Week 5: Theme

This Week

This week we'll be reading John Donne's "Death Be Not Proud" (p. 406), Ben Jonson's "On My First Son" (p. 407) and Wilfred Owen's "Dulce et Decorum Est" (431).  We are likely to also refer back to Dylan Thomas' “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night” (438), so if you didn't read that closely or didn't understand it last week, read it again please.

We will likely focus on Donne's poem on Monday, Jonson's on Wednesday, and Owen's on Friday, but please come to class on Monday having read all three poems so that we will be free to compare if we want to.

Journal Activity

Please choose either the creative or the critical option.

Creative
All of our poems for this week are about death. Your creative writing assignment is equally morbid.

1. Write a poem about death. It doesn't have to be depressing, and it doesn't have to be profound. It can be flippant or funny or it can be personal and thoughtful, whatever you like. Although this won't affect your ability to achieve full marks on the assignment, my advice to you is to try to be surprising. Try to think about this assignment in a way none of your classmates will.

2. Offer a brief analysis of your own poem. This should not be a reflection on your experience when writing it; it should be an analysis of the poem as if it wasn't yours. You may wish to talk about the form, or the poetic language, or about the meaning, or any analytical strategy you choose. A suggested strategy for this is to write the poem and then go do something else for awhile. Come back to the poem later so you can analyse it with fresher eyes.

Sample

Here is my poem, written for this assignment.

Is it worth it?
My friend does his exercises every day
He doesn't eat red meat or fat
He watches his sugar and watches his salt
And he doesn't eat much of that.
He doesn't play xbox or watch the tv.
He doesn't drink (soda OR beer)
He won't listen to music if it is too loud
(He doesn't want to damage his ear).
He ends every day by making a list
of the people he needs to forgive
So he doesn't get angry and damage his heart
Geez! How long does this guy want to live?

And my brief analysis of the poem.
"Is it worth it?" is a twelve line poem with regular rhyme and rhythm composed of three quatrains. Each quatrain follows an abcb. The rhythm alternates between four and three feet per line. The combination of the sing-song rhythm and the close, almost careless rhymes give the poem a comic tone. This comic tone is somewhat undercut, however, by the implied message of the poem, that death is unavoidable.

Critical

The poems we are reading this week are all about death, but that isn't the only thing they were about.  Jonson's "On My First Son," for example, is also about fathers and sons, and so is Thomas's "Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night."  Choose any two of the poems we've read so far in this course and, in a few paragraphs, discuss a shared theme between them.

Your discussion need not be structured as a formal essay, but remember that the more you practice the skills you will need to write academic essays the more you will develop those skills.

Some examples of possible themes include (but are not limited to) love, childhood, art, marriage, war, nature.

Looking Ahead to Next Week

Your second essay draft will be due on Friday of next week, February 15th.  Please feel free to come talk to me about your ideas as you prepare to write this essay.