Assignment 4
PORTFOLIO ASSIGNMENT 3.2: POEM SUMMARY AND CHARACTERDECLARATION
As you know good readers make textual connections. These textualconnections are text-to-text text-to-self and text-to-world. Well bereviewing each of these textual connections throughout the course. For thisassignment youll be making a text-to-text connection.
Text-to-text connections are more than superficially comparingcharacters from one book to another. I often hear students try to pawn off atext-to-text connection such as A character in Book A answered the telephoneand so did the character in Book B. Thats a connection. Well . . . not quite.Lets try to go a little deeper.
One way to make text-to-text connections is when you have aprimary text likeThe Crucible then afterreading another text you evaluate the primary text in a different way. Forthis assignment you will be given a poem and then asked to apply and comparethe primary text which in your case isThe Crucible. But firstread and understand the poem below.
Disillusionment ofTen Oclock2
Wallace Stevens
The houses are haunted
by white night-gowns
none are green
or purple with green rings
or yellow with blue rings.
None of them are strange
with socks of lace
and beaded ceintures.
People are not going
to dream of baboons and periwinkles.
Only here and there an old sailor
drunk and asleep in his boots
catches Tigers
in red weather.
Right away one of the first questions students ask me whenreading this poem is Whats a ceinture? A ceinture is a beaded belt. Whenreading poems imagine the action. We have two areas of action in this poem:the houses haunted by people in their nightgowns getting ready for bed and thedrunken sailor probably down at the docks. Once you have the center of actionyou can begin to visualize the meaning of the poem.
First lets discuss the nightgown people. What are these peoplelike? First of all theyre going to bed at ten oclock in plain white nightgowns. What image strikes you with the verb haunted? Are these peopledrifting through their own homes? Are they full of life? Why so muchdescription of what their nightgowns arenot?
Second the sailor who falls asleep in his boots what is he like?Is he full of life or is he drifting through his life in plain night clothes?
Third why is the bedtime ten oclock such a disillusionment?The speaker of the poem (not the same as the poet) is making an observationabout how to live life. What do you think it is?