Peotry questions - Assignment Example

POETRY QUESTION Audre Lorde, “Hanging Fire” (pages 682-683 What is the speaker worried about? What seems to concern her most? What do her anxieties tell about her personality and situation? Answer: The speaker is very much worried of her sickness at a very young age of 14. She has a deep concern with her health and youthfulness which she must have been enjoying. Her anxieties are the manifestation of her hopelessness at a very young age. 2. Consider the title of this poem. "Hanging Fire" is an idiom which means delaying.

However, like most such phrases, it has a literal base. It is an old gunnery term which indicates the time that passes between the firing of a gun and its explosion. More specifically, it refers to early weapons which required a lit match or cord to be held, then touched to the weapon to explode the gunpowder upon command, thus literally "hanging" or "holding fire." Explain what this idiom suggests about the speaker's situation. In particular, look at the lines, "There is nothing I want to do / and too much / that has to be done," simple but eloquent lines midway through the poem.

Answer: The title “Hanging Fire” symbolizes that the character in the story is just waiting for her end because of sickness and she just cannot do anything about her situation. Robert Frost, “Home Burial” (pages 1020-1023) 1. Who are the two speakers in the poem and what is the basis of their conversation? How does their physical situation (the actual setting of the poem) indicate their emotional relationship? Answer: The two speakers in the story are the husband and the wife and the basis of their conversation in the death of their son at the backyard of their house one winter time.

The actual setting of the story indicates that they are having a difficulty with their relationship in relation to the death of their son. Matthew Arnold, “Dover Beach” (page 704) 1. This poem has a speaker and a listener. How do you visualize the setting and their relationship? What sort of action is suggested? What does the landscape look like in the first stanza? Answer: The speaker in this poet is the poet and the listener is his companion. To visualize the setting of their relationship, they love each other very much and there should be honesty, love, and spiritual light between them.

The first stanza shows the landscape from the French Coast across the English Channel towards the England Sea wit the setting of the windy night beside the sea, underneath the pale moonlight. 2. How have the speaker's feelings changed by the final stanza? What has disturbed him? How does he try to resolve his feelings? How is the landscape described now, in terms of sight and sound? Answer: The poet approaches his beloved one to be honest between them. And the landscape turns to a new and beautiful world, a land of dreams but there is no joy and faith and love. 3. Consider the complex metaphor of the tides here and how the speaker dwells primarily on the ebb tide.

What does that seem to say to him about his world? Answer: Before, the speaker implies that the sea brings hope and happiness to the world but now it brings sadness, loneliness, and pain. Anthony Hecht, “Dover Bitch” Go to http://sophia.smith.edu/~cscott/bitch.html to read this poem. This poem is not in our textbook. Anthony Hecht's poem "Dover Bitch" provides a contemporary interpretation of Matthew Arnold's poem "Dover Beach." 1. According to Hecht's poem "Dover Bitch," what does the speaker’s companion think about his words and actions?

What would she rather be doing? How does this differ from the speaker’s perspective in “Dover Beach”? Answer: The companion thinks that the speaker is a drunkard and whiskers. She is regretting for what is happening and she gets angry. Both of the two poems bases are about love but they are not alike. The difference between the two is that the one is talking about a true love while the other one is love base on desire. Maya Angelou, “Africa” (pages 725-726) 1. How is Africa characterized in this poem?

Answer: “Africa” is characterizing in this poem as a complex, pretty, and ridiculously hot woman. 2. What are the implications of the image of Africa as a woman? How does the image of Africa as a woman work in concert with the image of violence in this poem? Answer: Brigands invaded Africa and put under hostage all the men and women. A lot of killings happen. Africa regains the power and now as a woman who went to long sufferings is now rising and ready to face the world. Theodore Roethke, “My Papa’s Waltz” (pages 734-735) 1.

How does the situation in the poem and the poem itself characterize the waltz and the speaker’s feelings about it? Which words are most suggestive and indicate the speaker’s feelings? Answer: The poem is trying to tell the readers that the father in the poem is stressed with problems and a risk of drinking is at risk. The son serves as a savior to his fathers’ tendency of drinking and the son made to have quality time with the father through dancing Waltz. The word that is used to indicate the feelings of the son towards the father is “death”, meaning, that he does not approved that his father is drinking.

