EMAIL<\/a> | SYLLABUS<\/a> | POLICIES<\/a> | QUESTIONS<\/a> | PRESENTATIONS<\/a> | JOURNALS<\/a> | PAPER<\/a> | EXAM<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Note: see Journals page for details on keeping your journal.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Assigned: Frost, Robert. \u201cThe Figure a Poem Makes\u201d (Norton Vol. D 250-52); \u201cMowing\u201d (Vol. D 231-32); \u201cMending Wall\u201d (Vol. D 232-33); \u201cThe Death of the Hired Man\u201d (Vol. D 233-37); \u201cThe Wood-Pile\u201d (Vol. D 241); \u201cThe Road Not Taken\u201d (Vol. D 241-42); \u201cBirches\u201d (Vol. D 242-44); \u201cOut, Out\u2014\u201d (Vol. D 244); \u201cFire and Ice\u201d (Vol. D 245); \u201cNothing Gold Can Stay\u201d (Vol. D 245); \u201cStopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening\u201d (Vol. D 245); \u201cDesert Places\u201d (Vol. D 246); \u201cDesign\u201d (Vol. D 246); \u201cThe Gift Outright\u201d (Vol. D 248).<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThe Figure a Poem Makes\u201d (Norton Vol. D 250-52)<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n 1. In his essay \u201cThe Figure a Poem Makes,\u201d what complaint does Robert Frost make on page 250 against so-called \u201cabstractionists\u201d or radical experimenters in modern poetry? Why can\u2019t we just consider a poem as pure sound, or pure wildness (i.e. random association and so forth)? If sound and \u201cwildness\u201d are to be worthwhile, with what do they respectively need to be combined?<\/p>\n\n\n\n 2. On pages 250-51 of \u201cThe Figure a Poem Makes,\u201d how does Frost develop his initial statement that the \u201cfigure a poem makes\u201d may be captured with the dictum, \u201cIt begins in delight and ends in wisdom\u201d?\u00a0How<\/em>\u00a0does a poem do that? What do you understand by such associated claims as the remark that a worthwhile poem \u201cends in a clarification of life\u201d and amounts to \u201ca momentary stay against confusion\u201d (251)?<\/p>\n\n\n\n 3. On page 251 of \u201cThe Figure a Poem Makes,\u201d how does Frost differentiate between the scholar and the artist with regard to how they obtain their own kind of knowledge? How does a scholar (or scientist) attain and value knowledge? How does an artist do so? While Frost hardly means to condemn scholars or scientists, it\u2019s pretty clear that he favors the way artists arrive at and relate to their kind of knowledge. On 251-52, what justification does he offer for praising artists and poets\u2019 way of \u201cknowing\u201d? In particular, what\u2019s the result when someone gains and then conveys understanding in the artistic way?<\/p>\n\n\n\n On page 251-52 of \u201cThe Figure a Poem Makes,\u201d Frost shows a certain disdain for political \u201cprating\u201d (251 middle) about big concepts like freedom. He wasn\u2019t friendly towards President Franklin Delano Roosevelt\u2019s New Deal, which the Democratic president and his supporters deemed necessary to jolt the country out of the Great Depression during the 1930s; Frost\u2019s prose and poetry shows a strong individualist tendency that put him at odds with so-called \u201ccollectivist\u201d approaches to life and politics. When it came to art, it seems that Frost thought art should deal with the supposedly permanent elements of human nature and the human condition, not involve itself deeply in immediate social or political issues. Do you agree with that kind of approach, or do you find that prescription too rigid? Explain your response.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cMowing\u201d (Vol. D 231-32)<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n 5. Mowing the grass or wheat to make hay is the stuff of traditional pastoral poetry, and Frost gives us a variation on that theme in \u201cMowing\u201d — one that isn\u2019t about a love complaint or an idyllic setting but that rather seems to concern itself with labor. What quality of representation and reflection with regard to the work of mowing, then, do you find in this poem?<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cMending Wall\u201d (Vol. D 232-33)<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n 6. Aside from the obvious, what is a \u201cwall\u201d in the context of Frost\u2019s poem \u201cMending Wall\u201d? How might this poem be explored as a philosophical reflection on the origin and nature of the divisions we make between nature and ourselves, between one person and another?<\/p>\n\n\n\n 7. In Frost\u2019s poem \u201cMending Wall,\u201d what seems to be the speaker\u2019s attitude towards his neighbor? We know they disagree about whether or not their two properties really need a dividing wall, but how does the speaker respond to his neighbor\u2019s insistence on upholding tradition and property rights?<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThe Death of the Hired Man\u201d (Vol. D 233-37)<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n 8. What difference in perspective do you find in Frost\u2019s \u201cThe Death of the Hired Man\u201d between the husband Warren and his wife Mary with respect to Silas, the itinerant (i.e. traveling) worker they have long hired to do odd jobs for them? Does Warren\u2019s view change or become clearer to us in the latter half or so of the poem, or does it stay the same? Explain.