“Poetry Out Loud” Assignment
Due Date:Monday, May 9th
Point Value:20 points for recitation (rubric below)
RECITATION
Students will recite a selected poem to the class. The poem does not need to be memorized, however if the poem is NOT completely memorized the highest grade a student can earn is a “B.” The student does need to show evidence of multiple rehearsals and familiarity with the poem. The recitation will be judged using this rubric below.
Physical Presence—4 points
Are you poised? Do you make eye contact? Do you appear stiff or nervous? You should “project ease and confidence” by your physical presence.
Voice and Articulation—4 points
This category includes your volume, pace, rhythm, intonation, and pronunciation. Any changes in tone (yelling or getting louder) should be appropriate to convey the meaning of the poem. Your pace should suit the subject matter. You should not mispronounce any words (since you’ve practiced). When poems rhyme or have a regular rhythm, be careful not to become too “singsong”y.
Dramatic Appropriateness—4 points
“Recitation is about conveying a poem’s sense primarily with one’s voice…and is closer to the art of oral interpretation than theatrical performance.” The following mistakes will lead to lower scores in this category: “affected pitch, character voices, singing, inappropriate tone, distracting or excessive gestures, or unnecessary emoting.” In other words, you are not “acting out” the poem; you are interpreting it and helping your audience to understand it better.
Level of Difficulty—4 points
“Every poem is a different combination of content, language, and length.” Shorter poems may contain complex and difficult-to-convey ideas, while long poems may be relatively unsophisticated in their concepts and easier to grasp. Make sure to choose a poem that shows off your interpretive skills effectively.
Evidence of Understanding—4 points
“Students should demonstrate that they know the meaning of every line and every word of the poem.” Make difficult lines clearer. Use correct tone. “The student who understands the poem best will be able to voice it in a way that helps the audience to understand the poem better.”
.**Quoted material is from the official “Poetry Out Loud” judges’ guide.
**Search for a poem at the Poetry Out Loud Website.
- Click the Link on the right in the red box underPoems.
- Click on 25 lines and fewer and peruse the poems at your leisure
- Choose a poem that you understand and like the sound of as you read it aloud. (Make sure you inform Mrs. Hayes, as no 2 people can have the same poem in a class.)
- Define any words that you don’t know the meaning and/or pronunciation. (Don’t assume you know…make sure you know)
- PRACTICE!PRACTICE!PRACTICE!
WRITTEN POETRY ANALYSIS
Students will write an analysis of their selected poem.
Rough Draft Due Date: (10 points) Wednesday, May 4th
Final Draft (20 points) Due Date: Monday, May 9th
Requirements:2 paragraphs
250-500 words
Typed, double-spaced, standard margins, 12-pt print font
This paper is to present YOUR explanations and understanding of the poem and YOUR connection to it. THIS IS NOT A RESEARCH PAPER. USE LIMITED OUTSIDE SOURCES, EITHER IN PREPARING TO WRITE OR IN THE PROCESSOF ACTUALLY WRITING YOUR ANALYSIS. In other words, it is NOT okay to just go online to “read about” your poem to “help you understand it.” I want to know YOUR understanding of the poem.
Paragraph One: Explanation and Understanding
- Begin by naming the title, in quotation marks, and the author of the poem
Then, include answers to these questions if they apply to your poem. If a question doesn’t apply, then skip it. Don’t take up space listing literary devices your poem doesn’t include; simply talk about what it does include.
- How many lines does the poem contain?
- Does it have a rhyme scheme?
- Who is the speaker in the poem?
- What is going on in the poem? Is the speaker telling a story (narrative poem) or sharing feelings (lyric poem)?
- What is the poem’s theme or message?
- What is the poem’s tone? What specific words (diction) does the poet use to give the poem this tone?
- Does the poem contain figurative language (similes, metaphors, personification)? If so, how does it add to the poem’s meaning?
- Does the poem use sound devices (alliteration, onomatopoeia, internal rhyme)? If so, how does it add to the poem’s meaning?
- How does the title of the poem relate its meaning?
- Are there any symbols or allusions? If so, how do they add to the meaning?
Paragraph Two: Your Connection
Simply put, why do you find this poem interesting? Here are questions you can ask yourself (and answer in your paper).
- Does the poem’s theme relate to something you’ve thought a lot about?
- Does the poem describe an experience similar to an experience you’ve had or feelings similar to feelings you’ve had?
- Did the poem move you in some way?
- Does the poem pose a question you find interesting in some way?
- Do you agree (or disagree) with the poem’s point for some reason?
