Assignment Task
Preparation: Step 1:
As the term suggests, close reading is a form of analysis that consists of very close attention to the movement and structure of the language of a particular literary text. Read the poem over several times, the more the better. Be on the lookout for patterns of any sort: images or metaphors that repeat, thematic issues that keep returning, statements that may seem mutually contradictory, or produce some other sort of tension. As you become increasingly familiar with the poem in rereading it, try to trace the movement of its language from beginning to end as minutely as possible, sentence by sentence, phrase by phrase, even word by word. (These patterns can include sound patterns, but don’t focus on them to the exclusion of everything else.) Are there points where the poet says something surprising? Where what h/she says at one point does not seem necessarily to follow from h/she has said previously, that contradicts it or throws it in an unfamiliar light, or where h/she offers a piece of information that seems in some respect gratuitous or superfluous.
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Get Help Now!Step 2:You should have noticed that unlike most of the poems we have read this semester, this poem does not really establish a particular narrative situation. (We could say that the speaker is thinking about the nature of death, and that would be true, but almost by definition that is not a very particular situation.) What we do have is a very obvious conceit. (What is it?) The conceit is fairly paradoxical, with the result that the poem is clearly built around a central paradox. Your essay should seek to identify and explain that paradox, and then detail how Hughes elaborates it.
Step 3:
Poems are generally built around tensions, contradictions, and paradoxes. Is there a tension or contradiction or paradox built into the narrative situation of the poem? Or built into the way the story unfolds? Or between the story and the patterns which complicate it? Consider the smaller patterns you have noticed. Can you resolve them into some central tension or contradiction, or logical paradox which can account for all of them, or at least for as many as possible?
As you begin to identify some unifying tension, go back and reread the poem yet again, testing your idea against the smaller patterns you have noted. Can you find anything additional? Is there anything that doesn’t seem to fit? Can you modify your sense of the unifying concerns to accommodate it? In this way you will refine your idea of the poem’s central tension. This idea will provide the basis for your thesis.
Writing : This paper is like any other in that it should consist of a thesis, supported by evidence. What makes it tricky, and somewhat unfamiliar is the nature of the evidence. The evidence consists of the patters you have noticed. Begin the paper by stating your thesis and explaining it in general terms. This should take up the first paragraph. Then present your evidence in the paragraphs to follow by quoting liberally from the poem.
Bear in mindThat death ins a drumBeating foreverTill the last worms comeTo answer its call,Till the last stars fall,Until the last atomIs no atom at all,Until time is lostAnd there is no airAnd space itselfIs nothing nowhere,Death is a drum,A signal drum,Calling lifeTo comeCome!Come!
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