01 Thursday Jan 20

Jamia Jordan, January 2oth, 2011 Class Notes

Today in class we took our first quiz. It focused on the reading assignments outlined in our syllabus. After the quiz we talked about poems, and major poetic forms. Narrative poems tell a story, and there are three main kinds: epic, romance, and ballad. Lyric poems are usually fairly short. They usually express the feelings and thoughts of a single speaker. Professor Mathur told us that we would be focusing on this specific type of poem a lot in this course. Dramatic poems are poems in which there is an imaginary speaker adressing an imaginary audience. Than we moved on to talk about the components of poetic verse. We discussed terms such as rhyme scheme and stanza. We also talked about different poetic devices such as: image,symbol, metaphor, simile, metonymy, and enjambment. We than went on to discuss different binaries found in one of the selected readings for that class. After reading "To His Coy Mistress" by Andrew Marvell we came up with binaries to discuss this poem such as: tame/wild, subordinant/dominant, undeserved/deserved, given/received, and so on. We went into further detail discussing the shift in attitude of the speaker as the poem continued. Lastly, we answered discussion questions about this poem as a class.