Please attach a copy of the poem to the BACK of your analysis. Please don’t just print the entire page right off the Poetry Out Loud website. Copy and paste it into a separate word document.
Poem and author are named at the beginning of the paper1 point ____
Poem title is properly punctuated1 point ____
Paper is formatted as instructed—
Your name, title, two paragraphs, double-spaced, typed,
250 words minimum, poem attached to the back1 point ____
Paragraph one contains a sufficient number of specific references
to the poem3 points ____
Paragraph two adequately explains your connection to the poem3 points ____
Paper contains few errors in grammar, spelling, or usage1 point ____
A Barred Owl By Richard Wilbur
A Birthday By Christina Rossetti
A Black Man Talks of Reaping By Arna Bontemps
A Blessing By James Wright
A Boat beneath a Sunny Sky By Lewis Carroll
A Dream Within a Dream By Edgar Allan Poe
A Fixed Idea By Amy Lowell
A Hymn to God the Father By John Donne
A narrow Fellow in the Grass By Emily Dickinson
A Noiseless Patient Spider By Walt Whitman
A Red, Red Rose By Robert Burns
A Shropshire Lad II: Loveliest of trees, the cherry now By A. E. Housman
a song in the front yard By Gwendolyn Brooks
A Virginal By Ezra Pound
Abandoned Farmhouse By Ted Kooser
Actaeon By A.E. Stallings
“Alone” By Edgar Allan Poe
Altruism By Molly Peacock
America By Claude McKay
Amor Mundi By Christina Rossetti
Anecdote of the Jar By Wallace Stevens
Anne Rutledge By Edgar Lee Masters
Another Feeling By Ruth Stone
Anthem for Doomed Youth By Wilfred Owen
Ars Poetica By Archibald MacLeish
As Kingfishers Catch Fire By Gerard Manley Hopkins
At Cross Purposes By Samuel Menashe
At Melville's Tomb By Hart Crane
At the Vietnam Memorial By George Bilgere
Author’s Prayer By Ilya Kaminsky
Barter By Sara Teasdale
Battle Hymn of the Republic By Julia Ward Howe
Battlefield By Mark Turcotte
‘Be Music, Night’ By Kenneth Patchen
Beautiful Wreckage By W.D. Ehrhart
Bereavement By William Lisle Bowles
Black Boys Play the Classics By Toi Derricotte
Blind Curse By Simon Joseph Ortiz
"Blow, Blow, Thou Winter Wind" By William Shakespeare
Boy and Egg By Naomi Shihab Nye
Break, Break, Break By Alfred, Lord Tennyson
Break of Day By John Donne
Bright Star, Would I were Steadfast as Thou Art By John Keats
Broken Promises By David Kirby
Buick By Karl Jay Shapiro
Cabezón By Amy Beeder
Carmel Highlands By Janet Loxley Lewis
Carmel Point By Robinson Jeffers
Catch a Little Rhyme By Eve Merriam
Childhood By Margaret Walker
Childhood's Retreat By Robert Duncan
Chord By Stuart Dybek
Chorus Sacerdotum By Baron Brooke Fulke Greville
Coda By Basil Bunting
Cold Blooded Creatures By Elinor Wylie
Come into Animal Presence By Denise Levertov
Concord Hymn By Ralph Waldo Emerson
Contraction By Ravi Shankar
Cool Tombs By Carl Sandburg
Crossing the Bar By Alfred, Lord Tennyson
Danse Russe By William Carlos Williams
Deliberate By Amy Uyematsu
Difference By Stephen Vincent Benét
Dirge Without Music By Edna St. Vincent Millay
Discrimination By Kenneth Rexroth
Do Not! By Stevie Smith
Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night By Dylan Thomas
Dreamers By Siegfried Sassoon
Driving toward the Lac Qui Parle River By Robert Bly
Eagle Plain By Robert Francis
Eagle Poem By Joy Harjo
Early Affection By George Moses Horton
Early Occult Memory Systems of the Lower Midwest By B. H. Fairchild
Eating Poetry By Mark Strand
Eating Together By Li-Young Lee
Echo By Daryl Hine
Emplumada By Lorna Dee Cervantes
England in 1819 By Percy Bysshe Shelley
Entirely By Louis MacNeice
Epilogue By Robert Browning
Epilogue By Robert Lowell
Epitaph By Katherine Philips
Ex Machina By Linda Gregerson
Experience By Ralph Waldo Emerson
Fairy-tale Logic By A.E. Stallings
Faith By David Baker
Famous By Naomi Shihab Nye
Fever By Hailey Leithauser
“Find Work” By Rhina P. Espaillat
Fire and Ice By Robert Frost
First Poem for You By Kim Addonizio
Fishing By A.E. Stallings
Flaxman By Margaret Fuller
Flirtation By Rita Dove
Flood: Years of Solitude By Dionisio D. Martinez
Follow Thy Fair Sun By Thomas Campion
Football By Louis Jenkins
For Allen Ginsberg By X J Kennedy
For My Contemporaries By J. V. Cunningham
For My Daughter By Weldon Kees
Fortuna By Thomas Carlyle
Full Moon By Elinor Wylie
Garden By H. D.
