Michael Bailey

A Crazed Girl

A Crazed Girl

THAT crazed girl improvising her music. Her poetry, dancing upon the shore, Her soul in division from itself Climbing, falling She knew not where, Hiding amid the cargo of a steamship, Her knee-cap broken, that girl I declare A beautiful lofty thing, or a thing Heroically lost, heroically found. No matter what disaster occurred She stood in desperate music wound, Wound, wound, and she made in her triumph Where the bales and the baskets lay No common intelligible sound But sang, 'O sea-starved, hungry sea.' This explanation is taken from the following web site: http://www8.addr.com/~pazzobas/cat/SoCo8.html

"The second poem, That Strange Girl , presents Yeats's visualization of a poet possessed by the furies, maddened by them. The young Irish actress and poet, Margot Ruddick, is the dancer and singer of this poem; and, the events described in it actually happened. Yeats found in her poetry a "...power of expression of spiritual suffering unique in our generation." Twenty-seven to Yeats's sixty-nine when their affair began, she eventually left family and work to rush to Yeats in Majorca, saying she must die if she did not write a poem that would live. When Yeats told her she must work on each of her poems until it is perfect, she went out to die by the sea, but found so much in life that she loved that she danced instead on the rocks. Later, in Barcelona where she had fled, she jumped from a room in which, in her madness, she had been confined by her friends, broke her kneecap, and hid from the guardia in the hold of a ship. Here she sang to the sailors a poem beginning with "Sea-starved, hungry sea." Our singer both impersonates Margot Ruddick's improvisations, and, in another kind of voice, relates her story. The accompaniment is partially based on our aural version of her wild extemporizing, initiated by the furies."

Poetry Explication #4

This is Explication #4.  I misnumbered, so #3 will be forthcoming.

Anyway, if you were not here for this on Thursday, here's your chance to make it up.

Use your copy of "Two Suitcases" or the copy below and complete this assignment.

AP Literature

Imagery

Poetry Explication #4

Theme:  An ingredient of a literary work which gives the work unity. The theme provides an answer to the question: What is the work about?  Unlike plot which deals with the action of a work, theme concerns itself with a work's message or contains the general idea of a work. 

When a person describes a story’s theme, the person is describing what can be learned about life and/or people from the story.  Although sometimes theme is called “the moral of the story,” this isn’t accurate because theme and moral are separate entities.

It is important not to mistake the theme for the actual subject of the work; the theme refers to the abstract concept that is made concrete through the images, characterization, and action of the text.

The following themes have been drawn from “Two Suitcases.”  Using the poem and your notes, write a very brief essay in which you explain how the theme is revealed through imagery.  Use specific references.

Please write the theme you use at the top of your paper.

1. When faced with unspeakable horror and unbeatable odds, human beings still manage to find and maintain hope.
2. The human spirit can only take so much abuse then it finally loses hope.
3. When men destroy children, they destroy their own humanity.
4. The unfinished life of a child is the most tragic loss for humanity.

Two Suitcases of Children's Drawings
from Terezin, 1942-1944

by Edward Hirsch

In memory of Friedl Dicker-Brandeis,Vienna 1898 - Auschwitz 1944

1. A Children's Story

Two suitcases sat on a forgotten shelf
collecting dust
and waited to be remembered

But when the locks were unfastened
the drawings spilled over
like a waterfall
and everyone was drenched

2. Artist Unknown

A drawing that looked like the heavens
tilting on one wing

. . .

A yellow star rising over a blue square

. . .

A paper cut-out with brown paint
of a man hanging

. . .

A watercolor on shiny paper
of a girl in pigtails standing with a sword

. . .

Some wavy green lines on wrapping paper

. . .

An unsigned still life with a jelly jar
filled with meadow flowers

. . .

A drawing in red pencil of a candlestick

. . .

A pasted collage on an office form
of a sunny evening in Terezin

3. What Some of the Class Drew

Zuzga drew the saddest elephant in Block 4

. . .

Karel scribbled his name upside down
under a scrawny camel in the desert

. . .

Liana painted her face on a tin plate

. . .

Franta sketched a sleepy ballerina
lifting her leg over a wooden practice bar

She called it Memory of a Dancing Girl

. . .

Petr signed his name in the water
that swirled around the deportation train

. . .

      Sofia crayoned starlight in a dark room

. . .

Frantisek outlined his own hand

. . .

Mir glued an ambulance from the Red Cross
on semiglossy yellow paper

. . .

Elly drew a thick diagonal line
but the line needed a partner
and could not live on the paper alone

. . .

Raja penned an angel with braids
coasting like a hawk over the infirmary

. . .

Olga created Paradise with Forbidden Fruit

. . .

At twelve
Helga was too old for the children's class
and so she illustrated her father's book

God Came to Terezin and Saw that It was Bad

4. Children's Voices Spilled Out

This evening we walked along the street of death
We saw them taking away the dead in a wagon

. . .

Don't forget about me
deserted house in the ghetto

. . .

We made pets out of our fleas

. . .

I couldn't help laughing
when the mustached man with a bald head
checked Mama's head for lice

. . .

