Length: A typical essay with a short introduction, three body paragraphs, and a short conclusion is about
1250 words (about 4-5 pages, double-spaced). An essay <1000 words cannot pass, and please do not
exceed 1500 words.Task: Perform a comparative analysis of any two of the poems listed on page two to prove a single
thesis. Your argument should be based on your own interpretation of the primary texts, which you
should illustrate through careful analysis of the poems’ formal features and well-integrated quotations.
• Rather than simply observing that the two poems consider a similar topic or use a similar
technique, and then discussing each poem separately, you should draw on aspects of each poem
to illuminate aspects of the other. Try to implicitly answer the question, “What can we observe
by looking at these poems together that we could not learn if we looked at them individually?”
• The essay should offer a specific and sustained engagement with some of the formal features
discussed in class (for example, genre, meter, rhyme, stanza structure, figurative language, and
rhetorical figures). Beyond just name-dropping literary devices or techniques, try to specify why
that device is useful or how it operates in the poems.
Amoretti
LXVII: Like as a Huntsman
BY EDMUND SPENSER
Like as a
huntsman after weary chase,
Seeing the
game from him escap'd away,
Sits down
to rest him in some shady place,
With
panting hounds beguiled of their prey:
So after
long pursuit and vain assay,
When I all
weary had the chase forsook,
The gentle
deer return'd the self-same way,
Thinking
to quench her thirst at the next brook.
There she
beholding me with milder look,
Sought not
to fly, but fearless still did bide:
Till I in
hand her yet half trembling took,
And with
her own goodwill her firmly tied.
Strange
thing, me seem'd, to see a beast so wild,
So goodly
won, with her own will beguil'd.
my
dreams, my works, must wait till after hell
BY GWENDOLYN BROOKS
I hold my
honey and I store my bread
In little
jars and cabinets of my will.
I label
clearly, and each latch and lid
I bid, Be
firm till I return from hell.
I am very
hungry. I am incomplete.
And none
can tell when I may dine again.
No man can
give me any word but Wait,
The puny
light. I keep eyes pointed in;
Hoping
that, when the devil days of my hurt
Drag out
to their last dregs and I resume
On such
legs as are left me, in such heart
As I can
manage, remember to go home,
My taste
will not have turned insensitive
To honey
and bread old purity could love.
