12 THEME AND TONE

Poetry is full of surprises. Poems express anger or outrage just as effectively as

love or sadness, and good poems can be written about going to a rock concert or
having lunch or mowing the lawn, as well as about making love or smelling flowers
or listening to Beethoven. Even poems on “predictable” subjects can surprise us
with unpredicted attitudes or sudden twists. Knowing that a poem is about some
par ticular subject or topic—love, for example, or death—may give us a general
idea of what to expect, but it never tells us altogether what we will find in a par tic-
ular poem. Labeling a poem a “love poem” or a “death poem” is a convenient way
to speak of its topic. But poems that may be loosely called “love poems” or “death
poems” may have little else in common, may express utterly different attitudes or
ideas, and may concentrate on very different aspects of the subject. Letting a poem
speak to us means more than merely figuring out its topic; it means listening to how
the poem says what it says. What a poem says involves its theme. How a poem
makes that statement involves its tone— the poem’s attitude or feelings toward its
topic. No two poems on the same subject affect us in exactly the same way; their
themes and tones vary, and even similar themes may be expressed in various ways,
creating different tones and effects.

TONE
Tone, a term borrowed from acoustics and music, refers to the qualities of the
language a speaker uses in social situations or in a poem, and it also refers to a
speaker’s intended effect. Tone is closely related to style and diction; it is an effect
of the speaker’s expressions, as if showing a real person’s feelings, manner, and
attitude or relationship to a listener and to the particular subject or situation. Thus,
the speaker may use angry or mocking words, may address the listener intimately
or distantly, may sincerely confess or coolly observe, may paint a grand picture or
narrate a legend.
The following poem describes a romantic encounter of sorts, but its tone may
surprise you. As you read the poem, work first to identify its speaker, situation,
and setting. Then try both to capture its tone in a single word or two and to figure
out which features of the poem help to create that tone.

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 W. D. SNODGR ASS Leaving the Motel 795

W. D. SNODGR ASS
Leaving the Motel
Outside, the last kids holler
Near the pool: they’ll stay the night.
Pick up the towels; fold your collar
Out of sight.
5 Check: is the second bed
Unrumpled, as agreed?
Landlords have to think ahead
In case of need,
Too. Keep things straight: don’t take
10 The matches, the wrong key rings—
We’ve nowhere we could keep a keepsake—
Ashtrays, combs, things
That sooner or later others
Would accidentally find.
15 Check: take nothing of one another’s
And leave behind
Your license number only,
Which they won’t care to trace;
We’ve paid. Still, should such things get lonely,
20 Leave in their vase
An aspirin to preserve
Our lilacs, the wayside flowers
We’ve gathered and must leave to serve
A few more hours;
25 That’s all. We can’t tell when
We’ll come back, can’t press claims,
We would no doubt have other rooms then,
Or other names.
1968

The title and details of Leaving the Motel indicate the situation and setting:
Two secret lovers are at the end of an afternoon sexual encounter in a motel room
(perhaps one is speaking for both of them), reminding themselves not to leave or
take with them any clues for “others” (line 13)—their spouses?— to find.
Whereas many poems on the topic of love confirm an enduring attachment or
express desire or suggest erotic experience, this poem focuses on the effort to erase
a stolen encounter. The two lovers have no names; indeed, they have registered
under false names. They have already paid for this temporary shelter, can’t stay the
night like other guests or build a home with children of their own, and are running
through a checklist of their agreements and duties (“Check,” “Keep things straight,”
“Check” [lines 5, 9, 15]). Other than the “wayside” lilacs (line 22), the objects men-
tioned are trivial, from matches and key rings to license numbers. The matter-of- —-1
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 796 CH. 12 | THEME A ND TONE

the last two stanzas in the wish to make “claims” or preserve flowers [line 26]). The
failure to express love— or guilt— enhances the effect when the tone shifts, at the
word “still” (line 19), to the second thoughts about leaving something behind. The
poem’s short rhyming lines, sounding brisk and somewhat impersonal, contrast
with the situation and add to the tone of subdued regret that nothing lasts.

