Author Archives: Joseph Kelly

Study guide under the Assignments tab.  See you on the 15th at noon.  Don’t forget to bring your journal.

Students, I have to cover someone else’s class today, so I cannot make my office hours this morning, Tuesday, 11-noon.  My apologies for the short notice.

Students, I’m in the process of sending your papers back to you.  If you go into the dropbox in OAKS where you turned the paper in, you should find your grade and an attachment–your paper with my marginal and final comment.  If you do not see any marginal comments (this especially for those who used .pdf format), let me know. In the meantime, read this excerpt from one paper–a particularly good example of close reading:

Flowers, clouds, groves, and the ocean are all colored in a warm hue by the sun. At the end of this stanza, there is a metaphor in “as I have stood, silent with swimming sense” (Line 38). To understand this line, several things should be explained. In my opinion, when people swim in water, they do not feel weight, which means they float randomly. There is no limitation and restriction. Water soothes people’s feelings and minds, getting rid of physical and mental pressure. Also, when people soak in water, the skin of their whole body senses the water directly without any turbulence. Coleridge uses this metaphor to describe that he immerses in natural beauty, as opposed to merely seeing. He relaxes in the dazzling nature, talking about super nature in “as veil the Almighty Spirit, when yet he makes Spirits perceive his presence” (Line 42).

Note in the Schedule that the due date for your first paper, the explication of “Lime Tree Bower,” has been pushed back to Sept. 24.

Write a paraphrase of the second stanza of Wordsworth’s “Lines” Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey (p. 289).  The stanza begins with the line, “These beauteous forms.”

When you paraphrase, your “translate” the poetic language into your own, commonplace, modern prose.  You should come up with a block of prose that, when read aloud, are perfectly sensible to someone (your roommate for instance) without any great difficulty.  This is NOT a summary.  Leave nothing out.  Speak in the first person the way the speaker in the poem does, and rewrite everything in the stanza.

Turn it in as a hard copy at the start of class.

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