Journal 30: Sonnet Presentations Due Tomorrow!
Work with your group to analyze your assigned sonnet. Tomorrow, be ready to screen cast an annotated sonnet in which you point out its features and the evidence on which you base your interpretation of its meaning.
Make sure you cover...
1) Italian or British?
2) What poetic devices or features are actively contributing to the meaning of this sonnet? how? (Explain at least five.)
3) Where is the turn and how does the rhyme scheme organization contribute to the meaning?
Group 1
Remember
Remember me when I am gone away,
Gone far away into the silent land;
When you can no more hold me by the hand,
Nor I half turn to go yet turning stay.
Remember me when no more day by day
You tell me of our future that you plann'd:
Only remember me; you understand
It will be late to counsel then or pray.
Yet if you should forget me for a while
And afterwards remember, do not grieve:
For if the darkness and corruption leave
A vestige of the thoughts that once I had,
Better by far you should forget and smile
Than that you should remember and be sad.
Music Box
Music of Japan. Parsimoniously
from the water clock the drops unfold
in lazy honey or ethereal gold
that over time reiterates a weave
eternal, fragile, enigmatic, bright.
I fear that every one will be the last.
They are a yesterday come from the past.
But from what shrine, from what mountain’s slight
garden, what vigils by an unknown sea,
and from what modest melancholy, from
what lost and rediscovered afternoon
do they arrive at their far future: me?
Who knows? No matter. When I hear it play
I am. I want to be. I bleed away.
Never Again Would Birds' Song be the Same
He would declare and could himself believe
That the birds there in all the garden round
From having heard the day long voice of Eve
Had added to their own an oversound,
Her tone of meaning but without the words.
Admittedly an eloquence so soft
Could only have had an influence on birds
When call or laughter carried it aloft.
Be that as may be, she was in their song.
Moreover her voice upon their voices crossed
Had now persisted in the woods so long
That probably it never would be lost.
Never again would birds' song be the same.
And to do that to birds was why she came.
That the birds there in all the garden round
From having heard the day long voice of Eve
Had added to their own an oversound,
Her tone of meaning but without the words.
Admittedly an eloquence so soft
Could only have had an influence on birds
When call or laughter carried it aloft.
Be that as may be, she was in their song.
Moreover her voice upon their voices crossed
Had now persisted in the woods so long
That probably it never would be lost.
Never again would birds' song be the same.
And to do that to birds was why she came.
Sonnet 130: My Mistress' Eyes are Nothing Like the Sun
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, by heaven, I think my love as rare
As any she belied with false compare.
To the Poet Before Battle
Now, youth, the hour of thy dread passion comes;
Thy lovely things must all be laid away;
And thou, as others, must face the riven day
Unstirred by rattle of the rolling drums,
Or bugles' strident cry. When mere noise numbs
The sense of being, the sick soul doth sway,
Remember thy great craft's honour, that they may say
Nothing in shame of poets. Then the crumbs
Of praise the little versemen joyed to take
Shall be forgotten; then they must know we are,
For all our skill in words, equal in might
And strong of mettle as those we honoured; make
The name of poet terrible in just war,
And like a crown of honour upon the fight.
Sonnet Sickness
BY MR. RENO (Our beloved English teacher from years past)
When I consider sonnets I turn green.
I gag. I heave. Dry heaves, they will not stop
Until I write a quatrain...wait! I mean
An octave! (What I've written is mere slop.)
I cannot do this... meter? When will't end?!!!
As soon as the meter's dial'd I kill the rhyme.
This casualty results when I don't tend
All sheep at once. I'm running out of time...
Shakespeare'ean hydra! Come at me full force!
My loins I'll gird and stand my ground a man
Who will not shirk from war, nor from the course
will I depart. (my mind has hatched a plan!)
Submission to this yoke (the sonnet's weight)
Now means I've earned the right to graduate.
