Exercise Denotation and Connotation

Words exist on two or more levels – the literal or dictionary definition and the figurative or suggested meaning. The former is the denotative meaning and the later is the connotative.

We all know what is a poet. That is we know the word in its denotative context. However, there may be as many connotative meanings as there are poets or people who read poetry. Here are two:

A poet is a tall scholarly man with a slight stoop and an air of abstraction. He is diffident, and at cocktail parties, may be found in another room reading his host’s books.

A poet is a slim youthful man with a sensitive, slightly haggard face. He is given to velvet lapels and extravagant neckwear and attends salons—where he reads his own verses—and has innocuous conversations with middle-aged women.

Exercise 1: Below are some examples of connotation. Write out your ideas of the connotation of each of the words in two of the groups below.

Exercise 2. Describe the scene the poet is depicting here. Comment on “the vines that round the thatch-eaves run, the mossed cottage Comment on “bosom-friend, maturing, bless.” Discuss any other words that seem to contribute to the mood? What is the mood of the poem? Comment on the poet’s use of detail to achieve mood. What is the speaker’s attitude?

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,

Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;

Conspiring with him how to load and bless

With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eaves run;

To bend with apples the mossed cottage-trees,

And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;

To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel-shells

With a sweet kernel; to set budding more

And still more, later flowers for the bees,

Until they think warm days will never cease,

For summer has o’er brimmed their clammy cells.

Suggested Answer:

This is a stanza from Keat’s ode “To Autumn.” The poet is depicting a small English country village whose cottages have thatched roofs and small gardens, in which the apple trees are so old they are covered with moss, and where vines (perhaps grapevines) grow up the cottage walls and round the windows. The gardens contain gourds and probably beehives, although of course the bees could be wild, but the other details suggest domestic cultivation. The setting for this poem is the country; not the open fields, but life in a small village. There are no people in this stanza, but there is a sense of human activity all around. The poet seems to be writing about autumn and its blessings for man, especially the country villager, who would live closer to Nature in all its aspects than the townsmen.

Autumn is personified here as a “bosom-friend.” Autumn is on terms of great intimacy with the sun, and together the two conspirators hatch their benign plot: how to increase the yield of all the crops of the season. The sun of early fall, the time of last growth before harvest, is a maturing sun: it has made the season warm and dry at the right time for ripening. The atmosphere is one of contentment and fulfillment, when each plant prospers – the gourds swell, the hazelnuts become plump and meaty inside the shells; frost has not yet come, so that the honey-flow continues much longer than usual. The mood of richness, of luxuriance and prosperity, is shown also in “load and bless with fruit, bend with apples, ripeness to the core.”

To achieve his effect the poet appeals constantly to the senses. His mention of mists, together with the later reference to maturing sun makes one think of a typical fall day, misty and chilly in the morning, but comfortably warm and mellow as the sun comes up. The vines, the bent-over trees, the gourds, nuts and flowers appeal to the sense of sight, but also to the sense of taste. The words “swell, plump, and sweet,” give a sense of almost cloying richness. The repetition of fruit and fruitfulness and the references to vines and apples and ripeness almost make the mouth water, but the most striking detail is the climactic lines about the bees:

“Until they think warm days will never cease,

For summer has o’brimmed their clammy cells.”

“Clammy,” as a word descriptive of the cool stickiness of honey, has a great impact, and summarizes the richness of the other pictures in this stanza, most of which are fairly conventional. The first nine lines establish an atmosphere that is strengthened by the vivid details of “clammy cells.”

Exercise 3: The following passage is the opening paragraph of a short story. Read it carefully and answer the following questions.

1. What can you deduce about Midge and Annabel?

2Would the author have enjoyed their usual lunch? What words or phrases led you to your conclusion, and why?

1. What is the attitude of the author of this passage towards both the girls and the

food? How did you arrive at it?

