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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