Blog #22 - Luciano Pantano - Period 1 - 3/19/2021 - Day A

Aim: How do poetic elements create a thematic effect over the course of a poem?




The Do Now was to brainstorm and think about what comes to mind when we think of the word identity. Then we shared our responses and recorded them in the Slideshow in the post.




Next, we began discussion about musical and sound devices in language, which include Cacophonous and Euphonious sounds and rhythm.

We then touched on the concept of an extended metaphor, which is a metaphor that reoccurs throughout the piece of work, often being active throughout a majority of the work. And to take a closer look at what they would look like, we checked out two excerpts from William Shakespeare and Margaret Atwood, respectively. The excerpts are here:

“All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances; And one man in his time plays many parts.”- Shakespeare




“Marriage is not / a house or even a tent / it is before that, and colder: / the edge of the forest, the edge
of the desert / the unpainted stairs / at the back where we squat / outside, eating popcorn / the edge of the receding glacier / where painfully and with wonder / at having survived even
this far / we are learning to make fire”- Atwood




After that, we read the poem “How to eat a poem” which also featured an extended metaphor, connecting a poem with an apple in the way that we consume them.

Once we finished talking about Extended metaphors, we moved on to Theme, which is the meaning of a work, according to the slides- a central idea, point, and underlying meaning of a literary work. Theme isn’t just a topic or subject, it’s more than that.

We were told to annotate a poem called Identity by Julio Noboa Polanco by looking for things that stood out to us personally, and in the next slide, we looked for Extended metaphors in breakout rooms with our teammates. The poem is here:

Identity

by Julio Noboa Polanco

Let them be as flowers

always watered, fed, guarded, admired,

but harnessed to a pot of dirt.

I’d rather be a tall, ugly weed,

5 clinging on cliffs, like an eagle

wind-wavering above high, jagged rocks.

To have broken through the surface of stone,

to live, to feel exposed to the madness

of the vast, eternal sky.

10 To be swayed by the breezes of an ancient sea,

carrying my soul, my seed,

beyond the mountains of time or into the abyss of the bizarre.

I’d rather be unseen, and if

then shunned by everyone,

15 than to be a pleasant-smelling flower,

growing in clusters in the fertile valley,

where they’re praised, handled, and plucked

by greedy human hands.

I’d rather smell of musty, green stench

20 than of sweet, fragrant lilac.

If I could stand alone, strong and free,

I’d rather be a tall, ugly weed.

What my team came up with was that Flowers are a metaphor for people that care solely about looks and let themselves get walked on by people because they’re not original or different. Weeds, on the other hand, are people that may not look pretty but are fearless, original different people that don’t care about appearance and won’t be walked all over, like the flowers.




This was followed by the Twist analysis, which is where we tried to get at the main theme of the poem by analysing different aspects of the writing (Tone, Word choice, Imagery, Style, Theme- TWIST). 

After analysing the aspects of the writing, we concluded that the theme is- Everyone looks for different things in their lives, and the speaker values freedom and happiness much more than they value appearance.

And in the last slide were some small grammatical rules regarding participles, gerunds, and infinitives. We didn’t work on them too much.




So, what’s my reflection? I think today’s lesson was an informative, interesting and overall very fun one, and I learned quite a few things about theme and metaphor, and poems in general. I never knew how important Cacophonous and Euphonious sounds could be until I reached the slide where it explained all of that. I forgot the last time we went so deep into what theme really is, and how to find it and why it’s important. I also really enjoyed the flower and weed metaphor, it really showed me a lot about the kinds of ways metaphors can be used to prove a point(instead of writing “happy and free because I don’t care about my looks”, we could just write “flower” and the reader will understand). And the ending twist really brought everything we learned that day together into one giant analysis, which was a good idea- this way we see how this all has to do with everything else. I’d give this lesson a 10 out of 10.