Grade 11 Poetry:

Second Coming:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;

Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
William Butler Yeats

Questions:

1. Yeats, especially with a poem like 'The Second Coming,' is considered an early
figure in which artistic movement?
2. What is the 'gyre' to which Yeats refers?
3. What historical event is considered largely responsible for the sentiment
expressed in 'The Second Coming'?
4. The title 'The Second Coming' is a reference to what event?
5. All of the following are themes of 'The Second Coming' except:
 Yeats uses a speaker who has a series of visions about what the end of the
world looks like. What are these visions? Put them into your own words.
6. This poem’s subject matter isn’t innately modern. The Second Coming is a grand
topic and one that has always been traditionally used in poetry. However, Yeats’
word choice is extremely modern. Why
7. What words in the poem seem modern? List three
8. Where does the poem become conversational? Offer a quote and explain.
9. Why is this unusual? What is surprising about using a conversational tone for this
subject?
10. Yeats’ descriptions of the sphinx. What words in his description are surprising?
Why?
 Refugee Mother and Child

No Madonna and Child could touch

that picture of a mother's tenderness
for a son she soon will have to forget.
The air was heavy with odours

of diarrhoea of unwashed children

with washed-out ribs and dried-up
bottoms struggling in laboured
steps behind blown empty bellies. Most

mothers there had long ceased

to care but not this one; she held
a ghost smile between her teeth
and in her eyes the ghost of a mother's
pride as she combed the rust-coloured
hair left on his skull and then –

singing in her eyes - began carefully

to part it... In another life
this would have been a little daily
act of no consequence before his
breakfast and school; now she

did it like putting flowers

on a tiny grave.
Chinua Achebe
 The Woman

A minute ago I came from the well

Where young women drew water like myself
My body was weary and my heart tired.
For a moment I watched the stream that rushed before me;
And thought how fresh the smell of flowers,
How young the grass around it.
And yet again I heard the sound of duty
Which ground on me – made me feel aged
As I bore the great big mud container on my head
Like a big painful umbrella.
Then I got home and cooked your meal
For you had been out drinking the pleasures of the flesh
While I toiled in the fields.
Under the angry vigilance of the sun
A labour shared only by the bearings of my womb.
I washed the dishes; yours
And we swept the room we shared
Before I set forth to prepare your bedding
In the finest corner of the hut
Which was bathed by the sweet smell of dung
I had this morning applied to the floors
Then you came in,
In your drunken lust
And you made your demands
When I explained how I was tired
And how I feared for the child – yours – I carried
You beat me and had your way
At that moment
You left me unhappy and bitter
And I hated you
Yet tomorrow I shall again wake up to you
Milk the cow, plough the land and cook your food,
You shall again be my Lord
For isn’t it right that woman should obey,
Love, serve and honour her man?
For are you not the fruit of the land?
Kristina Rungaro
 To Learn how to Speak:

To learn how to
With the voices of the land,
To parse the speech in its rivers,
To catch in the inarticulate grunt,
Stammer, call cry, babble, tongue’s knot
A sense of the stoneness of these stones
From which all words are cut.
To trace with the tongue wagon-trails
Saying the suffix of their aches in -kuil, -pan, -fontein,
In watery names that confirm
The dryness of their ways.
To visit the places of occlusion, or the lick
in a vlei-bank dawn.
To bury my mouth in the pit of your arm,
In that planetarium,
Pectoral beginning to the nub of time
Down there close to the water-table, to feel
The as it drums
At the back of my throat
Its cow-skinned vowel.
To write a poem with words like:
Stompie, stickfast, golovan,
Songololo, just boombang, just
To understand the least inflections,
To voice without swallowing
Syllables born in tin shacks, or catch
the 5.15 ikwata bust fife
Chwannisberg train, to reach
The low chant of the mine gang’s
Mineral glow of our people’s unbreakable resolve.

To learn how to speak

With the voice of this land.
Jeremy Cronin
Questions:

1. In a short paragraph discuss the issues that the poet is referring to.
2. How do the issues discussed above relate to the problems in a multi-cultural,
multi-lingual society?
3. What does he propose as a solution to the various “voices” in the land?
 Sonnet 104:
To Me Fair Friend:

To me, fair friend, you never can be old,

For as you were when first your eye I eyed,
Such seems your beauty still. Three winters cold
Have from the forests shook three summers’ pride,
Three beauteous springs to yellow autumn turned
In process of the seasons have I seen,
Three April perfumes in three hot Junes burned,
Since first I saw you fresh, which yet are green.
Ah, yet doth beauty, like a dial-hand,
Steal from his figure, and no pace perceived;
So your sweet hue, which methinks still doth stand,
Hath motion, and mine eye may be deceived:
For fear of which, hear this, thou age unbred:
Ere you were born was beauty’s summer dead.
William Shakespeare
Questions:

1. Can you find any alliterations? Why do you think Shakespeare uses them?

2. Why does Shakespeare use the seasons of the year to tell us something?

3. What type of sonnet is this? Give 5 reasons for your answer.

4. To what does Shakespeare compare the beauty of his lover, which is different
from the beginning of the sonnet. Why do you think he changed his
comparison?
 Anthem for Doomed Youth

What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?