Annabel and Midge came out of the tearoom with the arrogant slow gait of the leisured, for their Saturday afternoon stretched ahead of them. They had lunched, as was their wont, on sugar, starches, oils and butterfats. Usually they ate sandwiches of spongy new white bread greased with butter and mayonnaise; they ate thick wedges of cake lying wet beneath ice cream and whipped cream and melted chocolate gritty with nuts. As alternates, they ate patties, sweating beads of inferior oil, containing bits of bland meat bogged in pale, stiffening sauce; they ate pastries limber under rigid icing, filled with an indeterminate yellow sweet stuff, not still solid, not yet liquid, like salve that has been left in the sun. They chose not other food, nor did they consider it. And their skin was like the petals of wood anemones, and their bellies were as flat and their flanks as lean as those of young Indian braves.

Suggested Answer:

Midge and Annabel are coming out of a tearoom after lunch, “with the arrogant slow gait of the leisured, for their Saturday afternoon stretched in front of them.” If they feel so leisured just because they have the afternoon off, they are probably office workers or schoolgirls – people who do work quite hard the rest of the week. They are obviously quite young, since they habitually eat a lunch loaded with calories, mainly carbohydrates and fats, and yet their skin is “like the petals of wood anemones,” and they are slender, almost thin, “like young Indian braves.”

The author is revolted by what they eat. “Bread greased with butter . . . patties, sweating beads of inferior oil . . . bland meat bogged in . . . sauce and the pastries with sweet stuff . . . like salve that has been left in the sun.” The words “greased,” “ gritty,” “ sweating,” “ bogged,” and “ stiffening” have strong overtones of distaste, even disgust. One feels that one bite of the girl’s diet would have been too much for the author. She dislikes the diet partly for its texture and appearance, partly for its taste, but largely for its excessive richness and gooeyness.

The author laughs at Midge and Annabel a little for their “arrogant, slow gait.” Perhaps they are pretending to be very grand and that they never work at all. The author understands the feeling of how much a day off means when you are young and working. The author also feels that the girls have horrible taste in food, but she admires their appearance, and is probably a little envious of anyone who can eat such rich food with no ill effects. The emotional feelings the author displays about the food and the obvious admiration for their metabolism, suggests that the author is a person who could never eat what the girls had without suffering for it. There is a distinct note of envy in the last sentence. The girls are not only slender and clear-skinned; they have delicate fresh complexions “like wood anemones,” and really fit, healthy bodies “like Indian braves.” Envy of this sort suggests that the author is herself a woman. She is obviously a good deal older that Midge and Annabel, for her attitude is patronizing or superior at times. She looks down on the girls for their horrible taste in food; she laughs at their childish behavior in the first sentence 4. This attitude of amused scorn (tolerant amusement, amused superiority) suggests that she is a good deal more sophisticated than Midge and Annabel.

Exercise 4: Read the two passages below carefully. Both are pictures of a New England scene in winter; show how the tone of the second is quite different from that of the first. Discuss what words the respective authors use to establish the tone and mood of the two works. Make specific references and provide explanations.

Abreast of the schoolhouse the road forked, and we dipped down a lane to the left, between hemlock boughs bent inward to their trunks by the weight of the snow. I had often walked that way on Sundays, and know that the solitary roof showing through bare branches near the bottom of the hill was that of Frome’s sawmill. It looked exanimate1 enough, with its idle wheel looming above the black stream dashed with yellow-white spume and its cluster of sheds sagging under their white load. Frome did not even turn his head as we drove by, and still in silence we began to mount the next slope. About a mile farther, on a road I had never traveled, we came to an orchard of starved apple-trees writhing over a hillside among outcroppings of slate that nuzzled up through the snow like animals pushing out their noses to breathe. Beyond the orchard lay a field or two, their boundaries lost under drifts; and above the fields, huddled against the white immensities of land and sky, one of those lonely New England farm-houses that make the landscape lonelier.

1. deprived of life

They drove slowly down the road between fields glistening under the pale sun, and then bent to the right down a land edged with spruce and larch. Ahead of them, a long way off, a range of hills, stained by mottlings of black forest, flowed away in round white curves against the sky. The lane passed into a pinewood with boles reddening in the afternoon sun and a warm stillness seemed to drop from the branches with the dropping needles. Here the snow was so pure that the tiny tracks of wood-animals had left on it intricate lace-like patterns, and the bluish cones caught in its surface stood out like ornaments of bronze.

