poetry section goals thing

the poetry tip bullet points in the book are pretty bad. they're painfully obvious or self-nullifying a lot of the time. my favorite says "there are six types of questions, and then there are two other types, and then probably more after that." and then there's "when you read the poem a second time, take more time to highlight complicated words, but don't actually do that" and "read it aloud in your head." the entire section sounds more like a post on a middle school student's poetry blog than it does a textbook. but unfortunately that's not what this post is about. goals:

• compare how a theme is employed with how the same theme is presented in another poem. the keats poem with its "experience destroys innocence" theme thing reminded me of the stuff from brit lit about William Blake's Songs of Innocence and of Experience and it'll probably be handy to be able to do that kind of intertextual relation later.
• note the setting. unless it's hammered into my brain I usually just ignore it and often miss some pretty big hints at what the themes and mood of the poem are.
• look for figurative things in new places like a change in speaker or setting or something like that. in the frame and not the picture, if that makes sense.
• familiarize myself with different writing styles and vocabulary so ye olde (or Shakesperian) English won't throw me off and the sometimes awkward phrasing in more contemporary poems doesn't make me cringe.
• learn more about the literary movements so I can know what all the themes are in a poem just from knowing when it was written.

I chose these goals mostly because I already knew I wanted to work on them. didn't get much out of the practice problems other than "comprehension" which is kind of a no-brainer. Relating different texts is very handy for writing essays on anything so I think that will be very helpful to practice. The setting point is pretty simply explained up there. An example that comes to mind for the third point is a Matthew Arnold poem we read in Brit Lit called Dover Beach. Ms. Huntley told us that the irregular shape of the lines of the poem itself could symbolize the motion of the tides and stuff. I mean to basically look for symbolism and such everywhere except the scene, objects and events described in the poem. The fourth and fifth bullets are pretty straightforward and only kind of joking.

33/50

the test was pretty much exactly what I expected it to be. I think it's awfully silly to try to grade one's interpretations of figurative language objectively, and with a multiple choice test no less. that said, not all of the test was flawed, and I did better than I was expecting to do; I'm usually not good with languages. I should probably brush up on vocabulary a bit, so I don't forget what elegies are or anything like that. uhh I liked the humor in the Pride and Prejudice passage a lot, and I liked the John Donne poem, if only because it was lyrical (though I do think it's stupid when people try rhymes like "love" and "remove").