My suffering took a number

It got in line

. . .

We listed all the things we couldn't do
like jumping around on our beds at night

We called the game No Skipping

. . .

I dreamt my parents got drunk on wine vinegar
and forgot to have me circumcised

. . .

Somewhere out there in the trees
far away from the barracks
childhood is still waiting for me

. . .

The moon was like a soldier
with a bandaged head

The bandage was soaking wet

. . .

The heaviest wheel rolls across our forehead

. . .

When you cut the veins of the piano
and let the blood flow through the notes
grief had a new name

. . .

Your eyes were as dark as skullcaps

Your forehead was as heavy as the heavens before it rains

. . .

Papa was one of the skeletons
harnessed to a funeral cart
carrying bread to the canteen

. . .

To make me laugh
the man with a long beard
wriggled his eyebrows

. . .

Hunger drained the last grays from his face

. . .

The yellow dandelions flew around our heads
like butterflies

. . .

Butterflies vanished

5. Parables

This is a guard with a stick

This is a stick with a heart

This is a heart with a horseshoe

This is a girl flinging the horseshoe
at a guard

. . .

The boy drew a suitcase on scrap paper

He folded the paper and put it in a suitcase

He left the suitcase open in the rain

. . .

All night the girl looked out the window
until the window disappeared
and there was no girl

. . .

The simple son was pulverized
by the back of a rifle

The wise son forgot to ask

. . .

We disliked the ancient story
of the sacrificial lamb
who wandered into a slaughter yard

and yet no one revised it

. . .

No one in dormitory L410 remembered
if the Talmud was written
in black letters on white fire
or in white letters on black fire

. . .

Some people despise the color green
because it is the offspring
of a mixed marriage
between celestial blue and earthly yellow

. . .

Someone was always shouting at us
in a language we didn't understand

The Tower of  Babel had become a pit

. . .

She painted herself light blue
when she felt like a flute

She painted herself dark blue
when she felt like a cello

She painted herself black and blue
when she was bruised into silence

. . .

He drew a German shepherd inside a cage
and blackened the cage with a crayon

It was sealed shut
but he could hear the dog barking at night

. . .

The passive element of the blue in red
could still make her sad

and the purple light sinking to black
echoed a grief that was scarcely human

. . .

We did not make graven images
we made images from the grave

. . .

Not even the teacher
who studied at the Bauhaus
could draw the face of God

. . .

The Rabbi said that Adonai
hides in the Hebrew alphabet

but we didn't know Hebrew
and we didn't believe him

. . .

Someone wrote in tiny letters in pencil

I don't believe God forgot us

but someone else scrawled in thick letters in pen

I don't believe

God forgot us

6. The Art Teacher

Frau Brandeis said that every object tells a story
if you look hard

She said that art supplies perspective
and engraves memories

She said that childhood is genius

and she praised her teachers who believed
in seven axioms

Force Intensity Form Dimension
Character Composition Color

She believed in mixing pigments
and drawing from nature

She taught exercises in composition
and breathing

She spoke of positive and negative forms
and the rhythm of geometric shapes
and the musical keyboard of color

Often we drew with charcoal
to the colorful sound of her voice

She said that we are like mortar
or stone in a fresh building

She told us to imagine ourselves
as an open window or a rising staircase
or a bamboo tree growing in bursts

She said something about the emancipated line
and the aspirations of the vertical

She praised the illuminating hand

Light absorbed her

. . .

It still seemed natural for her
to pass around pencils and paper

She said
The wisdom lives in the pencil
and the paper remembers everything

. . .

But no one drew pictures anymore
after the materials ran out

and the art teacher
was deported

7. Art Project

Cut 15,000 pieces of paper into dolls
Each piece of paper represents one child

Now start a bonfire
and burn 14,900 of the paper dolls

Keep 100

8. The Angel of Mercy

did not get up

It did not unleash our thirty-thousand wings

. . .

Smoke from the oncoming trains blackened our faces

. . .

Fog invaded the camp

The sky was like a blackboard
clouded with erasures

. . .

The coward moon cowered in the clouds

. . .

The city spires pretended to be asleep

Stars muffled their lights

. . .

The sun at night witnessed everything
from a secret place behind the bridge
but it was too frightened to rise

. . .

All the transports headed East into nothingness

. . .

Brushes forgot themselves

Pencils expired

. . .

Someone stuffed the drawings into two suitcases

. . .

The drawings whispered like secrets in the dark

. . .

The secrets were a children's story

. . .

The story waited patiently to be told

. . .

Two suitcases sat on a forgotten shelf
collecting dust

9. The Injunction

At the end of the story
the locks were fastened again

The new teacher shut the school
and went home

. . .

But the waterfall did not stop
and the magic suitcases could not be closed

. . .

The injunction was scribbled in a child's hand

Whoever looks at these drawings
shall stand under the waterfall
and remember

10. Far Away

Somewhere a blue horse floats
over a sloping roof

and a kite soars away from its string

The Whipping
Robert Hayden

The old woman across the way

     is whipping the boy again

and shouting to the neighborhood

     her goodness and his wrongs.