THEME
Our response to the tone of a poem, however it surprises or jars or stirs us, guides us
to understand its theme (or themes): what the poem expresses about its topic. A
theme is not simply a work’s subject or its topic; it is a statement about that topic.
Although we can usually agree on what a poem is about without much difficulty, it is
harder to determine how to state a poem’s theme. Not only may a theme be expressed
in several different ways, but a single poem may also have more than one theme.
Sometimes the poet explicitly states a poem’s theme, and such a statement may clar-
ify why the author chose a particular mode of presentation and how the poem fits
into the author’s own patterns of thinking and growing. However, the author’s words
may give a misleading view of how most people read the poem, just as a person’s self-
assessment may not be all we need in order to understand his or  her character.
Further study of the poem is necessary to understand how it fulfills— or fails to
fulfill—the author’s intentions. Despite the difficulty of identifying and expressing
themes, doing so is an important step in understanding and writing about poetry.

Topic Versus Tone and Theme:

A Comparative Exercise
Reading two or more poems with similar topics side by side may suggest
how each is distinctive in what it has to say and how it does so—its theme
and tone. The following two poems are about animals, although both of
them place their final emphasis on human beings: The animal in each case
is only the means to the end of exploring human nature. The poems share
the assumption that animal behavior may appear to reflect human habits
and conduct, and that it may reveal much about us; in each case the charac-
ter central to the poem is revealed to be surprisingly unlike the way she thinks
of herself. But the poems differ in their tones, in the specific relationship
between the woman and the animals, and in their themes.
How would you describe the tone of the following poem? its topic and theme?

MAXINE KUMIN
Woodchucks
Gassing the woodchucks didn’t turn out right.
The knockout bomb from the Feed and Grain Exchange
was featured as merciful, quick at the bone
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 A DRIENNE RICH, Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers 797

and the case we had against them was airtight,

5 both exits shoehorned shut with puddingstone,1
but they had a sub-sub-basement out of range.
Next morning they turned up again, no worse
for the cyanide than we for our cigarettes
and state-store Scotch, all of us up to scratch.
10 They brought down the marigolds as a matter of course
and then took over the vegetable patch
nipping the broccoli shoots, beheading the carrots.
The food from our mouths, I said, righteously thrilling
to the feel of the .22, the bullets’ neat noses.
15 I, a lapsed pacifist fallen from grace
puffed with Darwinian pieties for killing,
now drew a bead on the littlest woodchuck’s face.
He died down in the everbearing roses.
Ten minutes later I dropped the mother. She
20 flipflopped in the air and fell, her needle teeth
still hooked in a leaf of early Swiss chard.
Another baby next. O one-two-three
the murderer inside me rose up hard,
the hawkeye killer came on stage forthwith.
25 There’s one chuck left. Old wily fellow, he keeps
me cocked and ready day after day after day.
All night I hunt his humped-up form. I dream
I sight along the barrel in my sleep.
If only they’d all consented to die unseen
30 gassed underground the quiet Nazi way.
1972

As you read Woodchucks aloud, how does your tone of voice change from
beginning to end? What tone do you use to read the ending? How does the
hunter feel about her increasing attraction to violence? Why does the poem
begin by calling the gassing of the woodchucks “merciful” (line 3) and end by
describing it as “the quiet Nazi way” (line 30)? What names does the hunter
call herself? How does the name-calling affect your feelings about her?
Exactly when does the hunter begin to enjoy the feel of the gun and the idea of
killing? How does the poet make that clear?

ADRIENNE RICH
Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers
Aunt Jennifer’s tigers prance across a screen,
Bright topaz denizens of a world of green.

1. Mixture of cement, pebbles, and gravel. —-1

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 798 CH. 12 | THEME A ND TONE

(continued)
They do not fear the men beneath the tree;
They pace in sleek chivalric certainty.
5 Aunt Jennifer’s fingers fluttering through her wool
Find even the ivory needle hard to pull.
The massive weight of Uncle’s wedding band
Sits heavily upon Aunt Jennifer’s hand.
When Aunt is dead, her terrified hands will lie
10 Still ringed with ordeals she was mastered by.
The tigers in the panel that she made
Will go on prancing, proud and unafraid.
1951

In this poem, why are tigers a particularly appropriate contrast to the

woman embroidering or cross-stitching a hunting scene? What words
describing the tigers seem particularly significant? Why are Aunt Jennifer’s
hands described as “terrified” (line 9)? What clues does the poem give about
why Aunt Jennifer is so afraid? How does the poem make you feel about
Aunt Jennifer’s life and death? How would you describe the tone of the
poem? Why does the poem begin and end with the tigers?

