English 11, Honors Creative Writing Assignment – PERSONIFYING NATURE

DIRECTIONS: READ THE EXCERPT BELOW FROM CH. 9 of A SEPARATE PEACE. CONSTRUCT YOUR OWN ONE PARAGRAPH CREATIVE PIECE THAT PERSONIFIES A SEASON OR SPECIFIC TIME OF YEAR.

Saturday afternoons are terrible in a boys’ school, especially in the winter. There is no football game; it is not possible, as it is in the spring, to take bicycle trips into the surrounding country. Not even the most grinding student can feel required to lose himself in his books, since there is Sunday ahead, long, lazy, quiet Sunday, to do any homework.

And these Saturdays are worst in the late winter when the snow has lost its novelty and its shine, and the school seems to have been reduced to only a network of drains. During the brief thaw in the early afternoon there is a dismal gurgling of dirty water seeping down pipes and along gutters, a gray seamy shifting beneath the crust of snow, which cracks to show patches of frozen mud beneath. Shrubbery loses its bright snow headgear and stands bare and frail, too undernourished to hide the drains it was intended to hide. These are the days when going into any building you cross a mat of dirt and cinders led in by others before you, thinning and finally trailing off in the corridors. The sky is an empty hopeless gray and gives the impression that this is its eternal shade. Winter’s occupation seems to have conquered, overrun and destroyed everything, so that now there is no longer any resistance movement left in nature; all the juices are dead, every sprig of vitality snapped, and now winter itself, an old, corrupt, tired conqueror, loosens its grip on the desolation, recedes a little, grows careless in its watch; sick of victory and enfeebled by the absence of challenge, it begins itself to withdraw from the ruined countryside. The drains alone are active, and on these Saturdays their noises sound a dull recessional to winter.

Only Phineas failed to see what was so depressing. Just as there was no war in his philosophy, there was also no dreary weather. As I have said, all weathers delighted Phineas. “You know what we’d better do next Saturday?” he began in one of his voices, the low-pitched and evenly melodic one which for some reason always reminded me of a Rolls-Royce moving along a highway. “We’d better organize the Winter Carnival.”

Sam Ple(10) Grammar and Mechanics

English 11, 6.0(15) Personification and Imagery

Mr. Manero(10) Development and Insight

16 September 2013

Creative Assignment #1 – Personification

Begin writing here…