Poem

English 4 Sem B
Unit 1 – The Romantic Period
Essay 1:
In this task, you will closely examine a poem from the romantic period: “The World Is Too Much with Us” by William Wordsworth. You will then write an essay that explains the poem by presenting a claim about it and providing an argument to support the claim. Your essay will also include an analysis of how specific elements affect the poem as a whole.
Read the poem carefully and think about these specific elements:
• theme or central idea
• figurative language and other poetic devices
• tone
• structure or organization (including rhyme scheme, meter, and stanza structure)
After you have read the poem thoroughly, present your analysis of the poem in an essay. Think of a major claim that you can make about the poem and build an argument to support that claim using evidence from the text. (An essay that contains such an argument is called an explication of a poem.) Your claim may be a specific interpretation of the poem, a view about the poet’s attitude toward the subject, the relationship of the subject to the historical context of the poem, the significance of some element of the poem’s form, and so on.
Your essay should include the following:
• your interpretation of the poem
• textual evidence to support your interpretation
• an analysis of specific elements of the poem
• a discussion of how specific elements of the poem (such as theme, figurative language, or structure) affect the meaning of the entire poem
• a major claim about the poem
• an argument to support your claim
Essay 2:
What kind of beauty is Lord Byron defining in “She Walks in Beauty?” Is this a kind of beauty you can make sense of? Does it seem more like part of real life or fantasy? Write an essay in which you discuss your viewpoint on the beauty you think he defines in the poem. Use evidence from the text to support your response.
Unit 2 – The Victorian Era
Essay 1:
Write a fiction or nonfiction narrative of about 500 to 700 words on a theme that is present in some of the selections from Victorian literature that you read in this unit. Below are a few themes involving difficult childhood circumstances and ill-fated love, both of which are present in this unit’s readings. In developing your own narrative, you can choose one of these themes, create a variation on one of them, or use another theme in consultation with your teacher:
• a child who does not fit well into his/her social circumstances
• a child who is perceived as bad when he/she is actually good, or vice versa
• an orphan or displaced child who faces struggles similar to those of Oliver Twist, Kim, or Heathcliff
• two people who are attracted to one another but are prevented from uniting due to social norms and/or related personal conflicts
Your narrative can be about real events and people, it can be fictionalized, or it can be a mix of real and fictional events and people. A narrative can be a full-fledged story or an anecdote that mainly conveys key events and conflicts. Regardless of what type of narrative you are writing, it will be richer and more enjoyable to read if it includes many of the elements of fiction. Before writing, you should decide which literary elements to develop most fully.
• Theme
• Setting
• Characters
• Tone
• Point of view
• Plot
Essay 2:
Oscar Wilde’s play The Importance of Being Earnest is a harsh critique of Victorian society and encourages citizens to change their ways.
Use support from the lesson you’ve read, text from the play, and your own knowledge to write an essay in which you analyze Wilde’s critique of one of the following elements:
• Self-importance
• Marriage and courtship
• Class structure
• Living above your means
• Idleness of the upper class
Unit 3 – The Modern Era
Essay 1:
Listen to President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s speech to Congress on December 8, 1941 (known as the “Day of Infamy Speech” or the “Infamy Speech”) after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor during World War II.
Analyze the “Day of Infamy Speech,” paying special attention to factors such as the speaker’s purpose and point of view. Explain Roosevelt’s reasoning, points of emphasis, and his use of rhetoric and tone, as well as how he links ideas. You can use both the written and audio versions of the speech to complete your analysis. You might need to do some additional research into the historical background of the speaker and the speech to complete this activity.
Essay 2:
Now that you have analyzed the elements of a speech, you will prepare your own speech on a topic that is relevant to your daily life. Write a persuasive speech on one of these two topics:
• The classes offered at your school
• The extracurricular activities that your school offers
Below are some questions that you can use to narrow your focus:
• Do you feel that the school should offer certain classes that would be useful to students but that it currently does not offer?
• Has the school cut an extracurricular program that you feel is important to student development?