Term 3 Week 4 : Personification

This week, a literacy device called Personification was introduced to the class.

Personification considers objects as alive, although in fact they are not. It depicts the objects as having human qualities. It assigns living qualities such as habits, actions, feelings, thoughts, and even personalities, to things that are not human.

Examples include:

1) The moon smiles to me at night.

2) Yellow leaves parachute down the trees onto the ground.

3) The dogs sympathized with me, and comforted me through the toughest of times.

4) Time will march on forever, so make sure you don't waste any of it.

If you noticed well enough, Personification can be sub-classified into 3 different categories:
***** Objects, Concepts & Animals *****

That's it for the post. See you next time for another blog post.

Term 3 Week 6 : 10-step Poem Analysis

Using a quick 10-step method, analysing poems just got easier. The following is the 10-step process done on the poem titled "Three or So".

1. Forget what the poem may or may not mean, or what it may be about.
   
   
2. Look at just the title and write down about half a dozen things that the title suggests to you. Give literal meanings as well as other associations.
   
   a) Poem about a child who is about three years old
   b) Counting things
   c) Guessing a child's age
   d) Recalling childhood memories
   e) Recalling an event related to a child
   
   
3. Read the poem once quickly, and then several more times slowly. Try to hear the poem aloud in the head. DO NOT recite the poem aloud in class; if you must hear it aloud, read it quietly to yourself.
   
   
4. Write down a list of all those things in the poem that force their attention on you or which catch your interest for a particular reason. This includes unusual/odd/striking words, rhymes, or repetitions/patterns/contrasts, etc.
   
   a) "mother's eyes & brother's smile" ---> the two phrases rhyme
   b) "drone, howl, scream, shush, whooshing" ---> emphasises on the scariness of the scene
   c) "I've forgotten... I've forgotten... I've forgotten" ---> poet has forgotten about her
   childhood, probably adult now
   d) "She's someone else now, to be wondered at" ---> poet has probably changed from that
   experience
   
   
5. Write down any features of figurative language in the poem: metaphors, similes, personification, alliteration, assonance, onomatopoeia, symbolism, etc.
   
   a) Onomatopoeia
   b) Assonance
   c) Rhyme
   d) Alliteration
   e) Symbolism
   
   
6. Write down groups of words that may be thematically similar (for example, that all similes make reference to animals/death/plants, etc., or all the first words of lines are conjunction words, etc.). Don't worry about whether your groups of words seem silly or improbable; look at what you have observed and ask yourself: what is its significance?
   
   Symbolism in stanzas 4 and 5 describe a gangster's dangerous environment.
   Significance ---> could show how entering alley-way changed the author
   
   
7. Look at your lists, notes, and groups. Do you see any pattern taking shape? If so, WRITE DOWN this pattern.
   
   I do not see any pattern.
   
   
8. Read the poem again and WRITE DOWN your intelligent guesses of what the poem may mean.
   
   a) Author is reflecting about her past and regrets one of her past actions as a child.
   b) Thinking about her child, about what happened to her and the similarities they share.
   
   
9. Answer the following questions:
   
   a) Who is "speaking" in the poem? Is it the poet or a persona?
   The poet is speaking here, aka. this is a first-person poem.
   b) Who is the poem "spoken" to? In other words, who is the audience for this poem? Is it to a particular person, to the poet himself (reflective) or to the public in general?
   It is to the poet herself, aka. this poem is reflective. It can also be to her child.
   c) What is the speaker's attitude to this audience? Is it angry, sincere, joking, teasing, etc.?
   She is angry towards herself/her child, and is also frustrated.
   d) What is the poet's attitude to this audience? (This may be different from the speaker.)
   The same as the speaker.
   e) Why is the poem organized in the way that it is?
   The poet was trying to organize it in such a way that she first tells us how we reminisce on a photo of a young child, how it leads to a reflection of the past event, and how she feels about it. It is organized such that we can understand how she feels.
   f) What is the effect of all the things you have written down in Steps 2-8?
   It gives us an image, about the event that happened to the child, or the poet in her childhood times, and allows us to synchronize with the poet's feelings.
   
