Analyzing+Poetry+Around+a+Theme

=Love Poems: Mr. Neal's Example of Part One Work=

Part one of the "Eating Poetry" project asks you to gather four to five poems connected around a theme of your choosing. The exact directions are:

1. Analyze two poems within a theme, using at least five hyperlinks for each poem.
 * //Three links// should be to external sources (images, dictionary, thesaurus, reference material, etc)
 * //Two must be linked// to paragraphs of your own analysis of a theme, concept, image, idea, or metaphor in the poem. A six to eight sentence paragraph, for the last two hyperlinks, is fine; we'll go over how to create your own pages within the Wiki so you can complete these links.
 * The last paragraph (the 5th hyperlinked paragraph) per poem must answer this question: **What do you think the poet's highest purpose is for this piece of writing?**

2. After you have explored each poem separately, you need to take a step back and examine the four to five poems with these questions: This needs to be 1-2 paragraphs long.
 * What are the important points of comparison: how are poems similar? different?
 * How is the binding topic evident in each?
 * Which poem had the most effect on you and why?

Here's an example of what a finished part one "theme" project would look like. You'll need to post your own work on your personal pages, located at Eating Poetry home page.
=Examples of "Love" hyper-linked poems:=

"Sonnet 130"
by William Shakespeare

My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun; Coral is far more red than her lips' red; If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun; If hairs be wires, [|black wires] grow on her head. I have seen roses [|damasked], [|red and white], But no such roses see I in her cheeks; And in some perfumes is there more delight Than in the breath that from my mistress [|reeks]. I love to hear her speak, yet well I know That music hath a far more pleasing sound; I grant I never saw a goddess go,-- My mistress, when she walks, treads on the ground. And yet, byheaven, I think my love as rare As any she belied with false compare.

"A Blessing from My Sixteen Years' Son"
By Mary Karr

I have this son who assembled inside me during [|Hurricane Gloria]. In a flash, he appeared, in a heartbeat. Outside, [|pines toppled].

Phone lines snapped and hissed like cobras. Inside, he was a raw pearl: microscopic, luminous. Look at the muscled obelisk of him now

pawing through the icebox for more grapes. Sixteen years and not a bone broken, not a single stitch. By his age,

I was marked more ways, and small. He's slouching six foot three, with implausible blue eyes, which settle

on the pages of Emerson's "Self-Reliance" with profound belligerence. A girl with a navel ring

could make his cell phone go //brr//, or an [|Afro'd boy] leaning on a mop at Taco Bell-- creatures strange as dragons or eels.

Balanced on a kitchen stool, each gives counsel arcane as an oracle's. Bruce claims school //is [|harshing my mellow]//. Case longs to date

a tattooed girl, because he wants a woman //willing to do stuff she'll regret.// They've come to lead my son

into his broadening spiral. Someday soon, the tether will snap. I birthed my own mom

into oblivion. The night my son smashed the car fender, then rode home in the rain-streaked cop car, he asked, //Did you

and Dad screw up so much?// He'd let me tuck him in, my grandmother's wedding quilt

from 1912 drawn to his goateed chin. //Don't blame us,// I said. //You're your own idiot now.// At which he grinned.

The cop said the girl in the [|crimped Chevy] took it hard. He'd found my son awkwardly holding her in the canted headlights,

where he'd draped his own coat over her shaking shoulders. //My fault//, he'd confessed right off.

//Nice kid//, said the cop.

"Those Winter Sundays"
by Robert E. Hayden 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?

"You’re"
by Sylvia Plath

Clownlike, happiest on your hands, Feet to the stars, and moon-skulled, Gilled like a fish. A common-sense Thumbs-down on the dodo’s mode. Wrapped up in yourself like a spool, Trawling your dark as owls do. Mute as a turnip from the Fourth Of July to All Fools’ Day, O high-riser, my little loaf.

Vague as fog and looked for like mail. Farther off than Australia. Bent-backed Atlas, our traveled prawn. Snug as a bud and at home Like a sprat in a pickle jug. A creel of eels, all ripples. Jumpy as a Mexican bean. Right, like a well-done sum. A clean slate, with your own face on.

The "Big Wrap Up"
1-3 paragraphs examining the three poems with these questions:
 * What are the important points of comparison: how are poems similar? different?
 * How is the binding topic evident in each?
 * Which poem had the most effect on you and why?