27 March 2007, Class Discussion

Poetry
We should feel cozy with identifying the Speaker, Setting, and Theme by now.
Discuss:
"Mid-Term Break" by Seamus Heaney
First line? must be sick...or someone is?
What gender is the narrator? I thought male, since greeters shake his hand.
How many children are there in the family?
Relation to narrator...the deceased individual?
"a foot for every year"...means a 4 year old.
Necessary Terms (Basic Vocabulary)
abstract – words that express a quality or characteristic apart from any specific object, ie. love, faith, honesty.
allusion
a reference—whether explicit or implicit, to history, the Bible, myth, literature, painting, music, and so on—that suggests the meaning or generalized implication of details in the story, poem, or play.
imagery
broadly defined, any sensory detail or evocation in a work; more narrowly, the use of figurative language to evoke a feeling, to call to mind an idea, or to describe an object.
metaphor
(1) one thing pictured as if it were something else, suggesting a likeness or analogy between them; (2) an implicit comparison or identification of one thing with another unlike itself without the use of a verbal signal. Sometimes used as a general term for figure of speech.
scanning/scansion
Scansion is the process of scanning a poem, analyzing the verse to show its meter, line by line.
simile
a direct, explicit comparison of one thing to another, usually using the words like or as to draw the connection.
speaker
the person, not necessarily the author, who is the voice of a poem.
style
a distinctive manner of expression; each author’s style is expressed through his/her diction, rhythm, imagery, and so on.

symbol
a person, place, thing, event, or pattern in a literary work that designates itself and at the same time figuratively represents or "stands for" something else. Often the thing or idea represented is more abstract, and general; the symbol, more concrete and particular.
tone – the poem’s attitude or feelings about the theme.




Language Terms
alliteration
the repetition of initial consonant sounds through a sequence of words— for example, "While I nodded, nearly napping" in Edgar Allan Poe’s "The Raven."
ambiguity
the use of a word or expression to mean more than one thing.
assonance
the repetition of vowel sounds in a sequence of words with different endings— for example, "The death of the poet was kept from his poems" in W. H. Auden’s "In Memory of W. B. Yeats."
concrete - representing or applied to an actual substance or thing, as opposed to an abstract quality: The words “cat,” “water,” and “teacher” are concrete, whereas the words “truth,” “excellence,” and “adulthood” are abstract.
connotation
what is suggested by a word, apart from what it explicitly describes.
denotation
a direct and specific meaning
onomatopoeia
a word capturing or approximating the sound of what it describes; buzz is a good example.
personification
(or prosopopeia) treating an abstraction as if it were a person by endowing it with humanlike qualities.
rhythm
the modulation of weak and strong (or stressed and unstressed) elements in the flow of speech. In most poetry written before the twentieth century, rhythm was often expressed in regular, metrical forms; in prose and in free verse, rhythm is present but in a much less predictable and regular manner.
theme – the subject of a poem.