AP Literature & Composition Summer Work 2013
How will reading or not reading these books and completing the assignments affect to my permanent
placement or grade in AP Lit?
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Failure to read the texts and complete the assignments may result in your being placed
in a non-AP class.
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You will be tested on the texts during the first full week of school.
You will also be given a grade for the posts, annotations, completed worksheet, and AP
Major Works Data Sheet that accompany your reading.
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We will be using the texts as a part of many discussions and assignments throughout
the year. If you haven't read them, you'll be at a definite disadvantage.
A Note about Plagiarism: Plagiarism is not acceptable. While you may (and are even encouraged to) consult
outside sources and references to deepen your understanding of the works that you read, the work that you
submit must be your own – your own thoughts and interpretations, in your own words. Any phrases from other
sources should be properly cited in MLA form. No credit will be given for work that is plagiarized, and any
student who plagiarizes will be referred for removal from the course.
How to Read Literature Like a Professor
Discussion Board Assignments
As part of your summer work, you are required to read How to Read Literature Like a Professor in its entirety.
You should actively read by annotating, especially noting main concepts in each chapter. In addition, you are
required to post analyses and comments on our class blog: http://mccallsenglishclass.blogspot.com. Please
return your email address to the contract on the front of this packet as soon as possible. I will add your email
address to the blog, and you will receive an invitation to join via the email address you give me.
The posts will be due three times throughout the summer:
June 10: Ch. 1-10, p. 1-81
June 24: Ch. 11-18, p. 82-162
July 8: Ch. 19-26, p. 163-244
Specific directions for your posts will be given on the blog website. Your posts will be graded, and I expect
them to be thoughtful, supported, coherent, and readable. Please note that the final reading assignment is
lengthy, and allow enough time to complete it.
The Old Man and the Sea
Major Works Data Sheet
The following MWDS is a blank version of the form you will complete. Please type your answers into an
electronic version of this form (I will email a copy to everyone when I receive your email addresses). You will
be required to submit your completed MWDS to turnitin.com during the first full week of school.
AP English Literature and Composition
MAJOR WORKS DATA SHEET
Biographical Information about the Author
Title: ___________________________________
Author: _________________________________
Date of Publication: _______________________
Genre: __________________________________
Historical Information about the period of
publication
Characteristics of the Genre
Plot Summary
Describe the author’s style
An example that demonstrates that style
Memorable Quotes
Quotation
Significance
Characters
Name
Role in the Story
Significance
Adjectives
Setting
Significance of opening scene
Significance of ending/closing scene
Symbols
Old AP Questions
Possible Themes
“The Canonization”
John Donne, 1572 - 1631
For God’s sake, hold your tongue, and let me love!
Or chide my palsy or my gout,
My five gray hairs or ruined fortune flout;
With wealth your state, your mind with arts improve,
Take you a course, get you a place,
Observe his honor or his grace,
Or the king’s real or his stamped face
Contemplate; what you will, approve,
So you will let me love.
Alas, alas, who’s injured by my love?
What merchant ships have my sighs drowned?
Who says my tears have overflowed his ground?
When did my colds a forward spring remove?
When did the heats which my veins fill
Add one more to the plaguy bill?
Soldiers find wars, and lawyers find out still
Litigious men which quarrels move,
Though she and I do love.
Call us what you will, we are made such by love.
Call her one, me another fly;
We are tapers too, and at our own cost die;
And we in us find the eagle and the dove;
The phoenix riddle hath more wit
By us; we two, being one, are it.
So to one neutral thing both sexes fit.
We die and rise the same, and prove
Mysterious by this love.
We can die by it, if not live by love,
And if unfit for tombs and hearse
Our legend be, it will be fit for verse;
And if no piece of chronicle we prove,
We’ll build in sonnets pretty rooms:
As well a well-wrought urn becomes
The greatest ashes as half-acre tombs,
And by these hymns all shall approve
Us canonized for love,
And thus invoke us: “You whom reverend love
Made one another’s hermitage,
You to whom love was peace, that now is rage,
Who did the whole world’s soul contract, and drove
Into the glasses of your eyes
(So made such mirrors and such spies
That they did all to you epitomize)
Countries, towns, courts: beg from above
A pattern of your love!”
