Today we read and annotated three poems during class. If you were absent, be sure to pick up the package. Tonight, Read and annotate the Auden poem and the two Lawrence poems. Create a thesis statement for each which answers the question (while always keeping a BIGGER eye on the poem's overall theme).
Also, take notes on Sir Philip Sidney, the Renaissance cultural attitudes, and W.H. Auden.
Sample introductions:
Elizabethans see the world as vast and unified, a great chain of being in hierarchical order, a place where a man must choose to become depraved, like the lower animals, or spiritual, the place below the angels. The title of Sidney's English sonnet effectively characterizes the didactic theme of this piece, reminiscent of Donne's "Holy Sonnet 6", "Death Be Not Proud," resolutely extolling to Desire that only a blind man (not knowing the glory of humanity) can willingly succumb to Desire's bestial offerings. Syntactically, the author prepares the reader for this attitude toward desire through the use of parallelism, repetition, and the sonnet form.
The key contrast in Auden's "Law Like Love" between the first and second set of lines is from order to disorder, or from the political to the personal. Using similes, imagery , rhyming couplets, and a fable-like tone, the narrator suggests that laws, must, like love, reflect the individual.
Both the bohemian and ordered ways of living described in Larkin's "Poetry of Departures" offer an easy, objectified view of life--both "reprehensibly perfect"; as a result, the narrator is choosing to depart from hearsay and epitaph in order to swagger deliberately into a world both sober and excitatory.
Can you create introductions like the ones above in 15 minutes? Yes. Especially if you practice zooming in on your TICK chart strategy. A TICK sucks out the essence of the poem. (I know, horrible insect analogy that will BUG you forever).
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