Honors Victorian Poetry Project



Honors Victorian Poetry Project

After graduation, you go on a cruise with your friends to celebrate. You have ventured far from the United States when, unfortunately, the ship comes into contact with a massive hurricane. After struggling in the rain and darkness, the ship finally sinks. Everyone is lost in the terrible storm, but you wash-up on the shores of a remote island by yourself. You are hungry and tired. You can’t find any food. The only water around is saltwater from the ocean. Your clothes are ragged. The sun is hot.

You desperately search the island for provisions. All you find is a book of popular Victorian poetry, a blank journal, and some writing materials. You decide to read the book of poetry and are soon inspired to write your own poetry. You copy your favorite poems into your new journal. You also illustrate them. Then, you write your own poetry on the same themes. This experience is therapeutic for you and keeps you from losing your mind.

You compile all that you’ve done in the hopes that someday, years from now, someone will find your remains and know all that is important about you from reading the journal. As you complete the task, you ponder the meaning of life and the possibility that you may die on the island. You want your journal to reveal your struggles in the past and present. Your journal must reflect who you are, what you’ve experienced, and what you hope for the future.

As you face different emotions and fears, you are inspired by different themes that are found in Victorian poetry. Choose four themes that display your emotional reaction to being a castaway.

Do the following four times (4 poems—all must have a different theme):

1. Find and copy a poem from the book you found. Choose a poem that speaks to you personally. Figure out the theme. Write the theme at the bottom of each page for that particular theme (found poem/illustration of found poem/original poem/journal entry). See the back for a list of authors and themes from which you must choose.

2. Illustrate the poem you found. The illustration may be on the same page as the found poem or on the page after it. Write the theme at the bottom of the page.

3. Write a poem of at least 10 lines on the same theme. Write the theme at the bottom of the page. Make it personal to you. Make it reflect an experience you remember from your past or a current emotion you have as a castaway. It can also present your shattered hopes for the future.

a. Make your poem artistic by using techniques you’ve learned this year like metaphor, allusion, apostrophe, etc.

b. Underline your use of literary techniques in the poems you write. Label the technique in the margin.

c. Use at least eight different techniques throughout the project.

d. See the “Poetry Starters” handout for ideas for writing poems and the rough list of poetry terms for techniques to try. Remember to view your notes throughout the year for terms that may not be on the handout.

4. Write a journal entry tying together the Victorian poem you choose, your illustration of it, and your own original poem. Make sure you write the theme at the bottom of the page. Be sure to explain why you chose this particular poem and what it means to you. Explain your illustration in detail. Explain how your original poem connects to the theme and how it reflects some aspect of your life. This entry should be at

least a page long. Make sure your journal entry stays true to your status as a castaway.

Journal-Writing Pointers!

1. Remember you’re a castaway. There are no computers on your island! Don’t use computer graphics. Draw it yourself. Don’t type it. Write neatly.

2. Don’t turn in your book on loose-leaf paper. Prepare all the pages and bind them together in some creative way. Don’t use lined paper.

3. Decide on the audience of your journal and address all entries to that person. Perhaps you’d like to write to a friend or a family member. Start your entries accordingly.

4. Get creative. Expand this project to best suit your personality. The more you embrace this project, the higher your grade will be.

Remember you must find/illustrate four poems using four different themes. Here is a list of themes common in Victorian poetry from which you must choose.

|Nature |Heroic materials of the past |Naturalism |

|Beauty |Time |Society |

|Carpe Diem |Being in Love |Realism |

|Lost Love |Progress |Spiritual intensity |

|Desire |Greed |Romanticism |

|(Action-packed narratives) |British Empire |Life’s disappointments |

|Change |Pride |Religion |

|(Dramatic monologues) |Pessimism |Fear |

|Loss of individuals’ close ties to nature | | |

( ) = not a theme but a popular “genre” of the time

The book you found on the beach includes all of the following Victorian writers. There may be only one repetition of one author.

|Matthew Arnold* |Aubrey de Vere |John Keble |Arthur O’Shaughnessy |

|Alfred Austin |Sydney Dobell |Fanny Kemble |Francis Turner Palgrave |

|William E. Aytoun |Austin Dobson |Rudyard Kipling |Coventry Patmore |

|Philip James Bailey |Edward Dowden |Charles Kingsley |Joseph Noel Paton |

|William Barnes |Ernest Dowson |Edward Lear |John Payne |

|Emily Brontë* |George Eliot* |William James Linton |Adelaide Anne Procter |

|T.E. Brown |Sebastian Evans |Frederick Locker-Lampson |Christina Rossetti |

|Elizabeth Barrett Browning* |Frederick William Faber |Edward Robert Bulwer Lytton |William Bell Scott |