1. the trunk of a tree or red clay

Suggested Answers:

These two passages deal with winter in New England, but from very different perspectives. In the first passage winter is depicted as stark and cruel, something to be endured, where survival is the ultimate goal. The hemlock boughs are “bent inward” by the weight of the snow that is heavy and burdensome, and hemlock is a plant that is poisonous, thus carrying negative connotations. The sawmill is “solitary,” the branches are “bare,” the mill-wheel is “idle,” and the shed roofs are “sagging” under a white “load.” The landscape is harsh, bleak, cold, figuratively as well as literally. Frome seems in keeping with the landscape and with his solitary mill; the people drive in silence, with no companionable conversation; Frome does not even turn his head as they pass by the mill.

Nothing is warm or friendly. The total effect is of lifelessness, or rather of suspension of life. The “idle” water-wheel, so busy in the summer, the “examinate” scene, and even the motionless Frome adds to the impression that all life has come to a standstill.

On a strange road the narrator sees an apple-orchard personified in its struggle against murderous winter. The apple-trees are “starved,” and they are “writhing,” in agony, presumably, among outcroppings of slate, which are depicted as animals suffocating under the snow. Winter is painful, isolating; it deprives everything of food and companionship. The final scene of the “huddled” fields and the lone farmhouse that makes the landscape lonelier emphasizes the bleakness and depression of the whole. The passage is loaded with emotionally connotative words, all suggesting unpleasant emotional states. “Solitary,” “bare,” “idle,” “looming,” “starved,” “writhing,” “lost,” “huddled,” “immensities,” lonely,” all contribute to the total effect of life overwhelmed by a murderous unfeeling power. The use of imagery that is angled and planed lends harshness to the overall scene.

In the second passage the tone is one of delight in a beautiful scene, of enjoyment of a pleasurable experience. Winter here is safe, cozy and secure, with the snow protecting the ground, deadening sound and creating a scene of beauty. The fields “glisten” under the pale sun. The distant hills, on which the forest is merely a “stain” or “mottling . . . flowed in round white curves against the sky,” instead of being an inimical presence like the writhing trees in the first passage, the view is attractive both in the distance and nearby. The pinewood is not bleak but warm-colored, with the tree-boles “reddening in the afternoon sun,” and “delicate blue shadows” on the snow. Inside, the wood seems a magical place, still, warm, pure and quiet, with “tiny tracks of wood animals making intricate lace-like patterns” and cones “like ornaments of bronze.” With its roundness and curves, it is a kinder, more inviting scene.

The first passage is emotional in its hatred of one aspect of winter. The colors are stark black and white, relieved only by the “yellow-white spume” of the water wheel. There is no sun. The scene is like an abandoned world.

The second passage is more impersonal in tone – admiring, in detail, such things as the “lace-like tracks” and the “ornaments of bronze,” enjoying the delicate curves of the scenery, the glowing colors, the sensation of safety within the wood, and the sense of awakening animal life all around. The colors in the second passage are varied. As well as black and white there is red, blue, and bronze.

Exercise 5: Discuss the choice of words and how the connotative values of these words add to the theme and emotional impression of the work

“On First Looking into Chapman’s1 Homer”

Much have I travell’d in the realms of gold,

And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;

Round many western islands have I been

Which bards in fealty to Apollo2 hold.

Oft of one wide expanse had I been told

That deep-brow’d Homer rul’d as his demesne;3

Yet did I never breathe its pure serene

Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:

Then felt I like some watcher of the skies

When a new planet swims into his ken;4

Or like a stout Cortez when with eagle eyes

He star’d at the Pacific – and all his men

Look’d at each other with a wild surmise –

Silent, upon a peak in Darien.5

______

1early translator of Homer

2god, among other things, of poetry

3lord’s estate

4knowledge

5the Isthmus of Panama

Suggested answers: