Daniel Sasson's AP Literature Portfolio
Please Email me for any questions or comments at [email protected]
Please Email me for any questions or comments at [email protected]
What I Know About Poetry
To me poetry is not just a short piece of writing using a rhyme scheme, it is an art form used to express thoughts, ideas, and emotions. Other forms of literature don't contain as much emotion and personal connection as poetry (my opinion). I think that more emotional and abstract people like to write poetry because poetry is usually emotional but also ambiguous. We study poetry in school because poetry is a unique form of literature. Poetry requires critical thinking, analysis, and interpretation. I do not recall reading any specific poems, but I am familiar with some famous poets such as,Thoreau, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, and Robert Frost. Poetry differs from other forms of literature in that it tends to capture the emotions and thoughts of the poet.
10 Poems I Liked
1. The Road Not Taken - Robert Frost
2. Out, Out - - Robert Frost
3. Mac Flecknoe - John Dryden
4. A Riddle - Jonathan Swift
5. Fugue of Death - Paul Celan
6."O Captain! My Captain!" - Walt Whitman
7. Sonnet 138 - Shakespeare
8. SONNET 18 Shall I compare thee to a summer's day? - Shakespeare
9. "A Dream Within a Dream" - Edgar Allen Poe
10. I Cry - Tupac Shakur
2. Out, Out - - Robert Frost
3. Mac Flecknoe - John Dryden
4. A Riddle - Jonathan Swift
5. Fugue of Death - Paul Celan
6."O Captain! My Captain!" - Walt Whitman
7. Sonnet 138 - Shakespeare
8. SONNET 18 Shall I compare thee to a summer's day? - Shakespeare
9. "A Dream Within a Dream" - Edgar Allen Poe
10. I Cry - Tupac Shakur
A Story By Lee Young Lee Analysis
In Young Lee’s, “A Story”, Lee conveys the complex relationship between a father and son by using a third person point of view in order to bring out the desperation of the father to hold on to his son as his son grows older.
The third person point of view is used to describe the father in the present as not being able to come up with stories to tell his son. As the father sits by his son, dumbfounded and without a story to to tell, he imagines his son saying “not the same story. Baba. A new one”. As the son utters those words the father feels a rush of emotions and pictures his son leaving him.
As the father pictures his son leaving him, the poem changes from the present tense to the future tense. In his mind the father screams “hear the alligator story! The angel story once more!” The father yells out in desperation in an attempt to keep his son from leaving. From line 15 on the entire poem becomes the father’s imagination. The reader knows that in reality the father’s “five year old son waits on his lap”; But, the father’s emotions are so intense that his imagination takes over the rest of the poem. In his imagination, the father witnesses his son packing up his shirts and preparing to leave. The father has feelings of guilt when he says “Am I a god that I should never disappoint?” Young children often see their parents as gods. Parents protect, shelter, and are a constant source of love. It’s a rarity that a parent should disappoint a young child, so when a parent fails to live up to standards, does the child lose faith in their parent? The father seems to think so, having thoughts about his son leaving, taking his keys and shirts and walking away.
The poet uses the changing of tenses and imagery effectively in order to display the complex relationship. Imagine witnessing your son packing up and leaving because you feel you let him down. The poet brings out the feelings of desperation of an emotional father, enhancing the complex relationship between the father and his son.
The third person point of view is used to describe the father in the present as not being able to come up with stories to tell his son. As the father sits by his son, dumbfounded and without a story to to tell, he imagines his son saying “not the same story. Baba. A new one”. As the son utters those words the father feels a rush of emotions and pictures his son leaving him.
As the father pictures his son leaving him, the poem changes from the present tense to the future tense. In his mind the father screams “hear the alligator story! The angel story once more!” The father yells out in desperation in an attempt to keep his son from leaving. From line 15 on the entire poem becomes the father’s imagination. The reader knows that in reality the father’s “five year old son waits on his lap”; But, the father’s emotions are so intense that his imagination takes over the rest of the poem. In his imagination, the father witnesses his son packing up his shirts and preparing to leave. The father has feelings of guilt when he says “Am I a god that I should never disappoint?” Young children often see their parents as gods. Parents protect, shelter, and are a constant source of love. It’s a rarity that a parent should disappoint a young child, so when a parent fails to live up to standards, does the child lose faith in their parent? The father seems to think so, having thoughts about his son leaving, taking his keys and shirts and walking away.
The poet uses the changing of tenses and imagery effectively in order to display the complex relationship. Imagine witnessing your son packing up and leaving because you feel you let him down. The poet brings out the feelings of desperation of an emotional father, enhancing the complex relationship between the father and his son.
