Assignments for next week: two harvest poems ~ After Apple-Picking; To Autumn

Read the text that opens Chapter 4. It'll reinforce what we went over Friday. Then take the two poems named above (they're within a few pages of each other in the new edition, and they appear in all the other ones, too). Read each poem before you even look at the questions below them.

Good practice in reading poetry:

1. Read the poem more than once — much will come to light with each new reading.

2. Keep a dictionary nearby and use it (also be aware of allusions to mythology, the Bible, Shakespeare, etc.). Remember, as Hamlet does, that words carry more than one meaning.

3. Read to hear the sounds in your mind—every aspect of each word (and its placement) counts in a good poem.

4. Pay careful attention to the way the poem says what it says. Keep track of the subjects of verbs, heed & consider punctuation, antecedents of pronouns, etc.

5. Pay attention to the title, if the poem has one (at times the first line serves to identify a poem, as with all of Emily Dickenson’s work).

6. Practice reading each poem aloud when alone. Or try reading to friends or family. You’ll be surprised to find how many people enjoy the experience.

i. Read naturally, neither too fast nor too slow. You’ll develop a sense for the pace of each work, and for variations in pace.

ii. Observe punctuation within each line, and pause at the end of each line at least a bit. The length of such pauses varies with the context. If there’s a period or comma, a dash or semicolon, the pause will be longer.

iii. Feel, but don’t exaggerate, the rhythm. Tap your foot occasionally as you read to find the prevailing meter. Don’t be slavish about meter—it’s a flexible medium.

7. Paraphrase if you are not clear on meaning. You can’t encompass all that is in a poem with a paraphrase, but you can open the door to greater comprehension.

8. Be on the lookout for shifts in tone. Often they coincide with a new section or stanza.

And here are the poems, in case you wish to print them out and mark on paper what you observe:

After Apple Picking

BY ROBERT FROST

My long two-pointed ladder's sticking through a tree

Toward heaven still,

And there's a barrel that I didn't fill

Beside it, and there may be two or three

Apples I didn't pick upon some bough.

But I am done with apple-picking now.

Essence of winter sleep is on the night,

The scent of apples: I am drowsing off.

I cannot rub the strangeness from my sight

I got from looking through a pane of glass

I skimmed this morning from the drinking trough

And held against the world of hoary grass.

It melted, and I let it fall and break.

But I was well

Upon my way to sleep before it fell,

And I could tell

What form my dreaming was about to take.

Magnified apples appear and disappear,

Stem end and blossom end,

And every fleck of russet showing clear.

My instep arch not only keeps the ache,

It keeps the pressure of a ladder-round.

I feel the ladder sway as the boughs bend.

And I keep hearing from the cellar bin

The rumbling sound

Of load on load of apples coming in.

For I have had too much

Of apple-picking: I am overtired

Of the great harvest I myself desired.

There were ten thousand thousand fruit to touch,

Cherish in hand, lift down, and not let fall.

For all

That struck the earth,

No matter if not bruised or spiked with stubble,

Went surely to the cider-apple heap

As of no worth.

One can see what will trouble

This sleep of mine, whatever sleep it is.

Were he not gone,

The woodchuck could say whether it's like his

Long sleep, as I describe its coming on,

Or just some human sleep.

To Autumn

by John Keats

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;
To bend with apples the moss’d cottage-trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;

To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
For summer has o’er-brimm’d their clammy cells.

Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?
Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find
Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,
Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;
Or on a half-reap’d furrow sound asleep,
Drows’d with the fume of poppies, while thy hook
Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers:
And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep
Steady thy laden head across a brook;
Or by a cyder-press, with patient look,
Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours.

Where are the songs of spring? Ay, where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,
While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,
And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;
Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
Among the river sallows, borne aloft
Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft
The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft;
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.