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 9. What is Silas\u2019 situation in Frost\u2019s \u201cThe Death of the Hired Man\u201d when he arrives at Warren and Mary\u2019s farm? What are some of the key points at which Frost makes his narrator provide us with further information about Silas? How does the poem bring home to us the starkness, the anything but ideal or secure quality, of the old laborer\u2019s life?<\/p>\n\n\n\n 10. In Frost\u2019s \u201cThe Death of the Hired Man,\u201d the last full stanza seems to contain a genuinely symbolic moment, one that connects \u201cThe moon, the little silver cloud, and she\u201d {Mary, Warren\u2019s wife} just before Warren returns to announce quietly that old Silas has died. Explore the significance of this section of the poem: in what sense might it be suggestive of Silas\u2019 value to Mary, or Silas\u2019 predicament more generally? (If you read this part of the text differently, that\u2019s fine; the point is to explore its symbolic charge.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThe Wood-Pile\u201d (Vol. D 241)<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n 11. In Frost\u2019s \u201cThe Wood-Pile,\u201d the speaker muses about some chopped wood left out in the forest rather than stacked where it can be reached to heat the chopper\u2019s home in winter. How is this poem both a reflection on the labor we engage in and, at the same time, on how we invest what we do and make with purpose and significance? So far as you can tell, what does the poem as a whole privilege — the wood-chopper\u2019s labor and the product he created, or the speaker\u2019s own communion with objects like that wood-pile? Which is more true, if either is more true — the purposeful labor, or the quiet reflection? Explain your answer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThe Road Not Taken\u201d (Vol. D 241-42)<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n 12. In lines 6-12 of Frost\u2019s \u201cThe Road Not Taken,\u201d how does the speaker describe the supposed difference between the two paths that he mentions? So how different are they, based on what the speaker says? (Be attentive to these lines — it\u2019s easy to misconstrue them and thereby miss much of the poem\u2019s complexity as a reflection on the \u201cpaths\u201d that make up a person\u2019s life.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n 13. What time frames can you find in Frost\u2019s \u201cThe Road Not Taken\u201d? One of them is of course the moment at which the speaker made a choice and walked down one path rather than the other, but what other temporal horizons would it make sense to recognize, and how might this temporal complexity lead us towards a strong understanding of the poem\u2019s final stanza?<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cBirches\u201d (Vol. D 242-44)<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n 14. In Frost\u2019s \u201cBirches,\u201d we are treated to the adult speaker\u2019s recollections about the fun he had swinging from sinewy birch trees during his boyhood. How does the speaker transform those recollections into a reassertion of the human bond with nature as well as, perhaps, a meditation on religious notions about going to one\u2019s otherworldly reward at the end of life?<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cOut, Out–\u201d (Vol. D 244)<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n 15. In Frost\u2019s \u201cOut, Out–,\u201d with its title borrowed from a line by Macbeth at the hollow end of his bloody career (see\u00a0Macbeth<\/em>\u00a05.5.23-24) a young boy just finishing up the day\u2019s work with a saw cuts his hand off and dies in surgery when the country doctor arrives to amputate the hand. How is the boy\u2019s death regarded by others in the poem, and how does the speaker\u2019s attitude compare to the regard shown?<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cFire and Ice\u201d (Vol. D 245)<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n 16. In Frost\u2019s \u201cFire and Ice,\u201d the speaker alludes to the end of the world. The general meaning of fire and ice seems to be that the first references a religious perspective in which the world finally burns, as in the \u201cEnd Times\u201d of Christian theology, and the second references a scientific perspective in which the sun eventually burns out, leaving the planet cold and lifeless. But how does Frost\u2019s speaker turn \u201cfire\u201d and \u201cice\u201d into symbols that speak more directly about human nature itself? What seems to be the speaker\u2019s attitude towards \u201cus\u201d?<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cNothing Gold Can Stay\u201d (Vol. D 245)<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n 17. Frost (a native Californian) was a fine observer of the natural environment in his adopted New England, and here in the short poem \u201cNothing Gold Can Stay,\u201d he shows the same acuteness as poets like Wordsworth, Coleridge, or Gerard Manley Hopkins. How does Frost\u2019s speaker turn a simple nature-observation into a broader contemplation of the transient quality of life, as well as change our traditional perception of the color \u201cgold\u201d?