Lesson Plans

Assignment to have been completed: Students should have read “Chapter Four – Imagery,” pages 689-692 in Perrine’s Literature. They should also have written answers to Exercises 1-4 on page 692, (NOT the items under Reviewing the Chapter on the same page).

Objective Recognize imagery in poetry and interpret its contribution to meaning

Activities:

• A. Conduct exercise in sensory perception.

  • 1. Have students take a sheet of paper and mark four columns, labeling one Hearing, another Smell, another Taste, and the fourth Touch.
  • 2. Instruct them to list words or phrases that evoke the sense identified in each column – at least 10 under each sense. Allow them about 2-3 minutes.
  • 3. Ask various students to share their lists, with no one in groups following the first sharing terms that have already been offered.
  • 4. Next ask the groups to come up with a list of images – appealing to as many senses as possible – that describe something that most people in the room would recognize. They must not, however, identify the object.
  • 5. Have the groups share their lists, and challenge the rest of the students to identify the object the images are supposed to evoke.

• B. Do a close reading of Robert Hayden’s “Those Winter Sundays” on pages 699-700.

  • 1. Ask students how their parents, guardians, or other caring relatives have shown their love for them in practical ways. (Think especially the sacrifices they may have made.) Ask if they believe they have always shown their appreciation. Has that appreciation ever changed over time?

  • 2. Review imagery.

    • a. What are the literal and figurative meanings of cold, hot, and warm?
    • b. Instruct students to list several examples of things that are cold and things that are warm or hot – both literally and figuratively.
    • c. Have students select one or two items from their lists and write sentences in which they use the words both literally and figuratively.
    • d. Consider the connotative difference between warm and hot.
    • e. Write the following examples on the board in list: screaming pain, cool green, bitter cold, loud colors, gravelly voice, sweet melody, and freezing stare.
    • f. Ask students to come up with other similar examples.
    • g. Explain that these are all examples of synesthesia – an implied metaphor in with an attribute associated with one of the physical senses is applied to a term associated with another sense.

  • 3. Read aloud “Those Winter Sundays,” pp. 709-710. Then ask for four volunteers to read, in turn the first sentence (lines 1-5, stopping at blaze), the short sentence in line 5, lines 6-12, and the question that ends the poem.

    • a. Discuss the impact of these shifts in narration.
      • What is the purpose of the first sentence?
      • What is the effect of the short sentence in line 5?
      • How do lines 6-12 contrast with the first sentence in the poem?
      • What is the literary function of the closing question?
    • b. Have a volunteer re-read the poem once more.

  • 4. Distribute photocopies of the poem and different colored highlighters.

    • a. Instruct the students to use a different colored highlighter to indicate each of the following sentence: touch, sight, and sound.
    • b. Have them to annotate the images by identifying the emotional effect of each.
    • c. Ask them to look for both literal and figurative examples of warmth and cold.
    • d. Have them underline examples of synesthesia.
    • e. Ask if any specific details not specifically linked to the senses do nevertheless evoke a vivid sensory impression.

  • 5. Discuss the impact of imagery.

    • a. What is the impact of “blueblack cold” (synesthesia)? Of “cracked hands,” “fires ablaze,” “cold splintering, breaking”?

      The coldness is made especially vivid in the sensory images that describe it — “blueblack” (2) in the pre-dawn darkness, and so solid and brittle that its retreat from the heat causes it to splinter and break.

      The physical warmth of the house cannot dispel the emotional chill: the speaker flatly asserts that “No one ever thanked him,” and the household continues to suffer from “chronic angers” (5, 9)

    • b. Ask students to interpret what the “chronic angers of that house” may have been. Does the speaker express conflicted feelings about his childhood home?

    • c. Ask what “love’s austere and lonely offices” are. (It is important to note the following definitions of offices:

      place for tickets or information: a booth or other place where tickets or information may be obtained

      set form of a Christian service: the prescribed order or form of a Christian church service, or of daily prayers

      task or assignment: a task, assignment, or chore (formal) (usually used in the plural)

  • 6. Provide a biographical connection regarding the poem and the poet: The African American poet Robert Hayden was raised by foster parents in a stormy family filled with the “chronic angers” depicted in the poem.

