Hmm. Active ("experienced") and passive ("experienced")

The woman cares for the medical student.

Sorry, this is the Catholic school boy in me. This is a biblical allusion to the letter of Paul to the Corinthians, right after the famous "Love is patient, love is kind" passage.

The woman asks questions that move the conversation along. Does Chika?

Abacha "was a Nigerian Army officer and dictator who served as the de facto President of Nigeria from 1993 until his death in 1998.

In August 2019, the population of Kano was just under 4 million; the population of Lagos, somewhere around 21 million, the largest city in all of Africa.

Something interesting here going on with the narrative voice. Is this third person omniscient, or is this unannounced a shift into Chika's POV?

Let's imagine that you lost a necklace in a riot and told somebody about it, a person you saved from the violence. How would you feel if this were her response to you?

This is the first of eight times that the narrator says "Later, the first of eight times that the narrator pushes the reader past the resolution of this action. What's the impact of this narrative choice?

At what point did you see this as something other than path to your self-knowing?

perceptive on gender & flamenco.

Dilletantism

What responsibility have you ever accepted?

I mean, this is cultural tourism, right? Responding to a notice at a food co-op?

I mean, isn't it also the hidden hybrid of culture? the Arabic and the Spanish language?

Hmm. I wonder if Sullivan himself wrote this. Very often the headline / title is written by an editor. What made this the necessary best title?

Very cool surprise to the story!

For another personal essay on mental health issues that has a scientific facet to it, check out Esme Wang's Perdition Days.

Greenhill students, I wonder what kind of unfiltered material you can weave into your own story. Teacher comments? Old texts? Snapchat stories? Photos?

This might make a great "springboard" sentence for students trying to tell their own stories in writing.

I know that Sullivan is speaking in general terms. But allow me to geek out. There's a thing called blood harmony, a term used to describe the utterly close familial interplay of voices. The Louvin Brothers do this, one takes the lead and sometimes within the same phrase shifts to the harmony so imperceptibly that you can't believe it's not the same lead vocal. It happens in "When I Stop Dreaming" at about 0:36

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zUhYckHoTxM

Fast forward to about 14:00 in this podcast episode for a fuller explanation.

This is a high literary family. Edmund Spenser wrote an epic poem called The Fairie Queene that I read twenty years ago in grad school. (It's roughly contemporaneous with Shakespeare's work.) English at the time had a kind of ending "e" that has, over time, been dropped in many words. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gPlpphT7n9s

I'm an English teacher, so I'm persuaded by this idea: We learn how to human (yes, I'm using that as a verb), we learn how to human, and we choose how we will human by means of the stories that we hold dear.

A thing, really. You'll come to see when you read Upon This Rock why Sullivan is so adept at, so comfortable with a faith-informed rhetoric.

All-too-familiar change in diagnosis and hope. If you've had a family member in the hospital, you know this facet of the story well.

In the few personal essays of his that I've read, Sullivan does this to great effect--he unpacks a detail late in the narrative, late in the reflection. Not a hidden thing, not a surprise, just a moment of clarity that makes us experience the moment fully before we can mitigate in or mediate it through any other lens, as in this case, the parentage of each.

I love how, despite the circumstances, Sullivan is careful that he's not overstating the case. That he anticipates a skeptical or free-thinking or atheist reader as well as one who would let the word slide.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vLwd_giY9dg

You may add text alone.

Somebody cultivated curiosity for her. Somebody directed her vision to big questions & ideas captured in elevated language.

Hmm. What are the analogous zero-sum stakes, what are the analogous public results of my work?

This essay seems to be about gratitude. Leaders & non-leaders, careerist folk & non-careerist folk are blessed with meaningful people, events, & environments.

The English teacher, non-entrepreneurial ethos within me finds this diction unsettling.

It doesn't surprise me that there is no single person, event, or influence. Maybe that's encouraging--we are always learning, being led, being inspired, etc.

See this Brazilian bar with glasses that stand up only if you rest them on your phone.

