Poetry Analysis

Choose the poem assigned last week from The Norton Introduction to Literature for your analysis. Using close reading techniques, develop an argumentative thesis for your analysis. Write a two-three-page paper that supports your thesis. At the end of the essay, provide a Writing Process Summation by answering the following questions:

• Why did you choose this poem?
• How did you arrive at your understanding and assertion about the poem?
• What were the points you made in this essay?
• How did you revise this?
• What do you want your reader to see from your essay?

This paper must have a Works Cited page, separate from the body of the essay (insert a page break to make sure it is always on another page). See p. 462 in The Little, Brown Handbook for the example for citing a selection from an anthology, such as The Norton Introduction to Literature. 

Mid-Term Break

Related Poem Content Details

BY SEAMUS HEANEY

I sat all morning in the college sick bay

Counting bells knelling classes to a close.

At two o'clock our neighbours drove me home.

In the porch I met my father crying—

He had always taken funerals in his stride—

And Big Jim Evans saying it was a hard blow.

The baby cooed and laughed and rocked the pram

When I came in, and I was embarrassed

By old men standing up to shake my hand

And tell me they were 'sorry for my trouble'.

Whispers informed strangers I was the eldest,

Away at school, as my mother held my hand

In hers and coughed out angry tearless sighs.

At ten o'clock the ambulance arrived

With the corpse, stanched and bandaged by the nurses.

Next morning I went up into the room. Snowdrops

And candles soothed the bedside; I saw him

For the first time in six weeks. Paler now,

Wearing a poppy bruise on his left temple,

He lay in the four-foot box as in his cot.

No gaudy scars, the bumper knocked him clear.

A four-foot box, a foot for every year.