Wednesday - Tone

We will talk about writing

explications of "My Last Duchess"

If you have trouble writing an explication of "My Last Duchess" yet. Think about the following things:

Themes: Power, Language and Communication (or lack of), Jealousy, Madness.

Symbols: “Spot of Joy”, statue of Neptune, the painting of the Duchess.

Form: Dramatic Monologue in open couplets (why couplets? Why open?), and in iambic pentameter.

Characters: The Duke. Look at how the Duke talks, his punctuation within the lines, the flow of his thoughts. Can the Duke express himself (he claims at one point that he can’t).

Irony: Dramatic irony, and a few situation ironies.

The title: What's the meaning behind it?

The setting: Is there any thing important about the setting?

Today we will read Tone (chapter 10) and write a journal entry on tone and how you interpret tone in one of the following poems: "The Telephone", "Love in Brooklyn" and "The Flea". 
 


Love in Brooklyn
By John Wakeman

"I love you, Horowitz," he said, and blew his nose.
She splashed her drink. "The hell you say," she said.
"Not love. You don't love me. You like my legs,
and how I make your letters nice and all.
You drunk your drink too fast. You don't love me."

"You wanna bet?" he asked. "You wanna bet?
I loved you from the day they moved you up
from Payroll, last July. I watched you, right?
You sat there on that typing chair you have
and swung round like a kid. It made me shake.
Like once, in World War II, I saw a tank
slide through some trees at dawn like it was a god.
That's how you make me feel. I don't know why."

She turned towards him, then sat back and grinned,
and on the bar stool swung full circle round.
"You think I'm like a tank, you mean?" she asked.
"Some fellers tell me nicer things than that."
But then she saw his face and touched his arm
and softly said, "I'm only kidding you."

He ordered drinks, the same again, and paid.
A fat man, wordless, staring at the floor.
She took his hand in hers and pressed it hard.
And his plump fingers trembled in her lap.




The Telephone    (Robert Frost)

"When I was just as far as I could walk
From here today,
There was an hour
All still
When leaning with my head against a flower
I heard you talk.
Don't say I didn't, for I heard you say--
You spoke from that flower on the windowsill--
Do you remember what it was you said?"

"First tell me what it was you thought you heard."

"Having found the flower and driven a bee away,
I leaned my head,
And holding by the stalk,
I listened and I thought I caught the word--
What was it?  Did you call me by my name?
Or did you say--
Someone said 'Come'--I heard it as I bowed."

"I may have thought as much, but not aloud."

"Well, so I came."

 

THINGS TO KNOW 

Elements: Know both definitions and examples
Imagery, denotation, connotation, irony – verbal, situational, dramatic, sarcasm, metaphor, personification, metonymy, apostrophe, synecdoche, symbol, allegory, paradox, overstatement, understatement, allusion, tone, alliteration, assonance, consonance, internal rime, slant rime, end rime, approximate rime, refrain, meter, iamb, trochee, anapest, dactyl, spondee, monosyllabic foot, line, stanza, cacophony, caesura, enjambment.

Forms:
Structure, line breaks, how the poem looks, rhyme and rhythm and how it is created
Blues, Sestina, Villanelle, Pantoum, Sonnet (English, Italian, Spenserian, and hybrid), haiku, quatrain, tercets, couplets, litany, ballad.

Poems:
“Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” “Home Burial” “Heights of Machu Picchu” “The Flea” “My Last Duchess” “The Wastelands” “To His Coy Mistress”, “The Waste Lands” “Nani” “The Colonel” “One Art” “Fern Hill” “The Waking” “My Mistress’ Eyes” “The Second Coming”


POETRY EXPLICATION PART I
A poetry explication is a relatively short analysis which describes the possible meanings and relationships of the words, images, and other small units that make up a poem. Writing an explication is an effective way for a reader to connect a poem's plot and conflicts with its structural features. This handout reviews some of the important techniques of approaching and writing a poetry explication, and includes parts of two sample explications.