This week’s reader’s journal will explore the literary genre of poetry. Specifically, we will look at poems about protest, resistance, and empowerment. So often, when we think of these stances, we picture a physical presence of some sort—marching in the streets, acts of disobedience, or brute force. But words can be acts of protest, resistance, and empowerment too. Poetry, in its unique ability to capture an image and evoke emotion in an economy of words, is a powerful tool to speak truth to power and to rally the masses against any of the many social ills that threaten our ability to live as neighbors. Poetry can galvanize. It can shame. It can challenge. It can call out. It can imagine a better world. The poems you’ll be exploring this week for your reader’s journal assignment are powerful examples of this.
Assignment Instructions
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/53900/making-peace
After you’ve reviewed as necessary the instructional materials the module and selected an approved poem (see above) for this assignment, please create a document to submit in which you will respond to the following prompts. In your response to each of the prompts below, you must incorporate specific evidence from the poem (words and/or lines from the poem) to support your answers.
Introduce the poet’s full name and provide the name of the poem. (Poem titles should be in quotes.) Indicate why you selected the poem. What drew you to it for this assignment? It might be something about the sound of it, the topic, the title—anything really. What about the poem caught your attention? Summarize the focus or gist of the poem (what it’s about).
Analyze the poem by identifying its poetic elements. Poetic elements fall into four main categories: figures of speech, sound devices, rhythm and meter, and voice and tone. You must refer to specific evidence from the poem to justify your identifications.
Explain how the elements you identified contribute to the overall meaning and power of the poem.
Figures of speech include imagery, simile, metaphor, personification, apostrophe, overstatement (a.k.a. hyperbole), understatement, metonymy, synecdoche, and allusion. Please refer to the instructional materials in week 5 of our course for help with these terms.
Sound devices include alliteration, consonance, assonance, cacophony, euphony, and onomatopoeia. Again, please refer to the instructional materials in week 5 of our course for help with these terms.
Rhythm and meter are what give a poem its musicality, usually from the recurrence of stresses and pauses when we read the poem aloud. A stress is a greater amount of force given to one syllable when speaking than is given to another. The meter of the. poem is when stresses recur at fixed intervals in a line and within stanzas. Rhythm and meter provide the “beat” of the poem and they can add emphasis to certain words. The four most common types of meters in English poetry are: iambic, anapestic, trochaic, and dactylic. Rhyme scheme is the identification of the pattern of rhyme that occurs at the end of each line. For example, the common one stanza rhyme, “Roses are red, violets are blue, sugar is sweet, and so are you” has an ABCA rhyme scheme. Enjambment is another device that can create rhythm in a poem. See the instructional materials in week 5 of our course for more information on these terms.
Voice and tone include the words used, both their dictionary definition (denotation) as well as the associations the words might have (connotation), symbolism in the poem, the juxtaposition of words, the style of the poem, the use of another language or of a spoken dialect in the poem, and the attitude that the poet or the speaker of the poem (like a narrator, but called a persona in poetry) has towards the topic or subject or readers of the poem. Voice and tone also come into play if the poet uses irony or satire to say something other than what is literally being said in the poem. There are instructional materials in week 5 to help you with these concepts.
After having analyzed the poem, what about the poem did you find most compelling and why? What surprised or intrigued you? What stayed in your mind after you put the poem down? What did analyzing the poem help you to see more clearly or appreciate more fully in terms of the topic or maybe even in terms of poetry in general?
Assignment Requirements
Citation Requirements: only your chosen poem
No outside research is required
Word Count: 600 word minimum
Formatting:
A numbered list of answers is required. Please do not answer in one continuous piece of writing because this makes it difficult to assess your treatment and understanding of each individual prompt. You do not need to copy the questions or create graceful transitions between each of your numbered responses. You do not need a title page.
Plagiarism Submission
