Sonnet Day

TODAY IN CLASS
Here's hoping you did Wednesday night's reading on Crime and Punishment, but today in class we switched to poetry.  People who were gone will have a later make-up grade for the written work, but you should still examine the poetry that we looked at today.

All three periods looked at two more John Donne sonnets (Holy Sonnet X and Holy Sonnet XIV).  Although we used the "big black book" in the room for these, they can easily be found online.  For X ("Death be not proud . . .") we focused on TONE--if you were gone, make sure you see how defiant, scornful, contempuous, and taunting all work.  We also noted the use of apostrophe and paradox in this sonnet.
For XIV ("Batter my heart, three-personed God. . .") we looked most at the pattern created by diction and imagery.  We saw that the first eight lines drew its raw power and violence from strong verbs and from words associated with military attacks or the results (the conquering force's power over the losing side). In the last six lines, the language overtly shifts to "love" ("Yet dearly I love You, and would be loved fain"), but the diction and implicit analogy sets up a further power equation in which one relationship is "divorced" and the other consummated in fairly violent and again paradoxical fashion.  Trace all this through, if you missed today, to see further evidence of what is stated here.

In 1st period we continued with a VERY brief look at a Shakespearean sonnet, but I'm not posting details on that today. . . we will examine it in 5-7 minutes at the beginning of class on Friday. 

TONIGHT
If you just started C and P this week, tonight is Day 2 of being a reading machine.  You should have read all of Parts I and II by class time tomorrow.  We will do enough with this tomorrow that I think you should be in good shape to press on over break.