Poetry Interpretation Assignment
You will be divided into groups of about 4 people each. You will closely study one poem by Byron, Keats, or Shelley (see example below). Here are the poems you can choose from. Each group MUST do a different poem—no repeats—so your choice must be approved by me first.
Required (these must be covered):
“She Walks in Beauty” (Byron) page 795
“Ozymandias” (Shelley) page 803
“When I have Fears” (Keats) page 827
“Ode on a Grecian Urn” (Keats) page 836
Other(choose from these when the first four are taken):
“Childe Harold” (Byron) page 797
“Ode to the West Wind” (Shelley) page 806
“To a Skylark” (Shelley) page 849
“On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer” (Keats) page 826
“Ode to a Nightingale” (Keats) page 831
Tomorrow we will form different groups, each containing one person from each of today’s groups. You will take turns teaching each other about the poem that your group studies today.Everyone in your group is responsible for the information, so everyone should be taking notes today. I will collect one set of notes for each group and I’ll pass it back to you tomorrow so that you can use them for tomorrow’s group work.
Here’s a model of what I expect. I used the poem “Ode” on page 846 (Wordsworth).
Paraphrase:
1)Back in the day, the whole world seemed so beautiful to me. It had the qualities of a dream. But now it’s not like that. No matter what I do, I can’t see things that way anymore.
2)There are beautiful things in the world, like a rainbow, a rose, the moon, water, and sunshine. But still, no matter where I go, there is a beauty that has gone from the world.
5)When we are born, we forget about heaven, where we have come from. While we are young we still have the joy of God and heaven. As you grow up, you can still try and successfully feel this joy. But when you’re grown up the light fades and becomes common and dull.
Vocabulary:
Celestial: heavenly
Wheresoe’er: wherever
Poetic/Literary Devices (speaker, metaphor, personification, symbols, etc.)
1)speaker:an older man
2)personification: the moon looks round her
metaphor: “The sunshine is a glorious birth”
5) metaphor: “our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting”
Soul = “our life’s Star”
Shades of the prison-house = Earth (symbol and metaphor)
Symbols: earth = prison, keeps us away from heaven
Baby/boy = connection to heaven
Nature = God’s love