Monday, November 3, 2025

WEEK 7

Hello!


Here's your work:

1. Revise your chivalry essay. NO 3rd drafts on this, so revise and edit carefully. Remember these basics: no plot retelling, incorporate your quotes, format those titles correctly.

2. Read "Literary Focus" on page 119. It discusses meter and rhyme scheme. You'll need to read this carefully in order to understand how to do 3 and 4 below.  

Meter refers to the regular rhythm of a poem. We practiced this with the folk ballad, but let's review anyway. If you look back at the "Patrick Spens" and "Wife of Usher's Well" ballads, you can see that each stanza had a 4 beat, 3 beat, 4 beat, 3 beat pattern. They read like this:

ba da   ba da   ba da   ba da  (4 beats)
ba da   ba da   ba da   (3 beats)

Here are two lines from "Spens". Try clapping your hands as you read them:

O up     and spake    an eld    ern knight
Sat at   the king's    right knee

Each of the two-syllable chunks is called an iamb. Each iamb is stressed on the second syllable, so if you clapped the previous lines correctly, you clapped on the second syllable. It's natural to do that. The 4-beat line is in a meter called iambic (because the beats are iambs) tetrameter; the 3-beat is in iambic trimeter. The sonnets you read last week are in iambic pentameter (five iambs). Like this:

With how   sad steps,   Oh Moon,   Thou climbst   the skies!


Rhyme scheme refers to the pattern of rhyme at the end of the lines. If we assign letters to each rhyme sound, we can record the whole poem's rhyme scheme by looking only at the last sound. So Wife of Usher's Well was written in  abcb defe ghih jklk (and so on for 12 stanzas). Sonnets are shorter, so your rhyme scheme will only be 14 lines. 


3. Read the two sonnets by Spenser on p.126. What is the rhyme scheme for each? Write out Sonnet 75 and show the iambs like I did with the "Spens" and Shakespeare examples above. I'll start you out...

One day    I wrote   her name   up on   the strand,
But came   the waves   and wash   ed it   away; 

See what I had to do with the word washed? If you look closely in your text there's an accent mark over the  -ed-  that means it gets pronounced. It's old fashioned,  but it's a good trick to remember when you have to write your own sonnet next week. There are ways of both stretching a line to fit the meter and compressing it. This trick stretches it by one syllable. 


4. Choose any TWO of the five Shakespeare sonnets from last week and do the same for each: ID rhyme scheme and write it out in its meter. You can do it like I started the Spenser sonnet above, or you can write it out normally and show where the stressed syllable is. 

Like this:

One day I wrote her name upon the strand,

There's probably some fancy way of actually putting in an accent mark over the stressed syllable; I just haven't tried to figure that out yet. 


5. 
LBGB

Choose FOUR of these and teach me the concept. Include the problem and how to avoid or correct it.
  • action verbs over linking
  • ambiguous they
  • parallel structure
  • begs the question
  • mano a mano
  • Choose one of your own.



Everything is due by midnight, Friday. HAVE A GREAT WEEK! 




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