Poem Tone Analysis
Tone Analysis of The Red Hat:
The tone of the “Red Hat” is very colloquial and personal. The poem is about two parents following their son to school because they are very concerned for him. The poem comes off as conversational as we see read the line, “I or his father track him on the way”, in context it feels like the mother is talking to the reader. After I knew that the parents track their son, a question popped into my head. Why do the parents track their son? Is because they are suspicious of him or concerned for his safety? After reading that once the son passes “Straus Park” the parents can no longer watch their son from a distance, the reader finds out that the son really becomes alone. The mother (narrator) then states, “The watcher's heart stretches, elastic in its love and fear, toward him as we see him disappear.” From the mother’s words we see that the parents follow their son for as long as they can because they love him so much. The parents are concerned about their son’s safety of course; but, after reading this line it now becomes obvious that the parents have a deep love for their child. After reaching this conclusion I think the poem might be talking about how the parents used to walk their child to school and now that he has grown up he walks to school by himself for the first times. The son growing up might have hit the parents suddenly and it is hard for them to see their child walking to school on his own because it leads them to the realization that their once small son is now a maturing teenager.
The tone of the “Red Hat” is very colloquial and personal. The poem is about two parents following their son to school because they are very concerned for him. The poem comes off as conversational as we see read the line, “I or his father track him on the way”, in context it feels like the mother is talking to the reader. After I knew that the parents track their son, a question popped into my head. Why do the parents track their son? Is because they are suspicious of him or concerned for his safety? After reading that once the son passes “Straus Park” the parents can no longer watch their son from a distance, the reader finds out that the son really becomes alone. The mother (narrator) then states, “The watcher's heart stretches, elastic in its love and fear, toward him as we see him disappear.” From the mother’s words we see that the parents follow their son for as long as they can because they love him so much. The parents are concerned about their son’s safety of course; but, after reading this line it now becomes obvious that the parents have a deep love for their child. After reaching this conclusion I think the poem might be talking about how the parents used to walk their child to school and now that he has grown up he walks to school by himself for the first times. The son growing up might have hit the parents suddenly and it is hard for them to see their child walking to school on his own because it leads them to the realization that their once small son is now a maturing teenager.
Those Winter Sundays
Those Winter Sundays is a poem about a lonely and unappreciated father. The father in the poem is hard working man as implied by the lines, “Sundays too my father got up early” and “with cracked hands that ached from labor in the weekday”. The reader sees that the father goes unappreciated when the poem states, “No one ever thanked him”, in reference to the father. The last Stanza really shows how distant the relationship between the father and his child really is. The narrator (the child) says “speaking indifferently to him (the father)”. The last line, “what did I know of love's austere and lonely offices?” can be interpreted in two different ways. The line can be interpreted as the child feeling melancholy because the child never gets to see his/her father due to his/her father’s harsh working hours. The line can also be interpreted as the child feeling resent towards his/her father because the father only focuses on his work and neglects to give his child enough attention and be a father figure. I personally interpret the line as the child feeling sad and upset.
Compare and Contrast
Emily Dickinson's We Grow Accustomed to the Dark and Robert Frost’s Acquainted with the Night both have themes of darkness. The difference between the two poems his how darkness is presented.
Dickson presents Darkness as times of hardship but the message of the poem as a whole is seeing the light through the darkness, as conveyed in the fourth stanza, “The bravest grope and hit a tree, but learn to see, the darkness alters, or the sight adjusts.” The central message of the poem is that darkness can harm us, but the existence of darkness is just a part of life. Living and experiencing life means facing the truth. Experiencing darkness such as witnessing injustice, living through war, or just having a bad day is part of life. Dickson tries to convey that life is filled with times of darkness, but its about finding the silver lining in every situation that gets everyone through times of darkness.
We Grow Accustomed to the Dark is a sad poem about a person’s isolation and solitude. The narrator accepts his loneliness (his darkness), he does not attempt to change it or how he thinks about it. He walks down the city’s saddest lane and is unable to meet the eyes of the watchman. I believe the narrator feels as if no one loves him because he says he heard a cry from a house but as he turned around to look at the source of the cry he noticed it wasnt anyone who wanted to “call me back or say goodbye.”
We Grow Accustomed to the Dark and Acquainted with the Night both have the central theme of darkness. However both poets portray darkness in a different way. Dickinson portrays darkness as part of life, and a motion that everyone goes through. Frost portrays darkness as the sadness and loneliness that eats away at peoples lives.