Don't mean to look like a troll, but this [ahem] reevaluation of Thoreau makes for a nice complement to our current understanding of his work.

And your child responds quickly to the value you place on SM. My kids often ask for us to post a photo to FB

How does Sullivan resist quoting Orwell here: To see what is in front of one's nose needs a constant struggle. :)

Reading this article made me more fully aware. For the moment, my kids don't have cell phones. What will dinner be like when they do?

Maybe the earlier imagery of salvation and addiction weren't quite exact: The internet is a site for predators and prey

A revealing mixing of imagery in these opening paragraphs: seeking salvation and admitting to addiction

Dang! He's been talking in their front yard for hours! Would you entertain some stranger reluctant to answer direct questions for hours? On another subject entirely, isn't Allen Ginsberg the best?

Hmm. Is O'connor trying to suggest that he's down on his luck, seeing as his clothes don't match?

So he arrives near the end of day--I wonder how long they entertain him in conversation

Cool word choice

An apparent shift from the female gaze to the male gaze

In the next linies, the speaker describes what men "still can't see"...why can't they see these seeminlgy apparent physical things? How/can men be better seers?

Hmm. It ought to make me proud?

As some of you know, you don't know an Angelou poem until you hear her read it. This recording has some small differences, but not key ones.

Consider tracking the characterization of the speaker--how/does it change/evolve?

Let's talk about love as instruction. Is it a lasting lesson? one that we need much instruction in?

You might notice that each stanza ends with a parenthetical statement. Track the effects or pattern of these statements.

The title is not a name or place, but the name of a strict closed form of poetry. You'll notice that the six words at the end of the first sestet (a six-line stanza) repeat in each of the subsequent sestets (in a different, but strict, order), and that they all are there in the closing three line stanza (known as the sestina's envoi).

This is a typo. It should be "mind"

The most regular of iambic lines of the poem. Unrhymed iambic pentameter is called "blank verse", which you're familiar with due to your study of Shakespeare. Here, Heaney constructs a very regular ten-syllable line, but the monologue feels conversational rather than "poetic".

Click here for a reading of the poem by Greenhill School class of 2016's CL

Within the epiphany and the tears and the hunger and the death, Sullivan doesn't lose his snarky edge.

!!!

Christianity in practice, at its best--no judgment, no demands, a relationship

Let's say it's a phase. What's important about it? What's the allure?

"may not exist"!? Don't forget to draw students to the definition of faith at Hebrews 11:1: Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen (KJV)

His religious experience is mature, thoughtful, intellectual.

Okay, so here, Sullivan's newness is officially otherness. He transmits their faith via his writing--so they define and show their passion

How true is this of faith generally? Should it be quiet and subtle, like that of U2, or should it be bold, like that of Jars of Clay?

When/do they become aware of Sullivan's intentions/faith experience/skepticism?

Note the attempt to connect, somehow, even the tiniest thing in common.

The dialect, the all caps, the quick decision. We have to hear the voice--Sullivan doesn't translate.

So from very early on, he acknowledges (almost as if by accident) that believers are not of a single type. The point about race?

Kind of a glimpse at his process--this happened, I noted it, it's not important, the getting-there doesn't matter.

Click here for Greenhill School's Flor Chavez reading the poem.

Check out this manuscript image hosted at Harvard's Emily Dickinson Archive! And click here to listen to Greenhill School's Kelly McCain read the poem.

Check out this manuscript image hosted at Harvard's Emily Dickinson Archive! And click here to listen to Greenhill School's Gillian Glengarry read the poem.

Click here for a reading by Greenhill's Assistant Head of School Tom Perryman.

Click here for a reading of the poem by Greenhill School's Genie Burke.

Click here to listen to Greenhill School's Scott Griggs read.

Greenhill School's Scott Cotton reads the poem here.

Greenhill School's Kindergarten teacher Rachel Baldwin reads the poem here.

What are the connotations of fire and ice? In general (not in world-ending terms), which would you prefer and why?

Okay by this point it might be worth asking if the poem is not about the literal end of the world, but about two different kinds of destructive mindsets--a cold dispassionate one and a fiery dangerous one.

