Class Notes

1. today's topic

poetry is one of the three major genres of imaginative literature, which has its origins in music and oral performance and is characterized by controlled patterns of rhythm and syntax (often using meter and rhyme); compression and compactness and an allowance for ambiguity; a particularly concentrated emphasis on the sensual, especially visual and aural, qualities and effects of words and word order; and especially vivid, often figurative language.

2. difinition

(1) affix:

【dic】say, tell, word

dictionary

(n) a book or electronic resource that lists the words of a language (typically in alphabetical order) and gives their meaning, or gives the equivalent words in a different language, often also providing information about pronunciation, origin, and usage.

predict

(v) say or estimate that (a specified thing) will happen in the future or will be a consequence of something.

【tude】biased, partial

(2) phrases

1. coming out of the closet 出櫃

2. love at first sight 一見鍾情

lol

3. I'm sorry. 表示感同身受

4. I apologize. 道歉

5. I owe you an apology.

(3) 詩言志

古語云：“詩者，志之所之也，在心為志，發言為詩”，詩言志，是詩人作詩的總目的，表達詩人的志向、理想和抱負等。

an obligation to fulfill its expectation

to demonstrate its personality or character

(4) romance

1. Originally, a long medieval narrative in verse or prose written in one of the Romance languages (French, Spanish, Italian, etc.) and depicting the quests of knights and other chivalric heroes and the vicissitudes of courtly love; also known as chivalric romance.

2. Later and more broadly, any literary work, especially a long work of prose fiction, characterized by a nonrealistic and idealizing use of the imagination.

3. Commonly today, works of prose fiction aimed at a mass, primarily female, audience and focusing on love affairs (as in Harlequin Romance).

(5) movie: The age of adaline

YouTube---office trailer

The Age of Adaline is a 2015 American epic romance fantasy film directed by Lee Toland Krieger and written by J. Mills Goodloe and Salvador Paskowitz. The film stars Blake Lively, Michiel Huisman, Kathy Baker, Amanda Crew, Harrison Ford, and Ellen Burstyn. The film was released on April 24, 2015.

(6) didacticism

Didacticism is a philosophy that emphasizes instructional and informative qualities in literature and other types of art. Didactic art was meant both to entertain and to instruct. Didactic plays, for instance, were intended to convey a moral theme or other rich truth to the audience.

(7) index 索引

An index (plural: usually indexes, see below) is a list of words or phrases ('headings') and associated pointers ('locators') to where useful material relating to that heading can be found in a document. In a traditional back-of-the-book index the headings will include names of people, places and events, and concepts selected by a person as being relevant and of interest to a possible reader of the book. The pointers are typically page numbers, paragraph numbers or section numbers.

(8) index finger

The index finger, (also referred to as forefinger, pointer finger, trigger finger, digitus secundus, digitus II, and many other terms), is located between the first and third digits, between the thumb and the middle finger.

(9) metaphor

A metaphor is a figure of speech that identifies something as being the same as some unrelated thing for rhetorical effect, thus highlighting the similarities between the two. A metaphor may compare or directly equate them, and so does not necessarily apply any distancing words of comparison, such as "like" or "as".

(10) personification 擬人 ( = anthropomorphism )

Personification is a figure of speech that involves treating soething nonhuman, such as an abstraction, as if it were a person by endowing it with humanlike qualities, as in "Death entered the room."

(11) iamb (iambic pentameter) 抑揚格 (五步抑揚格)

YouTube: Why Shakespeare loved iambic pentameter? ← 讚!! :D

Iamb referring to a metrical form in which each foot consists of an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed one; this type of foot is an iamb. The most common poetic meter in English is iambic pentameter—a metrical form in which most lines consist of five iambs: "One cóm- | mon nóte | on éi- | ther lýre | did stríke" (Dryden, "To the Memory of Mr. Oldham").

ex: Sakespeare

"To be or not to be that is the question."

"Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?"

"A rise fair sun, and kill the envious moon."

