Pleasure Questions

For today's class, my students will have read "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?," "Those Winter Sundays," "may i feel, said he," by Cummings, Auden's "As I Walked Out One Evening," Thom Gunn's "The Man with the Night Sweats," and Louise Gluck's "The Balcony."

Here are the questions they'll get:

Pleasures Group Work

NOTE: Many poems and passages from poems give multiple pleasures at once. Feel free to refer several times to the same material in your answers; be sure, though, to be ready to discuss a different pleasure each time!

1. According to Vendler (and to you), what are some of the pleasures that rhythm can provide? Find two examples from the poems you read for today, and be ready to explain what lines or passages in them give you rhythmic pleasure.

2. According to Vendler (and to you), what are some of the pleasures that rhyme can provide? What about the pleasures of stanza shape? Find at least two examples from the poems you read for today, and be ready to explain what lines or passages in them give you rhyme and stanza pleasure.

3. According to Vendler (and to you), what are some of the pleasures that structure can provide? Pick one of the poems you read for today and be ready to explain how it gives you structural pleasure.

4. According to Vendler (and not to you, this time, because her version is quite idiosyncratic), what are the pleasures that images can give? Find at least two examples from the poems you read for today and be ready to explain what lines or passages in them give you Vendler’s version of image pleasure.

5. According to Vendler (and to you), what are the pleasures that argument can give? Find at least one example from the poems you read for today, and be ready to explain how it gives you argument pleasure.

6. According to Vendler (and to you), what are the pleasures of poignancy? Find at least two examples from the poems you read for today, and be ready to explain how they give you the pleasures of poignancy.

Maybe I'll divvy the class up into six groups, and give each group a question. Too hard to have everyone do all of them--or, rather, not too hard, but too slow. Maybe start each group with one question, have them present their answers, and then see if there's time to spin each to a new question, and so forth.

I'll let you know how it goes!