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Poetry, 1

Lesson One: What is and is not a poem.

Read the samples below. Which ones are poems? Which ones are not, and what are they if not
poems? Identify the samples you believe are poems, and compare them to the non-poems. What
are the characteristics you use to determine whether or not the sample is a poem? Create a Tchart showing at least 4 characteristics each of what is a poem and what is not a poem. Due at the
end of the periodone chart per partnershipmake sure both students names are recorded.

Sample A
A dozen local brown eggs
A half-gallon of 2% milk
A loaf of freshly baked Italian bread
4 Boneless, skinless chicken breasts
1 lb. Capellini pasta
2 medium sized eggplants
Sample B
4 vine-grown tomatoes
Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Coffee filters
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Fabric softener
Which alters when it alteration finds,

Sample C

since feeling is first

Or bends with the remover to remove:

O, no! It is an ever-fixd mark,
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worths unknown, although its height be
taken.
Loves not Times fool, though rosy lips

and cheeks
who pays any attention

Within his bending sickles compass

come;
to the syntax of things

Love alters not with his brief hours and

weeks
will never wholly kiss you;
wholly to be a fool
while Spring is in the world

But bears it out even to the edge of doom.

If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

my blood approves,
and kisses are a better fate
than wisdom
Sample D
lady i swear by all flowers. Dont cry
At length the Parsonage was
discernible. The
--the best gesture of my brain is less than
garden sloping to the road, the house
standing
your eyelids flutter which says
on it, the green pales and the laurel hedge,
everything declared they were arriving. Mr.
we are for each other:then
Collins and Charlotte appeared at the door,
laugh,leaning back in my arms
and the carriage stopped at the small gate,
for lifes not a paragraph
which led by a short gravel walk to the house,

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Poetry, 1

amidst the nods and smiles of the whole

And death I think is no parenthesis
party. In a moment they were all out of the
chaise,
rejoicing at the sight of each other.

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Poetry, 1

NAMES: ___________________________ & ______________________________

Samples that ARE poems: (circle the relevant letters)
A

What IS a poem

D
What is NOT a poem

1.

1.

2.

2.

3.

3.

4.

4.

Closure: Discuss this with your partner, and write one response in the space below.
Based upon your work with the samples, what do you think poetry is really about? How is it
different from other writing?
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Poetry, 1

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