N & Q on Richard Eberhart's Poem "The Fury of Aerial Bombardment"

1. Vocabulary: relent (line 2); multitudinous (line 7); ancient furies (line 8); ravens [verb, not noun] (line 12); avidity (line 12); belt feed lever (16); belt holding pawl (line 16). What particular machine, with relevance to the poem's title, is implied by "belt feed lever" and "belt holding pawl"?

2. To answer the excellent first question on the poem by R&J, students must emphasize the hint by R&J about focusing on the last stanza of the poem in providing the clues about the speaker's identity; the main clues about that identity are mainly here, in conjunction with the poem's title. Further, what the poet may or may not have done in real life is often not an accurate guide to the identity of the speaker of the poem (Robert Browning was in real life a uxorious English Victorian husband and nothing like Renaissance Duke who is the speaker of "My Last Duchess") or the first-person narrator of a work of prose fiction (the narrator of Amy Tan's "Two Kinds" is not Amy Tan but the character Jing-Mei Woo, and the narrator's mother is not Amy Tan's mother but the fictional character Suyuan Woo; likewise, Sherwood Anderson's job in a paint factory does not define the identity of the first-person narrator in his short story "I'm a Fool").

3. (a) How does diction itself help establish this poem's structure into the two parts of stanzas 1-3 (first part) and stanza 4 (second part)? (Use for help questions 2 and 3 by R&J.) (b) Within the poem's first part, how are two main subcomponents established --- partly through the syntax of the first two lines of each of the three stanzas --- of stanzas 1-2 vs. stanza 3? (c) Nouns -- as discussed in the explanations of grammar in composition handbooks -- are often classified as common, proper, or abstract. Which category dominates the first line of stanza 4?  How is this particular kind of noun essential to the speaker's shift in stanza 4 from what the speaker has been doing in stanzas 1-3? (c) How do the speaker's purpose and focus change in stanza 4 from what they were in stanzas 1-3?

4. (a) What the students, to whom the speaker refers, are studying will be made clearer to some readers by looking at Randall Jarrell's moving -- if somewhat obscure -- poem "The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner" (in Ch. 13/"Meeting Poetry: An Overview" of RJ7), as well as looking at a couple of photographs -- first a general photo, and then a detail -- of the B-17 Flying Fortress bomber, one of the principal Army Air Force weapons in World War II.  (b) How is this airplane a central feature of the films Twelve O'Clock  (1949), starring Gregory Peck and many other fine actors, and Memphis Belle (1990), starring Matthew Modine, Eric Stoltz, D.B. Sweeney, Billy Zane, Sean Astin, Harry Connick (Jr.), and David Straitharn? (c) What ironic antithesis occurs in lines 15-16, focused particularly in the two words "early" and late"?

N & Q on Stephen Spender's Poem "I Think Continually of Those Who Were Truly Great"

1. Stephen Spender's poem "I Think Continually of Those Who Were Truly Great," besides diction or word choice, has quite notable figurative language (see Ch. 17 of R&J). (a) How does hyperbole occur in line 2, and what does it help convey? (b) How does metaphor occur twice in line 3, and what do the figures help convey? (c) How do hyperbole and personification occur in line 4, and what do they help convey? (d) How does metaphor occur in line 5, and what does it help convey? (e) How does metaphor occur in line 6, and what does it help convey? (f) How do metaphor and simile occur in lines 7-8, and what do they help convey? (g) What two or three metaphors occur in lines 10-11, and what do they help convey? (h) What two metonymies and one personification occur in lines 12-13, and what do they help convey? (i) What two metaphors occur in lines 14-15, and what do they help convey?

2. (a) Why are the noise and fog (= smog) of traffic (lines 14-15) a good metaphor for the modern world? How do denotation and connotation of the word traffic help suggest the modern world? (b) How does the metaphor for the spirit (of the truly great) in line 15 stand in opposition or antithesis to the figure of speech referring to the quotidian modern world in lines 14-15?

3. How does the word grave (line 13) have connotative or punning overtones besides its primary denotation?

4. With regard to syntax, how does this poem make striking use of the sentence fragment and of parallelism?