For Friday, October 3

Please read and careful annotate My Last Duchess for todays class. In doing so, imagine that
youve been asked to write a 500 word response to one particular aspect of the poem that
seems particularly noteworthy and worthy of careful consideration. Before you select and
prepare to discuss your choice and its significance in class today, Id urge you to consider these
four questions:

1. Who is the SPEAKER? What do we know, what can we infer, whats beyond our ability
to understand about the voice behind the piece?

2. What is the poems SUBJECT, first on the most literal and concrete levels, and then,
perhaps, more metaphorically or symbolically? Youd be wise to identify places where problems
or multiple possibilities emerge in your literal reading - these are often moments where a
poem/poets project is revealed. As you begin to consider more figurative or abstract subjects
for the poem, you may want to again consider the poems project, specifically what
conversations it seems to want to enter into or initiate, what questions it seeks to answer, and/or
what questions it seeks to introduce or raise.

3. What is the poems TONE? How does the speaker/poet/poem feel about its subject,
whats its position or attitude, and how do you know? There may be no more consistent key to
understanding any poem (and human speech in general) than the ability to recognize and
precisely identify a speakers tone and the intentions behind it.

4. What are the specific aspects of the poem that bring you PLEASURE, cause you PAIN,
or give you PAUSE? What are the words, lines, moments, etc. that seem to have extra weight
and value? Identifying and exploring these moments will often produce a great deal of insight
into the poem and/or your reading of it. Any or all of these might help you identify the project of
the poem

Or Try the SOAPSTONE approach

1. Which of the SOAPSTone categories provided the obvious and accessible way into the
poem, and what does it yield?

2. Which of the SOAPStone approaches, though perhaps less obvious, provides the most
original or interesting avenue into a reading or discussion of the poem?
Hester Prynne, with a mind of native courage and activity, and for so long period not
merely estranged, but outlawed, from society, had wandered, without rule or guidance,
in a moral wilderness; as vast, as intricate and shadowy, as the untamed forest, Her
intellect and heart had their home, as it were, in desert places, where she roamed as
freely as the wild Indian in his woods.

From Chapter 18 - "A Flood of Sunshine"- The Scarlet Letter

Desert Places
Snow falling and night falling fast, oh, fast
In a field I looked into going past,
And the ground almost covered smooth in snow,
But a few weeds and stubble showing last.

The woods around it have it-- it is theirs.

All animals are smothered in their lairs.
I am too absent-spirited to count;
The loneliness includes me unawares.

And lonely as it is, that loneliness

Will be more ere it will be less--
A blanker whiteness of benighted snow
With no expression, nothing to express.

They cannot scare me with their empty spaces

Between stars-- on stars where no human race is.
I have it in me so much nearer home
To scare myself with my own desert places.
Robert Frost - 1934
 Design
I found a dimpled spider, fat and white,
On a white heal-all, holding up a moth
Like a white piece of rigid satin cloth
Assorted characters of death and blight
Mixed ready to begin the morning right,
Like the ingredients of a witches' broth
A snow-drop spider, a flower like a froth,
And dead wings carried like a paper kite.

What had that flower to do with being white,

The wayside blue and innocent heal-all?
What brought the kindred spider to that height,
Then steered the white moth thither in the night?
What but design of darkness to appall?
If design govern in a thing so small.

Robert Frost