I Am Number 6 Poetry Responce/I Hope your Moving Went Well

Virginia Byde Pacetti
Mrs. Jernigan
AP English IV
28 February 2011
Poetry Response #6
Hartley Coleridge’s poem “To a Deaf and Dumb Little Girl” is not necessarily addressed to a deaf and mute girl, but rather Coleridge comments on the seeming seclusion and isolation he would associate with such an affliction. He wrote this poem as a Petrarchan sonnet, with fourteen lines and a rhyme scheme ABBAACCADEEDFF. Like traditional sonnets most of the lines have 10 syllables, though lines ten and eleven have one and two extra respectively. Though the sonnet consists of only one stanza there exists a definite shift between line eight and nine.
The first octave deals with the separation and loneliness that comes from being an outsider and not being able to readily communicate with those around oneself. To demonstrate this side effect of not being able to hear or speak, Coleridge begins with a simile comparing the child to an island surrounded by a vast “fickle sea,” and highlighting the resulting “privacy.” He then discusses She can watch a dance but never listen to the music to explain that while she is privy to the visually beautiful aspects of life she will always remain oblivious to the auditory wonders. Such explicative and informative information presented at the beginning help to conjure sympathy from the reader for the unknown girl.
The concluding sextet draws attention to her actual actions and abilities. Coleridge describes “All her little being/Concentrated in her solitary seeing,” emphasizing the diminutive stage of life she is at and also the effort she must exert to understand the world. The poem then ends on a happy and understanding note as Coleridge writes he thinks, “God must be with her in her solitude.”

At least I Finnished It/Poetry Responce

Virginia Byde Pacetti

Mrs. Jernigan

AP English IV

23 February 2011

Poetry Response #5 (I think) of semester 2

            William Shakespeare’s sonnet “Shall I Compare Thee to a summer’s Day?” is written as a loving and complementary metaphor. Though it appears that he might be speaking to a lover, he is actually addressing a mentee. Therefore, in this case the structure of a sonnet may have indeed hindered his attempts to convey his feelings. Having such a specific fixed form limits the variability of expression. This means that for meters sake lines such as “So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,” relates a false since of sexual longing. And the line, “And often is his gold complexion dimmed,” highlights such physical attraction, yet the line is necessary and stagnate because it must have ten syllables and rhyme with the line at the stanzas end which ends with “untrimmed.” Although one might never realize William Shakespeare was writing about a person at all, if the reader skipped the first line, because the rest of the poem just extends the description of a pleasant summer day, without again drawing reference to the person he wished to immortalize in his work.

            “Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer’s Day” is a traditional English sonnet.  Shakespeare wrote many more of them, so many that they are also referred to as Shakespearian sonnets. The entire poem is in iambic pentameter, and because of that strict regulation, a few of his words are abbreviated to fit the meter. Yet even when he shortened the word owest to “ow’st” to fit the meter, he made sure to rhyme it with a perfect rhyming word “grow’st” in order to obey the rhyme scheme ABABCDCDEFEFGG.

Poetry Responce #3 for the 3rd Quarter/I'm Presently Lamenting the Lack of Snow

Virginia Byde Pacetti

Mrs. Jernigan

AP English IV

7 February 2011

Poetry Response #3-Second Semester

            Moira Egan wrote a dramatic monologue entitled “Dear Mr. Merrill.” The speaker currently resides in Olympia, Greece, although by her language, need to clarify her location, and admission of newly exploring staple art pieces of the city, it seems she permanently resides, or at the very least hails from somewhere else, possibly the states. Egan leads me to believe the woman is most likely an art professor, and of middle age. The poem is addressed as a letter to Mr. Merrill, a man who has also observed art in Olympia. She first apologizes for the “informality of this letter.” And to some extent this clarification indeed implies to the letter, if examined from a purely poetic standpoint. The poet herself may be apologizing to the reader. While there are five stanzas each compromised of six lines each, the structure becomes more lax from there. The writer makes no attempt at an overall common rhythm or syllabic parallelism.  A common rhyme scheme shell of ABABCC only comes to full fruition in stanza four. Elsewhere inexact appears: “lines” with “shine,” “pomegranate’s” with “sonnet,” and “him” with “him.” Other times the speaker abandons rhyming altogether.

            The most common feature in this story would be the allusions, most of which are Greek in origin and relate to the reader a sense of unfulfilled sexual passion. She cites her desire to render a statue of Hermes holding grapes (a symbol of pampering and sometimes of bondage of the one holding the fruit) into her own Pygmalion statue (Pygmalion carved a statue of a perfect woman and then married it turning it to life).  And later after expanding greatly on the promiscuous dreams that revolved one of her students, she references a pomegranate, the fruit Persephone ate after being taken to the Underworld against her will to serve as Hades’ Queen. Yet, despite what I might consider bleakness for her love life on the horizon, the story lacks actual evidence to any real love life, she finishes the poem positively: “Love held tight in a sonnet.”

My Glog on Agamemnon from The Oresteia

Note: The top film clip is of the opening to Macbeth and the lowest left passege requires scrolling.
http://pleah.glogster.com/glog-1649/