@Drama__chick @yellingwithlove & @finleyt noted that the poem seems strangely unconcerned with these eschatological questions, seems deliberately apathetic

So I guess this is a kind of volta. The speaker leans on the "fire" response at first. "But if it had to perish twice"? Subtle biblical allusion (Noah, Revelation)? Deliberate illogic?

Interesting how the closing lines are among the shortest. @HMKunick gets "the sensation that the poem "melts" into the final line"

Most of the poem is monosyllabic. This is one of the few words longer than one syllable. What are the effects of this simplistic diction?

How would you scan the opening of this line--iambic or spondaic? Explain the differences on the ear and the mind.

Hmm. "Some" (line 1) plus "Some" (line 2) plus "I" (line 3) = All opinions?

The second time the speaker offers a gentle lack of authority to the poem. "From what I've tasted" limits his perspective, perhaps.

Click here for Jenny Fisher's reading.

See line 2 of WIlbur's poem.

Alexie is either tipping his hat to this e.e. cummings love poem, or ... not tipping his hat to that poem.

Here is WIlbur's poem.

Click here for Jack Fisher's reading.

IMDB fans, any suggestions about which actors (or Greenhill folk) you would cast in the filming of this poem? Explain.

Believable/relatable claim? Relevance to poetry/manhood?

Now that you've read the whole thing, what is the relation between the speaker and the addressed "you" of the poem...husband and wife? friends? former lovers?

Yeats refers here to Genesis 3, when Adam eats the forbidden fruit and is punished by the Lord: "cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life; thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee; and thou shalt eat the herb of the field; the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return" Genesis 3:17-19.

Click here for Mel Girard's reading.

From the present "I walk" through the daydream/hopeful "I would" and finally to the bleak future "I shall"

I'm really interested in how the speaker makes herself a subject, how she recharacterizes herself here.

This poem is published originally in 1916, FYI.

Before you read through the rest of the poem, consider this self-characterization. What might the speaker mean by this? Are you a rare pattern? a more common pattern?

Click here to listen to Greenhill School Librarian Jenn Tirrell read the poem.

Reminds me, somehow, of that moment in Frost's "I'd like to get away from earth for a while" in Birches, how she shifts from the physical reality to her meditation.

I suppose you're supposed to read this one as if the title is the first line of the poem.

Click here to listen to Greenhill's Mary Tapia read the poem.

I like the proximity and distance that's suggested here. The speaker is, apparently, tight with the host but not the host's girlfriend.

Since we read J. Alfred Prufrock recently, I cannot help but notice how the speaker crafts immediately the horrors of slavery as a shared experience, how the speaker and the reader have a shared trauma.

Note the way Angelou moves from a nightmare topography here to, in subsequent lines, an actual domestic setting.

The third and last time Angelou summons this refrain.

Back to water imagery, imagery that is hinted at in the rain/storm of the poem's resolution.

Cool image. Sustaining, flowing, natural. This speaker does not bring his passions from the common spring. What, in your experiences, are the common springs from which one brings passions?

Check out this guy who performs Whitman as a temple cantor might.

...

A kind of flirtation: A young woman would accidentally drop a handkerchief so that a young man could pick it up, give it to her, and talk to her. In polite society, this kind of elaborate play would be necessary because young women simply did not go up and talk to young men.

Is this a kind of dialogue between soul and body? A recollection of an erotic encounter? A metaphor for the relationship between the reader and the poet? Something else?

In our class, be prepared to discuss parts 1, 5, 6, 11, 24, and 52.

It makes little sense to say "the speaker" when talking about this poem, huh? : )

Watch Patrick Stewart and David Suchet work through this scene. Stewart argues (at about 28:00 in this documentary that this speech, conventionally understood as a kind of testament to a shared humanity, should be understood instead as a cold-hearted justification for revenge.

At about 7:00, David Suchet notes in this documentary that Shylock is called by name only six times; he is called "the Jew" twenty-two times.

Hmm. If the Jew must be merciful, must the Christian?