Wildly he crashes through elephant ears,

     pleads in dusty zinnias,

while she in spite of crippling fat

    pursues and corners him.

She strikes and strikes the shrilly circling

     boy till the stick breaks

in her hand.  His tears are rainy weather

     to woundlike memories:

My head gripped in bony vise

     of knees, the writhing struggle

to wrench free, the blows, the fear

     worse than blows that hateful

Words could bring, the face that I

     no longer knew or loved . . .

Well, it is over now, it is over,

     and the boy sobs in his room,

And the woman leans muttering against

     a tree, exhausted, purged--

avenged in part for lifelong hiding

she has had to bear.

Born Asa Bundy Sheffey in 1913, Robert Hayden was raised in a poor neighborhood in Detroit.  He had an emotionally tumultous childhood and was shuttled between the home of his parents and that of a foster family, who lived next door.  Because of impaired vision, he was unable to participate in sports, but was able to spend his time reading.  In 1932, he graduated from high school and, with the help of a scholarship, attended Detroit City College (later Wayne State University).

Hayden published his first book of poems, Heart Shape in the Dust, in 1940.  He enrolled in a graduate English literature program at the University of Michigan where he studied with W. H. Auden.

Hayden's poetry gained international recognition in the 1960s and he was awarded the grand prize for poetry at the First World Festival of Negro Arts in Dakar, Senegal, in 1966 for his book Ballad of Remembrance.  In 1976, he became the first black American to be appointed as Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress (later called the Poet Laureate).  He died in Ann Arbor

In 1976, he became the first black American to be appointed as Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress (later called the Poet Laureate). He died in Ann Arbor, Michigan, in 1980..

We began studying the effects of imagery in poetry today with a brief look at TPCASTT which we applied to the following poem.

If you missed us today, then apply TPCASTT to this poem.  Answer the questions that follow.

TPCASTT

Poems can be very difficult to interpret because a lot of what they have to say is not written but is implied. A major problem that students have with interpreting poetry is that they read the poem once, pick out a detail or two and then jump to a conclusion, often the wrong conclusion. To avoid this pitfall, it is important to gather significant data and try out different hypotheses before drawing a conclusive interpretation. These steps, sort of like the scientific method, comprise a safe way to avoid serious misinterpretations.

Title

Ponder the title before reading the poem. Make up questions about the title. There are two kinds of titles: interactive titles and naming titles. Interactive titles are have some sort of interplay with poem itself and can affect its meaning. Naming titles may give less crucial information. If a poem lacks a title, you can do this step with the first line of the poem or skip it.

Paraphrase

Translate the poem into your own words. And I mean translate! Word for word! Find synonyms for every possible word. Summarizing is NOT paraphrasing!

Connotation

Contemplate the poem for meaning beyond the literal. Identify and figure out the figurative language.

Attitude

After identifying a subject/topic of the poem, figure out how the speaker (and/or the poet) feels about it.

Shifts

Note transitions in the poem. Shifts in subject, attitude, mood, or motif.

Title

Examine the title again, this time on an interpretive level. Answer your questions. Figure out how the title illuminates the poem. Remember a "naming title" may not mean much. Remember you can do this with the first line of a poem if it lacks a title or you can skip this step altogether.

Theme

After identifying a subject/topic of the poem, determine what the poet thinks about the subject. What is his/her opinion.

First Death in

Nova Scotia

by Elizabeth Bishop

In the cold, cold parlor
my mother laid out Arthur
beneath the chromographs:
Edward, Prince of Wales,
with Princess Alexandra,
and King George with Queen Mary.
Below them on the table
stood a stuffed loon
shot and stuffed by Uncle
Arthur, Arthur's father.

Since Uncle Arthur fired
a bullet into him,
he hadn't said a word.
He kept his own counsel
on his white, frozen lake,
the marble-topped table.
His breast was deep and white,
cold and caressable;
his eyes were red glass,
much to be desired.

"Come," said my mother,
"Come and say good-bye
to your little cousin Arthur."
I was lifted up and given
one lily of the valley
to put in Arthur's hand.
Arthur's coffin was
a little frosted cake,
and the red-eyed loon eyed it
from his white, frozen lake.

Arthur was very small.
He was all white, like a doll
that hadn't been painted yet.
Jack Frost had started to paint him
the way he always painted
the Maple Leaf (Forever).
He had just begun on his hair,
a few red strokes, and then
Jack Frost had dropped the brush
and left him white, forever.

The gracious royal couples
were warm in red and ermine;
their feet were well wrapped up
in the ladies' ermine trains.
They invited Arthur to be
the smallest page at court.
But how could Arthur go,
clutching his tiny lily,
with his eyes shut up so tight
and the roads deep in snow? 

1. What is the significance of the title of the poem?  How does the title unite the poem’s imagery and meaning?
2. What does this poem describe?
3. Identify the images in the poem.  How do they create meaning?
4. What images parallel each other?  How does that affect the poem’s meaning?
5. What details or images are repeated?  What does that contribute?