Please read the following instructions carefully and completely. Before you beg

Please read the following instructions carefully and completely.
Before you begin, review the sections in the textbook on poetic terms and writing about poetry. Also look over the instructions given for the first explication. Pay particular attention to the sections on “The Music of Poetry” (15-16) and, in the Glossary, to the parts on meter (1014), the sonnet (1017), the villanelle (1019), and the Ballad (1010). Review as well the list of poetic terms.
Write an essay of about four full pages explicating a poem with a set pattern and meter. The poems in our textbook that fit this description are listed below. Though your paper can’t cover everything, it should demonstrate that you know the basic elements to include in an explication, that you understand the poetic terms, and that you can apply them and analyze their effects. This essay differs from the first one in that you must include some consideration of the poem’s form, rhyme scheme, meter, and rhythm. You will write about a closed form, such as a sonnet or a ballad, with a set meter and rhyme scheme.
Organization. In the first part of your essay (this may take several paragraphs), give the poet’s name, the title of the poem, and the year it was published. Comment briefly on the poem’s theme, speaker, dramatic situation, tone, and basic structure, organization, and meter.
Then, in the main body of the essay, move through the poem, identifying poetic devices and their effects. In terms of paragraphing, you could devote a paragraph to each stanza or section of a poem. As you explicate, note the way the elements of sound and figurative language and rhythm and so on work together to create meaning.
In your conclusion, discuss the major idea you believe the poet is striving to communicate.
Content. As you explicate, your essay should touch on the following poetic elements:
speaker
topic/situation
form and rhyme scheme
meter
tone
word choice
figurative language
rhetorical figures
irony
symbols
themes
anything else you find relevant to the poem
Within the text of your essay, you MUST comment on the poem’s form and meter. Within the body of your essay, you MUST include consideration of at least three specific times in the poem where the stressed and unstressed syllables contribute to the meaning. And you MUST attach a clean scanned copy of the poem, with feet and stressed and unstressed syllables marked, along with your essay.
In the text of your paper, you do not need to explain the scanning of each line in detail, but you should note places where the meter or accented syllables add to the effect of the poem and to its meaning. When there is a variation from, say, the poem’s iambic pattern, what effect does it produce?
For example, in the first line of Yeats’s “Leda and the Swan,” what effect is produced by the spondaic fourth foot? Quote the line as you discuss it, indicate each foot with a slash, and mark the stressed and unstressed syllables so the reader is guided, as in
A sud / den blow, / the great / wings beat / ing still
iamb iamb iamb spondee iamb
That way, when you discuss the effect the meter creates, the reader will be able to understand your point. In this case, the three stressed syllables in a row mimic the beating of wings and slow down the line.
(Normally, one marks the accented syllables with an accent mark above the stressed syllable and a u above the unstressed syllable. I do not know how to use those marks on a computer, though some of you may. That’s why I have bolded the stressed syllables and labeled the foot. You may follow whatever form you want as long as you make clear where the stressed and unstressed syllables are and where the poem is divided into feet. See the handout on Meter.)
Similarly, if you identify a poem as an English sonnet at the start of your essay, say something about the way the poem is structured as you explicate. Does each quatrain present a different idea? Or, if it is an Italian sonnet, do the octave and sestet represent different parts of the poem’s message? Does the rhyme scheme place stress on certain pairs of words? Why? And so on.
Concentrate on those elements that most contribute to the poem’s overall meaning and effect. Where does a metaphor or an oxymoron or an anapestic foot or a paradox attract a reader’s attention? What is the poet emphasizing? Remember, too, that establishing the literal meaning of a poem sometimes requires you to interpret two (or more) lines together. A line by itself may not tell you everything.
Please DO NOT use outside sources other than the information in the textbook and in The Oxford English Dictionary or other dictionaries or reference books about language (such as Eric Partridge’s Shakespeare’s Bawdy) found in the library’s reference databases. Please consult no other works. Recall the warnings about plagiarism on the syllabus. I do not care what Scholars X or Y say about a poem or line or word; I care about what you say. However, if you do consult any sources, even if you are not quoting them, you must cite them to avoid plagiarism.
There is no single correct explication. Use the OED to be sure that the meaning you attribute to a word was in fact current when the poem was written. Ground your interpretation in what the poem literally says. See me if you have questions.
Choose from the following closed form poems in our textbook. Each has a set form and meter or pattern. Some are in iambic pentameter, some use ballad stanza form, some are in anapestic tetrameter, some have seven syllables per line, and so on.
Blake, “The Chimney Sweeper” (163-64) from Songs of Innocence
Blake, “The Garden of Love” (166)
Blake, “London” (166-67)
Blake, “The Tyger” (167-68)
Dickinson, “I Felt a Funeral” (170)
Frost, “The Road Not Taken” (173)
Cullen, “Incident” (176-77)
Larkin, “This Be the Verse” (178)
Wheatley, “On Being Brought from Africa to America” (536)
Lazarus, “The New Colossus” (536-37)
Wordsworth, “The World Is Too Much With Us” (346)
McKay, “If We Must Die” (359)
Randall, “Ballad of Birmingham” (361-62)
Shakespeare, “Sonnet 64” (629-30)
Shakespeare,“Sonnet 116” (630)
Shakespeare, “Sonnet 130” (630-31)
Parker, “One Perfect Rose” (640)
Roethke, “I Knew a Woman” (640-41)
Roethke, “My Papa’s Waltz” (655)
St. Vincent Millay, “I Know I Am But Summer to Your Heart” (660)
Shakespeare, “Sonnet 73” (885-86)
Donne, “Death, Be Not Proud” (887)
Swift, “A Satirical Elegy on the Death of a Late Famous General” (887-88)
Shelley, “Ozymandias” (889)
Dickinson, “I Heard a Fly Buzz When I Died” (892)
Dickinson, “Because I Could Not Stop for Death” (893)
Dickinson, “Apparently, with No Surprise” (892)
Housman, “To an Athlete Dying Young” (894-95)
Thomas, “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night” (903-904)
Heaney, “Mid-Term Break” (908)
See me when you decide which poem you are explicating so that I can tell you its meter. Scan the poem, marking the stressed and unstressed syllables and the feet, label each foot, and turn the scansion in to me as soon as possible. That way, I can check it, perhaps correct it, and return it to you before you write your draft. When you turn in your final draft, include as an Appendix at the end of the essay a clean, retyped, scanned copy of the poem.
If you want to write on a poem not listed above, see me. There are a lot of other poems you could choose aside from those in the book (such as Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 129”), but I need to be sure that they have a closed form that can be scanned.
Note too that some of these poems are fairly short. If you choose to explicate a short poem, you will be expected to note virtually every element in the poem in addition to considering the form, meter, and rhyme scheme.
On the longer poems, concentrate first on the poem’s form, meter, and rhyme scheme. Explicate the other elements that stand out to you or that reinforce the meter. For example, sometimes word choice and alliteration work along with the stressed and unstressed syllables to create meaning.
Remember, you must comment on the poem’s form, meter, or pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables.
You must note in the body of your paper at least three times where the meter or pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables contributes to the meaning and effect of the poem.
And you must include as an Appendix a clean copy of the poem scanned, marking feet, stressed and unstressed syllables, and identifying the feet — i.e., an iamb, a trochee, a spondee, an anapest, a dactyl. Look again at the example from “Leda and the Swan” above and also at the handout explaining meter.