Remember their joking about mercy, virtue, and damnation when you get to the trial scene.

This scene depicts S&S reactions to misfortune--They consider Antonio's misfortunes tragic, Shylock's comic.

A rare moment of aphoristic wisdom from this joyful character. I love how his wisdom is echoed centuries later in Keats' ode.

Note how skilfully she improvises a rebuttal, not just of the logic of Bassanio's appeal, but also of the very phrasing of it!

She has a very philosophical instinct

Note how tragic are all of the figures they cite.

Note his critique of the apparent hypocrisy of the Venetians...and of course, the irony (his daughter will marry a Christian who will inherit all of Shylock's resources).

Note that the song's opening rhymes with "lead", the "winning" casket!

For Launcelot alone, or for all of us?

Folk looking at this depiction as anti-semitic read this term as a kind of perversion of circumcision, a condition of Abraham's covenant (Genesis 17:10)

Many critics note how unique Shylock's rhetoric is--here, he repeats rather than responds to the terms of the bond.

Note how light hearted are many of Bassanio's exchanges with his friends.

Okay, is Wilbur's soul saying it's a difficult balance for the nuns alone, or for thieves, lovers, nuns...that is, a difficult balance for all people?

The title is a kind of paraphrase/riff on Augustine's discovery late in his Confessions that God is in the world, not in some distant place. Here is a link to how some critics have responded to this poem.

I guess in terms of structure, here is a volta, right?

literally and figuratively!

Wilbur appeals to our ear most often by means of alliteration and consonance (w's and k's in this line) rather than by means of rhyme.

Here is the poem.

The closest that we get to a joke in just about any poem we've read.

One of the few sentences in the poem that isn't enjambed, plus it's regularly iambic.

Notice how it's a fanciful vision, a deliberate early move away from physical truth.

Maybe it's nothing, but I'm love how Wilbur flips the meter at the beginning of lines like these. We need to ask Mr Worcester (tomorrow's reader) about the effects of this poem's shifting meter--sometimes iambic (the RAtion STACKS are MILky DOMES), but not exclusively so (BURNED on the MOON, COVered the TOWN)

Wilbur writes this in 1947. Alsace was "the epicenter of [Germany's] last major offensive of World War II. In December 1944 Hitler had ordered a last-ditch operation, code-named Nordwind, against the thinly stretched lines of the U.S. Seventh Army and the French First Army in the Vosges Mountains, in the west of the region. The Alsatian people, their homes, and their land were now in the middle of the Nazis’ final, desperate attempt to stave off the Allies" (link).

Keep an eye on the rhyme here. It's called terza rima, and Wilbur borrows this interlocking method from Dante's Divine Comedy: ABA BCB CDC...

Literally, it is sweet and glorious to die for one's country.

that is, the lenses of a gas mask

He's speaking, of course, about a sheet of ice atop the water in the trough.

If you want a challenge, track the rhyme and see if any patterns or curiosities emerge.

The third (?) time that the body reproaches the soul for forgetting.

Again, keep Marvell's poem in mind.

Read between the lines. Why might the body panic, according to Solly?

The poem is shot through with (rhetorical?) questions

Consider carefully the symbolic terms that ground each part of the dialogue--here, slavery/imprisonment and sensory deprivation.

Maybe it's worth noticing that the body gets the last word.

I'd love to hear your ideas about how you react to these meter and vowel sounds

How many times does this word get repeated? :)

Look again at the title: From what you can tell, what happened to this relationship? Was the love reciprocated?

A caesura, that is, a pause within a line of poetry. This poem has (from what I can tell) no enjambment. A very deliberate, patient (?) rhythm and pace.

The woman's effects are described first on nature, then on the speaker.

Each stanza resolves by means of three successive rhymes and a parenthetical statement.

Remember the speaker here--a poet, a person who make a living bringing life to the page.

The only eight-line stanza--all the others are nine lines long.

In tragedy, maybe y'all talked about the dramatic function of peripety (reversal). Here, Doty constructs an imaginative rewind of the tragedy.

