Second Essay
Due: Wednesday, November 10Approx. Length: 5 pages
Give a reading of the pairs or trios of poems below, emphasizing speaker(s), setting or occasion, and tone. You may draw ideas from introductory material, footnotes, or questions in the Norton Introduction to Literature as long as you cite them properly. In each case, discuss first one poem and then another. Your essay should begin with a thesis, include a clear transition between your discussions of the poems, and end with a conclusion. You should not use any secondary sources for your essay.
Before writing on any topic, you should read the poems and ask yourself the following questions: Who is the poem’s speaker? What is the occasion? What is the setting? Is there more than one? How is setting and/or occasion important in each poem? How would you describe the tone? Does it change over the course of the poem? If so, where and to what effect(s)? What isthe theme of each poem? After you have answered the questions, draw on your relevant answers to organize and write an essay on how the poems use speaker, occasion and/or setting, and tone to express the poems’ themes. You may also draw on the sub-questions I suggest for each poem on page 2 of this assignment.
Choose one of the four topics below:
1. How do Simon J. Ortiz’s “My Father’s Song” (Norton 470-471) and Robert Hayden’s “Those Winter Sundays” (Norton 471-472) use speaker, setting and/or occasion, and tone to comment on memories of fathers by adult sons and/or on different modes of masculinity?
MANDATORY DEADLINE : Friday, December 17th 11:00 PM
Sources :
Poem 1
My Father’s Song
by Simon J. Ortiz
SUNDAY, 15 JUNE 2003
Listen (RealAudio) | How to listen
Poem: “My Father’s Song,” by Simon F. Ortiz from A Good Journey (University of Arizona Press).
My Father’s Song
Wanting to say things,
I miss my father tonight.
His voice, the slight catch,
the depth from his thin chest,
the tremble of emotion
in something he has just said
to his son, his song:
We planted corn one spring at Acu-
we planted several times
but this one particular time
I remember the soft damp sand
in my hand.
My father had stopped at one point
to show me an overturned furrow;
the plowshare had unearthed
the burrow nest of a mouse
in the soft moist sand.
Very gently, he scooped tiny pink animals
into the palm of his hand
and told me to touch them.
We took them to the edge
of the field and put them in the shade
of a sand moist clod.
I remember the very softness
of cool and warm sand and tiny alive mice
and my father saying things.
Poem 2
Those Winter Sundays
BY ROBERT HAYDEN
Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.
I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he’d call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house,
Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love’s austere and lonely offices?
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