Writing Homework Help

There are two different worksheets assignments. 1) Any Six William Black Poems Questions 2) Any Six Shelley’s “Ozymandias” and Keats’ “La Belle Dame sans Merci,” “To Autumn,” “Ode to a Nightingale,” and “Bright Star” Questions. All the poems and short stories are in the PDF File Attached.

For this assignment, specifically, students must answer ANY SIX of the following thirteen questions on William Blake’s poems by identifying each answer with both the alphabetical and numerical designation.  You are not required to follow MLA format to answer questions.

QUESTIONS:

On “The Lamb” from Songs of Innocence:

A1.  Who or what is the speaker in this poem?  The listener?  How are they related?

A2.  What is the effect of repetition in the poem?

A3.  How would you characterize the diction in this poem?  High, middle, or low?  Abstract or concrete?  How is it consistent with the speaker? 

A4.  What are the connotations of “softest,” “bright,” “tender,” “meek,” and “mild”?  What do these words imply about the Creator?

On “The Tyger” from Songs of Experience:

B1.  What do the associations of the image of “burning” suggest?  Why is the burning done at night rather than day?  What does night suggest?

B2.  Describe the kinesthetic images of lines 5-20.  What ideas are Blake’s speaker representing by these images?  What attributes does the speaker suggest may belong to the blacksmith-like initiator of these actions?

B3.  Line 20 presents the kinesthetic image of a creator.  What is implied about the mixture of good and evil in the world?  What answer does the poem offer?  Why does Blake phrase this line as a question rather than an assertion?

B4.  The sixth stanza repeats the first stanza with only one change of imagery of action.  Contrast these stanzas, stressing the difference between “could” (line 4) and “dare” (line 24)?

On “London” from Songs of Experience:

C1.  What does London represent to the speaker?  How do the persons who live there contribute to the poem’s ideas about the state of humanity?

C2.  What sounds does the speaker mention as a part of the London scene?  Characterize these sounds in relation to the poem’s main idea.

C3.  Because of the tension in the poem between civilized activity (as represented in the chartering of the street and the river) and free human impulses, explain how the poem might be considered revolutionary.

C4.  The poem appeared in Songs of Experience, published in 1794.  Explain the appropriateness of Blake’s including the poem in a collection so named.

SOURCE:  Roberts, Edgar V.  Literature:  An Introduction to Reading and Writing.  Pearson, 2008, p. 62, 82, 161,

ASSIGNMENT GUIDELINES FOR ANSWERING QUESTIONS:

When answering questions, students are to write in complete sentences, restate or rephrase the question as part of their answer, and answer all that is being asked.  Each assigned question is worth two points with an additional two points to cover overall grammar, punctuation, and mechanics on the paper.  Students lose one point for a wrong answer, not answering the question(s) in full, or for having a fragment, comma splice, or run-on.

For this assignment, specifically, students are asked to answer ANY SIX of the following nineteen questions on Shelley’s “Ozymandias” and Keats’ “La Belle Dame sans Merci,” “To Autumn,” “Ode to a Nightingale,” and “Bright Star” by identifying each answer with both the alphabetical and numerical designation.  You are not required to follow MLA format to answer questions.

QUESTIONS:

On Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Ozymandias”:

A1.  What is the meter of this poem?  The rhyme scheme?  What traditional closed form is modified here?  How do the modifications affect the poem?

A2.  To what extent are content and meaning shaped by the closed form?  What is described in the octave?  In the sestet?

A3.  Characterize Ozymandias (thought to be Ramses II, pharoah of Egypt, who died in 1225 B. C. E.) from the way he is portrayed in this poem.

On John Keats’ “La Belle Dame sans Merci”:

B1.  Who is the speaker of stanzas 1-3?  Who speaks after that?

B2.  In light of the dreamlike content of the poem, how can the knight’s experience be viewed as symbolic?  What is being symbolized?

B3.  Consider “relish” (line 25), “honey” (line 26), and “manna” (line 26) as symbols.  Are they realistic or mythical?  What does the allusion to manna signify?  What is symbolized by the “pale kings, and princes too” and “Pale warriors” (lines 37-38)?

B4.  Consider the poem’s setting as symbols of the knight’s state of mind.

On John Keats’ “To Autumn”:

C1.  How is personification used in the first stanza?  How does it change in the second?  What is the effect of such personification?

C2.  How does Keats structure the poem to accord with his apostrophe to autumn?  That is, in what ways can the stanzas be distinguished by the type of discourse addressed to the season?

C3.  Analyze Keats’ metonymy in the first stanza and synecdoche in the second.  What effects does he achieve with these devices?

C4.  How, through the use of images, does Keats develop his idea that autumn is a season of “mellow fruitfulness”?

On John Keats’ “Ode to a Nightingale”:

D1.  Formulate the structure (meter of each line and rhyme scheme) of the stanzas.  What traditional form is employed here?

D2.  What is the speaker’s mental and emotional state in stanza one?  What similes are employed to describe this condition?

D3.  What does the speaker want in stanza two?  Whom does he want to join?  Why?  From what aspects of the world (stanza three) does he want to escape?

D4.  How do the speaker’s mood and perspective change in stanza four?  How does he achieve the transition?  What characterizes the world that the speaker enters in stanza five?  What senses are employed to describe this world?

D5.  What does the speaker establish about the nightingale’s song in stanza seven?  What does the song come to symbolize?

On John Keats’ “Bright Star”:

E1.  With what topic is the speaker concerned in this sonnet?  How does he compare himself with the distant star?

E2.  What qualities does the speaker attribute specifically to the star?  What role does he seem to assign to it?  In light of this role, and the qualities needed to serve in it, how might the star be compared to a divine and benign presence?

E3.  In light of the emphasis on the words “forever” and “ever” in lines 11-14, how appropriate is the choice of the star as the subject of the apostrophe in the poem?  

SOURCE:  Roberts, Edgar V.  Literature:  An Introduction to Reading and Writing.  Pearson, 2008, pp. 115, 127, 85, 114, 81.