Remind me to tell you what Doty told my students about homophobic slurs years ago when we Skyped.

I'm really taken by how Doty bravely includes this pejorative stereotype--that homosexual men have limp wrists.

You'll notice that this poem is written in quatrains and ends in a couplet. You're familiar with how both function in Shakespeare's sonnets--how do they function here?

Ha! The neighbor speaks in aphorisms.

Interesting observation that really drives the inquiry of the poem--why do we need walls?

Though this poem does not rhyme, it sometimes rings out in a strict metrical pattern--black verse, that is, unrhymed iambic pentameter. And SPILLS the UPper BOULders IN the SUN

Hmm. What's the qualitative difference between reading and studying a book you love?

Not sure why I love this reassertion, but I do.

I'd love to hear your opinions about the syntax (word order) here.

Just as it was helpful to know that Hopkins was a deeply religious man, it might be helpful to note in studying this poem about freedom that as "a civil rights activist, Angelou worked for Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X". Click the "Related Content" tab for more on her bio.

You'll notice here especially that the poem is driven by two rhetorical modes--comparison and repetition. Consider how the comparison impacts you emotionally, how you re-read in a new tone the second time "The caged bird sings" stanza appears. [How many times does something have to repeat before you call it a refrain?]

Hopkins has a knack for creating new words (literary term: neologism) like this one and day-labouring-out in line four

It occurred to me only here that the sestet is animated by negatives (not, no, nor).

Okay, notice how this sonnet is unlike Shakespeare's. Here, no interlocking rhymes, not the same variety of rhyme, no pithy couplet. If you had to describe the impact of this structure, how would you?

As in Pied Beauty line 6 ("áll trádes"), Hopkins has a very specific sound in mind. What is the sense/meaning of that specific sound?

When we use nature to our own ends, we know what we're doing--don't we?

Mixed things are beautiful--how mixed? Which mixtures are best?

Listen to Greenhill's US counselor Priya Singhvi read the poem

Hmm. Where exactly is the soul, acdg to the speaker? Where do we traditionally locate the soul?

Donne was one of a group of poets that some critics derisively called "metaphysical" for constructing "a combination of dissimilar images, or discovery of occult resemblances in things apparently unlike". Like a lover, his beloved, as a flea. This kind of combination of dissimilar images came to be known in poetry as a conceit.

What does it mean to be more than married?

So many near-synonyms for the mental activity of the protagonist--recomposing and completing, discovering and remembering and recognizing.

Hmmm. Poetry offers a resolution (think of Shakespeare's pithy couplets) but not conclusions.

I guess we're back to the debate we had earlier. what kind of mimesis is poetry? An ideal one, a realistic one, a nobly-lying one?

Quatrain one here is a lengthy appositive phrase modifying "They" of line five. The main verbs driving the opening six lines are "do inherit" and "husband".

We open with stone imagery and close with flowers and weeds.

Might be worth looking up the difference culturally/socially/economically between a steward and a lord.

For those of you interested in looking at the meter, how do you understand this kind of exclamation metrically, and what are the effects?

Note also the emotional pitch of the poem--loads of questions. Do they get more frantic? more detailed? Is there some pattern to the progression of questions?

Again, keep track of the grammar here. Because [lines 1-2], then...

Listen to Melissa Battis read the poem!

Okay, so there's an agricultural image here. The Fair Youth will reap (in offspring) what he sows in the...uh... field of his wife's womb. Track the variety of imagery in this poem, and figure out which image reinforces the argument best.

It might be helpful to track the grammar and voice here. Quatrain 1 has an if-then statement in lines two and three. Quatrain 2 asks questions of the Fair Youth. The couplet pushes another if-then statement.

Listen to @drama_chick read the poem!

Effects of the parentheses? (not the image within it, but the punctuation)

Much of this meditation focuses on the Speaker in comparison with other men.

Be careful to track the grammar here. It's an elaborate single sentence. When X happens, Y. There's a volta with respect to rhyme that's standard (line 13). Where/is there an emotional volta of the sonnet?