Assignment:   For Paper #2, you will pick two poems on a similar theme to  compare and contrast .  Your paper will explain how the poems use some of the poetic devices we’ve been discussing to express distinct attitudes towards their common subject.  It will point out the  similarities and differences  in the ways the two poems do  this .  Therefore, you will need to compare and contrast the general tones of the poems as well as how they use poetic devices to create those tones.  Poetic devices you might want to consider include diction, imagery, figurative language, sound (including rhyme, alliteration, assonance, rhythm, and meter), and form. Your  audience  for this paper is other students in the class who have read these poems.  You can assume that your reader has the poems in front of him or her, so you don’t need to quote the whole poem, though a brief paraphrase might be useful.  You will need to quote specific lines, phrases, or words in order to point out specific features of the poems.  Your  purpose  is to help your reader see the differences and similarities  in the two poems and, consequently, to better understand how each one works to create its particular effects or meanings. Your paper should be  800 – 1000 words long, typed and double-spaced, with 1” margins all around .   Use of secondary sources (other than our own textbook) is not allowed  for this assignment. If you have questions about the poem, ask other students or the instructor. Here are some  suggested topics : 1.  Compare and contrast the ways Whitman’s “To a Locomotive in  Winter ” (p. 504) and Dickinson’s “I like to see it lap the Miles” (p. 504-05) represent their common subject:  a locomotive.  What claims does each poem make about the locomotive?  What tone or attitude is taken towards the locomotive?  How does each poem use specific poetic devices to create its tone?  2.  Compare and contrast the ways Lovelace’s “To  Lucasta ” (p. 521) and Owens’ “ Dulce et  Decorum  Est ” (p. 521-22) represent their common subject:  war.  What claims does each poem make about war?  What tone or attitude is taken towards war?  How does each poem use specific poetic devices to create its tone?  3.  Compare and contrast the ways  any two  love poems in our reading represent their common subject.  What claims does each poem make about love?  What tone or attitude is taken towards love?  How does each poem use specific poetic devices to create its tone?  (Please check the two poems you pick with the instructor before proceeding.) 4.  Compare and contrast the ways  any two  of the following poems represent God:  · Donne’s “Batter my Heart, Three- Personed  God” (p. 531), · Hopkins’ “God’s Grandeur” (p. 624), · Herbert’s “Easter Wings” (p. 676), · Blake’s “The  Tyger ” (p. 824-25). What claims does each poem make about God?  What tone or attitude is taken towards God?  How does each poem use specific poetic devices to create its tone?  5.  Compare and contrast the ways.

1. Assignment:
For Paper #2, you will pick two poems on a similar theme to
compare and contrast
. Your paper will explain how the poems use some of the poetic
devices we’ve been discussing to express distinct attitudes
towards their common subject. It will point out the
similarities and differences
in the ways the two poems do
this
. Therefore, you will need to compare and contrast the general
tones of the poems as well as how they use poetic devices to
create those tones. Poetic devices you might want to consider
include diction, imagery, figurative language, sound (including
rhyme, alliteration, assonance, rhythm, and meter), and form.
Your
audience
for this paper is other students in the class who have read these
poems. You can assume that your reader has the poems in front
of him or her, so you don’t need to quote the whole poem,
though a brief paraphrase might be useful. You will need to
quote specific lines, phrases, or words in order to point out
specific features of the poems. Your
purpose
is to help your reader see the
differences and similarities
in the two poems and, consequently, to better understand how
each one works to create its particular effects or meanings.
Your paper should be
800 – 1000 words long, typed and double-spaced, with 1”
margins all around
.
Use of secondary sources (other than our own textbook) is not
allowed

2. for this assignment. If you have questions about the poem, ask
other students or the instructor.
Here are some
suggested topics
:
1. Compare and contrast the ways Whitman’s “To a Locomotive
in
Winter
” (p. 504) and Dickinson’s “I like to see it lap the Miles” (p.
504-05) represent their common subject: a locomotive. What
claims does each poem make about the locomotive? What tone
or attitude is taken towards the locomotive? How does each
poem use specific poetic devices to create its tone?
2. Compare and contrast the ways Lovelace’s “To
Lucasta
” (p. 521) and Owens’ “
Dulce
et
Decorum
Est
” (p. 521-22) represent their common subject: war. What
claims does each poem make about war? What tone or attitude
is taken towards war? How does each poem use specific poetic
devices to create its tone?
3. Compare and contrast the ways
any two
love poems in our reading represent their common
subject. What claims does each poem make about love? What
tone or attitude is taken towards love? How does each poem use
specific poetic devices to create its tone? (Please check the two
poems you pick with the instructor before proceeding.)

3. 4. Compare and contrast the ways
any two
of the following poems represent God:
·
Donne’s “Batter my Heart, Three-
Personed
God” (p. 531),
·
Hopkins’ “God’s Grandeur” (p. 624),
·
Herbert’s “Easter Wings” (p. 676),
·
Blake’s “The
Tyger
” (p. 824-25).
What claims does each poem make about God? What tone or
attitude is taken towards God? How does each poem use
specific poetic devices to create its tone?
5. Compare and contrast the ways
any two
of the following poems represent death:
·
Frost’s “’Out, Out—” (p. 494-95),
·
Auden’s “The Unknown Citizen” (p. 515-16),
·
Wordsworth’s “A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal” (p. 616-17),