— Only the monstrous anger of the guns.
Only the stuttering rifles' rapid rattle
Can patter out their hasty orisons.
No mockeries now for them; no prayers nor bells;
Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs,—
The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells;
And bugles calling for them from sad shires.

What candles may be held to speed them all?

Not in the hands of boys, but in their eyes
Shall shine the holy glimmers of goodbyes.
The pallor of girls' brows shall be their pall;
Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds,
And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds.
Wilfred Owen
 London, 1802

Milton! thou shouldst be living at this hour:

England hath need of thee: she is a fen
Of stagnant waters: altar, sword, and pen,
Fireside, the heroic wealth of hall and bower,
Have forfeited their ancient English dower
Of inward happiness. We are selfish men;
Oh! raise us up, return to us again;
And give us manners, virtue, freedom, power.
Thy soul was like a Star, and dwelt apart:
Thou hadst a voice whose sound was like the sea:
Pure as the naked heavens, majestic, free,
So didst thou travel on life's common way,
In cheerful godliness; and yet thy heart
The lowliest duties on herself did lay.
William Wordsworth
 The Tyger:

Tyger Tyger, burning bright,

In the forests of the night;
What immortal hand or eye,
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

In what distant deeps or skies.

Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand, dare seize the fire?

And what shoulder, & what art,

Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
And when thy heart began to beat,
What dread hand? & what dread feet?

What the hammer? what the chain,

In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? what dread grasp,
Dare its deadly terrors clasp!

When the stars threw down their spears

And water'd heaven with their tears:
Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the Lamb make thee?

Tyger Tyger burning bright,

In the forests of the night:
What immortal hand or eye,
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?
William Blake
Questions:

1. What is the Tyger or what does it represent?

2. Who or what created the Tyger?
3. What is the crucial question Blake is posing about God and His creations?
4. Discuss the imagery and tone of the poem. Justify your answer with reference
to the poem.
5. What is the significance of the one-word change from the first to last stanza of
the poem?
6. Why are so many questions posed in the poem?
 We Wear the Mask:

We wear the mask that grins and lies,

It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes,—
This debt we pay to human guile;
With torn and bleeding hearts we smile,
And mouth with myriad subtleties.

Why should the world be over-wise,

In counting all our tears and sighs?
Nay, let them only see us, while
We wear the mask.

We smile, but, O great Christ, our cries

To thee from tortured souls arise.
We sing, but oh the clay is vile
Beneath our feet, and long the mile;
But let the world dream otherwise,
We wear the mask!
Paul Laurence Dunbar
Questions:
1. Describe the speaker of this poem.
2. Who else might be able to relate to this poem? Why?
3. What is the major symbol in this poem? Why is it appropriate? Explain.
4. In your own words, explain what wearing the mask represents in this poem?
5. How does “We Wear the Mask” tie into Quarter 4’s theme of “The American
Dream: Reality or Illusion”?
 Eating Poetry

Ink runs from the corners of my mouth.

There is no happiness like mine.
I have been eating poetry.

The librarian does not believe what she sees.

Her eyes are sad
and she walks with her hands in her dress.

The poems are gone.

The light is dim.
The dogs are on the basement stairs and coming up.

Their eyeballs roll,

their blond legs burn like brush.
The poor librarian begins to stamp her feet and weep.

She does not understand.

When I get on my knees and lick her hand,
she screams.

I am a new man.
I snarl at her and bark.
I romp with joy in the bookish dark.
Mark Strand
 An African Thunderstorm

From the west

Clouds come hurrying with the wind
Turning sharply
Here and there
Like a plague of locusts
Whirling,
Tossing up things on its tail
Like a madman chasing nothing.

Pregnant clouds
Ride stately on its back,
Gathering to perch on hills
Like sinister dark wings;
The wind whistles by
And trees bend to let it pass.

In the village
Screams of delighted children,
Toss and turn
In the din of the whirling wind,
Women,
Babies clinging on their backs
Dart about
In and out
Madly;
The wind whistles by
Whilst trees bend to let it pass.

Clothes wave like tattered flags

Flying off
To expose dangling breasts
As jagged blinding flashes
Rumble, tremble and crack
Amidst the smell of fired smoke
And the pelting march of the storm
David Rubadiri