English 2000, 4-5 pages, MLA style, 1 inch margins, 12 pt. font. Due Monday, October 24, 2016, to dropbox by midnight.

The goal of this essay is to decipher the meaning of the poem you address. Please support your thesis through a close-reading analysis of several brief quotations from the poem. When quoting poetry, you show line breaks for MLA in text citations. Eg: “Tyger, Tyger burning bright,/ In the forests of the night” (1-2). Line numbers rather than page numbers are cited. For block indented quotations of four or more lines, follow the line breaks in the poem and do not use quotation marks except for denoting dialogue.

Topic: In “Legion,” who is the speaker of the poem and how does this relate to the poem’s title? Is identification possible when reading this poem? That is, can you identify with the speaker of the poem?

Choose one or two of the following poems to analyze in your essay:

A Shakespeare sonnet we discussed, Millay, “Sonnet XXXVI,” Stafford, “Sonnet 747,”William Blake, “The Tyger,” W.S. Merwin, “Ash,” Elizabeth Bishop, “One Art,” “Sestina,” or Craig Dworkin, “Legion.”

Methods of Close Reading of a poem:

Methods of close reading a poem rely on the assumption that often broad considerations and implied but not always stated concerns of any given work are encoded in small discrete textual details including diction or word choice (are simple or elaborate words used to describe situations?), syntax or word order (are sentences short or like labyrinths?), point of view (what can you know about the speaker of the poem? Is there more than one persona in the poem? To whom is the poem addressed? What can you discern about this audience?) tone (is the poem didactic, descriptive, contemplative, anxious, serious or humorous?), and pattern (how is the poem structured? Does it follow a set form such as sonnet or villanelle? If not, what elements of pattern does it employ? Does it have a set meter? A rhyme scheme? When does the poet break the pattern?). By listing and then considering peculiarities of these types of “close”-to-the-text details, you can often discover more nuanced, and at times, contradictory analytical concerns you may not have initially noticed. By starting with small details and then widening your scope, as opposed to starting with an argument and rendering the submission of the poem, you can challenge and enhance your own insights into the views, ideology, and “point” of the work. When structuring a close reading of a poem, think in broad categories as you approach the poem—how does sound work—what elements of musicality does the poem employ? What images are presented? What structure and patterns are used? Who seems to be the intended audience? You may want to look for some of the following techniques and evaluate their significance for the work: prosopopoeia, personification, metaphor, allegory, metonymy, synecdoche, rhyme (full and half), rhyme scheme, repetition, meter, invocation, parallelism, alliteration (assonance and consonance), pattern, line breaks, enjambment. In short, how does form affect content?