The assignment details and information is attached, it is very important that it is in no way plagiarized!
ESSAY COMPONENTS Follow the Poetry Explication Guides from week 6, also reprinted below the list of poems on this assignment page. In a developed 3-4 page essay, explicate (do a close reading of) ONE of these poems: William Shakespeare, Sonnet 138 (PF) John Donne, “The Sun Rising” (PF) John Keats, “When I have fears that I may cease to be” (605) Emily Dickinson, “My Life had stood a loaded Gun” (PF) Christina Rossetti, "In an Artist's Studio" (PF) William Butler Yeats, “The Second Coming” (638) Robert Frost, “Acquainted with the Night” (644) Marianne Moore, “Poetry” (653) Edna St. Vincent Millay, “What lips my lips have kissed” (660) Wilfred Owen,’ “Dulce Et Decorum Est” (660) Langston Hughes’ “Theme for English B” (666) Dylan Thomas, “Do not go gentle into that good night” (684) Explication Guidelines 1. Don’t refer to yourself in a literary analysis. Remove or replace all references to “I” or “you” or “the reader" or "audience” to stay objective and focused on the poem itself. 2. Study the poet but analyze the poem. Poetic meaning goes beyond strictly personal expression. Review the biographical background on the poet to place the poem in an accurate and meaningful context. To learn about the poet’s sensibility and relevant information, read Poetry Foundation and biographical notes in our textbook, review class notes, and check the poet’s other poems. 3. The lyric speaker (“I”) is not necessarily or exactly the poet! There is some—and sometimes much–difference between the poet and his/her created speaker, even when a poem seems personal or confessional. Most poets are chameleons, changing moods and perspectives from poem to poem. 5. Identify and analyze elements of poetic explication: type of poem--ballad, sonnet, villanelle, free verse—diction, connotation, imagery (simile, metaphor, personification, symbol), allusion, sound effects (onomatopoeia, assonance, consonance, alliteration, rhyme, rhythm (end stopped lines, enjambment, caesura), hyperbole, understatement, and tone. How do the methods work together to add to, dramatize, and affect the poem’s delivery, its evolving experience, its overall meaning? 6. Do not just name or list techniques, which is pointless and removes these special effects out of a meaningful context. What are important techniques doing for the poem’s ideas? 7. Discuss the poem in its natural order, stanza by stanza, first to last, noting shifts in focus or form. Do NOT skim or skip around. Do NOT focus any points on a poetic technique! This approach separates the poetic delivery from the contents of the poem, which distorts and destroys the created experience and its meaning - the focus of the explication. 8. Quoting the poem is required as evidence. Quote 1-3 lines, using spaced forward slashes between the quoted lines. For 4 or more lines, indent on left, double space, as printed on original - NO quotations. 9. No MLA parenthetic notes and work cited are needed for this essay. 10. Avoid outside sources. Any uncredited borrowing is PLAGIARISM! A plagiarized essay fails, per the course, department, and college policy. Preparing for and Writing an Explication To explicate means to explain in detail how the poem brings out its meaning. A poem’s meaning is not what a poem is about, but rather, what a poem reveals about its topic. What is the poem’s perspective on the issue? Avoid personal opinion and overgeneralization. Base the explanation on objective study of the work. Rely on evidence from the poem and only relevant information about the poet for support. Pay close attention to the language: look up all unfamiliar words; check all possible definitions. Poets are wordsmiths, precise yet adventurous with diction: they tend to explore several levels of meaning. Be accurate and precise in explaining words in context of the other words, which changes the meaning. A poetry explication MUST relate form and content working together to create the poem’s meaning. Paraphrasing a poem line by line is helpful to get its basic foundation. However, just restating its content is not enough. What the poem says cannot be separated from how it is said. Keep relating ideas to their delivery, special effects that is part of the meaning. Pay attention to all important parts of the whole poem. Do not skim read or rush the reading and writing. Do pay special attention to the end and how the poem changes or evolves. The shorter the poem, the more you need to unpack its form and content. Read and study the poetic lines as they are laid out to avoid misreading sentences with line breaks, and to notice references (it, this, he - who or what?) in the poem. Consider how and why the poet chooses to break up the lines for poetic effect. Structuring the Essay: How Does a Poem Mean? Opening: The first paragraph is not just an introduction. It states your overall argument about the poem’s meaning. Give brief but relevant, focused background on poet and poem, lead into the thesis, which must state the poem’s overall meaning-- not what speaker is talking about. Support: The point-by-point explanation of how poem develops, evolves, and builds up its meaning. Follow the order of the poem, explaining it stanza by stanza (or where it shifts focus). Analyze the contents as presented with the poetic techniques, placed in a clear context. Do NOT just name techniques - how they affect the content where they are used? Conclusion: You must be done with explication; the closing need not be long! Do not just repeat thesis and points