Gitanjali 35 By Rabindranath Tagore
God's Grandeur By Gerard Manley Hopkins
Golden Retrievals By Mark Doty
Good People By W. S. Merwin
Grief By Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Hap By Thomas Hardy
Harp Song of the Dane Women By Rudyard Kipling
[He lived childhood summers] By Lorine Niedecker
Hearing your words, and not a word among them By Edna St. Vincent Millay
Helen By H. D.
Her Kind By Anne Sexton
Here By Joshua Mehigan
Here Is an Ear Hear By Victor Hernández Cruz
History Lesson By Natasha Trethewey
Holy Sonnets: Batter my heart, three-person'd God By John Donne
Holy Sonnets: Death, be not proud By John Donne
“Hope” is the thing with feathers By Emily Dickinson
How many times these low feet staggered By Emily Dickinson
Hush By David St. John
I Am Learning To Abandon the World By Linda Pastan
I Am the People, The Mob By Carl Sandburg
i carry your heart with me(i carry it in By E. E. Cummings
I Close My Eyes By David Ignatow
I Dreamed That I Was Old By Stanley J. Kunitz
I felt a Funeral in my Brain By Emily Dickinson
I Hear America Singing By Walt Whitman
I heard a Fly buzz – when I died – (591) By Emily Dickinson
I think I should have loved you presently By Edna St. Vincent Millay
I, Too By Langston Hughes
I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud By William Wordsworth
Ice By Gail Mazur
Idea LXI By Michael Drayton
Immortal Autumn By Archibald MacLeish
Immortal Sails By Alfred Noyes
In By Andrew Hudgins
In a London Drawingroom By George Eliot
in Just- By E. E. Cummings
In My Craft or Sullen Art By Dylan Thomas
In Praise of My Bed By Meredith Holmes
In Praise of Pain By Heather McHugh
In the Desert By Stephen Crane
Incident By Countee Cullen
Inside Out By Diane Wakoski
Insomnia By Dana Gioia
Insomnia By Dante Gabriel Rossetti
Introduction to the Songs of Innocence By William Blake
Invictus By William Ernest Henley
Invitation to Love By Paul Laurence Dunbar
Isla By Virgil Suárez
It Couldn't Be Done By Edgar Albert Guest
It sifts from Leaden Sieves By Emily Dickinson
It was not death, for I stood up By Emily Dickinson
It would be neat if with the New Year By Jimmy Santiago Baca
It's the Little Towns I Like By Thomas Lux
['Joy of my life, full oft for loving you'] By Edmund Spenser
Keeping Things Whole By Mark Strand
kitchenette building By Gwendolyn Brooks
La Figlia che Piange By T. S. Eliot
Late Echo By John Ashbery
Layabout By John Brehm
Learning to Love America By Shirley Geok-Lin Lim
Learning to Swim By Bob Hicok
Leda and the Swan By William Butler Yeats
Let Evening Come By Jane Kenyon
Let It Be Forgotten By Sara Teasdale
Let the Light Enter By Frances Ellen Watkins Harper
Life By Edith Wharton
Life in a Love By Robert Browning
Light Shining out of Darkness By William Cowper
Like Rousseau By Amiri Baraka
Lincoln By Vachel Lindsay
Lissadell By Wendy Cope
Listening By Jean Valentine
London By William Blake
Love (III) By George Herbert
Love Armed By Aphra Behn
"Love of My Flesh, Living Death" By Lorna Dee Cervantes
Love Lives beyond the Tomb By John Clare
Lucinda Matlock By Edgar Lee Masters
Medusa By Louise Bogan
Mezzo Cammin By Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Mingus at the Showplace By William Matthews
Mrs. Adam By Kathleen Norris
Mrs. Kessler By Edgar Lee Masters
Much Madness is divinest Sense — By Emily Dickinson
mulberry fields By Lucille Clifton
Nineteen-Fourteen: The Soldier By Rupert Brooke
No Moon Floods the Memory of That Night By Etheridge Knight
Nocturne By Li-Young Lee
Not Waving but Drowning By Stevie Smith
November Cotton Flower By Jean Toomer
Nude Descending a Staircase By X J Kennedy
Nurture By Maxine W. Kumin
Ode on Solitude By Alexander Pope
Often I Am Permitted to Return to a Meadow By Robert Duncan
['Often rebuked, yet always back returning'] By Emily Jane Brontë
“oh antic God” By Lucille Clifton
