Speaker, Occasion, Audience, Purpose

The old dog barks backwards without getting up.

I can remember when he was a pup.

-Robert Frost

The old dog barks backwards without getting up.I can remember when he was a pup.

The old dog barks backwards without getting up.I can remember when he was a pup.

The old dog barks backwards without getting up.

I can remember when he was a pup.

The real title is….

The old dog barks backwards without getting up.

I can remember when he was a pup.

Shall I compare thee to a summer's day? Thou art more lovely and more temperate:Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,And summer's lease hath all too short a date: Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,And often is his gold complexion dimm'd; And every fair from fair sometime declines,By chance or nature's changing course untrimm'd;But thy eternal summer shall not fadeNor lose possession of that fair thou owest;Nor shall Death brag thou wander'st in his shade,When in eternal lines to time thou growest:

So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,So long lives this and this gives life to thee.

Look for two parts

The number of lines in each box is dispensed with. This juxtaposition hypothesizes that the sonnet is a kind of match between nature and art.

This leads to a discussion worth having, hinted at in this diagram:

What is the purpose of the flattery?How will the beloved feel when told

the speaker’s blazoning will last forever?

Surely the speaker means for the compliment to be felt—and returned.

Dividing a passage according to its meaning structure suggests a paragraph structure for an essay.

This is an imagist poem (remember “The Red Wheelbarrow” by William Carlos Williams?

There are many avenues into the speaker-audience conversation in the following poem, through point of view, subject matter, tone, effect on audience.

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;

Petals on a wet, black bough.

Ezra Pound

Each of the following box diagrams express rhetorical choices, suggesting meaning or theme

Ah, now we can began an essay….

Ezra Pound’s two-line poem “In a Station of the Metro” functions as a dialogue between mystery and understanding.

All we need is fourteen lines, well, thirteen now,and after this one just a dozento launch a little ship on love's storm-tossed seas,then only ten more left like rows of beans.How easily it goes unless you get Elizabethanand insist the iambic bongos must be playedand rhymes positioned at the ends of lines,one for every station of the cross.But hang on here wile we make the turninto the final six where all will be resolved,where longing and heartache will find an end,where Laura will tell Petrarch to put down his pen,take off those crazy medieval tights,blow out the lights, and come at last to bed.