5
10
15
20
25
30
35
40
45
Name: ________________________________________
Date: ____________________
“The Canonization”
Poetry Analysis Worksheet
1. Please annotate the poem (remember TP-CASTT).
2. a. Who is the speaker and what is his condition? How old is he? To whom is he speaking?
b. What has his auditor been saying to him before the opening of the spoem? What sort of values can we ascribe
to the auditor by inference from the first stanza?
c. What values does the speaker oppose to these? How does the stanzaic pattern of the poem emphasize this
value?
3. The sighs and tears, the fevers and chills, in the second stanza, were commonplace in the love poetry of Donne’s
time. How does Donne make them fresh? What is the speaker’s argument in this stanza? How does it begin to
turn from pure defense to offense in the last three lines of the stanza?
4. How are the things to which the lovers are compared in the third stanza arranged? Does their arrangement reflect
in any way the arrangement of the whole poem?
a. Explain line 21.
b. Interpret of paraphrase lines 23-27.
5. Explain the first line of the fourth stanza. What status does the speaker claim for himself and his beloved in the
last line of this stanza?
6. In what sense is the last stanza an invocation? Who speaks in it? To whom? What powers are ascribed to the
lovers in it?
7. What do the following words from the poem have in common: “Mysterious” (27), “hymns” (35), “canonized”
(36), “reverend” (37), “hermitage” (38)? What judgment about love does the speaker make by the use of these
words?
“Sunday Morning”
Wallace Stevens, 1879 - 1955
1
Complacencies of the peignoir, and late
Coffee and oranges in a sunny chair,
And the green freedom of a cockatoo
Upon a rug mingle to dissipate
The holy hush of ancient sacrifice.
She dreams a little, and she feels the dark
Encroachment of that old catastrophe,
As a calm darkens among water-lights.
The pungent oranges and bright, green wings
Seem things in some procession of the dead,
Winding across wide water, without sound.
The day is like wide water, without sound,
Stilled for the passing of her dreaming feet
Over the seas, to silent Palestine,
Dominion of the blood and sepulchre.
2
Why should she give her bounty to the dead?
What is divinity if it can come
Only in silent shadows and in dreams?
Shall she not find in comforts of the sun,
In pungent fruit and bright green wings, or else
In any balm or beauty of the earth,
Things to be cherished like the thought of heaven?
Divinity must live within herself:
Passions of rain, or moods in falling snow;
Grievings in loneliness, or unsubdued
Elations when the forest blooms; gusty
Emotions on wet roads on autumn nights;
All pleasures and all pains, remembering
The bough of summer and the winter branch.
These are the measure destined for her soul.
3
Jove in the clouds had his inhuman birth.
No mother suckled him, no sweet land gave
Large-mannered motions to his mythy mind.
He moved among us, as a muttering king,
Magnificent, would move among his hinds,
Until our blood, commingling, virginal,
With heaven, brought such requital to desire
The very hinds discerned it, in a star.
Shall our blood fail? Or shall it come to be
The blood of paradise? And shall the earth
Seem all of paradise that we shall know?
The sky will be much friendlier then than now,
A part of labor and a part of pain,
And next in glory to enduring love,
Not this dividing and indifferent blue.
4
She says, 'I am content when wakened birds,
Before they fly, test the reality
Of misty fields, by their sweet questionings;
But when the birds are gone, and their warm fields
Return no more, where, then, is paradise?'
There is not any haunt of prophecy,
Nor any old chimera of the grave,
Neither the golden underground, nor isle
Melodious, where spirits gat them home,
Nor visionary south, nor cloudy palm
Remote on heaven's hill, that has endured
As April's green endures; or will endure
Like her remembrance of awakened birds,
Or her desire for June and evening, tipped
By the consummation of the swallow's wings.
5
She says, 'But in contentment I still feel
The need of some imperishable bliss.'
