the gunnels—until everything
was rainbow, rainbow, rainbow!
And I let the fish go.