AUTHORS ON THEIR WORK

AD R I EN N E R ICH ( 1929–2012)
From “When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision” (1971)*
In writing this poem, composed and apparently cool as it is, I thought I was creat-
ing a portrait of an imaginary woman. But this woman suffers from the opposition
of her imagination, worked out in tapestry, and her lifestyle, “ringed with ordeals
she was mastered by.” It was important to me that Aunt Jennifer was a person as
distinct from myself as possible— distanced by the formalism of the poem, by its
objective, observant tone— even by putting the woman in a different generation.

*“When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision.” Women’s Forum of the MLA, Dec. 1971,
Chicago. Address.

Questions for Comparing Poems

Here are some questions and steps for identifying, interpreting, and com-
paring the topic, theme, and tone of more than one poem. Some of these
steps will be familiar to you already, and you may discover other ways to illu-
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 THEME A ND TONE 799

As you respond to these questions or prompts, be sure to note line numbers

to cite your evidence, according to this format: “puddingstone” (line 5) or “her
terrified hands will lie / Still ringed with ordeals” (lines 9–10).

1. Read each poem through slowly and carefully.

2. Compare the titles. How do the titles point to the topics and possible
themes, and are these similar or different? Take Woodchucks and Aunt
Jennifer’s Tigers, for example. What different qualities do we associate
with woodchucks or tigers, animals rarely kept as pets?
3. What is the situation and setting in each poem? Make a list of the words in
each poem that name objects or indicate actions. Which things or scenes are
most significant, and how would you visualize or imagine them? Compare
your notes on situation, setting, objects, and actions in both poems.
4. Who are the speakers? Are there other people in the poems? Is anyone iden-
tified as a listener or auditor? Are any things or beings (such as animals)
personified or given human traits? Compare the speakers and other person-
alities in the poems.
5. What happens in each poem? Look closely at each stanza. Could the stanzas
or lines be rearranged without making a difference? Does one poem tell of a
single event or short passage of time, whereas another describes repeated
actions or longer periods? Is one poem more eventful than the other?
6. Write down four or five words that describe the tone of each poem. Do these
words also describe the language or style of each poem? Can you use all or
some of the same words for both poems?
7. What is different about the two styles and forms, including length? Notice
the rhythms and sounds, any regular or irregular patterns of meter or rhyme,
and the shape of the stanzas.
8. Re-read the poems and try to express their themes in complete sentences.
Then try to combine the two themes in a single statement that notes simi-
larities and differences between them. Does your statement comparing the
themes resemble your comparison of the tone and style of the two poems?
Do the themes relate to similar or different historical, political, and social
issues or contexts featured in the poems? Do the poems develop their
themes with comparable allusions to myth, religion, literature, art, or other
familiar or traditional ideas or associations?
9. Drawing on your notes and responses to the other questions, outline and
write an essay comparing the two poems.

THEME AND CONFLICT

Since a theme is an idea implied by all of the elements of the poem working
together, identifying theme—as opposed to topic and tone— can sometimes be a
tough and tricky business. In reading and writing about poetry, then, it often
helps to focus first— and most—on conflict. Though we usually think of conflict
as an aspect of plot, even perfectly plotless poems are almost always organized
around and devoted to exploring conflicts and tensions. To begin to identify these,
look for contrasts and think about the conflict they imply.
Take, for example, Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers. Though it might be hard to say at
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 800 CH. 12 | THEME A ND TONE