Oh, Hope! thou soother sweet of human woes By Charlotte Smith
Old Ironsides By Oliver Wendell Holmes
On An Unsociable Family By Elizabeth Hands
On Inhabiting an Orange By Josephine Miles
On Monsieur's Departure By Queen Elizabeth I
On Shakespeare. 1630 By John Milton
On the Death of Richard West By Thomas Gray
On the Lawn at the Villa By Louis Simpson
On Virtue By Phillis Wheatley
One Art By Elizabeth Bishop
Ox Cart Man By Donald Hall
Ozymandias By Percy Bysshe Shelley
Part for the Whole By Robert Francis
Past-Lives Therapy By Charles Simic
Piano By D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
Pleasures By Denise Levertov
Poem By Muriel Rukeyser
Poem for My Twentieth Birthday By Kenneth Koch
Possible Answers to Prayer By Scott Cairns
Prayer By Jorie Graham
Prayer for My Father By Robert Bly
Pride By Yusef Komunyakaa
Prison Song By Alan Dugan
Queen-Anne's Lace By William Carlos Williams
Recuerdo By Edna St. Vincent Millay
Remarks on Poetry and the Physical World By Mary Barnard
Retired Ballerinas, Central Park West By Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Reverie in Open Air By Rita Dove
Richard Cory By Edwin Arlington Robinson
Riprap By Gary Snyder
Rock and Hawk By Robinson Jeffers
Romance By Claude McKay
Rondeau By Leigh Hunt
Russell Market By Maurya Simon
Sad Boy's Sad Boy By Charles Bernstein
Sadie and Maud By Gwendolyn Brooks
Safe in their alabaster chambers By Emily Dickinson
Saint Francis and the Sow By Galway Kinnell
Saturday's Child By Countee Cullen
Say not the Struggle nought Availeth By Arthur Hugh Clough
Self-Employed By David Ignatow
Self-Portrait By Chase Twichell
Self-Portrait By Robert Creeley
Shawl By Albert Goldbarth
She Walks in Beauty By Lord Byron
Shiloh: A Requiem (April, 1862) By Herman Melville
Shine, Perishing Republic By Robinson Jeffers
Sign By George Starbuck
Sign for My Father, Who Stressed the Bunt By David Bottoms
Silence By Thomas Hood
Since There Is No Escape By Sara Teasdale
Snowflake By William Baer
Snowy Owl Near Ocean Shores By Duane Niatum
So We'll Go no More a Roving By Lord Byron
Solitude By Ella Wheeler Wilcox
Somewhere to Paris By Richard Blanco
Song By Edmund Waller
Song After Campion By Robert Fitzgerald
Song to Celia By Ben Jonson
Song: to Celia By Ben Jonson
Sonnet CXVI: Let me not to the Marriage of True Minds By William Shakespeare
Sonnet from the Portuguese 44: How do I Love thee? By Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Sonnet LV: Not marble, nor the gilded monuments (55) By William Shakespeare
Sonnet XV: When I Consider everything that Grows By William Shakespeare
Sonnet XVIII: Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer's Day? By William Shakespeare
Sonnet XXIII: Methought I Saw my Late Espoused Saint By John Milton
Sonnet XXIX: When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes (29) By William Shakespeare
Spring By Gerard Manley Hopkins
Spring By William Shakespeare
Spring and Fall By Gerard Manley Hopkins
Stanzas in Meditation: Stanza LXXXIII By Gertrude Stein
Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening By Robert Frost
Sugar Dada By J. Allyn Rosser
Summer at North Farm By Stephen Kuusisto
Susie Asado By Gertrude Stein
Testimonial By Rita Dove
The Affliction of Richard By Robert Bridges
The Albatross By Kate Bass
The Alphabet By Karl Jay Shapiro
The American Soldier By Philip Morin Freneau
The Animals By Josephine Jacobsen
The Arrow and the Song By Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
The Author to Her Book By Anne Bradstreet
The Birth of John Henry By Melvin B. Tolson
The Bloody Sire By Robinson Jeffers
The Chimney Sweeper: A little black thing among the snow By William Blake
The Chimney Sweeper: When my mother died I was very young By William Blake
The Cities Inside Us By Alberto Ríos
The Clouded Morning By Jones Very
The Coming of the Plague By Weldon Kees
