Length: three(3) pages
Poetry Explication Instructions
An explication is part interpretation, part analysis, and part explanation. Focus on the language of the poem!!
Note: You cannot write about the other poems.
To Prepare: To help you better prepare for the essay, I want you, before you begin, to print out a copy of the poem (One Art) you are writing about and then, in the margins, summarize, word for word, what the poet is describing/discussing. I’d also like you to write down your initial reflections and analyses about what you might infer from the language of the poem (One Art). This way, before you begin writing, you will have engaged the poem closely enough to provide you with enough material to shape your initial writing direction. Note: your writing task will be much easier if you take the time to read the poem many times so that you will be very familiar with what happens in it.
What Should I Be Explicating? In general, when explicating, one explores the text of the poem— specifically such things as the poet’s use of metaphor, simile, symbols, personification, paradox, hyperbole, imagery, form/structure, and music (alliteration, assonance, consonance, end rhyme, internal rhyme). Keep in mind, however, that one does not need to cover all of these things (nor does each poem utilize every one of these devices). It is not your job to offer a shopping list of every figurative or musical device in a poem but, instead, to closely examine those that are most relevant to the poem. I do not, for example, want you to write something like the following:
In the poem “Design,” Robert Frost uses a variation of the Italian sonnet form. The poem has the following rhyme scheme: ABBAABBA CDCCDD. Frost uses personification and symbols as well as similes. In the first eight lines of the sonnet, what is called an octave, Frost tells the reader about a white spider on a white heal-all that he encounters. In the last six lines, which are called a sestet, Frost asks several questions.
Each “item” on this list is most certainly relevant, but instead of just listing items, you need to explore each facet on its own and show your reader its relevance. For example, the discussion of the sonnet form is very useful if you are demonstrating how the poet uses the conventions of that structure to explore (a) the questions theme brought up in the poem and/or (b) how the poet addresses them.
Audience: When writing about a poem, you will struggle with choosing what to say and what not to say and what to cover in the poem and what not to cover. One can reduce the difficulties of such choices by considering who the audience for one’s paper will be. For our purposes, I want you to write as if you are writing to your fellow classmates— which means that you will be writing for an audience who is familiar with the poem. DO NOT USE “I” OR “YOU” FOR THIS ESSAY
Structure: For this essay, and this essay only, do not provide a formal introduction and a thesis statement placed at the beginning of your essay— just jump right in and explicate the poem. State your thesis in your conclusion. This way you will have argued towards your conclusion / thesis.
EX: As the poem begins, Frost encounters “a dimpled spider, fat and white” on a white heal-all (1).
Use the following for your works cited requirement (please note EXACTLY how it is formatted)
Poet’s Last Name, Poet’s First Name. “Title of Poem.” English 1B Course Reader: Spring 2017. Ed. Nathan Wirth. Novato, CA: Nathan’s Mind Inc. 2017. Print.
Outside Sources: Don’t reference any outside sources.
Formatting: Check the formatting rule in the file “rules”
The Poems You Can to Write About:
Biographical Note for “One Art”
“There is no doubt that the crisis behind [“One Art”] was the apparent loss to Bishop of Alice Methfessel, the companion, caretaker, secretary, and great love of the last eight years of her life. Although its method is the description of the accumulation of losses in the poet’s life, its occasion is the loss of Alice.”
Source:
Millier, Brett Candlish. “Elusive Mastery: The Drafts of Elizabeth Bishop’s ‘One Art.'” Elizabeth Bishop:
The Geography of Gender. Ed. Marilyn May Lombardi. Charlottesville, VA: Virginia UP, 1993. Print.
One Art by Elizabeth Bishop (1976)
The art of losing isn’t hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster,
Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.
Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.
I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three beloved houses went.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.
I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.
— Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident
the art of losing’s not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.
NOTE: MAKE SURE YOU LOOK AT THE NEXT PAGE, WHERE THE FORM OF THE VILLANELLE IS EXPLAINED This will help you to understand the specific form of this poem, which you need to know about in order to fully grasp the poem.
Villanelle: a villanelle carries a pattern of only two rhymes, and is marked most distinctively by its alternating refrain, which appears initially in the first and third lines of the opening tercet. In all, it comprises five tercets (three line stanzas) and a concluding quatrain.
