Imagery in Poetry
By Thursday, post your response of at least 150-200 words to the Discussion Area. To support your comments, your discussion answers should include specific information and quotations from the readings.
By Monday, comment on at least two of your classmates’ submissions. Your replies to classmates should be at least a paragraph in length and made with an eye to expand, clarify, defend, and/or refine their thoughts. Consider asking questions to further meaningful conversation. Be clear and concise, referring to specific ideas and words from your classmates’ postings. Participation must be completed by the end of the first week to earn credit.
Prompt: Choose a poem from the assigned readings, which are listed in the Syllabus and found in our course eBook. Title your discussion response with the poem’s title. This will help other students see which poems have already been discussed. Once a poem has been discussed twice, please do not choose it for analysis. Review all of the thread starters including the closed list before beginning your response.
Post a response of at least 150-200 words, focusing on the elements below. Identify the key images in the poem, which you believe are vital to understanding it. Provide a detailed discussion of how those images function in the poem. Do the images work together to form a coherent pattern? What ideas or feelings are conveyed by the images? How do the images contribute to the overall meaning of the poem?
Tips
Remember to provide evidence for your claims in the form of quoted passages from the poem. Quotations, paraphrases, and summaries should be cited according to APA rules of style, including in-text and reference citations. Quoted material should not exceed 25% of the document.
Use the APA Citation Helper resource for properly citing resources.
Post directly to the discussion; do not attach a document. Make sure you check spelling and grammar, and use APA style for citations.
Example Response
Students often ask to see a model of what is expected, so here is an example post:
“The Oven Bird” is a sonnet by Robert Frost, and the poem focuses on a bird that sings a sad song about death and loss. Some of the key images include variations on singing, the seasons, and foliage, such as leaves and flowers. The following lines illustrate the use of these images: “He says that leaves are old and that for flowers/Mid-summer is to spring as one to ten/He says the early petal-fall is past/When pear and cherry bloom went down in showers” (Frost, 2016, Lines 4-7). The images in the poem work together to tell a story about the oven bird, which has a loud, discordant song that “makes the solid tree trunks sound again” (Frost, 2016, Line 3). The bird sings about having lost its first set of young to predators, and now the bird must learn to go on living with great loss. The sad yet brave feeling of the poem is summed up in the final couplet: “The question that he frames in all but words/Is what to make of a diminished thing” (Frost, 2016, Lines 13-14).
Frost, R. (2016). The oven bird. In L.G. Kirszner & S.R. Mandell (Eds.), Compact Literature: Reading, Reacting, Writing [VitalSource digital version] (p. 123). Boston: Cengage.