4. ·
Thomas’ “Do Not Go Gently Into That Good Night” (p. 659-60),
·
Dickinson’s “I Felt a Funeral—in My Brain” (p. 774-75),
·
Dickinson’s “I hear a Fly buzz—when I died” (776),
·
Donne’s “Death be not Proud” (p. 836), or
·
Roethke’s “Elegy for Jane” (pp. 872).
What claims does each poem make about death? What tone or
attitude is taken towards death? How does each poem use
specific poetic devices to create its tone?
6. Compare and contrast the ways
any two
of the following poems represent the passage of time:
·
Lawrence’s “Piano” (p. 857-58),
·
Keats’ “Ode on a Grecian Urn” (p. 852-54),
·
Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress” (p. 861-62),
·
Shakespeare’s “That time of year thou
mayst
in me

5. beho.d
” (p. 873), or
·
Yeats’ “When You Are Old” (p. 888).
What claims does each poem make about the passage of
time? What tone or attitude is taken towards the passage of
time? How does each poem use specific poetic devices to create
its tone?
If you would like to write on a different pair of poems, check
your idea with the instructor before proceeding.
Process
Pre-writing:
1. Pick your pair of poems.
2. Read each one through a few times, including out loud, to
begin to get a general sense of its attitude towards or claim
about its subject. Keep in mind that tone may change over the
course of a poem.
3. Try to make sense of any tricky or ambiguous lines. Ask
questions if you need to.
4. Use the
list of questions
below to help you identify the specific poetic devices used in
each poem. Pay special attention to lines or passages that seem
important to establishing the poem’s general meaning or
tone. Consider how the specific poetic devices seem to be
contributing to the poem’s meaning, tone, or effects.
5. Note
similarities and differences
between the poems’ general meanings, claims, or tone. Note
similarities and differences
between the way the poems use specific poetic devices to

6. create those meanings, claims, or tones.
Drafting:
There are two general ways to organize a comparison/contrast
argument of this sort. One way would be to discuss each poem
separately: that is, say everything you have to say about poem
A and then say everything you have to say about poem B. At
some point, either in the discussion of poem B or in a
concluding section of the paper, you need to point out the
similarities and differences you’ve discovered, both the general
ones and the specific ones. The second way to organize such an
argument would be to discuss comparable aspects of the poems
one at a time: thus, you might have a paragraph or two on how
each one uses imagery, followed by a discussion of how each
one uses figurative language, followed by a discussion of how
each one uses rhyme, etc.
For most papers on this assignment, I think the first approach
would probably work better. It allows you to offer a more
coherent reading of each poem, rather than making your reader
skip back and forth between the two poems. The second
approach might work for two poems that are very similar, such
as two different Shakespeare sonnets. If you like the second
approach, be sure to give your reader a quick overview of the
similarities and differences you will focus on at the beginning
of the paper, to help your reader stay oriented.
Whichever approach you take, I’d recommend outlining this
paper before you begin drafting it. Sometimes outlines can be
stifling, but the organization of this sort of paper will probably
be pretty straightforward in most cases. Of course, if you come
up with a neat or useful insight after you’ve made your outline,
find some way to adjust the outline to fit it in.
Keep in mind that you will probably not want to write about all
the poetic features and devices you identify in each

7. poem. Rather, you will want to pick the ones that seem
important in creating each poem’s distinct tone, effect, or
meaning.
A
rough draft of the paper is due by midnight Sunday of Week
Three
. As with Paper #1, you will review a couple of other students’
drafts, and a couple of other students (and the instructor) will
review yours and make suggestions for revising it.
The
final draft of the paper is due by midnight Saturday of Week
Four
.
Get to Know Your Poems
Having picked the poems you’ll be writing about in Paper #2,
take the following initial steps to begin exploring each one:
1.
Try to decide the
subject
and
theme
of the poem:
Subject: what is the poem about?
Theme: what does the poem seem to say or feel about its
subject?
2.

8. Figure out how to
read the poem
aloud
. Follow the punctuation.
3.
Attempt to
paraphrase
the poem. Are there any words or lines whose sense is not
clear to you?
4.
How would you define the
tone
of the poem? Is the tone consistent throughout or does it
change? What poetic devices create the poem’s tone?
5.
Identify words, phrases, or lines which for any reason seem to
stand out
when you read them. Can you explain why they do? Do they
stand out for a reason? Are they particularly significant in the
poem?
6.
What is the
structure
of the poem? Does it seem to be a
closed form
or
open form

9. poem? Why? If closed form, what are its important formal
structures (e.g., line lengths, rhyme scheme, stanza form,
etc.)? In either case, does it seem to be broken into parts,
sections, or steps?
7.
Identify all
imagery
in the poem. What kinds are there? You might want to list the
imagery in order to see what the sequence of images suggests.
8.
Identify all
figurative language
in the poem. What specific kinds of figurative language do you
find (e.g., metaphor,
similie
, personification, metonymy, etc.)? What effect does the
figurative language have? What do the figures suggest about
the things they denote?
9.
Find examples of
alliteration
,
assonance
, or other interesting uses of the sounds of words. Do these
uses of sound “echo” the sense of the poem?
10.
If the poem
rhymes

10. , does it follow a structured rhyme scheme? Do the rhymes
create a strong sense of rhythm in the poem? Do they highlight
important words? Do you notice internal rhymes?
11.
Does the poem contain
caesura
that interrupt
the rhythms of certain lines? What effects are created at the
ends of lines? What lines are
end-stopped
or
run-on
? Does the poem sound musical, conversational, rough,
smooth?
12.
Scan the poem for
stressed and unstressed syllables
and for
significant pauses
. Do these rhythmic devices enhance the poem’s
effectiveness? Does the poem follow a particular form or
meter?
13.
Review
your responses to the above questions. Begin to note ways in
which these features of the poem work together to contribute to
the poem’s meanings or effects.