According to your anthology, an explication or close-reading paper “takes what is implicit or subtle in a work of literature and makes it explicit and clear. Literary language tends to be densely packed with meaning, and your job as you explicate it is to unfold that meaning and lay it out for your reader” (1185).
Select one of the poems that we read below and write a 3-4 page essay in which you explicate that poem.
• Following the poem stanza-by-stanza or line-by-line (depending on the length), come up with a thesis in which you present your interpretation of a major theme of the poem and argue for how and why that theme is important to the poem as a whole.
• You must analyze 2-3 specific examples of literary devices found in the poem (its diction, syntax, tone, form (line or stanza length, rhyme or meter), metaphors, imagery, etc.) to prove your thesis. How, specifically, does the poem get its meaning across? How do the poem’s devices affect the theme?
• Be sure to provide detailed textual support (quotations from the text) for your arguments and observations.
Poems (choose one):
“When I consider how my light is spent,” John Milton
“next to of course god america i,” e.e. cummings
“I felt a Funeral, in my Brain,” Emily Dickinson
“One of Their Gods,” C.P. Cavafy
“Morning Song,” Sylvia Plath
“Tour 5,” Robert Hayden