as the “conclusion.” End with a broader insight. Mentally step back and comment; why is the poem significant, how is it relevant now? Study the sample explication essay on Shakespeare’s Sonnet 65 and the poetry essay (explication and analysis) samples in the textbook in chapters 4 and 6. a) Preparing for and writing a poem explication To explicate means to explain in detail how the poem brings out its meaning. A poem’s meaning is not what a poem is about, but rather, what a poem reveals about its topic. What is the poem’s perspective on the issue? Avoid personal opinion and overgeneralization. Base the explanation on objective consideration of the work.. Rely on evidence from the poem and relevant information about the poet to support all claims. Your poetry explication MUST relate form and content as they work together to create the poem’s meaning. Although paraphrasing a poem is helpful to get its basic foundation, just restating its content is not enough. What the poem says cannot be separated from how it is said. Keep relating ideas to their delivery, special effects. Pay attention to all key parts of the whole poem. Do not skim; do not rush the reading and writing! A skewed focus distorts the meaning—pay special attention to the end. The shorter the poem, more packed with meaning: “unpack” it. Write out the poetic lines horizontally to avoid misreading sentences with poetic line breaks, and to prevent misreading references within the poem. Changing the poet’s layout should make you notice how and why the poet does choose to break up the lines for effect. Pay close attention to the language: look up all unfamiliar words; check all possible definitions. Poets are wordsmiths, precise yet adventurous with diction: they tend to explore several levels of meaning. Be accurate and precise in explaining words in context of the other words, which changes the meaning. Structuring the essay: How does a poem mean? Opening: The first paragraph is not just an introduction. It states your overall argument about the poem’s meaning. Give brief but relevant, focused background on poet and poem, lead in to the thesis, which must state the poem’s overall meaning-- not what speaker is talking about. Body: The point by point explication of how poem develops, evolves, builds up meaning. Follow the natural order of the poem, explaining it stanza by stanza (or where it shifts focus). Analyze the contents as presented with the poetic techniques, placed in a clear context. Do NOT just name techniques - analyze how they affect the content. Conclusion: You must be done with explication; it need not be long! Do not just repeat thesis and points as the “conclusion.” End with a broader insight. Mentally step back and comment what you’ve revealed; why is the poem significant, how is it relevant now? MLA Reminder! Have you quoted all borrowed material with ( ) notes. Works cited? Poetry’s Trumping of Time Like so many of Shakespeare’s poems, Sonnet 65 dramatizes a false choice between time’s relentless and inevitable destruction of everything, especially of “beauty” (579). It seems through most of the sonnet that nothing can withstand the effects of time’s silent brutal erosion. Yet “beauty” does triumph, in the form of poetry generally, and this poem, in particular. Shakespeare reverses the devastation of a seemingly indestructible time in two simple lines, boldly proving his point by the very act of our reading the couplet. Sonnet 65 serves as a testament to the power and permanence of poetry, and its greatest inspiration, love. The first quatrain presents the opening dilemma with a rhetorical question, the first of several to come: since no material on earth can survive the passage of time and its tragic outcome, “sad mortality,” how can “beauty” stand a chance? This premise makes the situation seem impossible and even logical at the onset, setting up the poet’s clever twist at the end. The personification of time throughout lends a human vitality and relevance to its all-powerful presence. The alliterated emphatic “b” sounds of “brass and “boundless” and the dominance of the rough “r” sounds mimic the sound and sense of a tough enemy force wearing down all material substances – be they metal, stone, or water. The simile of a “flower” evokes the pathetically fragile nature of the precious quality of beauty, in particular. It also begins to develop the theme of poetry and love as manifestations of beauty. The onomatopoeic “plea” in line 3 echoes the ineffectuality and feebleness of beauty in a physical context, in stark contrast to onomatopoeic words like the “rage” ascribed to time – harsh and intimidating. The next quatrain intensifies the vulnerable helpless quality of the initial plea. The speaker now muses with dismay, wondering how beauty could hold out against the savagery of warrior time: “O how shall summer’s honey breath hold / Against the wreckful siege of batt’ring days.” The melodic and sweet summery imagery in soft s’s again contrasts the rough, tough portrayal of time pummeling everything in its path. “Wreckful” and “batt’ring” capture the pounding relentless attacks of this metaphoric warrior, while “siege” suggests a menacing enemy waiting outside the gates. The last two lines in this quatrain stress the speaker’s fear that time will destroy and conquer even the hardest materials used to protect fortresses: “When rocks impregnable are not stout, / Nor gates of steel so strong, but Time decays?” That is, time will decay even rock and metal barriers, symbols of indestructibility. However, the oddly ambiguous order of phrasing, “But