DAY 5 - CYCLE 8 - SEMESTER 2

Today, we went through the first five words of Unit 7 in the vocabulary book. Then, we did four sentence diagrams on page 59 of the sentence diagramming workbook. Afterwards, I distributed the WWI poetry packet and cruelly told you that you needed to memorize ten poems by Monday. Hooray for April Fool's Day! You don't need to memorize anything. Thanks for letting me have fun at your expense, though!

Together, we read through the introductory essay. Test your remembrance of that essay by asking yourself:

1. What is a "poetic moment"?
2. How is form important to poetry?
3. How should you approach the reading of poetry to get anything out of it?

We then read over some instructions about how to read poems. Remember that simply to go through them once to get the gist of them is like walking by a stadium to get an understanding of a particular game of football. Doing so in either case won't lead you to a rewarding understanding and you certainly won't have any fun. So, take the trouble to get inside where what you see might excite, startle, and amuse you.

We'll be getting more into form in the following days, but for today we looked at sonnet forms: the Italian, English and Spenserian. Check your memory:

1. What are the stanza formations in each?
2. What is the rhyme scheme in each?
3. How do the stanzas relate to one another?
4. What's an octave, sestet, rhyming couplet, and quatrain?
5. What meter are sonnets written in? How would the rhythm of one line of that meter sound?

When poets deviate from these standards, look for reasons why he/she might have done that. Often, there's a reason that gives a clue to the poem's meaning. In two of the classes, I had the chance to tell you about a segment of the late Randy Pausch's "The Last Lecture;" the segment of which I spoke is at 37:20 in the video. The reason the ending of that virtual world is hilarious is because its opening was pure precious treacle. The whole notion of contrast is vitally important to WWI poetry (and just about any human endeavor to teach or amuse, frankly), so keep an eye out for it.

We began to look at a poem together: Rupert Brooke's "The Dead." Brooke, as I mentioned, died on the way to Gallipoli, and while he died young, perhaps he was spared a worse fate by missing that particular military encounter.

We all got through the first octave and started to make some good sense of that. But there is still much to be gained, and that's where your homework starts. In groups 2 and 4, I had brains enough left to collect your homework assignment due today: the list of thirty words you associate with WWI (15 nouns, 15 verbs). Group 6, I still need most of yours. You'll be writing your own war sonnet over the course of this unit, just to get a feel for what things are like on the other side of the pen.

But for tonight, you just need to get comfortable with the process of reading a poem for meaning, so I gave you a paraphrasing assignment.

HOMEWORK
Using the model poem, paraphrase, and note/comment form I passed out in class, complete your own paraphrase of the last stanza of "The Dead" and do one for "The Soldier," the poem that appears immediately to the right of "The Dead." We will talk about them tomorrow, right after we do some vocabulary and sentence diagramming. Group 6, bring your word lists with you.