I love you when you're standing on the lawn
Peering at something in a tree: "It's gone
It was so small. It might come back" (all this
Voiced in a whisper softer than a kiss).
I love you when you call me to admire
A jet's pink trail above the sunset fire.
I love you when you're humming as you pack
A suitcase or the farcical car sack
With round-trip zipper. And I love you most
290 When with a pensive nod you greet her ghost
And hold her first toy on your palm, or look
At a postcard from her, found in a book.

Formal Analysis

This will be a 3-4-page paper in which you perform a poetic analysis of part of a section of the poem "Pale Fire." (Please note that 2.5 pages is not 3 pages.) Choose a section of the poem that is long enough (about 10 lines of poetry) that you have something to say about it, but not so long (more than 20 lines) that you can't analyze everything in it. Choose a section in which you feel that there is a significant shift of some kind, so that you can analyze the relationship between form and meaning across that shift.

Introduction

In the introduction of your paper, you should begin with descriptive claims specific to the section of the poem that you have chosen. You do not need to introduce the poem to the reader as if she has never read it, as you can assume that all your readers (me and your classmates) have already done so. You also do not need to start with generic statements like "Throughout history..." or "Everyone experiences...." I recommend getting started with something like, "In lines 49-60 of '[Poem],' [poet] claims that..." Go on to describe some of the analytical discoveries you made about the poetic meter and form in this section. Then, in your thesis statement, which I expect to see at the end of the first paragraph, you should attempt to make a strong interpretive claim about poetic style in the section you have chosen, and a suggestion about what this would contribute about your reader's understanding of the poem. Keep in mind that the thesis is often the first line of a paper to be drafted, and the last to be revised. Performing a good formal analysis will force your thesis to change, so do not expect to turn in your first draft. You will be making an argument, not writing a proof.

Body

In the body of your paper, you should use evidence from the text to support the claims of your thesis. Each paragraph should work with a single quotation from the section you've chosen, usually one line at a time. After each quotation, but before the period, there should be a parenthetical citation listing the line number (l. 49). A body paragraph should introduce the quotation in its context, describe its content, provide the quotation, explicate it from a formal perspective, and show how it relates to your thesis. Each paragraph should carefully explicate some relationship between the formal poetic properties of a quoted line to the meaning. Be sure to employ the terminology of poetic analysis that we have learned in class. Feel free to mark the meter of the quoted lines using a pen after printing your paper. This will enable me to follow your argument when you refer to a particular metrical foot.

Conclusion

In the conclusion, you should not feel the need to review everything you've already said. Rather, finish your paper by showing how this kind of analysis contributes to a fuller (or usefully nuanced) understanding of the text as a whole.

Keep in mind

It will never be your job in this course to evaluate a text. I am not grading you on your opinions about the text or your appraisal of it, though of course your own interests and skills will guide your choice of material and attention to it. You also should avoid, in this paper especially, the temptation to draw connections between the text and "truth" or "the world." Over the course of the semester, we will be discussing how and when literary scholars pull evidence from sources outside the text to guide their explication, but for this particular assignment, you should focus narrowly on the formal properties of the text itself as they relate to meaning. If you have other questions about my expectations for college writing, please see the lower sections of this page, and, of course, feel free to ask.