Anonymous. “The Wife’s Lament”
Prompts:
You may choose to write about one or two of the following poems:
Anonymous. “The Wife’s Lament”
Arnold, Matthew. “Dover Beach”
Bishop, Elizabeth. “The Armadillo”
Brathwaite, Kamau. “The Making of the Drum”
Dungy, Camille T. “Characteristics of Life”
Gorman, Amanda. “The Hill We Climb”
Hayden, Robert. “Ice Storm”
Harvey, Mikko. “The Poem Grace Interrupted”
Hughes, Ted. “Hawk Roosting”
Jeffers, Robinson. “Hurt Hawks”
Jonson, Ben. “Inviting a Friend to Supper”
Parini, Jay. “Some Effects of Global Warming in Lackawanna”
Santos Perez, Craig. “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Glacier”
Stevens, Wallace. “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird”
Wordsworth, William. “The Tables Turned”
Yeats, William B. “The Lake Isle of Innisfree”
After choosing the primary source(s), explain how the poem(s) explore(s) one of the following topics:
grief and hope,
the purpose of poetry (i.e., expression of emotion, public education, political commentary or change),
nature poetry versus ecopoetry,
ecological disaster [induced by natural force(s) and/or anthropogenic emissions] or
a relationship among humans and other-than-humans or natural phenomena (birds, trees, snow).
Additionally, in your essay, you must correctly use at least five of the literary terms we have studied this semester (poetic situation, speaker, ecopoetry, action, prosody, meter, etc.) or literary terms explained in When using a term in your paper, bold the term the first time you use it. For every missing or incorrectly used term, two whole percentage points will be deducted from your paper. (Remember: Each literary term should be used to help you analyze textual evidence clearly and concisely. For instance, you should describe why it is significant that a play incorporates a certain type of diction or challenges a convention of a certain type of literary genre.)
