Essay Assignment
"The purpose of [an explication of] a literary work is to make the implicit explicit. Explication is a detailed explanation of a passage of poetry or prose. Because explication is an intensive examination of a text line by line, it is mostly used to interpret a short poem in its entirety or a brief passage from a long poem, short story, or play. Explication can be used in any kind of paper when you want to be specific about how a writer achieves a certain effect. An explication pays careful attention to language: the connotations of words, allusions, figurative language, irony, symbol, rhythm, sound, and so on. These elements are examined in relation to one another and to the work's overall effect and meaning."
--Michel Meyers
Write a 3-5 page explication of one of the following poems. For the Wordsworth poems use the checklist "Characteristics of Wordsworth's Poetry" (BB) as a guide to interpreting the poems. For Keats's poems, use the same checklist but this time to compare/contrast Keats and Wordsworth.
By William Wordsworth
• "The Solitary Reaper" 484-485
• "It is a beauteous evening" 476-77
By John Keats
• "On first looking into Chapman's Homer" 567-68
• "Bright Star" 588
• "La Belle Dame Sans Merci" 579-80
Submit a printed copy of your essay to me in class on the due date and an electronic copy on Turnitin.
As always I will base your essay grade on the thoroughness and insightfulness of the explication and on the clarity and cohesion of your essay.
1. I suggest you begin your paper with an introduction that serves as a lead-in to your thesis by briefly explaining the visionary thrust of Wordsworth's poetry, its recording of epiphanies that bring together and harmonize traditional binaries, such as the natural and supernatural.
2. Conclude the introduction by stating a thesis for your essay, one that captures the overall thought of the poem.
3. Do NOT organize your paper by the characteristics of Wordsworth's poetry. Instead organize the body of your essay so by stanzas (such as quatrains and the final couplet) so that you can show how the theme is developed as the poem moves from stanza to stanza, all the while making connections to these characteristics. Each stanza adds something new to what has come before. Note how paragraphs begin by connecting the poem's main idea with the new main idea of each stanza.
4. After the topic sentence, each paragraph should interpret every line of the stanza, though not in a mechanical way (e.g., "Line seven then says X").
5. Discuss lines out of sequence when they can be usefully connected to another phrase. The reader of your explication may need to know something later to understand something earlier, or the explanation of an extended metaphor may take you through two or more stanzas.
6. Pay careful attention to language: the denotation and connotations of words (the associations with the word that are relevant to the poet's intentions) and allusions to the Bible and classical mythology. You should look words up that you don't know or suspect have a different meaning in the Renaissance in the Oxford English Dictionary, which will tell you the meaning(s) of words in different stages of the language. The OED is to be found in the databases of the UHD library and can be accessed online. You can document points from the OED simply by following the point or quote with OED in parentheses.
7. Distinguish between literal and figurative language. Paraphrase or summarize literal language in your own words as much as you can, not the poet's.
8. Use technical terminology correctly in discussing the non-literal language of the poem: simile, metaphor, vehicle, tenor, metonymy, synecdoche, pun, hyperbole, paradox, oxymoron, irony. Be sure to identify and unravel the full, non-literal meanings of each instance of figurative language. With a metaphor for instance, does the paper draw out the full range of relevant the associations and emotions suggested by the vehicle? If the figure is a paradox, does the paper explain why the two parts are in contradiction and then show how the paradox actually makes sense or is true?
9. Quote words that are key to understanding the thought and artistry of the poem, but quote only words that help establish a point about the poem. Edit out words that distract from the point you are making by cherry picking only the most relevant words and editing out any extraneous words by using a three dot ellipsis ( ... ) to mark words that have been omitted from a quotation.
10. Every quotation should be a grammatical part of a sentence of your own. Do not let a quotation stand alone as its own sentence, and especially do not quote long passages (say a whole quatrain) as a block quote or place a stand alone quotation at the beginning of a paragraph.
11. Integrate quotations into your paper coherently. Words taken out of a poem usually require you to explain in your own words the original context as you are quoting. Moreover, the words from a quotation must fit grammatically into your sentence and they must make sense with the other words in your sentence.
12. Follow a quotation with its line number. If your sentence does not end with the line number, place it in parentheses at the end of the sentence before the period. If the quote appears at the end of the sentence, mark the end of the quotation with close quotes, provide the line number(s) in parenthesis, and then close the sentence with a period.
13. The paper should be carefully edited for precise word choice, conciseness, syntax, grammar rules (e.g., pronoun-antecedent clarity and agreement), punctuation, and spelling.
14. The paper should follow MLA specifications for the formatting of the paper and the Works Cited page. The only entries for the Words Cited page should be our textbook and the Oxford English Dictionary if you cite it in your paper. The Works Cited page does not count toward the 4-5 minimum for the essay, but should appear as the last paginated page of your essay.
15. Write a helpful title that point to the purpose or idea of the paper. Do not title the paper solely by the name of the poem.
16. The ideas in your paper should all come from your ingenuity in reading the poem. You are not to use any secondary sources such as books or article or web sites about the poem you pick to write on. A paper that borrows idea or words from a secondary source will not pass.