• D. If time permits, have one of the students read “The Widow’s Lament in Springtime” by William Carlos Williams, pp. 693-694 in Perrine’s Literature aloud. Ask the students the following questions about the poem. You may use the responses in bold italics to help you gauge their answers.

  • 1. Why is springtime so poignant a time for this lament? What has been the speaker’s previous experience at this time of year?

    Spring is a season associated with renewal and rebirth, but the speaker is meditating on the death of her husband.

    For 35 years prior she had taken great joy in the beauty of nature surrounding her.

  • 2. Imagery may have degrees of vividness, depending on its particularity, concreteness, and specific detail. What is the result of the contrast between the vividness of line 2-3 and the relative flatness of lines 13-14? How does the fact that “masses” (10, 11) appeals to two senses relate to the speaker’s emotional conditions?

    The most striking imagery in the poem occurs in the first five lines, when the widow is expressing her sorrow directly: “new grass / flames” combines (paradoxically) the color and freshness of springtime’s first growth with the visual impression of flickering and leaping upward, and the tactile pain of fire.

    “[T]he cold fire / that closes round me” compacts the paradox into an oxymoron, combining two contradictory tactile sensations with the suffocating sensation of being closed in.

    After that point in the poem, the imagery is generalized and flat (in imitation of the widow’s lack of responsiveness to what had formerly given her excitement through its visual impressions): the abstractly named colors (“white,” “yellow,” “red”), the indistinguishable “masses” (denoting quantity, connoting heaviness), even the flatly anonymous “some bushes” have little image-making vividness or specificity.

• E. If time permits, have one of the students read “I Felt a Funeral in My Brain,” pp. 695-696 aloud. Ask the students the following questions about the poem. You may use the responses in bold italics to help you gauge their answers.

  • 1. What senses are being evoked by the imagery? Can you account for the fact that one important sense is absent from the poem?

    Dickinson chooses to rely solely on the sense of hearing.

    The sense of sight is probably not evoked since the speaker, a corpse, is confined in her coffin. She cannot see through the coffin lid, and in any case her eyelids have been drawn down over her eyes, so she cannot see even in stanza 1 when the coffin is open.

  • 2. In sequence, what aspects of a funeral and burial are represented in the poem? Is it possible to define the sequence of mental events that are being compared to them?

    Stanza 1: the mourners view the body, which has been placed in an open coffin at the front of the church

    Stanza 2: the mourners have taken their places in their pews while the preacher conducts the service with Bible readings and observations about the life of the departed

    Stanza 3: the pallbearers carry the coffin from the church to the graveyard

    Stanza 4: (beginning with line 12) the dead person hears the church bell tolling for her death

    Stanza 5: the coffin is lowered into the grave

    I offer no one-to-one correspondence. However, the poem may serve as a metaphor for the gradual descent into insanity. The majority of critics read the poem as a metaphor for a mental breakdown—a psychotic episode in the speaker’s life. The fact that the “Funeral” was felt in the speaker’s “Brain” (not her soul), that she feels her “Sense . . . breaking through” and her “mind . . . going numb,” and especially the climactic assertion that “a Plank in Reason broke,” plunging her rapidly down through successively lower states of irrationality until she finally ceases “knowing”—all point toward the funeral’s being a metaphor for a progressive case of insanity.

  • 3. With respect to the funeral activities in stanzas 1-3, where is the speaker imaginatively located?

    She is located in her coffin.

  • 4. What finally happens to the speaker?

    Literally, she is buried. Metaphorically, she has probably gone mad.

Assignment for next class meeting: Read “To Autumn,” pages 701-702 in Perrine’s Literature. Write out responses to questions 1-5 following the poem. Complete the set of AP multiple-choice questions over the poem.