“prance” and “pace” freely, “proud and unafraid” through a world as colorful and
as lasting as they are (lines 1, 4, 12), Aunt Jennifer and her world seem just the
opposite: Nothing but her fingers and hands move at all in the poem, and even they
are “terrified” and tentative, “fluttering through her wool,” “weight[ed]” down by a
heavy “wedding band” in life and stilled permanently by death (lines 9, 5, 7). We
have, then, not just a contrast but a multifaceted conflict— between imaginary
and real worlds, between individual vision and social obligation. What the poem
concludes about this conflict is its theme, but starting with questions about con-
flict often provides not only an easier way into the poem but also a much richer,
more textured experience and understanding of it.
The following poem is in fact all about just this issue—the role of conflict in
poetry. As you read the poem, try to identify the contrasts it sets up, the underlying
conflict those contrasts point to, and the theme that ultimately emerges. Then test
your own interpretation of the poem against the author’s comments about how the
poem came to be and what, for her, it’s all about.

ADRIENNE SU
On Writing
A love poem risks becoming a ruin,
public, irretrievable, a form of tattooing,
while loss, being permanent,
can sustain a thousand documents.
5 Loss predominates in history,
smorgasbord of death, betrayal, heresy,
crime, contagion, deployment, divorce.
A writer could remain aboard
the ship of grief and thrive, never
10 approaching the shores of rapture.
What can be said about elation
that the elated, seeking consolation
from their joy, will go to books for?
It’s wiser and quicker to look for
15 a poem in the dentist’s chair
than in the luxury suite where
eternal love, declared, turns out
to be eternal. Who cares about
a stranger’s bliss? Thus the juncture
20 where I’m stalled, unaccustomed
to integrity, despite your presence,
our tranquility, and every confidence.
2012
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 W ILLI A M BL A K E London 801

AUTHORS ON THEIR WORK

AD RIEN N E SU (b. 1967 )
From The Best American Poetry 2013 (2013)*
When I started assembling my newest manuscript, The House Unburned, I found
it to be suffering from structural gaps and an excess of grief and regret. [. . .]
To round it out, I needed to come up with some poems of happiness, or at
least the absence of unhappiness. This presented a problem, since, as I’m always
telling students, successful poems are born of uncertainty, interior conflict, the
modes of strug gle that lack clear solutions. I went back and forth between two
selves: the editor, whose vision for the collection required some happier poems,
and the poet, who raged against the affront of an assignment so lacking in ambi-
guity. How, argued the poet, can happiness, gratification, or success be complex
enough to give life to a poem?
Eventually, the answer came with a shift in setting. If the poem could be about
writing, conflict would be inherent in the question. So I gave myself permission to
write about writing. Now that I had a conflict, the road to the poem appeared. (198)

*The Best American Poetry 2013. Edited by Denise Duhamel and David Lehman, Scribner
Poetry, 2013.

POEMS FOR FURTHER STUDY

WILLIAM BLAKE
London
I wander through each chartered street,
Near where the chartered Thames does flow,
And mark in every face I meet
Marks of weakness, marks of woe.
5 In every cry of every man,
In every Infant’s cry of fear,
In every voice, in every ban,
The mind-forged manacles I hear.
How the Chimney-sweeper’s cry
10 Every black’ning Church appalls;
And the hapless Soldier’s sigh
Runs in blood down Palace walls.
But most through midnight streets I hear
How the youthful Harlot’s curse
15 Blasts the new-born Infant’s tear,
And blights with plagues the Marriage hearse.
1794 —-1
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 802 CH. 12 | THEME A ND TONE

• Does the tone of this poem seem sad, angry, or both? Why and how so?
How might the repeated word “chartered” (lines 1 and 2) suggest a theme?

PAUL LAURENCE DUNBAR

Sympathy
I know what the caged bird feels, alas!
When the sun is bright on the upland slopes;
When the wind stirs soft through the springing grass,
And the river flows like a stream of glass;
5 When the first bird sings and the first bud opens,
And the faint perfume from its chalice steals—
I know what the caged bird feels!
I know why the caged bird beats his wing
Till its blood is red on the cruel bars;
10 For he must fly back to his perch and cling
When he fain2 would be on the bough a-swing;
And a pain still throbs in the old, old scars
And they pulse again with a keener sting—
I know why he beats his wing!
15 I know why the caged bird sings, ah me,
When his wing is bruised and his bosom sore,—
When he beats his bars and he would be free;
It is not a carol of joy or glee,
But a prayer that he sends from his heart’s deep core,
20 But a plea, that upward to Heaven he flings—
I know why the caged bird sings!
1893

• How might your interpretation of this poem’s theme change depending on

whether or not you consider the date of its publication and/or the fact that
its author was African American?

