Reference no: EM131715193
Assignment 1
Answer one of the questions below.
Introduction to Poetry
I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide
or press an ear against its hive.
5I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,
or walk inside the poem's room
and feel the walls for a light switch.
I want them to waterski
10across the surface of a poem
waving at the author's name on the shore.
But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.
15They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.
1. Which image in the poem do you think is the most effective? Is there an image that you think is not effective, that is confusing or awkward, or that you cannot understand?
2. Are the final two stanzas disturbing? Too disturbing? In their tone, are these stanzas similar to, or different from, the preceding stanzas?
Assignment 2
Answer one of the questions below.
The Road Not Taken
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
5To where it bent in the undergrowth;
Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
10Had worn them really about the same,
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
15I doubted if I should ever come back.
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I
I took the one less traveled by,
20And that has made all the difference.
1. If "The Road Not Taken" consisted of only the first and last stanzas, we would probably feel that Frost was talking about a clear-cut choice between two distinctive ways of life-for instance, the life of a poet or the life of a farmer. The poem does not consist only of the first and last stanzas, however. What do the two middle stanzas do? Do they complicate the poem in an interesting way? Or, do they make a muddle of it? Explain.
2. The poem is often interpreted as Frost's statement that he chose the life of a poet. Yet, Frost on several occasions said that he was spoofing the indecisiveness of a friend and fellow-poet, Edward Thomas. Given the fact that the middle stanzas suggest that the two roads are pretty much the same, and given the fact that the speaker in the last stanza does seem to playfully mock himself ("I shall be telling this with a sigh / Somewhere ages and ages hence"), do you think that we should or should not take the poem as a serious statement about the decisions we must make? Explain.