Form III Poems - and more!

For Form III, we select poems from an anthology:

Introduction to Poetry edited by X. J. Kennedy & Dana Goia:

1. Shakespeare, "Shall I Compare Thee..."
                                           Other sonnets: Collins, "Sonnet" Arnold, "Shakespeare"

2.  Frost, "Out, Out-"

3. Roethke, "My Papa's Waltz"

4. Sexton, "Her Kind"

5. Olds, "Rite of Passage"(with Audio)

6. Williams, "This Is Just to Say"

7. Eliot, "The Winter Evening Settles Down"

8. Tennyson, "The Eagle"



9. Rich, "Aunt Jennifer's Tigers"
(Text from Prof. Al Filreis English 88 Modern & Contemporary American Poetry)

10. Browning, "My Last Duchess" (with Audio)

11. Plath, “Metaphors” (with a paragraph of analysis)

12. Lawrence, “Piano”

13. Bottoms, "Sign for My Father, Who Stressed the Bunt" (Handout—this is not in the book)


Additional Poets & Poems:

14. Cummings, "in Just"

15. Stallings, "First Love: A Quiz"

16. Herbert, "Easter Wings"

17. Hollander, "Swan and Shadow"

18. Stevens, "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird"

19. Merwin, "For the Anniversary of My Death"

20. Collins, "Introduction to Poetry" (video on humor)

Shakespeare

BY MATTHEW ARNOLD

Others abide our question. Thou art free.

We ask and ask—Thou smilest and art still,

Out-topping knowledge. For the loftiest hill,

Who to the stars uncrowns his majesty,

Planting his steadfast footsteps in the sea,

Making the heaven of heavens his dwelling-place,

Spares but the cloudy border of his base

To the foil'd searching of mortality;

And thou, who didst the stars and sunbeams know,

Self-school'd, self-scann'd, self-honour'd, self-secure,

Didst tread on earth unguess'd at.—Better so!

All pains the immortal spirit must endure,

All weakness which impairs, all griefs which bow,

Find their sole speech in that victorious brow.

Introduction to Poetry

BY BILLY COLLINS

I ask them to take a poem   

and hold it up to the light   

like a color slide

or press an ear against its hive.

I say drop a mouse into a poem   

and watch him probe his way out,

or walk inside the poem’s room   

and feel the walls for a light switch.

I want them to waterski   

across the surface of a poem

waving at the author’s name on the shore.

But all they want to do

is tie the poem to a chair with rope   

and torture a confession out of it.

They begin beating it with a hose   

to find out what it really means.

Billy Collins, “Introduction to Poetry” from The Apple that Astonished Paris. Copyright � 1988, 1996 by Billy Collins. Reprinted with the permission of the University of Arkansas Press.

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