W. H. AUDEN
[Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone]
Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.
5 Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling on the sky the message He Is Dead,
Put crêpe bows round the white necks of the public doves,
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.

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 SH A RON OLDS Last Night 803

He was my North, my South, my East and West,

10 My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last for ever: I was wrong.
The stars are not wanted now: put out every one;
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun;
15 Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood;
For nothing now can ever come to any good.
c. 1936

• In what tone of voice would you read line 12? How might you turn this line
into a statement of the poem’s theme?

SHARON OLDS
Last Night
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
5 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
10 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
15 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,
20 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
25 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.
1996 —-1
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 804 CH. 12 | THEME A ND TONE

• What comparison is the speaker of this poem making between “dragonflies /

in the sun” and a night of love-making (lines 2–3)? What other comparisons
are made in the poem? How do they work together and contribute to tone
and theme?

KAY RYAN
Repulsive Theory
Little has been made
of the soft, skirting action
of magnets reversed,
while much has been
5 made of attraction.
But is it not this pillowy
principle of repulsion
that produces the
doily edges of oceans
10 or the arabesques of thought?
And do these cutout coasts
and incurved rhetorical beaches
not baffle the onslaught
of the sea or objectionable people
15 and give private life
what small protection it’s got?
Praise then the oiled motions
of avoidance, the pearly
convolutions of all that
20 slides off or takes a
wide berth; praise every
eddying vacancy of Earth,
all the dimpled depths
of pooling space, the whole
25 swirl set up by fending-off—
extending far beyond the personal,
I’m convinced—
immense and good
in a cosmological sense:
30 unpressing us against
each other, lending
the necessary never
to never-ending.
2003

• What is the “theory” articulated in this poem? Might that theory be the
poem’s theme?

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 TERR A NCE H AY ES Carp Poem 805

TERR ANCE HAYES

Carp Poem
After I have parked below the spray paint caked in the granite
grooves of the Frederick Douglass3 Middle School sign,
where men-size children loiter like shadows draped in outsize
denim, jerseys, braids, and boots that mean I am no longer young;
5 after I have made my way to the New Orleans Parish Jail down the
block,
where the black prison guard wearing the same weariness
my prison guard father wears buzzes me in. I follow his pistol and shield
along each corridor trying not to look at the black men
boxed and bunked around me until I reach the tiny classroom
10 where two dozen black boys are dressed in jumpsuits orange as the carp
I saw in a pond once in Japan, so many fat, snaggletoothed fish
ganged in and lurching for food that a lightweight tourist could have
crossed
the water on their backs so long as he had tiny rice balls or bread
to drop into the mouths below his footsteps, which I’m thinking
15 is how Jesus must have walked on the lake that day, the crackers and
crumbs
falling from the folds of his robe, and how maybe it was the one fish
so hungry it leaped up his sleeve that he later miraculously changed
into a narrow loaf of bread, something that could stick to a believer’s
ribs,
and don’t get me wrong, I’m a believer too, in the power of food at least,
20 having seen a footbridge of carp packed gill to gill, packed tighter
than a room of boy prisoners waiting to talk poetry with a young black
poet,
packed so close they’d have eaten each other had there been nothing
else to eat.
2010

• What theme might emerge from the particular way this poem describes and
compares what seems like three very different episodes— at the New Orleans
Parish Jail, in a Japanese garden, and in the Bible? What might the poem
suggest about prison? about poetry?