圖片1qr

wer

(12) sonnet

Sonnet is a fixed verse form consisting of fourteen lines usually in iambic pentameter. An Italian sonnet consists of eight rhymelinked lines (an octave) plus six rhymelinked lines (a sestet), often with either an abbaabba cdecde or abbacddc defdef rhyme scheme. This type of sonnet is also called the Petrarchan sonnet in honor of the Italian poet Petrarch (1304– 74). An English or Shakespearean sonnet instead consists of three quatrains (four- line units) and a couplet and often rhymes abab cdcd efef gg.

ex: Sall I Compare Thee to a Summer's Day? → iambic pentameter

(13) end rhyme

Tail rhyme (also called end rhyme or rime couée) is a rhyme in the final syllable(s) of a verse (the most common kind).

Bid me to weep, and I will weep
While I have eyes to see;
And having none, yet I will keep
A heart to weep for thee.

(14) rhyme scheme

Rhyme scheme is the pattern of end rhymes in a poem, often noted by small letters, such as abab or abba.

(15) free verse

Free verse is an open form of poetry. It does not use consistent meter patterns, rhyme, or any other musical pattern. It thus tends to follow the rhythm of natural speech.

(16) poet: Oscar Wilde

Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde (16 October 1854 – 30 November 1900) was an Irish author, playwright and poet. After writing in different forms throughout the 1880s, he became one of London's most popular playwrights in the early 1890s. Today he is remembered for his epigrams, his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, his plays, as well as the circumstances of his imprisonment and early death.

(17) poem: Sound and Sense Alexander Pope

True ease in writing comes from art, not chance,
As those move easiest who have learned to dance.
'Tis not enough no harshness gives offense,
The sound must seem an echo to the sense:
Soft is the strain when Zephyr gently blows,
And the smooth stream in smoother numbers flows;
But when loud surges lash the sounding shore,
The hoarse, rough verse should like the torrent roar;
When Ajax strives some rock's vast weight to throw,
The line too labors, and the words move slow;
Not so, when swift Camilla scours the plain,
Flies o'er the unbending corn, and skims along the main.
Hear how Timotheus' varied lays surprise,
And bid alternate passions fall and rise!

(18) poem: I wandered lonely as a cloud William Wordsworth

→ rhyme scheme → Lyric Poetry

poem analysis

※ daffodils → poet's spiritual symbol

I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o'er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

Continuous as the stars that shine
And twinkle on the milky way,
They stretched in never-ending line
Along the margin of a bay:
Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.

The waves beside them danced; but they
Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:
A poet could not but be gay,
In such a jocund company:
I gazed—and gazed—but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought:

For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.

← daffodils

(19) poem: somewhere i have never travelled,gladly beyond E. E. Cummings, 1894 - 1962

translation and analysis

YouTube---reading

YouTube---reading with music

※ E.E. Cummings → 無空格 & i 不大寫

康明斯將詩中的「I」全部改用小寫「i」，像是康明斯的個人標誌(Logo)，特有的簽名，小小的「i」，打破文法的拘限，像是融解大大的自我(ego)，小小的自己，融入自然與愛，康明斯是一個獨立而醇真的個體。

somewhere i have never travelled,gladly beyond
any experience,your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because they are too near

your slightest look easily will unclose me
though i have closed myself as fingers,
you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skilfully,mysteriously)her first rose

or if your wish be to close me,i and
my life will shut very beautifully,suddenly,
as when the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending;

nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility:whose texture
compels me with the colour of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing

(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens;only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody,not even the rain,has such small hands

(20) The Great Gatsby → She blossomed for him like a flower

His heart beat faster and faster as Daisy's white face came up to his own. He knew that when he kissed this girl, and forever wed his unutterable visions to her perishable breath, his mind would never romp again like the mind of God. So he waited, listening for a moment longer to the tuning-fork that had been struck upon a star. Then he kissed her. At his lips' touch she blossomed for him like a flower and the incarnation was complete.