ENGL 2283.X1 – Fall 2011
First Paper 5%
Explication
Your first paper should be short, no more, probably, than three pages. In it, you will explicate one of the following poems.
- Drayton's Sonnet III, from Idea, or;
- Drayton's Sonnet XII, from Idea, or;
- Daniel's sonnet "Delia XLVI," or;
- Jonson's "Epitaph on Michael Drayton," from Underwoods, or;
- Donne's "Elegy V," or;
- Herbert's "Death."
Your explication should aim primarily at convincing me to share your understanding of the poem. To do this, you’ll want to make what is implicit explicit, what is, or seems to be, hidden visible. Attend to figurative language—images, symbols, metaphors, similes—and to literal language. Distinguish between the two so you can decide when the poem is ironic and when it is to be taken at face value. What can the structure of the poem tell you about its meaning? How does its context—in a sonnet sequence, or in a poetic tradition, or in its historical moment, or the social class it describes or in which it seems to participate—inform your understanding?
The above paragraph should give you more than enough to think about to generate a short paper.
Formatting:
The first page short have a centered, informative title (your title, not the title of the poem) at the top. Immediately below that, centered, your name.
Do not indent your first paragraph, but indent all subsequent paragraphs.
Long quotations—those of four or more lines on your page—should have every line indented the equivalent of two tab spaces. Such text will not be included in the total length of the paper. For example, if you quote eight lines of poetry with line endings retained, a three page paper could conceivably be as much as ten lines onto the fourth page. Contact me if this is not clear to you.
If you quote short lines of poetry that you do not want to break your own prose, the appropriate way to signify line endings is with a forward slash, thus /. For example, “My love is as sharp / as the point on a dart.”
The abbreviation to indicate a single line of poetry is a single, lower-case l, followed by a period, thus l. More than one line gets two ls and a period, thus ll. For example, “in ll. 11–12 the poem’s problem is resolved.” (The same process applies to “page” and pages,” thus producing p. and pp. for abbreviations.)
Your text should be submitted electronically through Acorn, ideally in .doc format or as a pdf.
Your text should be double spaced, or spaced no more closely than 1.5 ll. Do NOT double space between paragraphs, and change your word processor’s settings if it increases the spacing automatically.
Pay attention to the red squiggly lines. The computer can check your spelling for you, so failing to catch spelling mistakes before you submit your paper for grade is just inviting trouble.
Please ask in class any questions you have about anything not covered here. If you need the information, so does everyone else. Furthermore, your question might prompt others that will benefit you and others in the class.