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Possible Topics for “Mid-Term Break”

Seamus Heaney’s “Mid-Term Break” offers many possible topics to write a paragraph about.

By Friday my seniors will have to annotate Seamus Heaney’s “Mid-Term Break” as well as write an insightful paragraph about it. Writing about poetry is not easy for them, so to get them ready, to sort of grease the wheels, we did a little brainstorming for possible topics. The above photo shows what my whiteboard looks like after such a brainstorming session.

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Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird

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I found this interesting short film about Wallace Steven’s “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.” I plan to use it as part of my poetry unit with bith 10th and 12th graders.

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“The Daffodils” by William Wordsworth (Rap)

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MC Nuts spits William Wordsworth hip-hop style.

The Daffodils

by William Wordsworth

I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o’er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

Continuous as the stars that shine
And twinkle on the Milky Way,
They stretched in never-ending line
Along the margin of a bay:
Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.

The waves beside them danced, but they
Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:
A Poet could not but be gay,
In such a jocund company:
I gazed–and gazed–but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought:

For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.

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Poem of the week: The Darkling Thrush, by Thomas Hardy

The Keatsian image of the thrush produces one of Hardy’s most lyrical poems

At once a voice arose among/ The bleak twigs overhead/ In a full-hearted evensong/ Of joy illimited ... - Hardy

[[Thomas Hardy]] and his thrush belongs to the Romantic tradition, in which birds express emotion in “songs” that inform human lives. Hardy was close enough to the 19th century to be able to present the bird as a symbol of hope for the new century. Later on in his career, Hardy became more, not less, despairing — expressed in the great poem of 1912 about the sinking of the Titanic, “The Convergence of the Twain.”

In 1899, however. Hardy was more optimistic. His dark pessimism had yet to metastasize. I agree with most commentators who consider the thrush to represent the poet himself since he was frail and bird-like in appearance and filled, at the time of this poem’s composition, with an abundant hope for the future.

Let the poet-thrush’s “happy good night air” sing us into the new year, with all my thanks and good wishes to friends old and new.

The Darkling Thrush

I leant upon a coppice gate
When Frost was spectre-grey,
And Winter’s dregs made desolate
The weakening eye of day.
The tangled bine-stems scored the sky
Like strings of broken lyres,
And all mankind that haunted nigh
Had sought their household fires.

The land’s sharp features seemed to be
The Century’s corpse outleant,
His crypt the cloudy canopy,
The wind his death-lament.
The ancient pulse of germ and birth
Was shrunken hard and dry,
And every spirit upon earth
Seemed fervourless as I.

At once a voice arose among
The bleak twigs overhead
In a full-hearted evensong
Of joy illimited;
An aged thrush, frail, gaunt and small,
In blast-beruffled plume,
Had chosen thus to fling his soul
Upon the growing gloom.

So little cause for carolings
Of such ecstatic sound
Was written on terrestrial things
Afar or nigh around,
That I could think there trembled through
His happy good-night air
Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew
And I was unaware.

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“The Prelude” by William Wordsworth

William Wordsworth

A behemoth of a poem, The Prelude is essentially a philosophical autobiography in blank verse, the story of the growth of the poet’s mind. In the course of the poem, Wordsworth explores his own imagination as worthy fodder of an epic.The poem evolves out of Wordsworth’s overarching metaphor that life’s journey is a circular one whose end is “to arrive where we started / And know that place for the first time” (T. S. Eliot, Little Gidding, lines 241-42). The poem dramatizes several journeys, both literal and figurative, through which Wordsworth tries to reconstitute hope in a dark time.

The Google Books edition is more than 250 pages, so better leave this one for a long weekend or holiday. But please make time for it. It is even richer than Whitman’s “Song of Myself.” As long English poems go, “The Prelude” is the most insightful look at the human condition of the past three centuries.

