Poem of the Week (POW
Poem of the Week (POW!!)
Each day you are responsible for reading or rereading the selected poem and answering/discussing the daily questions. Each day you must record your answer on paper to be turned in for a weekly assignment. Be ready to report your answer to the teacher/class at any time. (If you are absent, you are responsible for completing the assignment for the day you missed.)
Monday: Main Idea/Speaker. ***Read aloud to someone.
• Who is the speaker? How do you know? Support this with textual evidence.
• What is the main idea or central idea? How do you know? Support this with 2 examples from the text.
Tuesday: Poetic Devices [This includes sound devices (repetition, alliteration, onomatopoeia, irregular or regular rhythm, rhyme, consonance, assonance, etc.) and also literary elements (allusion, symbolism, figurative language such as metaphor, simile, personification, hyperbole, idioms, etc).
• What poetic devices are present in this poem? Support with textual evidence.
• What effect do they have on the reader?
Wednesday: Author’s Craft/Author’s Style – what makes this poem uniquely the author’s. ***Choral reading with someone.
• What type of poem is this?
• How many lines/stanzas?
• What does the poet place the most emphasis on?
Thursday: Word Choice ***Read Aloud to someone.
• Why does the author use these specific words?
• What mood do they create? Cite textual evidence.
• What tone is created by poet? Cite textual evidence.
Friday: Theme
• What theme is present in the poem? Support with at least 2 examples of textual evidence.
Grading: each day is 20 pts.
Week 1
Politics
How can I, that girl standing there,
My attention fix
On Roman or on Russian
Or on Spanish politics?
Yet here’s a traveled man that knows
What he talks about,
And there’s a politician
That has read and thought,
And maybe what they say is true
Of war and war’s alarms,
But O that I were young again
And held her in my arms!
-William Butler Yeats (Ireland)
Week 2
Fragment of a Lullaby
Sleep, darling
I have a small
daughter called
Cleis, who is
like a golden
flower
I wouldn’t
take all Croesus’
kingdom with love
thrown in, for her
-Sappho (Ancient Greece)
Week 3
Rocking
The sea rocks her thousands of waves.
The sea is divine.
Hearing the loving sea
I rock my son.
The wind wandering by night
rocks the wheat.
Hearing the loving wind
I rock my son.
God, the Father, soundlessly rocks
his thousands of worlds.
Feeling His hand in the shadow
I rock my son.
-Gabriela Mistral (Chile)
Week 4
And We Shall Be Steeped
And we shall be steeped my dear in the presence of Africa.
Furniture from Guinea and Congo, heavy and polished,
somber and serene.
On the walls, pure primordial masks distant and yet present.
Stools of honor for hereditary guests, for the Princes of the
High Lands.
Wild perfumes, thick mats of silence
Cushions of shade and leisure, the noise of a wellspring
of peace.
Classic words. In a distance, antiphonal singing like Sudanese
cloths
And then, friendly lamp, your kindness to soothes this
obsessive presence
White black and red, oh red as the African soil.
-Leopald S. Senghor (Senegal)
Written for khalam, a four-stringed guitar
Week 5
Sonnet 3
It was that very day on which the sun
in awe of his creator dimmed the ray,
when I was captured, with my guard astray,
for your fine eyes, my lady, bound me then.
It hardly seemed the time for me to plan
defense against Love’s stroke; I went my way
secure, unwary; so upon that day
of general sorrow all my pains began.
Love found me with nor armor for the fight,
my eyes an open highway to the heart,
eyes that are now a vent for tears to flow.
And yet he played no honorable part,
wounding me with his shaft in such a state;
he saw you armed and dared not lift the bow.
-Petrarch (Italy)
Week 6
Sonnet 29
When, in disgrace with Fortune and men’s eyes,
I all alone beweep my outcast state,
And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,
And look upon myself and curse my fate,
Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,
Featured like him, like him with friends possessed,
Desiring this man’s art and that man’s cope,
With what I most enjoy contented least;
Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising,
Haply I think on thee, and then my state,
Like to the lark at break of day arising
From sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven’s gate;
For thy sweet love remembered such wealth brings,
That then I scorn to change my state with kings.