The Cross of Snow By Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
The Daring One By Edwin Markham
The Days Gone By By James Whitcomb Riley
The Delight Song of Tsoai-talee By N. Scott Momaday
The Destruction of Sennacherib By Lord Byron
The Donkey By G. K. Chesterton
The Emperor of Ice-Cream By Wallace Stevens
The Fair Singer By Andrew Marvell
The Faithful By Jane Cooper
The Film By Kate Northrop
The Goddess Who Created This Passing World By Alice Notley
The Good-Morrow By John Donne
The Hill By Joshua Mehigan
The Idler By Alice Moore Dunbar-Nelson
The Illiterate By William Meredith
The Lake Isle of Innisfree By William Butler Yeats
The Lamb By Linda Gregg
The Last Laugh By Wilfred Owen
The Luggage By Constance Urdang
The Maldive Shark By Herman Melville
The Man He Killed By Thomas Hardy
The Man with Night Sweats By Thom Gunn
The Metal and the Flower By P. K. Page
The Negro Speaks of Rivers By Langston Hughes
The Net By Babette Deutsch
The New Colossus By Emma Lazarus
The New Decalogue By Ambrose Bierce
The Night of the Shirts By W. S. Merwin
The Nymph's Reply to the Shepherd By Sir Walter Ralegh
The Obligation To Be Happy By Linda Pastan
The Oldest Living Thing in L.A. By Larry Levis
The Other Side of This World By Calvin Forbes
The Passionate Shepherd to His Love By Christopher Marlowe
The People, Yes By Carl Sandburg
The Pilgrim By John Bunyan
The Poet By Yone Noguchi
The Princess: Now Sleeps the Crimson Petal By Alfred, Lord Tennyson
The Pulley By George Herbert
The River Now By Richard F. Hugo
The Road Not Taken By Robert Frost
The Rose By Jean Valentine
The Second Coming By William Butler Yeats
The Secret Garden By Rita Dove
The Snow Is Deep on the Ground By Kenneth Patchen
The Snow Man By Wallace Stevens
The Speakers By Weldon Kees
The Star By Ann Taylor
The Tide Rises, the Tide Falls By Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
The Treasure By Robinson Jeffers
The Tyger By William Blake
The Vacuum By Howard Nemerov
The War in the Air By Howard Nemerov
The Well Rising By William E. Stafford
The White City By Claude McKay
The Windhover By Gerard Manley Hopkins
The World Is Too Much With Us By William Wordsworth
Their Bodies By David Wagoner
There's been a Death, in the Opposite House By Emily Dickinson
These Poems, She Said By Robert Bringhurst
They Flee From Me By Sir Thomas Wyatt
Those Winter Sundays By Robert E. Hayden
Thou Art My Lute By Paul Laurence Dunbar
Thoughts in a Zoo By Countee Cullen
Time Does Not Bring Relief: You All Have Lied By Edna St. Vincent Millay
Time of the Missile By George Oppen
To — By Sarah Helen Whitman
To David, About His Education By Howard Nemerov
To Fashion By Elizabeth Moody
To Helen By Edgar Allan Poe
To my Dear and Loving Husband By Anne Bradstreet
To the Desert By Benjamin Alire Sáenz
To the Memory of Mr. Oldham By John Dryden
To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time By Robert Herrick
To the Western World By Louis Simpson
Traveling through the Dark By William E. Stafford
Trees By Joyce Kilmer
Truth Serum By Naomi Shihab Nye
Under the Vulture-Tree By David Bottoms
Unholy Sonnet 1 By Mark Jarman
Up-Hill By Christina Rossetti
Video Blues By Mary Jo Salter
Waking from Sleep By Robert Bly
War Widow By Chris Abani
Ways of Talking By Ha Jin
Weighing In By Rhina P. Espaillat
[What horror to awake at night] By Lorine Niedecker
What Kind of Times Are These By Adrienne Rich
What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why By Edna St. Vincent Millay
When All My Five and Country Senses See By Dylan Thomas
When I Consider How my Light is Spent By John Milton
When I have Fears That I May Cease to Be By John Keats
When I Was Fair and Young By Queen Elizabeth I
When You Are Old By William Butler Yeats
Women By Louise Bogan
Words By Barbara Guest
Yet Do I Marvel By Countee Cullen
You charm'd me not with that fair face By John Dryden