Li-Young Lee, “Persimmons” (pages 743-744) 1. Examine the voices in the poem. Whose voice is behind each of the lines? Who speaks the last four lines (lines 83–86), the father or the son? What difference does it make? Answer: The voice behind each of the lines of the poem is the author himself. The last four lines were spoken by the father. It is implying at the last four lines the difference of having good memories from the loved ones especially during the time where the sight is gone.. This poem draws on all the senses—sight, sound, taste, smell, and touch.

Re-read the poem and pay close attention to the experience with the persimmons (even though you may have never tasted them). What are some of the symbolic meanings embedded in the persimmons? Answer: The symbolic meaning embedded in the persimmons is the feeling of a person especially feeling of hope and survival. David Ferry, “At the Hospital” (page 759) 1. Who is “she” (first word in first line)? Answer: She is the patient in the hospital who died because of cancer. 2. What, exactly, has “clarified” the cancer’s “blurred grammar”? Explain. Answer: What probably happens at the story is that the patient, whom the author loved most died in cancer.

Wilfred Owen, "Dulce et Decorum Est" (pages 759-760) AND “Disabled” (pages 690-691) READ the following to learn more about World War I and pay close attention to the pictures, which provide images that might reflect the attitude of the poem: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_1 NOTE: Owen was killed in action on November 4, 1918, barely a week before the Armistice, fighting in World War I. He was shot in the head while trying to get across a canal in northern France. He was 25 years old.

Only four of his poems had been published at the time of his death, including “Dulce et Decorum Este” and “Disabled” in 1917. During World War 1, medical technology had advanced enough to keep a quadruple amputee alive—in other words, a person could have both arms and both legs amputated and survive. Thus, a shell explosion could blast away a soldiers two arms and two legs and he could survive. A person in this situation often would be carried around in a basket, resulting in his being referenced as a “basket case” (which is the first known use of the phrase).

“Dulce et Decorum Est” 1. What is implied by the comparison to “beggars” (line 1)? To “hags” (line 2) Answer: They like beggars that are very weak and tame against the power of hags that is powerful and strong. The soldiers are fallen from a youthful and strong fighter to “Bent Doubled”. 2. What are the shells said to “hoot” (line 7)? To be “disappointed” (line 8)? What is accomplished by giving human attributes to inanimate objects (which is the literary term personification)?

Answer: The gas shell begins to fall, and the only way to protect them is through the gas mask but the author saw one of the soldiers lost the gas mask. 2. What is “The old Lie” (line 27)? How does the poem justify the use of the phrase “The old Lie”? Answer: This means the promise to that the young soldiers of desperate glory after the war. This is justified because in spite the fact that many of the soldiers are dying in the war, still many of the young people wants to be a soldier.

“Disabled” 1. How might you respond differently to this poem if the soldier himself were the speaker? If the poem described the events of his life in the order in which they happened? Answer: The soldier in the story is physically disabled and he has not lost only his arms and legs but rather the meaning of his life. he has a big regret of what has happened with him. 2. The first three lines of this poem state: “He sat in a wheeled chair, waiting for dark, / and shivered in his ghastly suit of grey, / Legless, sewn short at elbow.

” The third line indicates that his suit has been modified because he is missing limbs—perhaps both legs (“legless”) and arms (“elbows”)—but yet is sitting in a wheelchair. As a result of his missing limbs, what will he miss? How does this situation impact the question in the last two lines: “Why don’t they come / and put him into bed? Why don’t they come?” Does this have a double meaning? Answer: He definitely misses his youthful life. He will not be able to move and walk the way he wants anymore.

He misses the vigor the youth possess. He is now in solitude or in isolation and at his age he could still recall the youthful days he could have lived but never comes because of what happened to him. And now that he is old and disabled, no body cares and he has to live in isolation because nobody comes anymore to put him to bed. Reference The Norton Introduction to Literature : Alison Booth, Kelly J. Mays (Paperback, 2010).