THEME (1) broadly and commonly, a topic explored

in a literary work (e.g., "the value of all life"); (2) more narrowly, the insight about a topic communicated in a work (e.g., "All living things are equally precious"). In other words, what a poem says involves its theme while how it is said involves its tone.

TONE: The poem’s attitude or feelings towards its

topic; closely related to style and diction (word choice)

Audio: http://www.poets.org/booth/booth.cfm How would you describe this poem’s

• Topic?• Tone?• Theme?

Why do you think the poet calls this poem “terribly autobiographical”?

Discuss post-poem questions

The American toy company Mattel launched the Barbie Doll in 1959 to enormous commercial success. Unlike dolls produced in earlier eras, which tended to represent infants or young children, Barbie was modeled on an adult female body. While Barbie’s look has changed over the decades, she has always been intended to serve as an icon of feminine beauty and fashion, and the marketing surrounding the doll emphasizes her clothing, make-up, hairstyle, and accessories. Since the 1970s, critics of Barbie have warned of the dangers of the doll’s power as a kind of aspirational ideal for young girls and have condemned the doll’s implicit promotion of patriarchal norms. Barbie’s designers’ assumptions about the professional and sexual roles available to women have been perceived as demeaning; their representations of various races and ethnicities have been viewed as insensitive and sometimes racist; and their endorsement of consumerism has been denounced. Perhaps most significantly, the Barbie Doll has been criticized for promoting an unrealistic—and unattainable—body image. The standard Barbie Doll, adjusted for scale, represents a 5’9” woman with a 36” chest, an 18” waist, and 32” hips. 

What toys are presented to the “girlchild”? What values do these toys seem to reflect? What kind of identity do they seem intended to produce in the child who plays with them? 

What social expectations greet the girlchild when she experiences the “magic of puberty”? 

What discrepancies does the poem highlight between the girlchild’s qualities and the way she is perceived by others? 

To what are we supposed to attribute the girlchild’s death in the final stanza? How do the funeral goers react to her death? 

How would you describe the tone of this poem?  How would you describe the speaker? What is her

attitude toward the girlchild as a character? What is her attitude toward the social forces shaping the girlchild?  

Knight was an African American writer of the Black Arts Movement He served in the Korean War as a medic and later suffered from a heroin addiction. He spent time in prison, which formed the theme of his early writing, and later focused on issues of racism and love.

Think about the various examples of figurative language describing Hard Rock. What do these examples have in common? Think also about the difference between Hard Rock before and after and the way the descriptions of him change accordingly.

Fill in the blanks of this sentence: While Hard Rock is described in terms of              before he is lobotomized, he is described as a              after. Is there a relation, logical or ironic, between the two words you chose? Do the two characterizations of Hard Rock have anything in common?

This poem is, in part, about the relation between Hard Rock and the other prisoners. In the second stanza, Hard Rock is described as a “stallion,” while the other inmates are compared to “indians.” What do you make of those comparisons? Why do you think the poet is borrowing the vocabulary of the Wild West for his imagery here?

This poem has a lengthy, descriptive title. What is the effect of such a long title, and how does it influence your response to the poem?

What else might this poem have been called?

Intending at first to become a scientist, Auden studied at Oxford, where he became the center of the “Oxford Group” of poets and leftist intellectuals. His travels during the 1930s led him to Germany, Iceland, China, Spain (where he was an ambulance driver in the civil war), and the United States (where he taught at various universities and, in 1946, became a naturalized citizen). A prolific writer of poems, plays, essays, and criticism, Auden won the Pulitzer Prize in 1948 for his collection of poems The Age of Anxiety, set in a New York City bar. 

To whom or what do you imagine the speaker of this poem is speaking?

What's the significance or effect of the poet's use of the language of command or entreaty (Do this; do that.)?

What's the significance or effect of the way the poet mixes references to telephones, airplanes, and traffic policemen with references to stars, the moon, and the ocean? Of the way the poet moves from more concrete images from everyday life to more abstract and traditionally poetic ones?

What's the significance or effect of the regular rhyme scheme?

AUDIO: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XmJYs6PQKVc

Why does the poem begin “Sundays too” (rather than “On Sundays”)?

What does the use of alliteration, as in “clothes,” “cold,” “cracked” (lines 2–3) and “blueblack,” “banked,” “blaze” (lines 2, 5), contribute to the poem?

What is the significance of the speaker's reference to his fear of “the chronic angers of that house” (line 9)? What might this line suggest about the relationship between father and son? What's the significance of the fact that the speaker talks about “angers” in the plural and without reference to any particular person (including himself)?

How about the setting overall, especially the fact that the speaker remembers winter in particular? What might this line suggest about the relationship between father and son?

A leading figure in the Native American literary renaissance that emerged in the 1960s, Simon J. Ortiz has published short fiction and non-fiction prose in addition to poetry. Whatever form his writing takes, though, it is concerned with modern man’s alienation from others, from himself, and from his environment—urging as a solution our meaningful re-connection with the wisdom of ancestral spirits and with our Mother Earth.Ortiz, who is an Acoma Pueblo Indian, was born and raised near Albuquerque, New Mexico and grew up speaking the Acoma tongue. “This early language from birth to six years of age in the Acoma family and community,” he has written, “was the basis and source for all I would do later;” ironically, he was punished for speaking it at school. Nicknamed “the reporter” by his father for the absorbed attention he paid as a child to tribal elders’ stories, he has continued to base his creative work on his people’s powerful oral tradition. 

Why does the author capitalize “Spring” (line 8)? What is his tone when describing the natural elements?

What about the poem might conform to your expectations of a Native American voice? What aspects do not?

How do the first-person narration and conversational diction of the poem draw the reader into the poem?