Post your ideas for the first essay below. This is a good place to test thesis statements and topics and to discuss the finer details of the assignment.
Review the prompt and details for this assignment on Blackboard.
Writing About Literature
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Thesis: In this essay, I will show how “Thirteen Ways to Look at a Blackbird” by Wallace Stevens and “Theme for English B” by Langston Hughes both have themes relation to human emotions and analyze the execution presenting such themes.
Kyla, this is a great start! Try and focus in on a specific emotion that you read in both of these poems. I’m immediately inclined to point out fear or perhaps love, but there are certainly other emotions described or implied in each poem even if they are not explicitly named.
Thesis:
“Ozymandias” and “My Last Duchess” are two poems that both describe works of art, a sculpture and a painting, respectively, both of which depict a deceased person. These artworks act as masks that hide the subjects’ real nature, as well as depicting the sum of their life’s work.
Petvy, this is a good overview for your essay. Your thesis statement might want to argue that the dead figures depicted in each work of art are similar and/or different in important ways. For instance, Ozymandias seems to have had a hand in the commissioning of his statue and seems to have held a great deal of power while he was alive. But the Duchess had her portrait commissioned by her husband and was ultimately (we may presume) murdered on her husband’s orders. While she lived, she seemed not to have much power (according to my reading, but perhaps you can prove otherwise). Do these figures fare differently as works of art? Ozymandias’s broken statue seems a bit embarrassing and ironic. The painting of Duchess, however, is a subtler presence: do you think the Duke remains jealous or fearful of her even after her death?
“Sonnet 73” and “Sonnet 116” are two different, yet very similar poems that use metaphors, imagery, and meter to portray the beauty and everlasting effect of love.
Karyna, commenting on the mystical qualities of love in Shakespeare’s sonnets is a great starting point for this essay. But know that every poem uses metaphor, imagery, and meter. What you’ll need to show is how the Shakespearean sonnet form (fourteen lines divided into three quatrains and a final conceit expressed in the closing couplet), exemplified in the two sonnets you’ve chosen, works within certain formal constraints to explore what you call “the beauty and everlasting effect of love.” I don’t see a hopeful outlook on love (by which I think you mean romantic love within the confines of a marriage?) in Sonnet 73. That poem is more pensive and is concerned with “lov[ing] that well which thou must leave ere long.” In other words, enjoy the moment because this love is not going to last. This seems to be the antithesis to “the beauty and everlasting effect of love,” so if you keep with the theme you’ve chosen, Sonnet 73 should act as a sort of foil to Sonnet 116. If you’re going to talk about “metaphors, imagery, and meter,” you would do better to focus on elements like tone or mood, personification, or simile, as well as sonic qualities of the poem where you notice them, such as alliteration, assonance, and consonance, and repeated or closely related words. Always use adjectives to describe the tone, mood, imagery, meter, or any other literary device you’re scrutinizing. Using any of these terms without an accompanying adjective doesn’t tell your audience anything they won’t already know.
How do you start to do this? Reading each poem very closely! Start by breaking the poem into sections (quatrains and couplets) and then into lines and finally phrases or single words.
The two poems I have selected for this Essay is Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening by Robert Frost and It is a Beauteous Evening, Calm and Free by William Wordsworth. The theme I am focusing on is nature and the influence it had on both characters in certain ways.
Tayyab, this is a good start. You’ll need to explicitly show what you mean by “nature” because it’s a broad term. You’ll also need to be more specific than to simply state that nature has an “influence… on both characters in certain ways.”
Here are some questions to get you started:
How, specifically, does Wordsworth’s speaker respond to the beauty and calmness and freedom of the evening by the seashore? Is the little girl part of “nature,” as you understand the term? How, specifically, does Frost’s speaker respond to the cold and the snow of the evening, to the woods, to his little horse, to the miles he still has to go before he can sleep? Does it matter that the speaker “thinks” he knows whose woods he stops by?
Do these speaker’s make similar resolutions? Do they have similar responses to their surroundings? What is important about the similarities or differences you see in these responses, and why?
