"If" and When We Take the Final

For your final, you are going to write an essay centered around the Rudyard Kipling Poem "If--." Over the next few classes, we will break the poem down from different angles, looking at different poetry elements, as well as discussing the applicable actions and themes presented in the poem.


 Before I go through elements with you, let's read "Reading Poems: 20 Strategies" as class.

Layers of Poetry | Word Choice

1. Denotation: the dictionary meaning a word holds; its surface meaning

2. Connotation: extra meaning a word carries, or “suggests”; the meaning may be cultural, thematically related to rest of poem’s content. Also, a word or phrase may depend on reader understanding alternate meanings in dictionary, sound-relations to other words (insure/ensure), context of usage, & other credible connections of the words to the rest of the text. 

• Writers use many figures of speech: they rely on a reader getting (or working to understand) the connotative values of their word choice.   (Look these terms up for further comprehension!)

• Imagery: visual thing, concrete, like a picture or sculpture--you can see thing being described (whether in action or stationary). Images can be literally within the poem or the speaker's own figure of speech (see this definition)
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• Symbol: an image that is both the literal and figurative thing.
• An eagle in a poem is an eagle, but its usage may also represent other things, like 
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• Idiom: an expression whose meaning doesn't logically apply to its parts of speech, but has come to have a particular usage.

• "not predictable from the usual meanings of its constituent elements, as kick the bucket or hangone's head, or from the general grammatical rules of a language, asthe table round for the round table, and that is not a constituent of a larger expression of like characteristics." (Dictionary.com)

• Personification: giving human qualities to non-human things, such as animals or inanimate objects.
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• Allusions: words in a piece that refer to people, places, historical events, literary works, works of art, etc.  For instance, what may a "bald eagle" refer to?
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• Metaphor: comparing a thing to another thing that it is normally unassociated with. Key to seeing: "____ is ______."
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• Similes: comparing specific qualities of a thing to an unlike thing, using "like" or "as."

• Hyperbole: a gross exaggeration to make a point (see "To His Coy Mistress").
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• & many more
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3. Precision versus Accuracy: Why a Write Chooses Words From Synonyms

• Accurate word=meets denotative meaning
• Precise word= connotations, and also situational à slice: knife, not slice: ax    (If word doesn’t fit the situation in a published piece – we should look into why they’ve used an imprecise word.)

• Writers, especially many poets, seek out the best word possible, based on a word’s accuracy and precision. 
• *Precision may also be based off of rhyme scheme, too. 
• Or off of other sound qualities, which we will cover next week.