Essay #: Poetry
Minimum Length: 525 words, not counting quotations
Due Date: Submitted to Blackboard by midnight March 27 Prewriting needs to be submitted either on the 27th or 29th in class
For our poetry essay, we are going to compare two poems withlsimilar contenti When you turn in your final copy, I would like you to also turn in your answers to the following prewriting questions:
a. After you have read both poems carefully, formed some notion of what they are about, and made certain that you understand every word (use the dictionary if you need to), list the two titles. How are the titles different and how might this difference suggest the different content or focus of the poems?
b. How do the styles of the poems contrast? Consider their tones, their diction, line length, and rhyme.
c. Both poems are told as first-person accounts, but how do the two narrators contrast with one another? Who is the more self-aware? Can you guess anything else about them from what they say and how they say it? How is their relationship to the pigs different?
d. What is the setting of the poems? Are the specific details of the settings different?
e. Although both poems involve pigs on the way to market, do the poems make different points about the pigs? Do the narrators arrive at any particular
insights about themselves?
f. What would you say the themes of the two poems are?
After you have answered the prewriting questions, can you come up with a thesis statement along the lines of "Although the two poems seem to address similar situations, they are quite different in their ." In explaining and supporting this thesis, make use of the texts of the poems and your prewriting.
Your essay, like all the other essays we write this semester, should have an original title, provide the author's names and the titles of the works to be discussed, and have a clear thesis that is analytical (not one that will lead you to write a summary). If you follow my model above, you should have a good analytical thesis.