Prompts - "Those Winter Sundays" and "Autumn Elegy"

For some reason, there were a lot of you absent today; in fact, there have been a lot of absenses lately. Please re-read the attendance policy on the syllabus. If you are not in class, you cannot do well, and I don't want you to be surprised when you lose your participation points and a big chunk of your grade. As I am grading your midterms, it is very apparent to me who has been in class and who has not. I'm particularly surprised that so many of you were gone today when I was introducing our poetry unit. Unless you are already an expert on how to read and analyze poetry, you should not be missing class. (There are a few of you who have contacted me about being absent; I am not talking to you.)

Don't feel obligated to answer every part of the following questions (there are a lot of questions within each prompt), but there should be something here that you can respond to. I think you will discover that when you start to write about a poem it will open up to you in exciting ways.

1. In any poem, but perhaps especially in a short poem, little things can have a big impact. How, for example, does the word “too” in the first line of “Those Winter Sundays” affect the way you read the poem? Certainly Hayden could have written "Sundays my father got up early," but he didn't. (It's always worth your time to consider what choices the poet did not make in addition to the evident choices on the page). How does the repetition of the question “What did I know?” affect you? Why do you think Hayden asks it twice rather than once? Why do you think the poem is called "Those Winter Sundays" and not just "Winter Sundays"? Why do you think the poem ends with a question, rather than a statement? Again, nothing in the poem is arbitrary or by accident, so everything is fair game for analysis.

With that in mind, consider the sounds of the poem. Read it aloud and notice the way it works in your mouth and in your ears. As we discussed today, a poem is itself an experience, not just about an experience. How does the play of sounds in "Those Winter Sundays" (change of vowel registers, assonance, consonance, alliteration, etc.), make it into an experience?

2. Autumn is literally present in "Autumn Elegy," but it is also used metaphorically. Discuss the metaphorical uses of the season. What properties of autumn are transferred to something else, helping you to see it in a new way? Notice, too, how the poem's form is related to its content. Why is it divided into four-line stanzas? Why aren't the stanzas autonomous? (In other words, why do the sentences cross over the white spaces between stanzas?) Why does the poem begin and end with the same word? Also notice that the poem rhymes, although the rhymes are generally slant (not exact). Slant rhymes don't call attention to themselves like exact rhymes do, and because the lines of the poem are not end-stopped, we tend to read right through the rhyming words. One might say that the rhyme is disguised (many readers don't notice the rhyme when they first read the poem). How might any or all of this relate to the poem's theme? How does Norris use sound (assonance, consonance, alliteration) to connect words together? How does he use different vowel registers to evoke certain emotions? For whom is this elegy written, and why is autumn an important part of it?

There is a lot more to talk about in both of these poems, but this is enough to get us started for Thursday. See you then.