Poetry

Students received a packet of poetic devices. We then analyzed 4 poems focusing on how sound impacts meaning.

The Bench of Boors

In bed I muse on Tenier's boors,
Embrowned and beery losels all;
A wakeful brain
Elaborates pain:
Within low doors the slugs of boors
Laze and yawn and doze again.

In dreams they doze, the drowsy boors,
Their hazy hovel warm and small:
Thought's ampler bound
But chill is found:
Within low doors the basking boors
Snugly hug the ember-mound.

Sleepless, I see the slumberous boors
Their blurred eyes blink, their eyelids fall:
Thought's eager sight
Aches--overbright!
Within low doors the boozy boors
Cat-naps take in pipe-bowl light.

Herman Melville


The Dance
In Brueghel's great picture, The Kermess,
the dancers go round, they go round and
around, the squeal and the blare and the
tweedle of bagpipes, a bugle and fiddles
tipping their bellies (round as the thick-
sided glasses whose wash they impound)
their hips and their bellies off balance
to turn them. Kicking and rolling
about the Fair Grounds, swinging their butts, those
shanks must be sound to bear up under such
rollicking measures, prance as they dance
in Brueghel's great picture, The Kermess.
William Carlos Williams



Traveling through the Dark

Traveling through the dark I found a deer
dead on the edge of the Wilson River road.
It is usually best to roll them into the canyon:
that road is narrow; to swerve might make more dead.

By glow of the tail-light I stumbled back of the car
and stood by the heap, a doe, a recent killing;
she had stiffened already, almost cold.
I dragged her off; she was large in the belly.

My fingers touching her side brought me the reason—
her side was warm; her fawn lay there waiting,
alive, still, never to be born.
Beside that mountain road I hesitated.

The car aimed ahead its lowered parking lights;
under the hood purred the steady engine.
I stood in the glare of the warm exhaust turning red;
around our group I could hear the wilderness listen.

I thought hard for us all—my only swerving—,
then pushed her over the edge into the river.

William Stafford




















Shut In Robert B. Shaw

Like many of us, born too late,
(like all of us, fenced in by fate),
the late October fly
will fondly live and die

insensible of the allure
of carrion or cow manure.
Withindoors day and night,
Propelled by appetite,

he circles with approving hums
a morning’s manna-fall of crumbs
hoping to find a smear
of jelly somewhere near.

In such an easeful habitat
while autumn wanes he waxes fat
and languorous, but not
enough to let the swat

of hasty, rolled-up magazine
eliminate him from the scene.
Outside, the air is chill.
Inside, he’s hard to kill.

Patrolling with adhesive feet
the ceiling under which we eat,
he captures at a glance
the slightest threat or chance,

and flaunts the facets of his eyes
that make him prince of household spies.
And as he watches, we,
if we look up, will see

a life of limits, like our own,
enclosed within a temperate zone,
not harsh, not insecure,
no challenge to endure,

but yet, with every buzz of need,
by trifles running out of speed.
One day he will be gone.
Then the real cold comes on.