The Freshly Cut Grass comes in on children’s shoes. The house is laughing. Dorothy Cameron Smith 1. What figure of speech is used in the description of the house? Explain your answer. 2. Summarize the meaning of this poem. l (a l(a le af fa ll s) one l iness --e.e.cummings 1. Attempt to read this poem. Try using the parenthesis—read what inside and what’s outside. Rewrite the poem in standard form. 2. How are the meaning and form related? What does the poem mean? How does the shape relate to this? 3. What is effective about the image Cummings uses? Why? Canadian January Night Ice storm: the hill a pyramid of black crystal down which the cars slide like phosphorescent beetles while I, walking backwards in obedience to the wind, am possessed of the fearful knowledge my compatriots share but almost never utter: this is a country where a man can die simply from being caught outside. Alden Nowlan 1. Find a metaphor in this poem and tell what two things are being compared. 2. Find a simile in this poem and tell what two things are being compared. 3. In your own words, explain why the speaker of the poem is walking backwards. 4. At the end of the poem, why may Nowlan have chosen to break the line after “simply from being”? Mother to Son Well, son, I'll tell you: Life for me ain't been no crystal stair. It's had tacks in it, And splinters, And boards torn up, And places with no carpet on the floor -Bare. But all the time I'se been a-climbin' on, And reachin' landin's, And turnin' corners, And sometimes goin' in the dark Where there ain't been no light. So boy, don't you turn back. Don't you set down on the steps 'Cause you finds it's kinder hard. Don't you fall now -For I'se still goin', honey, I'se still climbin', And life for me ain't been no crystal stair. Langston Hughes 1. Why might Hughes have chosen to break lines 6 and 7 the way he did? 2. What message is the mother trying to give her son? 3. What is used as a metaphor for life? What kind of life has the mother had? 4. Is this a narrative poem or a lyric poem? 5. Who is the speaker in this poem? Who is the speaker speaking to? 6. What is a theme of this poem? Why would you consider this to be a theme? 7. Give an example of strong imagery in this poem. What sense does the image appeal to? 8. Describe the tone of this poem. Introduction to Poetry Billy Collins I ask them to take a poem and hold it up to the light like a color slide or press an ear against its hive. I say drop a mouse into a poem and watch him probe his way out, or walk inside the poem's room and feel the walls for a light switch. I want them to waterski across the surface of a poem waving at the author's name on the shore. But all they want to do is tie the poem to a chair with rope and torture a confession out of it. They begin beating it with a hose to find out what it really means. Cartoon Physics, part 1 -Nick Flynn Children under, say, ten, shouldn't know that the universe is ever-expanding, inexorably pushing into the vacuum, galaxies swallowed by galaxies, whole solar systems collapsing, all of it acted out in silence. At ten we are still learning the rules of cartoon animation, that if a man draws a door on a rock only he can pass through it. Anyone else who tries will crash into the rock. Ten-year-olds should stick with burning houses, car wrecks, ships going down -- earthbound, tangible disasters, arenas where they can be heroes. You can run back into a burning house, sinking ships have lifeboats, the trucks will come with their ladders, if you jump you will be saved. A child places her hand on the roof of a schoolbus, & drives across a city of sand. She knows the exact spot it will skid, at which point the bridge will give, who will swim to safety & who will be pulled under by sharks. She will learn that if a man runs off the edge of a cliff he will not fall until he notices his mistake. Love Poem With Toast Miller Williams Some of what we do, we do to make things happen, the alarm to wake us up, the coffee to perc, the car to start. The rest of what we do, we do trying to keep something from doing something, the skin from aging, the hoe from rusting, the truth from getting out. With yes and no like the poles of a battery powering our passage through the days, we move, as we call it, forward, wanting to be wanted, wanting not to lose the rain forest, wanting the water to boil, wanting not to have cancer, wanting to be home by dark, wanting not to run out of gas, as each of us wants the other watching at the end, as both want not to leave the other alone, as wanting to love beyond this meat and bone, we gaze across breakfast and pretend. Sonnet LXXIII: That Time of Year thou mayst in me Behold 1 That time of year thou mayst in me behold 2 When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang 3 Upon those boughs which shake against the cold, 4 Bare ruin'd choirs, where late the sweet birds sang. 5 In me thou see'st the twilight of such day 6 As after sunset fadeth in the west, 7 Which by and by black night doth take away, 8 Death's second self, that seals up all in rest. 9 In me thou see'st the glowing of such fire 10 That on the ashes of his youth doth lie, 11 As the death-bed whereon it must expire, 12 Consum'd with that which it was nourish'd by. 13 This thou perceiv'st, which makes thy love more strong, 14 To love that well which thou must leave ere long. Notes: 12 –that: i.e., the ashes of what was formerly the fuel. “Warren Pryor” –Alden Nowlan When every pencil meant a sacrifice his parents boarded him at school in town, slaving to free him from the stony fields, the meagre acreage that bore them down. They blushed with pride when, at his graduation, they watched him picking up the slender scroll, his passport from the years of brutal toil and lonely patience in a barren hole. When he went in the Bank their cups ran over. They marvelled how he wore a milk-white shirt work days and jeans on Sundays. He was saved from their thistle-strewn farm and its red dirt. And he said nothing. Hard