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3. Prominent African American abolitionist, politician, and former slave (c. 1818–95). —0
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 806 CH. 12 | THEME A ND TONE

C. K. WILLIAMS
The Economy Rescued by My Mother
Returning to Shop
I sleep as always these dark days aquiver I awake atremble my limbs jerk I
thrash like a gaffed shark
no not shark too many sharks already fiscal financial that’s why gullible
guppy I was I thought
the boom wouldn’t bust the bubble not burst shred leave us hanging over
this thorny dollarless void
Markets staggered sales down the chute confidence off the cliff the aisles
of the box stores and chains
5 depeopled ghost towns even the parking lots empty the lane lines in
martial formation like wings
stripped of their feathers forlornly signalling for interstellar relief how not
quiver not jerk and thrash?
Wait don’t give up too soon here comes my mother back from beyond and
she’s going to shop!
Avid sharp-eyed alert gleaming and beaming as she always was on our old
bus expeditions downtown
with a vigilance keen and serene and hands entities sentient and shrewd
cunningly separate from her
10 evolved to analyze things’ intrinsic or better overlooked worth as they
collate the goods on their racks—
a blouse in silk and on sale!—which she shows an admiring mirror and
opens her wallet and buys
buys as that president told us we should4 though only my mother has
sufficient passion to effect this
Didn’t I once watch her unwrap a pair of new shoes to inhale the scent of
their unblemished soles
and in the very next quarter didn’t the G.N.P.5 begin to stir the number
of long-term unemployed slip
15 because of my mother’s single-minded devotion to the subtlest aspects of
commerce and exchange?
And all this after growing up poor in my grandmother’s half-starving
canned green-pea kitchen
and after surviving Depression and War how did she garner so much
abstruse lore on redistribution
how accrue so many practical speculations about what we’d need to
correct these failures and flops?

4. In a national address delivered shortly after the September 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade
Center and Pentagon, President George  W. Bush (b. 1946) called for “continued participation and
confidence in the American economy”; these and other remarks were later widely interpreted as a call
for Americans to “go shopping.”
-1— 5. Gross national product (acronym), total value of goods and ser vices produced by a nation’s residents
0— in a given time, usually a year.
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 SUGGESTIONS FOR W RITING 807

Delighted the gods of money must be to behold her again as she conveys
herself through their portals
20 Here’s ingenious Hepbaestus6 devising for our enchantment his gadgets
and gizmos and glitter
and here Hermes publicity market sales (not Hermès7 shrine for the rich
and pretend rich)
and vast Hades8 who lurks in the fear beneath all waiting to drag us down
to the realm of dire want
where a hound with three heads a banker’s a hedge-funder’s an
under-prime mortgage broker’s.9
snarls as my mother who once filched from her sister coins she didn’t
have to buy me an ice cream
25 croons as she crooned then Make it last and retires to her couch and
opens her credit-card statement
and pays isn’t it splendid to be able to pay for your new skirt your sheer
stockings your eau de toilette1
and so redeem the Dow and the Nasdaq2 and hallow us all for our humble
hungers our almost innocent greed?

• How do the poem’s title, diction, and many allusions contribute to its tone?

SUGGESTIONS FOR WRITING

1. Choose any two poems in this chapter that express positive and negative feelings
about their topics. How do the tones of the poems combine or contrast the feelings?
Is there a shift in tone in each poem? If so, where? How is the shift revealed through
language? Write an essay in which you compare the way each poet accomplishes
this shifting of tone.
2. Write an essay in which you consider the use of language to create tone in any two
or more poems on the same subject. How do the tones suit the themes of these
poems?
3. Write an essay on Maxine Kumin’s Woodchucks in which you show that the speak-
er’s conflict between sympathy and murderous instinct is reflected in the mixed tone
and varied vocabulary. Focus on formal and informal tone, noting phrases from law
or religion—“the case we had against them”; “fallen from grace” (lines 4, 15)— or from
everyday speech—“up to scratch,” “food from our mouths” (lines 9, 13). How does the
diction, or word choice, of the poem affect its tone?