John Milton’s “On His Blindness” and Sir Phillip Sydney’s Sonnet 1 are both examples of poems that discuss an artist’s relationship to his work and his struggle to find inspiration and meaning in his work. In “On His Blindness”, the author finds it in a higher being while in Sonnet 1 he finds it in another person.
Ilya, I like the contrast you’re setting up between these two sonnets. Besides Milton’s overt deference to God and Sidney’s Muse’s admonition that he need only look into his heart to find the words by which to express his love for his beloved, Milton emphasizes Talent while Sidney emphasizes a progression of interconnected, interdependent, personified ideas: Knowledge, Pleasure, Nature, Invention, Study, etc. Milton wants to avoid wasting his talent, while Sidney needs to be reminded by his Muse to look into his heart. Maybe there’s some room for comparison and contrast here.
Also worth comparing are the voices that speak in each poem: the murmuring voice of “On His Blindness” and the Muse in “Sonnet 1.” Can you make any connections between these two voices?
John Keats’ “Ode on a Grecian Urn” and Robert Browning’s “My Last Duchess” both concern the appreciation of beauty in its stillness. In “Ode on a Grecian Urn”, the speaker is content with the immortalization of movement and strong emotion while in “My Last Duchess”, the speaker is satisfied with keeping his previously outgoing wife still and controlled as a painting.
Chiara, comparing these poems is a very logical move, since they are both ekphrastic poems (talk about ekphrasis in your essay!).
Is the speaker of “Ode on a Grecian Urn” truly, as you say, content? What, then, do we make of his exclamation, “Cold Pastoral!” Pastoral is poetry about an idyllic, restful life in the countryside. But “Cold” vexes this sunny view of pastoral—interpreting the meaning of “Cold” in this line will go a long way toward defending your reading of the speaker’s response to the urn. I do like the ways you’re reading the two poems.
Although “Sonnet 73” by William Shakespeare and “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” by Wallace Stevens both talk about similar issues, they are able to talk about different aspects of the same idea using there unique poetic writing style.
Jordan, you’ll have to work on this thesis statement. To say both poets have a “unique poetic writing style” doesn’t tell your audience anything. Shakespeare’s sonnet is, formally speaking, a very different poem from Stevens’s “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” which has no rhyme scheme, meter, or fixed stanza. More importantly, what are the “similar issues” these poems talk about? Again, “similar issues” shows your audience nothing. Note the specific similarities in your introductory paragraph and show how your reading of the poems will bring new similarities and differences to light.
In this paper, I will analyze how both Robert Frost in, “Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening,” and Emily Dickinson in “Because I Could Not Stop For Death,” utilize irony to portray death with a paradoxical approach. Dickinson uses irony in her poem by relating a serious topic of death with a soft-approach and tone, treating it as a journey. Likewise, in “Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening,” the speaker wants to stop and admire the beauty of the tranquility in the woods, but cannot due to the obligations he still has to fulfill. Frost thus uses irony to convey how the speaker has responsibilities in life before he can “enjoy” a more calmer occasion, such as resting, or even death.
Love this! Keep building on these ideas.
“The Snow Man” and “The Learn’d Astronomer” employ the themes of nature and man. “The Snow Man” paints the scene of a winter landscape, while “The Learn’d Astronomer” demonstrates the battle between scientific knowledge and natural knowledge of the stars. Both poems involve a higher perspective of thinking: “The Snow Man” promotes an objective view of nature, while “The Learn’d Astronomer” advances that experience and wisdom are the key to true knowledge.
Mary, I really like the ideas you’re working through here. I would question the “objective view of nature” you posit to be present in “The Snow Man.” What, then, do we do with the lines “for the listener, who listens in the snow, / And, nothing himself, beholds / Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.” I can see how one might read this as an “objective view of nature,” as you do. And this is a good reading. I wonder whether the ambiguity of these lines might necessitate further explanation. Similarly, in Whitman’s poem, that learn’d astronomer himself seems to present the speaker and the students in the auditorium with an “objective view of nature.” Keeping in mind that what we now call science used to be called “natural philosophy,” I think you might mean to contrast “scientific knowledge” with “poetic knowledge.” Does this get closer to the position you’re trying to uphold?
