Assignment goals:
To encourage students to read a poem and analyze it based upon the literary merits, including critical responses from academic sources and to
facilitate a greater appreciation of modern poetry. Students may choose a poem or song lyrics if approved by their instructor.
Preparation: Students must choose a poem to memorize. POEM Will be shown BELOW.
Essay requirements: Write an analytical paper, evaluating the writing based upon critical responses from an academic source and literary
devices in the text. These have been discussed in class: title, author, genre, plot, narrator, setting, characters, tone, style, vocabulary,
language, symbols and themes.
Answer the following questions also, IN ESSAY FORM (Paragraphs):
1. What is the emotional heart of the poem?
2. Discuss at least two literary elements in the poem: plot, symbol, setting, etc. See textbook for suggestions or refer to literary analysis
sheet.
3. Evaluate the language, form and meter? Plain verse? Write at least two paragraphs discussing the language of the poem.
4. Find an outside source that discusses the poem. Include some of the ideas from the critic or evaluative writer. Academic sources only.
Length requirements: Essays must be 4-6 pages in length, include full MLA citations and Works Cited page, at least two internal quotes from
outside source.
Format of the essay: Modern Language Association (MLA), papers must include all the elements discussed in the course and have an epigraph.
See the rubric for writing assignments and refer to class notes for expectations. (Rubric will be uploaded) MAKE SURE TO HAVE PROPER GRAMMAR,
SPELLING, and PARAGRAPHS. INTRODUCTION with thesis sentence, and conclusion.
POEM TO WRITE ESSAY ON:
Those Winter Sundays
Robert Hayden, 1913 – 1980
Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.
I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he’d call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house,
Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love’s austere and lonely offices?
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