6. Greek god of fi re and of craftsmen; his Latin name is Vulcan.

7. In other words, the messenger of the gods and god of merchants, thieves, and oratory in Greek my thol-
ogy, not the high-end French retail chain famous for its luxury leather goods, perfume, and scarves.
8. Underworld or god of the Underworld in Greek my thology; his Latin name is Pluto.
9. Usually subprime mortgage, high-risk mortgage granted to a borrower with a lower credit rating than
required for a conventional mortgage. Hedge-funder: someone who runs a high-risk, high-return port-
folio of investments. Hound with three heads: According to Greek myth, the entrance to Hades is
guarded by Cerberus, a monstrous dog with at least three heads.
1. Literally, toilet water (French), a form of perfume.
2. National Association of Securities Dealers Automated Quotations (acronym), American stock
exchange that includes technology giants Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Amazon. Dow: Dow Jones
Industrial Average, a calculation of the average price of a select group of significant stocks traded on —-1
the NASDAQ and the New York Stock Exchange. —0
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 808 CH. 12 | THEME A ND TONE

4. Reimagine W. D. Snodgrass’s Leaving the Motel as a poem in which the speaker

and lover are happy and delighted with each other and certain that the relationship
will last forever. What details and phrases would need to be changed for the poem to
express a positive feeling about the relationship? Write an essay in which you relate
the tone of the poem to the subject of secret and short-lived sexual relationships.
5. Write an essay exploring just who or what C. K. Williams seems to poke fun at in
The Economy Rescued by My Mother Returning to Shop. For all its humor,
might the poem have a serious point or theme?

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 SAMPLE WRITING: RESPONSE PAPER
In the response paper that follows, Stephen Bordland works through Auden’s poem
Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone more or less line by line, writing
down whatever ideas come to him. The form of this paper is less important than the
process of thinking carefully about the poem’s music, emotions, and meanings. As
you can see, by the time Stephen reaches the end of his response, he has decided on
a topic for the more formal essay that he will write later.

Bordland 1

Stephen Bordland
Professor O’Connor
English 157
1 January 2017

Response Paper on Auden’s “Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone”

I fi rst heard this poem read aloud when I saw the movie Four Weddings and a
Funeral on cable. The character who read the poem was reading it at the funeral
of his lover. It was perfectly suited to the story and was very moving. I was
struck by the actor’s reading because the poem seemed to have a steady rhythm
for several lines and then suddenly hit what sounded like a dead end—“I thought
that love would last forever: I was wrong” (line 12). Hearing the actor’s reading of
this poem made me want to read it myself, to see if the poem would still affect
me if I read/heard it outside of the context of an emotional scene in a movie. It
did, and I think that the “I was wrong” line is the key—a turning point, I guess.
In the anthology, the poem seems to have no actual title (at least that’s how
I interpret the fact that the fi rst line is in brackets where the title usually goes),
but I did some searching on the Internet and found that this poem was once
called “Funeral Blues.” If I were reading the poem for the fi rst time under that
title, I would at least know that the poem has something to do with death right
from the start. But this title makes the poem sound irreverent rather than
sincerely painful. I wonder if that would have been true in the 1930s, when
Auden wrote the poem. There were lots of blues and jazz songs of that era whose
titles ended in “Blues” (like Robert Johnson’s “Kindhearted Woman Blues”), so
maybe the title wasn’t meant to be read the way that I’m reading it. Anyway,
I don’t know if Auden himself changed the title, or if there’s another story there,
but I think it’s a better poem without the title. —-1
—0
—+1
809