Thesis: In “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” by Wallace Stevens and “Because I Could Not Stop For Death” by Emily Dickinson, both poems utilize different literary devices such as vivid imagery that generates very dark undertones, that help develop the common theme of irony shared between the two.
Lanz, the questions you’ll have to address, if you keep this thesis unchanged, include the following. What is it about the imagery of these poems that can be called “vivid”? Likewise, can you give specific examples (perhaps images that seem similar or even the same between the two poems) of what you mean by “imagery that generates very dark undertones?” Dark in hue, or dark in mood? Both? One or the other, depending on the poem? What is ironic about each poem, and how does irony help us to better understand the speaker of Dickinon’s poem in relation to Death, and the speaker(s) in Stevens’s poem in relation to a blackbird?
The victims of time often are forced to face their own mortality, this phenomenon occurs throughout Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 60” and “Sonnet 64”. Imagery rooted in metaphorical language (generally alluding to themes regarding nature) in addition to structural parallelism (or lack thereof) creates an overarching theme across poems: Time is an enemy, and occasionally a paradoxical entity.
Cory, comparing these two sonnets is going to give you plenty to say. I think you can get even more specific than simply saying Shakespeare uses nature imagery. He uses imagery of oceans and shores, farms and fields, etc. “Nature” by itself could mean everything that is not myself, i.e., my mind. The shared theme of Time as something to be resisted through cultivating an appreciation for the fullness of life and youth is a great anchor to your more particularized readings of the imagery and its function within each respective poem.
For my essay, I will be comparing Robert Browning, “My Last Duchess” and Robert Frost, “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”. I am interested in the way the story gets told in each poem. I don’t know what it is called though!
The majority of Frost’s poem is the person being distracted by the woods. At the end, he regains focus and continues walking.
The majority of My Last Duchess is the person complaining about his ex in a painting. At the end, he dismisses it and moves onto Neptune.
I need help determining what this is called, but this is what I want the focus of my essay to be of.
Joe, I’m wondering whether you might consider the differences between solitude and society in these poems. On one reading Frost’s speaker is very much alone in the woods, and yet he is not lonely. He knows there’s a village and an acquaintance (perhaps the owner of the woods might even be surmised to be a friend) nearby. He knows he has a place to sleep at the end of his journey. Perhaps it’s in a warm, familiar place, or perhaps it’s an eternal sleep with a community of souls who have died.
Browning’s speaker, Ferrara, on the other hand, enjoys all the comforts of an obedient court, a rapt audience in the courtly attendant of his new fiancée, and a house filled with fine art commissioned by some of the best artists available for hire. And yet, in a very important, poignant way, he is utterly alone in spite of all his power. This is the thing people never seem to understand about power. It breeds isolation and distrust.
I think the word you’re looking for is persona. The persona of the speaker in Frost’s poem seems more genuinely self-assured than the confident yet jealous Ferrara.
Thanks for the reply?
Meant to say Thanks for the reply! With an exclamation not a question mark, now I sound sarcastic. I will definitely try to make comparison on Persona.
The two poems I will talk about in my essay are, “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Bird” and “Because I Could Not Stop for Death”. The common theme I will talk about between the two poems is Death.
Aiden, make sure in your opening paragraph, and in your thesis, to note specific ways each poem reflects on death. In Dickinson’s poem, Death is personified and takes on concrete characteristics (“He kindly stopped for me”). In Stevens’s poem, however, death is not personified and is more implied that openly articulated in the presence, absence, activity, or stillness of the blackbird or the scene in which the blackbird is involved. What role might literary devices like irony, sarcasm, innuendo, or mood play in each poem’s characterization(s) of death? What is clear or unclear about how the speaker thinks about or avoids thinking about death? Can either poem be said to be mournful? Obviously, there’s an endless font of questions to draw from. By articulating your reading of the particular ways in which each poem reflects on death early in your own essay, you’ll hopefully limit the range of possible interpretive questions to something manageable for a five-page paper.