-William Shakespeare (England)
Week 7
Winter Sun
It is noon. A park.
Winter. White paths;
symmetrical little mounds
and skeletal branches.
Under the hothouse roof,
orange trees in pots,
and in its barrel, painted
green, the palm tree.
A little old man says
to his old cape:
“The sunshine, this beautiful
sunshine!...” The children play.
The water in the fountain
glides, runs and dreams
licking, almost silent,
the greenish stone.
-Antonio Machado (Spain)
Week 8
June Nights
In summer, when the daylight’s gone, the fields,
Covered with blossoms, scent the air for miles around.
We sleep, but in a half sleep of transparent dreams,
Eyes shut, ears half opened to the summer’s sound.
Pure are the stars, then; and the dark is sweet:
A faint half daylight stains the eternal dome,
And gentle dawn, waiting for her hour to come,
All night below the sky’s edge seems to roam.
-Victor Hugo (France)
Week 9
The Swan
Nothing
Above the waters
And at once on the flick of an eye
Is suspended
Swanlike geometry
Rooted in water
Vining up
And bowed again
Swallowing dust
And measuring the universe
With air-
-Nelly Sachs (Germany)
Week 10
Summer Is Dying
Summer is dying, woven in fine gold,
Couched on a purple bed
Of falling garden leaves and twilight clouds
That lave their hearts in red.
The garden is deserted, save where a youth
Saunters, or a maiden walks,
Casting an eye and a sigh after the flight
Of the last and lingering storks.
The heart is orphaned. Soon a rainy day
Will softly tap the pane.
“Look to your boots, patch up your coats,
go fetch
The potatoes in again.”
-Chaim Nachman Bialik (Russia/Israel)
Week 11
Wind and Water and Stone
The water hollowed the stone,
the wind dispersed the water,
the stone stopped the wind.
Water and wind and stone.
The wind sculpted the stone,
the stone is a cup of water,
the water runs off and is wind.
Stone and wind and water.
The wind sings in its turnings,
the water murmurs as it goes,
the motionless stone is quiet.
Wind and water and stone.
One is the other, and is neither:
among their empty names
they pass and disappear,
water and stone and wind.
-Octavio Paz (Mexico)
Week 12
Street Cries
When dawn’s first cymbals beat upon the sky,
Rousing the world to labor’s various cry,
To tend the flock, to bind the mellowing grain,
From ardent toil to forge a little gain,
And fasting men go forth on hurrying feet,
Buy bread, buy bread, rings down the eager street.
When the earth falters and the waters swoon
With the implacable radiance of noon,
And in dim shelters koels hush their notes,
And the faint, thirsting blood in languid throats
Craves liquid succor from the cruel heat,
Buy fruit, buy fruit, steals down the panting street.
When twilight twinkling o’er the gay bazaars,
Unfurls a sudden canopy of stars,
When lutes are strung and fragrant torches lit
On white roof-terraces where lovers sit
Drinking together of life’s poignant sweet,
Buy flowers, buy flowers, floats down the singing street.
-Sarojini Naidu (India)
Week 13
Taking Leave of a Friend
Blue mountains to the north of the walls,
White river winding about them;
Here we must make separation
And go out through a thousand miles
of dead grass.
Mind like a floating wide cloud,
Sunset like the parting of old acquaintances
Who bow over their clasped hands at a distance.
Our horses neigh to each other
as we are departing.
-Li Po (China)
Week 14
Afterglow
Sunset is always disturbing
whether theatrical or muted,
but still more disturbing
is that last desperate glow
that turns the plain to rust
when on the horizon nothing is left
of the pomp and clamor of the setting sun.
How hard holding on to that light, so tautly drawn and different,
that hallucinations which the human fear of the dark
imposes on space
and which ceases at once
the moment we realize its falsity,
the way a dream is broken
the moment the sleeper knows he is dreaming.
-Jorge Luis Borges (Argentina)
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