Week 4: Voice and Diction

This Week

For Monday please read Shelley's "Ozymandias" (411).

For Wednesday please read Browning's "My Last Duchess" (413).

For Friday read Thomas's "Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night" (438).

Every day this week, please come to class prepared to discuss the tone of the poem and the persona and character of the speaker or speakers.

Journal Activity

Both last week and this one we are thinking about persona and tone in poetry. Poetry is capable of an incredible amount of nuance and subtlety in its tone, and we as readers are capable of an incredible amount of disagreement. For this week's writing assignment I want you to think more about persona and tone in poetry.

Write the first two paragraphs of an imaginary essay about the tone of  one of the poems we've read together. Follow the style and tone of a formal essay, and try to make us feel that you have a whole essay written but we're only seeing the first two paragraphs.

Example

In Dorothy Parker’s “One Perfect Rose” the final stanza effectively subverts the expectations built by the previous two. The language of the first two stanzas follows a pattern that should be familiar to us—and certainly was familiar to Parker. This familiarity leads us into a false sense of security. We think we know what kind of poem this is, and we think we can predict what the conclusion will be. Parker’s abrupt shift in tone subverts these expectations and forces us to reread the entire poem. With the new understanding of the speaker’s tone that we gain in the final stanza, we are able to reread the tone of the first two stanzas as well, and to understand the irony that was at first inaccessible.

 Parker's first stanza begins with the line, "A single flow'r he sent me, since we met" (1).  Parker could expect that her readers would immediately recognize the symbolic meaning of a single flower.  When this line is coupled with the title of the poem, "One Perfect Rose", it immediately sets expectations of the reader.  We recognize the sentiment as conventional and even cliche.  The speaker is being romantically pursued by the "he" of the first line.  She is the passive recipient of gifts and he is the conventional wooer.  The use of an apostrophe in the word "flow'r" is a strange one here, however.  It is, in 1926, when the poem was written, an archaic device.  The language of the poem in its first line, then, is conventional, predictable, and even stale.

Looking ahead to Next Week

Next week we'll be reading three poems about death.  Though they're assigned for different days, and we will most likely stay with them in that order, please come to class on Monday having read all three so that we can feel free to compare if we need to.