Dr. Prinsky

Engl. 1102

Notes and Questions on Ch. 14/"Words: The Building Blocks of Poetry," RJ8, Part 2

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

1. 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 nothing like the speaker of "My Last Duchess") or the first-person narrator of a work of prose fiction (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").

2. (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?

3. What ironic antithesis occurs in lines 15-16, focused particularly in the two words "early" and "late"?

4. 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"?

5.   To best understand what Van Wettering and Averill are training for, as gunners on a World War II bomber (one of the most widely used bombers by the U.S. was the B-17 Flying Fortress), click on the following links.  (Link 1: a ball turret, in which a gunner would sit, to fire at enemy fighter planes; also referred to in Randall Jarrell's widely-known poem "Death of a Ball Turret Gunner" [included in the R&J anthology].)     (Link 2: a full view of the B-17, which shows the many places where gunners were posted in the aircraft  -- not only on the underside of the plane's fuselage, but also on top, at the front, at the rear, and on the sides of the aircraft.)

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. 14 of RJc3 on figurative language). (a) How does hyperbole occur in line 2? (b) How does metaphor occur twice in line 3? (c) Hyperbole and personification in line 4? (d) Metaphor in line 5? (e) Metaphor in line 6? (f) Metaphor and simile in lines 7-8? (g) Two or three metaphors in lines 10-11? (h) Two metonymies and one personification in lines 12-13? (i) Two metaphors in lines 14-15?

2. (a) Why are the noise and fog (= smog) of traffic (lines 14-15) a good metaphor for 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?