Death is the mother of beauty; hence from her,
Alone, shall come fulfillment to our dreams
And our desires. Although she strews the leaves
Of sure obliteration on our paths,
The path sick sorrow took, the many paths
Where triumph rang its brassy phrase, or love
Whispered a little out of tenderness,
She makes the willow shiver in the sun
For maidens who were wont to sit and gaze
Upon the grass, relinquished to their feet.
She causes boys to pile new plums and pears
On disregarded plate. The maidens taste
And stray impassioned in the littering leaves.
6
Is there no change of death in paradise?
Does ripe fruit never fall? Or do the boughs
Hang always heavy in that perfect sky,
Unchanging, yet so like our perishing earth,
With rivers like our own that seek for seas
They never find, the same receding shores
That never touch with inarticulate pang?
Why set pear upon those river-banks
Or spice the shores with odors of the plum?
Alas, that they should wear our colors there,
The silken weavings of our afternoons,
And pick the strings of our insipid lutes!
Death is the mother of beauty, mystical,
Within whose burning bosom we devise
Our earthly mothers waiting, sleeplessly.
7
Supple and turbulent, a ring of men
Shall chant in orgy on a summer morn
Their boisterous devotion to the sun,
Not as a god, but as a god might be,
Naked among them, like a savage source.
Their chant shall be a chant of paradise,
Out of their blood, returning to the sky;
And in their chant shall enter, voice by voice,
The windy lake wherein their lord delights,
The trees, like serafin, and echoing hills,
That choir among themselves long afterward.
They shall know well the heavenly fellowship
Of men that perish and of summer morn.
And whence they came and whither they shall go
The dew upon their feet shall manifest.
8
She hears, upon that water without sound,
A voice that cries, 'The tomb in Palestine
Is not the porch of spirits lingering.
It is the grave of Jesus, where he lay.'
We live in an old chaos of the sun,
Or old dependency of day and night,
Or island solitude, unsponsored, free,
Of that wide water, inescapable.
Deer walk upon our mountains, and the quail
Whistle about us their spontaneous cries;
Sweet berries ripen in the wilderness;
And, in the isolation of the sky,
At evening, casual flocks of pigeons make
Ambiguous undulations as they sink,
Downward to darkness, on extended wings.
Name: ________________________________________
Date: ____________________
“Sunday Morning”
Poetry Analysis Worksheet
1. Please annotate the poem (remember TP-CASTT).
2. The poem presents a woman meditating on questions of death, mutability, and permanence, beginning with a
stanza that sets the stage and shows her being drawn to these questions beyond her conscious will. The
meditation proper is structured as a series of questions and answers stated in direct or indirect quotations with the
answer to a preceding question suggesting a further question, and so forth. In reading through the poem,
paraphrase the sequence of implied or stated questions, and the answers to them here.
3. The opening scene (stanza 1), in a collection of images and details, indicates the means the woman has chosen to
avoid thinking of the typical “Sunday morning” topic, the Christian religion.
a. Define the means she employs.
b. Trace the further references to fruits and birds throughout the poem, and explain the ordering principle
that ties them together (for example, what development of idea or attitude is implied in the sequence
oranges/plums and pears/wild berries?).
4. Explain the symbolic meanings implied by the images of
a. Water
b. The sun
c. Birds and other animals
5. The poem examines change and permanence, life and death.
a. Why does the woman give up her desire for unchanging permanence?
b. With what does she replace it?
c. What is her final attitude toward a world that includes change and death?
d. What is meant by “Death is the mother of beauty” (63, 88)?
6. The poet wrote, “This is not essentially a woman’s meditation on religion and the meaning of life. It is anybody’s
mediation” (Letters of Wallace Stevens, ed. Holly Stevens [New York: Knopf, 1966] 250). Justify or disprove that
claim.
7. “The Canonization” and “Sunday Morning” are dramatic poems. “The Canonization” is a dramatic monologue
(one person is speaking to another, whose replies we do not hear). “Sunday Morning” combines descriptive
scene-setting with an interior debate of question and answer. In what ways do the dramatic structures of these
poems facilitate what they have to say?