Students will view a slide show made by their classmates and glossed by the instructor to enhance the interpretation of two poems:
and
“I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud”
These two famous poems can be found with commentary on pages 661 and 628-629, respectively, in the Prentice Hall Literature Series, Gold Level (9th Grade).
Part 1: The first of these two master works, written, of course, in Shakespeare’s “adjusted sonnet” format, is a melancholy piece of reverie, hardly rescued from its maudlin fatalism by the meagerly pleasant closing couplet. Permeated as they are by the twin over-riding themes of Divinely directed Destiny and the Wheel of Life, the middle ten lines are thematically predictable in spite of the genius of their phrasing. Notwithstanding the lip-service he paid to the prevailing angst of his age, Shakespeare always gives, even today, his ticket-buyers their money’s worth, and two facets of this little wistful lyric lift it beyond mere Elizabethan dogma. One, of course, serves to substantiate his stature, nay, indeed, his reality, and refute the desperate ninnies who attempt to make a career from disembodying him from his. He can pop into deep poetry allusions verifying Shakespeare the Producer/Accountant/Bookkeeper/Paymaster (see question #4 in the “Thinking about the Selection” section) while maintaining his themes and mood, all the while enervating the future cynics who will say no one person could have. Finally, bracketing the bummer memoirs with a nifty conceit that starts with daydreaming and ends with, if not joy, at least reprieve from Hemingwayesque bathos synchs with the salient attributes of the alter ego of the Elizabethan psyche: persevering resilience and ardent social gaiety, the twisted pair of entwined threads whose steely elasticity empowered the cable which enabled the Tudor esprits de corps to not just survive, not just endure, but to span the Atlantic to dangle a democracy even their royal descendants could not reel back in, and thence to build a global empire so firmly based on intellectual free expression that not even Puritans could burn it down.
Part 2: The second, however, a seemingly light-weight bit of cutesy, descriptive fluff, transcends the merely horticultural, tourist post-card genre to which it belongs. Does it do so by stealing Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 30” riffs?