and serious like a young bear inside his teller’s cage, his axe-hewn hands upon the paper bills aching with empty strength and throttled rage. IN A STATION OF THE METRO The apparition of these faces in the crowd; Petals on a wet, black bough. Ezra Pound (1919) Funeral Blues by W. H. Auden Stop all 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 policemen 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. CXXX --Shakespeare My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun; Coral is far more red than her lips' red: If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun; If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head. I have seen roses damask'd, red and white, But no such roses see I in her cheeks; And in some perfumes is there more delight Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks. I love to hear her speak, yet well I know That music hath a far more pleasing sound: I grant I never saw a goddess go,— My mistress, when she walks, treads on the ground: And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare As any she belied with false compare. Hawkmoon 269 by U2 Like a desert needs rain Like a town needs a name I need your love Like a drifter needs a room Hawkmoon I need your love Like a rhythm unbroken Like drums in the night Like sweet soul music Like sunlight I need your love Like coming home And you don't know where you've been Like black coffee Like nicotine I need your love When the night has no end And the day yet to begin As the room spins around I need your love Like a Phoenix rising needs a holy tree Like the sweet revenge of a bitter enemy I need your love Like the hot needs the sun Like honey on her tongue Like the muzzle of a gun Like oxygen I need your love (I need your love) When the night has no end And the day yet to begin As the room spins around I need your love Like thunder needs rain Like a preacher needs pain Like tongues of flame I need your love Like a needle needs a vein Like someone to blame Like a thought unchained Like a runaway train I need your love Like faith needs a doubt Like a freeway out I need your love Like powder needs a spark Like lies need the dark I need your love Marginalia Sometimes the notes are ferocious, skirmishes against the author raging along the borders of every page in tiny black script. If I could just get my hands on you, Kierkegaard, or Conor Cruise O'Brien, they seem to say, I would bolt the door and beat some logic into your head. Other comments are more offhand, dismissive 'Nonsense.' 'Please! ' 'HA! ! ' that kind of thing. I remember once looking up from my reading, my thumb as a bookmark, trying to imagine what the person must look like why wrote 'Don't be a ninny' alongside a paragraph in The Life of Emily Dickinson. Students are more modest needing to leave only their splayed footprints along the shore of the page. One scrawls 'Metaphor' next to a stanza of Eliot's. Another notes the presence of 'Irony' fifty times outside the paragraphs of A Modest Proposal. Or they are fans who cheer from the empty bleachers, Hands cupped around their mouths. 'Absolutely,' they shout to Duns Scotus and James Baldwin. 'Yes.' 'Bull's-eye.' 'My man! ' Check marks, asterisks, and exclamation points rain down along the sidelines. And if you have managed to graduate from college without ever having written 'Man vs. Nature' in a margin, perhaps now is the time to take one step forward. We have all seized the white perimeter as our own and reached for a pen if only to show we did not just laze in an armchair turning pages; we pressed a thought into the wayside, planted an impression along the verge. Even Irish monks in their cold scriptoria jotted along the borders of the Gospels brief asides about the pains of copying, a bird signing near their window, or the sunlight that illuminated their pageanonymous men catching a ride into the future on a vessel more lasting than themselves. And you have not read Joshua Reynolds, they say, until you have read him enwreathed with Blake's furious scribbling. Yet the one I think of most often, the one that dangles from me like a locket, was written in the copy of Catcher in the Rye I borrowed from the local library one slow, hot summer. I was just beginning high school then, reading books on a davenport in my parents' living room, and I cannot tell you how vastly my loneliness was deepened, how poignant and amplified the world before me seemed, when I found on one page A few greasy looking smears and next to them, written in soft pencilby a beautiful girl, I could tell, whom I would never meet'Pardon the egg salad stains, but I'm in love Some Days by Billy Collins Some days I put the people in their places at the table, bend their legs at the knees, if they come with that feature, and fix them into the tiny wooden chairs. All afternoon they face one another, the man in the brown suit, the woman in the blue dress, perfectly motionless, perfectly behaved. But other days, I am the one who is lifted up by the ribs, then lowered into the dining room of a dollhouse to sit with the others at the long table. Very funny, but how would you like it if you never knew from one day to the next if you were going to spend it striding around like a vivid god, your shoulders in the clouds, or sitting down there amidst the wallpaper, staring straight ahead with your little plastic face? Picnic, Lightning By Billy Collins "My very photogenic mother died in a freak accident (picnic, lightning) when I was three." -Lolita It is possible to be struck by a meteor or a single-engine plane while reading in a chair at home. Safes drop from rooftops and flatten the odd pedestrian mostly within the panels of the comics, but still, we know it is possible, as well as the flash of summer lightning, the thermos toppling over, spilling out onto the grass. And we know the message can be delivered from within. The heart, no valentine, decides to quit after lunch, the power shut off like a switch, or a tiny dark ship is unmoored