<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cStopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening\u201d (Vol. D 245)<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n 18. In the first stanza of Frost\u2019s \u201cStopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,\u201d what purpose does the speaker give for stopping where he does? How, in the next two stanzas, does he go on to build a sense of the oddness of this action he has taken, \u201cstopping by woods\u201d on a dark winter night?<\/p>\n\n\n\n 19. Many readers of Frost\u2019s \u201cStopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening\u201d catch the almost hypnotic quality of the final stanza, with its repetition in the final two lines and its initial summation, \u201cThe woods are lovely, dark, and deep,\u201d If, then, this poem ends with something like a \u201ccall of the woods\u201d to the speaker and perhaps to us, how would you give voice to that call? What is being offered, beyond the literal level of simply going farther into the woods or staying longer in them? At the same time, why might it not be quite right to leave the matter at this primeval level? How, that is, does the poem as a whole cast the woods as part of the human world as well?<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cDesert Places\u201d (Vol. D 246)<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n 20. The Norton editors rightly point out on page 231 that while Frost is certainly a fine observer of nature, his outlook with regard to it can\u2019t be equated with that of American Transcendentalists such as Emerson and Thoreau. How does this poem both connect the speaker with the landscape and yet leave us with a rather unsettling sense of the relationship thereby posited between them? Furthermore, what does the final stanza, with its response to C17 French philosopher Blaise Pascal\u2019s often-quoted thought, \u201cthe eternal silence of these infinite spaces terrifies me\u201d (La silence \u00e9ternel de ces espaces infinis m\u2019effraie,<\/em>\u00a0from\u00a0Pens\u00e9es<\/em>), add to the poem\u2019s psychological depth?<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cDesign\u201d (Vol. D 246)<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n 21. The speaker of Frost\u2019s \u201cDesign\u201d asks a question after William Blake\u2019s heart — as when in that romantic poet\u2019s \u201cThe Tyger,\u201d the speaker asks the beautiful but deadly predator, \u201cwhat immortal hand or eye \/ dare frame thy fearful symmetry?\u201d What explanation, if any, does Frost\u2019s speaker arrive at for the existence and behavior of \u201cdimpled spiders\u201d like the one that stalks the white moth on the heal-all plant (Prunella vulgaris<\/em>)? If you don\u2019t think an \u201cexplanation\u201d is what the speaker is mainly trying to achieve, how do you read the poem\u2019s significance?<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThe Gift Outright\u201d (Vol. D 248).<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n 22. Perhaps the key line in Frost\u2019s \u201cThe Gift Outright\u201d (which the poet wrote in 1942 and later recited at President Kennedy\u2019s inauguration in January, 1961) is the eleventh, in which the speaker says that Americans \u201cfound salvation in surrender.\u201d In the context established by the poem, how do you interpret that line? What sense of American history, what relationship between the people and the land, does the poem imply?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" WALT WHITMAN QUESTIONS FOR E222 AMERICAN LITERATURECSU FULLERTON, FALL 2014 Note: see Journals page for details on keeping your journal. Assigned: Frost, Robert. \u201cThe Figure a Poem Makes\u201d (Norton Vol. D 250-52); \u201cMowing\u201d (Vol. D 231-32); \u201cMending Wall\u201d (Vol. D 232-33); \u201cThe Death of the Hired Man\u201d (Vol. D 233-37); \u201cThe Wood-Pile\u201d (Vol. D 241); […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_eb_attr":"","footnotes":""},"wf_page_folders":[11],"class_list":["post-772","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ajdrake.com\/academic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/772","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ajdrake.com\/academic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ajdrake.com\/academic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ajdrake.com\/academic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ajdrake.com\/academic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=772"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.ajdrake.com\/academic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/772\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4751,"href":"https:\/\/www.ajdrake.com\/academic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/772\/revisions\/4751"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ajdrake.com\/academic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=772"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"wf_page_folders","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ajdrake.com\/academic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/wf_page_folders?post=772"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}