|Robert Browning* |Violet Fane |Thomas Babington Macaulay |George Augustus Simcox |

|Robert Buchanan |Sir Samuel Ferguson |Phillip Bourke Marston |George R. Sims |

|C.S. Calverley |Edward Fitzgerald |Theo Marzials |Joseph Spiksey |

|Edward Caswall |David Gray |Gerald Massey |Alexander Smith |

|Arthur Hugh Clough |Thomas Gordon Hake |George Meredith |Charles Swaim |

|Mortimer Collins |Dora Greenwell |Richard Monckton Milnes |A.C. Swinburne |

|William Johnson Corey |Arthur Henry Hallam |Lewis Morris |Sir Henry Taylor |

|Dinah Marie Craik |Thomas Hardy* |Arthur Joseph Munby |Alfred, Lord Tennyson* |

|Lord De Tabley |Robert Stephen Hawker |Roden Noel |James Thomsom |

| |Gerald Manley Hopkins |John Henry Newman |Martin F. Tupper |

| |Richard Henry Horne | |Charles Turner |

| |A.E. Housman* | |Augusta Webster |

| |Jean Ingelow | |Charles Jeremiah Wells |

| |Ebenezer Jones | |Oscar Wilde |

| |Ernest Jones | |William Butler Yeats* |

Recap: For each theme (4 different themes): Find 1 poem by an author above (may only repeat one author once), 1 illustration of the found poem (on the same page or page after), 1 original poem, 1 journal = 12-16 pages.

*denotes Mr. Harris’s picks

*Books are your BEST bet. Trust me.

*The following are the ONLY websites you are allowed to use:





Library Dates:

Due Date:

Be ready to show off/present your projects to the class!

Poetry Starters

From Peter Elbow’s acclaimed book Writing with Power, I have gathered a list of poetry starters for you. Hopefully, you can use these ideas to begin your poetry writing. Remember, you are not restricted in any way to these suggestions. Use them to get your mind working and your pencil moving.

1. Write a poem with each line beginning with “I wish.”

2. Write a poem with each line beginning with “Once.”

3. Write a poem with each line beginning with “Now.”

4. Write a poem alternating lines beginning with any of the three words above.

5. Write a poem where each line is a lie.

6. Write a poem in which each line mentions a color.

7. Write a poem in which each line includes one word in another language.

8. Write a poem in which each line mentions a part of the body.

9. Write a poem in the style of a letter.

10. Write a poem in which each line addresses a person by name. For example, each line may begin with the word Dad.

11. Write an acrostic of a place or a person’s name. An acrostic is a poem written by writing a word vertically and using each letter of the word to begin a line of the poem.

12. Write a poem in which the following lines alternate: I seem . . . but really . . .

13. Write a poem with the format of if . . . then . . .

14. Write a poem in a Question/Answer format.

15. Write a poem organized by time, such as morning, noon, night or 8 o’clock, 9 o’clock, etc.

16. Write a poem consisting of four haikus. Haikus are three-lined poems. The first and third lines each have 5 syllables. The second line has exactly 7 syllables.

17. Start a poem with a quotation. It can be from someone famous, a memory, the words of a character you create, or whomever you want.

18. Start a poem with a cliché. But make the rest of the poem original, of course.

19. Start a poem by cursing or putting a spell on someone or something.

20. Write a poem in which you talk to an animal.

After you write your poem, feel free to revise it and alter it from the suggestions here. Remember that you are not restricted to these suggestions!

Poetry/Literary Terms

1. alexandrine

2. alliteration

3. allusion

4. anaphora

5. apostrophe

6. assonance

7. ballad

8. blank verse

9. caesura

10. carpe diem

11. chiasmus

12. cliché

13. conceit/metaphysical conceit

14. concrete poem

15. consonance

16. couplet

17. dialect

18. dramatic monologue

19. elegiac

20. eternizing conceit

21. feminine rhyme

22. flashback

23. foreshadowing

24. haiku

25. heroic

26. hyperbole

27. imagery

28. internal rhyme

29. irony-dramatic, verbal, situational

30. limerick

31. lyric

32. masculine rhyme

33. metaphor

34. metonymy

35. narrative poetry

36. ode

37. onomatopoeia

38. oxymoron

39. paradox

40. parallelism

41. pastoral

42. personification

43. pun

44. refrain

45. rhetorical question

46. sarcasm

47. satire

48. simile

49. sonnet

50. Spenserian stanza

51. symbolism

52. synecdoche

53. understatement

54. verbal wit

55. villanelle

56. slant rhyme

57. litotes

58. kenning

Plus, any others we have done. You can find more terms and definitions in the notes and handouts you have collected throughout the year!

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