Poets and Poetry
The poets chosen have written poems about either love and or politics. While reading the poems you will notice how interchangeable the topic of love and politics is. It is an interesting combination for 8 th grade in North Carolina because we study American History.
Emma Lazarus
Emma Lazarus's "The New Colossus" written in 1883 contains lines that reflect her feelings as a fairly recent immigrant to the United States with her family, trying to escape Russian persecution. She reluctantly wrote the poem to raise money for the pedestal's construction. In 1903 the last four lines of her poem was engraved on a bronze plaque. At that time the Statue of Liberty was not meant to be a symbol of immigration but it was quickly transformed into one. Her poem held out hope for outcasts and the down trodden of the world. The poem contains imagery and symbolism about the message of freedom from the Statue of Liberty. The first line includes a simile by comparing the Statue of Liberty to the Colossus of Rhodes one of the Seven Wonders of the World. Lines 1-9 talk about the country looking at the statue whereas the statue of liberty is personified because she is speaking directly to the immigrants in lines 9-14 3.
Claude McKay
Claude McKay, Jamaican-born, wrote during the Harlem Renaissance. Since he wasn't an American he was stunned by the racism in the south and inspired to write about it. He wrote about segregated public facilities. He was a proponent of full liberties and racial solidarity. These feelings motivated him to write "If We Must Die." It is a Shakespearean sonnet written in iambic pentameter and contains three quatrains with a couplet at the end. This poem was written about the race riots all over America in 1919. McKay's sonnet called "America", was written in a more ambivalent frame of mind, expressing grudging admiration for the vast energies of the oppressor that are reflected in the landscape. Throughout the poem America is personified as a woman. This is also a Shakespearean sonnet written in iambic pentameter and contains three quatrains with a couplet at the end.
Gwendolyn Brooks
"The Sonnet-Ballad" was written by Gwendolyn Brooks. This poem describes how a woman feels when her love goes to war. This Shakespearean sonnet has three quatrains and a closing couplet: the rhyme scheme is abab, bcbc, dede, ff. In the first quatrain the woman is expressing her feelings about her love going to war. She is prematurely mourning his loss as if he were dead already. She starts questioning the meaning of life and the purpose of a heart without him. In the second quatrain she clearly states he will never come home and she alludes to him being unfaithful. Finally in the third quatrain she repeats the phrase about his unfaithfulness but realizes it is with the war and not another woman. Personification is used in the poem, and the last line is symbolic because it treats death as a lover. The poem reflects on what happens to women when they are left behind in war time 4.
Walt Whitman
"Oh Captain, My Captain" is a metaphor-rich poem about the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. The sing-song meter and rhyme that Whitman used in the poem has never been replicated in any of his other poems. The metaphor of comparing a ship to a national state was used by Wadsworth Longfellow before the Civil War. The broken ship represents America and the fearful trip refers to the American Civil War. The titular "captain," refers to Lincoln's leadership. The poet refers to the Captain as a father, symbolizing the respect he has for him. Although he ensured, that the ship land safely, he himself did not. This sonnet has the feel of an ode. The expression "fallen cold and dead" is repeated three times as if in disbelief.
William Butler Yeats
Although the content in the poem "Leda and the Swan" is for a mature audience I know my students will connect with the poem because the news, movies, video games, and music they listen to contains similar information. The sonnet is a Petrarchan sonnet with a separation between the first 8 (octave) lines and final 6 (sestet). The iambic pentameter of the poem is abab, cdcd, efg, efg. The poem refers to the Trojan War. Zeus fell in love with a mortal Leda the Trojan Queen and raped her while taking on the form of a swan to protect his identity. She became pregnant and gave birth to Helen of Troy who was part goddess and part mortal, which in Yeats's view explains the exquisite beauty that eventually led to the destruction of one civilization and chaos and unhappiness in the other. The violence within the poem mirrors the destruction of Troy, which was thought in Yeats's time to end the Mythological Era and mark the birth of Modern history.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Sonnet 43, "How do I love thee, let me count the ways" has the Petrachan rhyme scheme. She emphasizes the vastness of her love by using the words breadth for width, height and depth for deep, and how far up for height. She continues to say that even if she can't see her love her soul can. She uses a metaphor to compare her love to the love from God. The poem even talks about how love is a basic need similar to food, water, clothing and shelter. Then the poem seems to contradict itself by saying that although love is a basic need it is also a choice and no one is forcing it on anyone. The poet also compares love to childhood innocence and says that it can withstand every emotion beyond eternity. She also mixes her love with her Christian faith. Her love for her husband was so deep that it was necessary for her to merge her love for her husband with her eternal relationship with God.
William Shakespeare
William Shakespeare is the world's most famous writer. Several familiar words (successful, fashionable, mimic etc.) and phrases (at one fell swoop) first appeared in his plays. Some writers have even turned his work in to famous plays Disney turned Hamlet into The Lion King. His plays and poems engage our hearts and our minds, exploring our most complex emotions and our most fundamental ideals, our fondest hopes and our most disturbing dreams. 5 He wrote for actors to perform his plays never knowing his work would be published, read and performed decades later.
Sonnet 18 is one of his best known and best loved poems 6. It refers to immortal love as a friend and as a gift bestowed by poetry. He also talks about how physical beauty doesn't last but is in the eye of the beholder. He also uses a metaphor to compare his love to a day in summer.
William Carlos Williams
It is hard to decide why Williams wrote the poem "This is just to say". To the reader it appears to be a note innocently left on the ice box but the innuendo behind the lines makes one wonder why he describes how the plums tasted so vividly. Additionally, the first line in the third quatrain is "Forgive me". But when one reads it in a poem it reads more like a command than an apology. He was a doctor so he could have been up early and did not have time to prepare anything else—which is why he probably took the plums. This poem makes one speculate about the relationship between the poet and his wife. Had they previously had an argument and the line "Forgive me" is also for something else that has occurred between the couple? Although there is not any specific rhyme scheme, "th" is repeated in lines 2, 3, and 4. Then the consonance of "f" is repeated in lines 8 and 9. Finally the consonant "s" is repeated in lines 11 and 12, and all these repetitions confer a kind of rhyme pattern on the free verse.
Robert Hayden
In "Those Winter Sundays," Robert Hayden acknowledges how his father provided for him during childhood. He mentions the pain in his dad's cracked hands that ached from the manual labor of his job but didn't prohibit him from taking care of the family. Even though his dad made sure the house was warm he still gingerly avoided thanking him, weary of the angry atmosphere either between his parents or between his neighbors or between his neighbors and his parents. Hayden had an emotionally tumultuous childhood and was moved back and forth between neighbors and parents. He was also impaired visually, which made it difficult to participate in sports. As a result he spent most of his time reading. Although the sonnet does not rhyme, it creates a rhyming relationship that had not existed with his father until now. It dispels his doubt about whether his father loved him—which he only realized when he became an adult and father himself.
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