One Art by Elizabeth Bishop
The art of losing isn’t hard to master; [this line is repeated in the 2nd and 4th tercets as well as the final quatrain]
so many things seem filled with the intent [the ent sound is found in the second line of all the tercets and the final quatrain] to be lost that their loss is no disaster, [a variation of the idea of it not being a disaster is found in the 3rd and 5th tercets and the final quatrain]
to be lost that their loss is no disaster, [a variation of the idea of it not being a disaster is found in the 3rd and 5th tercets and the final quatrain]
Lose something every day. Accept the fluster [fluster/master is a slant rhyme]
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.
Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.
I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or [last or /master is a slant rhyme]
next-to-last, of three beloved houses went.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.
I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.
— Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture [gesture/master is a slant rhyme]
I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident
the art of losing’s not too hard to master [note that Bishop alters the line here]
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster. [note that Bishop must use the word disaster here to complete the form of the villanelle]
Slant Rhyme: a rhyme in which either the vowels or the consonants of stressed syllables are identical, as in eyes / light; years / yours.
A Sample Poetry Explication
“My Only Swerving”: An Explication of William Stafford’s “Traveling Through the Dark”
In his blank verse poem “Traveling through the Dark,” William Stafford writes about a traveler who, while driving at night, encounters a pregnant deer which has been killed by a passing car. He faces a difficult choice— should he (a) leave the dead deer on the side of the road or (b) roll her over the edge? — two choices that will result in the unborn fawn dying. The opening stanza sets this scene as if the poem is a simple story, the speaker telling us he came upon a dead deer while driving at night on Wilson River Road (which is in rural Oregon, where Stafford lived most of his adult life). The name of the road, and the reference to the canyon, clearly indicates that the road follows the same path as a river down below. This is an important detail because this is how he will be able to move the deer so that others do not have to suddenly swerve to get out of the carcass’s way and, as result, possibly die themselves:
It is usually best to roll them into the canyon: that road is narrow; to swerve might make more dead (3-4).
The matter of fact tone of “usually best” suggests he has had many similar experiences before (and, after all, hitting a deer at night out in the country is not an uncommon occurrence). The road is narrow, so there would be little room for swerving out of the way and not much time to stop (one might even imagine that the poet himself had to stop suddenly).
The fact he has taken the time to stop in the middle of the night— especially when he was not the one who had hit the deer— reflects a sense of responsibility. This responsibility is further reflected by his decision to have pulled the car in front of the dead animal and then turned down his lights (later indicated in line 13: the “car aimed ahead its lowered parking lights). He observes the scene by the “glow of the tail-light” (5) after he has “stumbled back of the car” (5) likely because it is dark and difficult to see at night with only that pale reddish light to illuminate the scene. He describes the doe as a “heap,” a choice of words which brings to mind a pile of parts left on the side of a road, indicating an animal who is now just a pile of stuff and no longer a living creature. There are many hard consonants in the first two stanzas—the d’s, c’s, b’s slowing the reading and making the moment seem a bit cold: “deer,” “dead,” “best,” “canyon,” “car,” “doe,” “cold,” “dragged,” “belly,” “stumbled,” “road,” “stiffened,” “already,” “found.” And, through this language, he knows she has been killed recently because even though she has “stiffened already” (7) she is, at that time “almost cold” (7).
But then the language warms up in the next stanza with the l’s, w’s, r’s, and s’s found in the words: “side,” “reason,” “warm,” “fawn,” “waiting,” “alive,” “still,” and “hesitated.” And, then, as he begins to drag her body, he realizes “she was large in belly” (8), the poem now shifting into a deeper significance for both the “almost cold” and the “large in belly.” He soon realizes the doe, though dead, is pregnant and her fawn is alive: “her side was warm; her fawn lay there waiting, / alive, still, never to be born” (10-11). The warmth of her belly, which clearly indicates the life of the unborn fawn is contrasted against the “almost cold” of the dead mother— and this contrast is deepened even further by the fact that the deer will never be born even if, in a sense, it is still “waiting.” The poet’s choice of “still” can be read in several different ways. First, the doe still remains alive; i.e. it simply has not yet died. Secondly, the doe is still, i.e. not moving, and lies motionless but not dead in the womb of its dead mother. Thirdly, the distance between “still” and “born” in the line is not far and one might, as a result, put the two words together and end up with stillborn. Even though this word clearly denotes being dead before born, which is not the case here, the poet has clearly stated that the fawn is laying there “never to be born.” In other words, it might as well be dead because it is never going to live.