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“Ubi Sunt” in “The Wanderer”

“The Wanderer” from 1818 by Caspar David Friedrich

The theme of isolation dominates The Wanderer. Most of the poem gives the reader insight into the mind of a man suffering great sorrow because of the death of his family and comrades. He spends his days in a painful exile, reflecting on the life he once had — an exile forced upon him by an unfortunate and horrible turn of events. “The Wanderer” is considered a wisdom poem in that the poet achieves true insight: in this case into the degeneration of earthly goodness. From start to finish, it follows what is known as the “ubi sunt” motif: in other words it tries to answer the question, where are they?

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“The Wanderer”

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The Anglo Saxon poem, The Wanderer, consists principally of two different speeches, the first (lines 1-5 and 8-57) uttered by the eardstapa (land-wanderer), the second (58-110) by the philosophical person described as snotter on mode (wise spirit). The poet supplies sage advice in the epilogue (112-115). Some see the poem as having only one voice, that of the eardstapa, who speaks of his experiences and the sufferings of others and thus earns the epithet of line 111, snotter on mode. This is a perfectly good way to read the poem. But I prefer to think that the eardstapa and the snotter on mode are two different voices because the characterization is much sharper if the poem is read that way, although neither approach to the poem alters the sequence of ideas and emotions presented.

What I love most about this poem, and what it has in common with Boethius’s The Consolation of Philosophy, is its emphasis on alleviating personal sorrow by recognizing the inevitable ruin of earthly values and the great need to seek out a lasting satisfaction in another realm.

These themes are presented most artfully in the above Johnny Cash video, “The Wanderer,” with a little help from U2.

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Edwin Arlington Robinson

Edwin Arlington Robinson was a transitional poet between the generations of Whitman and Frost.

Today Edwin Arlington Robinson is known primarily for his poem Richard Cory, which was popularized by Simon and Garfunkel on Sounds of Silence. But he wrote others of probably greater depth, including Luke Havergal, Teddy Roosevelt’s favorite. Robinson’s poems have a way of working themselves into your psyche, the best example of which for me is Charles Carville’s Eyes; you can view an experimental short film of this poem here on this site.

Richard Cory

WHENEVER Richard Cory went down town,
We people on the pavement looked at him:
He was a gentleman from sole to crown,
Clean favored, and imperially slim.

And he was always quietly arrayed,
And he was always human when he talked;
But still he fluttered pulses when he said,
“Good-morning,” and he glittered when he walked.

And he was rich—yes, richer than a king,
And admirably schooled in every grace:
In fine, we thought that he was everything
To make us wish that we were in his place.

So on we worked, and waited for the light,
And went without the meat, and cursed the bread;
And Richard Cory, one calm summer night,
Went home and put a bullet through his head.

Charles Carville’s Eyes

A melancholy face Charles Carville had,
But not so melancholy as it seemed,
When once you knew him, for his mouth redeemed
His insufficient eyes, forever sad:
In them there was no life-glimpse, good or bad,
Nor joy nor passion in them ever gleamed;
His mouth was all of him that ever beamed,
His eyes were sorry, but his mouth was glad.

He never was a fellow that said much,
And half of what he did say was not heard
By many of us: we were out of touch
With all his whims and all his theories
Till he was dead, so those blank eyes of his
Might speak them. Then we heard them, every word.

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List of Poems Used in Dead Poets Society

The title of the movie comes from T. S. Eliot’s Tradition and the Individual Talent.

“No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists.”

Here are the poems in order of appearance.

• To the Virgins, Make Much of Time – Robert Herrick
• Ode 1.11 – Horace
• O Captain My Captain – Walt Whitman
• O Me! O Life! – Walt Whitman
• Excerpt from Walden [not a poem] – Henry David Thoreau
• The Prophet – Abraham Cowley
• Excerpt from Ulysses – Alfred Lord Tennyson
• The Ballad of William Bloat – Raymond Calvert
• The Congo – Vachel Lindsay
• Song of Myself – Section 52
• The Road Not Taken – Robert Frost
• Sonnet XVIII – William Shakespeare
• She Walks In Beauty – Lord Byron
• Song of Myself XVI – Walt Whitman
• A Midsummer Night’s Dream – William Shakespeare

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The Raven Visual

Here’s an example of what one creative student did with Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven” — a visual mind map of the poem. Click for larger image.

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