into the flow of the body's rivers, the brain a monastery, defenseless on the shore. This is what I think about when I shovel compost into a wheelbarrow, and when I fill the long flower boxes, then press into rows the limp roots of red impatiens-the instant hand of Death always ready to burst forth from the sleeve of his voluminous cloak. Then the soil is full of marvels, bits of leaf like flakes off a fresco, red-brown pine needles, a beetle quick to burrow back under the loam. Then the wheelbarrow is a wilder blue, the clouds a brighter white, and all I hear is the rasp of the steel edge against a round stone, the small plants singing with lifted faces, and the click of the sundial as one hour sweeps into the next. Love Poem With Toast Some of what we do, we do to make things happen, the alarm to wake us up, the coffee to perc, the car to start. The rest of what we do, we do trying to keep something from doing something, the skin from aging, the hoe from rusting, the truth from getting out. With yes and no like the poles of a battery powering our passage through the days, we move, as we call it, forward, wanting to be wanted, wanting not to lose the rain forest, wanting the water to boil, wanting not to have cancer, wanting to be home by dark, wanting not to run out of gas, as each of us wants the other watching at the end, as both want not to leave the other alone, as wanting to love beyond this meat and bone, we gaze across breakfast and pretend. Miller Williams The Chimney Sweep When my mother died I was very young, And my father sold me while yet my tongue Could scarcely cry ``'weep! 'weep! 'weep! 'weep!'' So your chimneys I sweep, & in soot I sleep. There's little Tom Dacre, who cried when his head, That curl'd like a lamb's back, was shav'd: so I said ``Hush, Tom! never mind it, for when you head's bare You know that the soot cannot spoil your white hair. And so he was quiet, & that very night, As Tom was a-sleeping, he had such a sight! That thousands of sweepers, Dick, Joe, Ned, & Jack, Were all of them lock'd up in coffins of black And by came an Angel who had a bright key, And he open'd the coffins & set them free; Then down a green plain leaping, laughing, they run, And wash in a river, and shine in the Sun. Then naked & white, all their bags left behind, They rise upon clouds and sport in the wind; And the Angel told Tom, if he'd be a good boy, He'd have God for his father, & never want joy. And so Tom awoke; and we rose in the dark, And got with our bags & our brushes to work, Tho the morning was cold, Tom was happy & warm, So if all do their duty they need not fear harm --William Blake The Road Not Taken –Robert Frost TWO roads diverged in a yellow wood, And sorry I could not travel both And be one traveler, long I stood And looked down one as far as I could To where it bent in the undergrowth; Then took the other, as just as fair, And having perhaps the better claim Because it was grassy and wanted wear; Though as for that, the passing there Had worn them really about the same, And both that morning equally lay In leaves no step had trodden black. Oh, I marked the first for another day! Yet knowing how way leads on to way I doubted if I should ever come back. I shall be telling this with a sigh Somewhere ages and ages hence: Two roads diverged in a wood, and I, I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference. -1919 5 10 15 20 The Fog The fog comes on little cat feet. It sits looking over harbor and city on silent haunches and then moves on. --Carl Sandburg SETTING THE TABLE (i) Knife who comes to the table fresh from killing the pig, edge of edges, entry into zip. Knife who can swim as its secret through the dialogue or glimmer in a kitchen drawer. Who first appeared in God’s hand to divide the day from the night, then the sheep from the goats, then from the other sheep, then from their comfortable fleeces. Nothing sinister in this except it had to happen and it was the first to have to. The imperative mood. For what we are about to take we must be grateful. (ii) Fork a touch of kestrel, of Chopin, your hand with its fork hovers above the plate, or punctuates a proposition. This is the devil’s favourite instrument, the fourfold family of prongs: Hard Place, Rock, Something You Should Know, and For Your Own Good. At rest, face up, it says, please, its tines pathetic as an old man’s fingers on a bed. Face down it says anything that moves. (iii) Spoon whose eloquence is tongueless, witless, fingerless, an absent egg. Hi Ho, sing knife and fork, as off they go, chummy as good cop and bad cop, to interrogate the supper. Spoon waits and reflects your expression, inverted, in its tarnished moonlight. It knows what it knows. It knows hunger from the inside out. --Don McKay You Reading This, Be Ready Starting here, what do you want to remember? How sunlight creeps along a shining floor? What scent of old wood hovers, what softened sound from outside fills the air? Will you ever bring a better gift for the world than the breathing respect that you carry wherever you go right now? Are you waiting for time to show you some better thoughts? When you turn around, starting here, lift this new glimpse that you found; carry into evening all that you want from this day. This interval you spent reading or hearing this, keep it for life— What can anyone give you greater than now, starting here, right in this room, when you turn around? --William Stafford i thank You God for most this amazing day:for the leaping greenly spirits of trees and a blue true dream of sky;and for everything which is natural which is infinite which is yes (i who have died am alive again today, and this is the sun's birthday;this is the birth day of life and love and wings:and of the gay great happening illimitably earth) how should tasting touching hearing seeing breathing any-lifted from the no of all nothing-human merely being doubt unimaginably You? (now the ears of my ears awake and now the eyes of my eyes are opened) -e.e. cummings