And herein lies the crux of the moral ambiguity for the speaker of this poem. He is clearly not going to deliver this fawn. After all, he cannot perform a caesarian on the doe (nor could he likely mother the fawn). His choices are to either push the doe (and thus the unborn fawn) over the side of the road to the river canyon below or to leave them on the side of the narrow road, potentially endangering the lives of other motorists. The speaker is a thoughtful person, one who take his time to think things over, and so he hesitates. As he does so, he observes the “lowered parking lights” (13) of his car (which further illustrates how responsible he is) and listens to the “purring” of his “steady engine” (14), the red from the taillights 21 | Page making the exhaust flowing from the tailpipe glow red. This eerie glow can easily echo the red blood that is likely present on the deer as well as the soon to be spilled blood of the fawn who will never be born. Following this description, he refers to “our group” (16), whose members include himself, the deer (and its unborn fawn), and the car all bound together in that moment as the wilderness listens (“around our group I could hear the wilderness listen”).
This is a strange line, for even if one considers that the poet is personifying the wild, the wilderness truly cannot listen— yet when one is alone in the dark, in the silence, one can sometimes feel as if something is listening. But what then might the wilderness be listening for? Before any answer can be arrived at, one needs to first ponder the immediate contrast between the “wilderness”— the river, the canyon, nature itself— and the “group” formed by himself, the car and the dead doe with its unborn fawn. This contrast is also echoed by the paved road he has stopped on, the road where the deer met its demise. Reading further into this line, one might conclude that the road serves as a representation of man’s attempt to adapt nature to his needs. The river that the road follows can serve as a representation of the wilderness. In doing so, we can see a contrast between the world of the wild, which the deer and its unborn fawn belong to, and the world of civilization.
Such a reading yields a contrast that further emphasizes the moral ambiguity of the situation. Nature is not concerned about life and death. It is not sentient. It is not moral. But the speaker, and, potentially, all humans are. This road that follows the direction of the river can represent how humankind lives between the world of wilderness and civilization and, sometimes, even on the edge between the two— and, at this border, on this evening in the dark, while traveling in the dark, the poet has encountered a moment when the machines of civilization have encroached on the wilderness and resulted in the death of both the deer and soon its unborn fawn. As a result, his moral dilemma comes with the added complexity of not being one who will at least save the fawn, and, therefore, the wilderness, then, might be “listening” for his reaction or, perhaps, for his next action, his decision about what to do.
The couplet, which ends the poem, might remind one of the ways a couplet ends a Shakespearean sonnet, viz., a final two lines that look back and reflect on the rest of the poem. Once again, we see that the poet is a responsible, thoughtful individual: “I thought hard for us all” (17). Who exactly is this “all”? Certainly, it could be the “group” that he has pondered in this poem— particularly the doe and the unborn fawn. But his other concerns are for the safety of others who might drive down this road that evening and the dangers that could befall them. Indeed, he explains that his thinking is “my only swerving” (17), a choice of words that invokes both the swerving of a car in the road, done last second to avoid hitting the carcass, and the swerving of his thoughts. Perhaps there is some part of his thinking in which he wishes to save the fawn, to not simply toss it over the side of the road and sealing its fate, and, thus, his swerving is a switching and moving in-between the choice of doing nothing further and leaving the deer on the side of the road or pushing it over—which is what he, ultimately, does.
Overall, the tone of the poem is often very matter of fact, more of a narrative than a deep exploration of an ethical dilemma, but, nonetheless, contained in that narrative is a moral quandary. The poet never suggests that his choice is cruel or selfish. In the larger picture of human existence in the modern world, the poet does not point a finger at the destructive forces of civilization and its machines even though one could easily argue that the deer, and eventually the fawn, died because a human driving a car hit them. One could easily argue that fewer deer (and fawns) would be killed if we did not drive our machines through “nature” in the night, that technology comes at a cost, but the speaker does does not suggest that nature is more important than man nor does he say that man is more important than nature. Simply, the choice he makes protects other humans from any potential accidents. The deer and its fawn have died because of man, but he will not let another man die because of that accident—and, quite likely, he regrets that the fawn will die (and would have probably died no matter what choice he makes). He has made the decision that will prevent further injury and death. So, ultimately, while his thoughts have “swerved,” it is not because of his indecision but because of his sensitivity, his sense of responsibility and his thoughtfulness.