   
10. Write down your guess at the poet's intent: what do you think the poet hoped to accomplish in writing this poem?
    
    The poet hoped that this message could reach her daughter someday, who has probably gone lost from the event that was described in stanzas 4 and 5. / She wanted to remember this incident and teach her children, nephew, etc. not to follow her footsteps.

This marks the end for my blog post. See you next time for another blog post.

Term 3 Week 7 : Lessons Learnt from Poetry

Poetry has a lot of lessons in store for all. It holds many lessons, many messages and techniques that everyone could learn. Here are just some of the things that I have learnt from studying poetry all this while.

1. A good poem uses meaningful figurative language to convey its message to its readers.
   
   You are wondering why poems were so complicated and hard to understand in the first place. The truth is that once you understand the ways of poetry you'd appreciate poems and find that its meaning gets to you rather immediately.
   
   
2. Poetry... is A LOT harder than you think.
   
   A lot of concepts and topics go into poetry. In order to understand a good poem well, good knowledge about all these concepts is needed. Examples include alliteration, irony, assonance and so on. And analysing poems is also difficult because you have to read between the lines. You must catch anything that catches your attention, and infer what it actually conveys.
   
   
3. Poetry is a good way to enhance your linguistic and analytical skills.
   
   Poetry can truly improve your linguistic skills as you find ways to make your poem truly meaningful, colourful and expressive. It can be a true challenge to actually make it look real, with a message. Also, trying to understand poems can also improve analytical skills. Looking out for its message, displayed through vivid description, can really make us much sharper in detecting the message in the poem, and this can even be applied to other real-life applications, like determining a correct course of action when faced with a situation, given the circumstances.

Poetry has many benefits, so I'm sure that somehow, sometime, all these things Mr Lundberg is teaching me will be put into good use, and all would be worth it.

I'll see you next time with another blog post.

Term 3 Week 4 : Limericks

This week, Limericks were also introduced to the class.

Limericks are 5-line poems with only one stanza, where lines 1, 2 and 5 rhyme, and lines 3 and 4 rhyme, separately from the first 3 lines. It suggests a funny person, usually in ridiculous ways. An example is as follows:

A YOUNG MAN OF CALCUTTA ----------> title

There was a young man of Calcutta ----> rhyme (a)

Who spoke with a terrible stutter. ----> rhyme (a)

At breakfast he said, ----> rhyme (b)

'Give me b-b-b-bread, ----> rhyme (b)

And some b-b-b-b-b-b-butter.' ----> rhyme (a)

Also notice that lines 1, 2 and 5 are long lines while lines 3 and 4 are short ones. As seen here, the limerick describes a man from Calcutta (used probably for rhyme purposes) with a ridiculously bad stutter. Therefore these short poems are something like bizarre ideas portrayed through impossible events. One more thing, in limericks, past tense is always used.

An example of my own limerick:

THE FAT MAN NAMED STEVE

There was a fat man named Steve,

Who ate burgers, nuggets and steak.

He was such a big "ball",

That one day he had a fall,

And he rolled, like a wheel, down the street.

I'll see you next time with another blog post.

Term 3 Week 4 : Onomatopoeia

This week's lesson is about Onomatopoeia.

The seemingly long word actually has a very simple meaning in it. It is just a term used to describe a set of sound words, like bang, zing, gobble, and so on. These words can actually put a lot of meaning into a poem, emphasising on the intensity of an action, or just describing it, for example, munch sounds like small bites but chomp sounds like someone is taking big bites.

And now with my own poem using onomatopoeia:

Chomping on your beef steak.

Slurping on your pasta.

Crunching on your cookies.

That's what you do, fat pig.

Gulping on your soft drink.

Gobbling on your cake.

Munching on your fries.

That's what you do, fat pig.

You just cannot stop,

Chomping, slurping, munching,

Gulping, gobbling, nibbling,

When is it going to end?

You chomp and crunch on your chips,

And sip and slurp on your soda.

You gulp and gobble on your chicken.

You really eat like a fat pig.

Onomatopoeia in this poem is used to show how much of a big eater the person in the poem is. Through loud eating words like "chomp", "munch" and "gobble", it gives a reader the impression of how loudly, and how heavily, this person eats.

Alliteration is also used in the last stanza.

I'll see you next time with another blog post.