In the poem "Thou Blind Man's Mark" by Sir Philip Sidney, the poet expounds on the topic of desire. Through alliteration and metaphors, the speaker creates at first a despairing, accusatory tone towards desire's effect on him and then transitions, through use of personification and repetition, to a triumphant ending.
Sidney begins the poem with a bout of sophisticated name-calling, with which he uses to describe the maliciousness of desire. He uses metaphors with harmful connotations to bequeath titles to desire, such as "blind man's mark," "scum," and "fool's self-chosen snare." To emphasize these phrases and their underlying detrimental meanings, Sidney uses alliteration such as "cradle of causeless care." This extensive list of names gives off the feeling of both the speaker being scathing towards desire but also the heavy despair the speaker feels or felt towards it to continue ranting against it. By listing so many of desire's flaws and dangers, the speaker fully conveys the vast, evil hold desire has over him and how its "end is never wrought".
The speaker of the poem also seems to be speaking directly to desire as if the concept were a person, using "thou" or "thy" frequently when addressing it. By personifying it, desire becomes more of a tangible threat and concern, rather than just an intangible concept. Desire is described to be selling "worthless ware" which the speaker has "too dearly bought, with price of mangled mind." The repetition of the speaker's exclamation "Desire, desire!" and the comment of "too long, too long" help further to illustrate the futility the speaker felt towards fighting desire's grip on him and how desire did not help him like it should be, which is "my mind to higher things prepare."
Then the speaker transitions to a different tone when he starts repeating the phrase "in vain" at the beginning of his lines. Starting with "in vain thou has my ruin sought," the speaker emphasizes how all of desire's actions, making him "to vain things aspire", kindling "thy smoky fire," were to no avail in making him fall for desire's traps. This time the repetition serves to highlight the speaker's triumph in conquering over desire's effects as everything desire has done was "in vain." Sidney explains that "virtue hath this better lesson taught-- ", using a dash to make the final ending message distinct, to seek his rewards in himself and not elsewhere. The final line, "desiring naught but how to kill desire," concludes the poem on a positive, contented note. The use of the noun and verb form of desire helps to add that sense of a complete ending, but also highlights the irony behind the line, showing that one can never truly escape the clutches of desire.
After going through the norming packet, I am actually pretty okay with my poetry essay. A lot of the things I brought up here I saw in some of the higher-scoring essays there. For example, the transition in tone and how it was created by the repetition and also the effect of the personification of desire. So, I'm getting better at not only identifying the poetic devices but also explaining their role in conveying the speaker's attitude. And I actually finished my essay in the time limit! I think a lot of this is due to the fact that the poem we had to analyze was so short. This gave me more time to organize my thoughts about it and develop a complex thesis to base the essay off of. The fact that my thesis was stronger made the writing much easier since I had a central idea I could connect everything to.
I still have much to improve on. The first thing that struck me while I was writing my essay was I could not name some of the poetic devices. Terms I was looking for, like anaphora, I just could not remember. I would know that there was a poetic device being used but not know what to call it. So I just talked around it in my essay. Another issue that we went over in class was describing the structure of the poem and how it contributed to the analysis. I could not identify that it was a sonnet and being knowledgable about such structures would have facilitated and increased the depth of my interpretation. Also there were some aspects of analysis that I missed; for example, the introspective tone of the middle lines and how the repetition gave the effect of the speaker trying to persuade himself. I also did not clearly identify the central problem, which was that desire was preventing the speaker from seeking higher things. In conclusion, I could have addressed the complexity in the piece better. I still must teach myself to search for the complexity in the poem.
Another thing I noted was my use of textual evidence could have been more sparing. I tend to over-quote the piece I think, and that tends to just drag on the analysis portion of the essay. I need to be more selective with my quotes and choose the ones that I'm really going to analyze. In afterthought, I could also be better at organizing this essay and adding to its cohesiveness. Some of my paragraphs don't flow very well at all.
I feel like a significant portion of my problems have to do with the actual writing of my essay, though I can always work on my analysis skills of course. To improve on my poetry essay, I will:
1. Learn and memorize my poetic devices. I will go and dig up my notes on tropes and schemes and review them. I will also look at the powerpoint on sonnet structures so next time I will be more prepared to fully analyze them. Sonnets are commonly used on the AP exam so it will be helpful to be familiar with them.
2. Read more poems. Poetry was never something I read a lot of so I should start reading more if I am to be proficient at analyzing them. I know that poetry is a lot different from prose so it would be most beneficial if I were used to the way that poems convey their meaning. I plan to find ones in the Literature and Composition textbook.
3. Work on my writing. One thing that has always helped me was reading high-scoring example essays. They give me ideas on how to structure and communicate my interpretation of the poem. I plan to read the norming essays posted on Edline for this particular prompt. Another way to improve my writing would be to write more. So using my 5 Steps to a 5, I can practice writing to the poetry prompts they have provided there. I am not sure my writing is up to the level of sophistication that a 9 or 8 essay requires so I have lots of room for improvement.
No comments:
Post a Comment