Literature Foundation 2009
Week 3
Note: your first formative assignment is supposed to be due in week 5. I will set the assignment next week, giving you full details of how to do it, what I expect to see in the essay, and how it is marked. I want you to hand it in by email, as an attachment, which means you can send it to me later than week 5, but no later than Thursday of week 6.
Details of the assignment are here.
For next week
1. Everyone, please, learn how to scan a poem. I have written a set of instructions that should teach you how to do this. (You will also find a link to the instructions in www.tomdavisinfo.com.)
2. Please scan this poem: a slumber did my spirit seal. You can check that you have got it right with the aid of this remarkable website:
http://prosody.lib.virginia.edu/materials/ypoems/a-slumber-did-my-spirit-seal/
You will also find more useful instructions on how to scan poems there. Bear in mind, though, that the scansion offered there is not necessarily the only possible one: you can disagree with it.
Note: at the moment (16/10/09) the site isn't working properly, sadly. Try it; keep coming back to it. It was fine a week or so ago.
Update: I have emailed the webmaster, and she is working on it (Monday 19 Oct).
Update: now working!
3. Do an analysis of the poem. Pay particular attention to the places where the scansion is irregular (eg trochaic substitutions) and see if you can see how these irregularities affect or reinforce the meaning of the poem.
4. Relate the overall meaning of the poem to Wordsworth's romanticism.
All of you, please, do all of this; in the seminar I would like group 1 to report on stanza one, group 2 on stanza 2, and group 3 on the overall meaning and romanticism.
Email me if you have any problems.
