Week 1 Discussion For composition III

Imagery and the Language of Poetry

By the due date assigned, post your response of one or two paragraphs (at least 150-200 words) to the Discussion Area. To support your comments, your discussion answers should include specific information and quotations from the readings. By the end of Week 1, comment on at least two of your classmates' submissions. Your replies to classmates should be at least a paragraph in length and made with an eye to expand, clarify, defend, and/or refine their thoughts. Consider asking questions to further meaningful conversation. Be clear and concise, referring to specific ideas and words from your classmates' postings. Participation must be completed by the end of the first week to earn credit.

Prompt: 

• Choose a poem from the assigned readings listed below, and identify some of the key imagery or other kinds of poetic language used in the poem, which you believe are vital to understanding it. Here are some possible approaches:
  
  
  
  • Provide a detailed discussion of how the images function in the poem.
  
  
  • Do the images work together to form a coherent pattern?
  
  
  • What ideas or feelings are conveyed by the images or figurative language?
  
  
  • How do the images contribute to the overall meaning of the poem?
  
  
  
  


•  Our course eBook (Portable Literature) should be your only source. Do not use outside sources.


• Title your discussion response with the poem’s title. This will help other students see which poems have been discussed. Once a poem has been discussed twice, please do not choose it for analysis.

Read the following poems and choose one to discuss:

• Alarcon, “’Mexican’ Is not a Noun”


• Alexie, “Evolution”


• Alvarez, “Dusting”


• Bradstreet, “To My Dear and Loving Husband”


• Browning, “How Do I Love Thee”


• Burns, “Oh, My Love is Like a Red, Red Rose”


• Cummings, “Buffalo Bill”


• Cummings, “Next to of Course God America I”


• Dunbar, “We Wear the Mask”


• Halliday, “The Value of Education”


• Hayden, “Those Winter Sundays”


• Heaney, “Digging”


• Heaney, “Mid-Term Break”


• Herrick, “To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time”


• Jarrell, “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner”


• Komunyakaa, “Facing It


• MacLeish, “Ars Poetica”


• Marlowe, “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love”


• Meredith, “Dreams of Suicide”


• Mirikitani, “Suicide Note”


• Pastan, “Ethics”


• Plath, “Daddy”


• Randall, “Ballad of Birmingham”


• Rich, “Living in Sin”


• Robinson, “Richard Cory”


• Roethke, “My Papa’s Waltz”


• Shakespeare, “Let Me Not to the Marriage of True Minds”


• Shakespeare, “My Mistress’ Eyes Are Nothing Like the Sun


• Shakespeare, “Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer’s Day?”


• Smith, “Not Waving but Drowning”


• Stevens, “Anecdote of the Jar”


• Yeats, “The Second Coming”

Tips

Remember to provide evidence for your claims in the form of quoted passages from the poem. Quotations, paraphrases, and summaries should be cited according to APA rules of style, including in-text and reference citations. Quoted material should not exceed 25% of the document.

Visit the South University Online Citation Resources: APA Style page for information regarding properly citing resources.

Post directly to the discussion; do not attach a document. Make sure you check spelling and grammar, and use APA style for citations.

Example Response

Students often ask to see a model of what is expected, so here is an example post:

“The Oven Bird” is a sonnet by Robert Frost, and the poem focuses on a bird that sings a sad song about death and loss. Some of the key images include variations on singing, the seasons, and foliage, such as leaves and flowers. The following lines illustrate the use of these images: “He says that leaves are old and that for flowers/Mid-summer is to spring as one to ten/He says the early petal-fall is past/When pear and cherry bloom went down in showers” (Frost, 2016, Lines 4-7). The images in the poem work together to tell a story about the oven bird, which has a loud, discordant song that “makes the solid tree trunks sound again” (Frost, 2016, Line 3). The bird sings about having lost its first set of young to predators, and now the bird must learn to go on living with great loss. The sad yet brave feeling of the poem is summed up in the final couplet: “The question that he frames in all but words/Is what to make of a diminished thing” (Frost, 2016, Lines 13-14).

Frost, R. (2016). The oven bird. In L.G. Kirszner & S.R. Mandell (Eds.), Portable Literature: Reading, Reacting, Writing [VitalSource digital version] (p. 123). Cengage https://digitalbookshelf.southuniversity.edu/#/books/9781337517775