Dover Beach Assignment
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Assignment 1 (200 words)
http://www.warpoetry.co.uk/owen1.html
http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/arnold/writings/doverbeach.html
Explain how the images in Wilfred Owen’s “Dulce et Decorum Est” develop further the ideas and sentiments suggested by Arnold’s final line concerning “ignorant armies clash[ing] by night.”
Assignment 2 (300 words)
http://www.jimmysantiagobaca.com/greenchile.html
How is this poem “Green Chile” a love poem? Compare the kind of love this poem illustrates (and it could be more than one kind of love) to the kind of love that Sharon Olds’ “Last Night” illustrates. In Olds’ poem, dragonflies are the dominant image. In Santiago’s poem, chile peppers are the dominant image. What do these images share in terms of the message they portray? Be specific and think broadly!
Last Night
by Sharon Olds
The next day, I am almost afraid.
Love? It was more like dragonflies
in the sun, 100 degrees at noon,
the ends of their abdomens stuck together, I
close my eyes when I remember. I hardly
knew myself, like something twisting and
twisting out of a chrysalis,
enormous, without language, all
head, all shut eyes, and the humming
like madness, the way they writhe away,
and do not leave, back, back,
away, back. Did I know you? No kiss,
no tenderness—-more like killing, death-grip
holding to life, genitals
like violent hands clasped tight
barely moving, more like being closed
in a great jaw and eaten, and the screaming
I groan to remember it, and when we started
to die, then I refuse to remember,
the way a drunkard forgets. After,
you held my hands extremely hard as my
body moved in shudders like the ferry when its
axle is loosed past engagement, you kept me
sealed exactly against you, our hairlines
wet as the arc of a gateway after
a cloudburst, you secured me in your arms till I slept—-
that was love, and we woke in the morning
clasped, fragrant, buoyant, that was
the morning after love.