Lesson Plan for Week 4: General Thoughts and Notes

Patrick Mooney, TA
Eng 10, Prof. Waid
24 April 2013

Major topics:

  1. Thought for the day:

    The hermeneutic procedure is therefore a two-step method, in which, in a first moment, fragments of experience betray the presence of symbolic figures — beauty, wholeness, energy, perfection — which are only themselves subsequently to be identified as the forms whereby an essentially Utopian desire can be transmitted.

    — Frederic Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future, ch. 1

  2. Administrative Issues:
  3. Questions for discussion:
    1. Look at Dickinson's poem 343 (page 161 in your course reader), and perform a sentence-by-sentence summary of it.
    2. What is the function of a dash in English written prose? What functions does it serve in Dickinson's poetry?
    3. What new verse forms have we encountered this week? What are their characteristics, and how can you recognize them?
      • common meter/hymn meter — sometimes referred to as the "ballad stanza": quatrains with alternating lines of iambic tetrameter/iambic trimeter, rhyming abab or abcb.
      • The villanelle: a nineteen-line form (five tercets, followed by a quatrain) with lines that repeat according to a certain pattern. Examples that I personally like better than Bishop's One Art are Theodor Roethke's The Waking and Dylan Thomas's Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night.
      • You may have also encountered the sestina, if you read some Bishop poems in the reader that weren't required on the syllabus. The sestina is a 39-line form (six sestets, followed by a tercet) in which the words that end the lines in the first stanza also end the lines of the succeeding five stanzas in a particular cyclical order, and each line of the final tercet contains two of those final words.