Analyze the author's purpose and rhetorical stance and develop your own interpretation of the poems.

Instructions

You will write a poetry essay exploring the conflict and ambiguity in the four groups of poetry you read in this module. The poetry selections in this module reflect conflict and ambiguity concerning themes that may be interpreted as both positive and negative elements. Construct a well-written essay that analyzes the author’s purpose and rhetorical stance and develops your own interpretation of the poems. Reference each poem in your essay. Remember, you must include both the author’s purpose as well as your personal response in your essay. Note: Rhetorical stance is language that conveys a speaker’s attitude or opinion with regard to a particular subject.

Complete the following four sections of the poetry essay:

Part 1: Poems by William Blake

– Analyze the author’s purpose and rhetorical stance and develop your own interpretation of the poems. Remember, you must include both the author’s purpose as well as your personal response in your essay.

Part 2: Poems by Richard Crashaw

Part 3: Poem by Robert Frost

Part 4: Poem by Thomas Hardy

Criteria for This Assignment

Length and Formatting Requirements

Five to six pages, double spaced
Time New Roman, 12-point font
Works Cited page
In-text citations
Divide your essay into four parts, each representing one of the four poetry elections

Content Requirements

Analyze the author’s purpose and rhetorical stance.
Develop your argument for your interpretation logically and cohesively.
Address all four parts of this essay.

William Blake:

“The Chimney Sweeper” from Songs of Experience

A little black thing among the snow,
Crying “weep! ‘weep!” in notes of woe!
“Where are thy father and mother? ”
“They are both gone up to the church to pray.

Because I was happy upon the heath,
And smil’d among the winter’s snow,
They clothed me in the clothes of death,
And taught me to sing the notes of woe.

And because I am happy and dance and sing,
They think they have done me no injury,
And are gone to praise God and his Priest and King,
Who make up a heaven of our misery.”

“The Chimney Sweeper” from Songs of Innonence

When my mother died I was very young,
And my father sold me while yet my tongue
Could scarcely cry “Weep! weep! weep! weep!”
So your chimneys I sweep, and in soot I sleep.

There’s little Tom Dacre, who cried when his head,
That curled like a lamb’s back, was shaved; so I said,
“Hush, Tom! never mind it, for, when your head’s bare,
You know that the soot cannot spoil your white hair.”

And so he was quiet, and that very night,
As Tom was a-sleeping, he had such a sight! —
That thousands of sweepers, Dick, Joe, Ned, and Jack,
Were all of them locked up in coffins of black.

And by came an angel, who had a bright key,
And he opened the coffins, and let them all free;
Then down a green plain, leaping, laughing, they run,
And wash in a river, and shine in the sun.

Then naked and white, all their bags left behind,
They rise upon clouds, and sport in the wind;
And the Angel told Tom, if he’d be a good boy,
He’d have God for his father, and never want joy.

And so Tom awoke, and we rose in the dark,
And got with our bags and our brushes to work.
Though the morning was cold, Tom was happy and warm:
So, if all do their duty, they need not fear harm.

Richard Crashaw

“To the Infant Martyrs”

Go, smiling souls, your new-built ages break,
In heaven you’ll learn to sing, ere here to speak
Nor let the milky fonts that bathe your thirst
Be your delay.

The place that calls you hence is, at the worst,
Milk all the way.

“Upon the Infant Martyrs”

To see both blended in one flood,
The mother’s milk, the children’s blood,
Make me doubt if heaven will gather
Roses hence, or lilies rather.

Note: The “Holy Innocents” are the newborns of Bethlehem murdered by King Herod.

Robert Frost

“Mending Wall”

Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun;
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.
The work of hunters is another thing:
I have come after them and made repair
Where they have left not one stone on a stone,
But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,
To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean,
No one has seen them made or heard them made,
But at spring mending-time we find them there.
I let my neighbor know beyond the hill;
And on a day we meet to walk the line
And set the wall between us once again.
We keep the wall between us as we go.
To each the boulders that have fallen to each.
And some are loaves and some so nearly balls
We have to use a spell to make them balance:
“Stay where you are until our backs are turned!”
We wear our fingers rough with handling them.
Oh, just another kind of out-door game,
One on a side. It comes to little more:
There where it is we do not need the wall:
He is all pine and I am apple orchard.
My apple trees will never get across
And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.
He only says, “Good fences make good neighbors.”
Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
If I could put a notion in his head:
“Why do they make good neighbors? Isn’t it
Where there are cows? But here there are no cows.
Before I built a wall I’d ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offence.
Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
That wants it down.” I could say “Elves” to him,
But it’s not elves exactly, and I’d rather
He said it for himself. I see him there
Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.
He moves in darkness as it seems to me,
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
He will not go behind his father’s saying,
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says again, “Good fences make good neighbors.”

Thomas Hardy

“Channel Firing”

That night your great guns, unawares,
Shook all our coffins as we lay,
And broke the chancel window-squares,
We thought it was the Judgment-day

And sat upright. While drearisome
Arose the howl of wakened hounds:
The mouse let fall the altar-crumb,
The worms drew back into the mounds,

The glebe cow drooled. Till God called, “No;
It’s gunnery practice out at sea
Just as before you went below;
The world is as it used to be:

“All nations striving strong to make
Red war yet redder. Mad as hatters
They do no more for Christés sake
Than you who are helpless in such matters.

“That this is not the judgment-hour
For some of them’s a blessed thing,
For if it were they’d have to scour
Hell’s floor for so much threatening….

“Ha, ha. It will be warmer when
I blow the trumpet (if indeed
I ever do; for you are men,
And rest eternal sorely need).”

So down we lay again. “I wonder,
Will the world ever saner be,”
Said one, “than when He sent us under
In our indifferent century!”

And many a skeleton shook his head.
“Instead of preaching forty year,”
My neighbour Parson Thirdly said,
“I wish I had stuck to pipes and beer.”

Again the guns disturbed the hour,
Roaring their readiness to avenge,
As far inland as Stourton Tower,
And Camelot, and starlit Stonehenge.