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 810 SA MPLE W RITING

Bordland 2
The poem starts with a request to an unknown person (everyone?) to make
some common aspects of daily life go away: “Stop all the clocks” (1) presumably
because time seems to be standing still; “cut off the telephone” (1) presumably
because the speaker wants to be alone and undisturbed, cut off from human
contact. I’m not sure what’s implied by “Prevent the dog from barking with a
juicy bone” (2) mainly because I’m confused about the literal meaning: Are we
supposed to prevent the dog from barking by giving him a juicy bone (one way
to interpret “with a juicy bone”), or are we supposed to prevent the dog with
a juicy bone in his mouth (another way of interpreting “with a juicy bone”) from
barking at all? I don’t think I really have a handle on what this line means in
relation to the other ones, but I’ll leave it for now. In the next line, “Silence the
pianos” (3) clearly means that the speaker wants no music now that his lover is
dead, except for the “muffled drum” (3) that will accompany the coffin and
mourners in the fourth line. It’s interesting that all of these things so far are
sounds—the tick-tock of the clock, the ring of the telephone, a barking dog,
music. They all seem to stand in for something, too—for the passing of time,
contact with other people (and with pets?), joy as expressed by music.
The image of “aeroplanes” (5) circling overhead (and “moaning” [5]—that’s a
really good choice of words) writing “He is Dead” (6) is very strong and would
have been a very modern reference at the time of this poem (c. 1936). A Christian
Science Monitor article about a “skywriting” pilot says that “[s]kywriting’s
heyday was from the 1930s to the early 1950s when Pepsi Cola used skywriting
as its main way of advertising” (Hartill), so the reference here is to a commercial
medium being used to make as many people as possible aware of the speaker’s
loss. If a poet tried to make a reference to something equivalent today, it would
have to be a television advertisement or a blog, maybe. I wonder if a modern poet
could really pull off a reference to a TV ad and still make it sound sincerely sad.
I’m not sure what the “crêpe bows round the white necks of the public
doves” (7) means. Would the bows even be visible? Does “crêpe” imply a color, or
is it just a type of fabric? And what is a public dove? I’m not sure I like the
repetition in this line of three adjective/noun pairs: “crepe bows,” “white necks,”
“public doves.” It seems too precious or “poetic.” The “traffic policemen” (8) that
I’ve seen all wear white gloves so that their hand movements can be seen clearly.
The speaker wants them all to wear “black cotton gloves,” the appropriate color for
mourning, but that would probably create real problems for the drivers trying to
see what the policemen are directing them to do. So, I wonder if the bows on
doves and black gloves on cops are both there to show us that the speaker is
feeling not just the sort of grief that moves him to write poetry, but also the sort of
intense pain that makes him want to throw the rest of the world into the same
confusion and chaos he’s experiencing. Or at least, he’s not only asking to be
alone, but also wanting the rest of the world to share his grief.
In the next four lines, the speaker turns to himself and his lover: “He was my
North, my South, my East and West / My working week and my Sunday rest” (9-12).

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 RESPONSE PA PER 811

Bordland 3
These lines flow so smoothly, with a soothing, regular rhythm; they’re almost
sing-songy. But they don’t seem sappy or wrong in this poem; they seem painfully
sincere. The author uses place (as described by the compass) and time (the whole
week, the reference to noon and midnight) to make very clear, in case we hadn’t
figured it out from the preceding lines, that his lover was everything to him. In the
fourth line of this section, this regular rhythm is interrupted, or even stopped
dead: “I thought that love would last for ever: I was wrong” (12). This is a very true
and moving conclusion to reach, but it also seems ironic, once we read to the end
of the poem. If the speaker was wrong to believe (before the death of his lover) that
love would last forever, isn’t it possible that he’s wrong about the conclusion
“nothing now can ever come to any good” (16)—that grief will last forever?
I think that Auden probably intended us to be aware of this irony. It seems to
me that the poem is broken into three major parts. First, we sympathize with the
speaker’s grief and sense of loss. Then we’re supposed to stop at the point where
the speaker makes a judgment about his understanding of the world prior to that
loss (“I thought that love would last for ever: I was wrong” [12]) and to spend a
moment absorbing the meaning of that judgment. Finally, as we read the most
extreme expression of the speaker’s loss (“Pack up the moon and dismantle the
sun” [14]), we can see that although we sympathize and understand, we also know
something that the speaker doesn’t know at the moment. Just as his love
apparently blinded the speaker to love’s inevitable end, so his profound grief is
probably blinding him to grief’s inevitable end. Also, it may just be me, but it
seems that this last part is almost too dramatic or theatrical, as if maybe the
speaker has made some sort of transition from being unself-consciously mournful
to being self-consciously aware that the way he’s expressing himself is poetic.
Back to the idea about the irony: The poem itself seems to be arguing against
the notion that love cannot last forever (or, okay, a very long time). After all, people
are still reading this poem, and I bet people will continue to read it for as long as
people read poetry. That’s about as close to forever as we get on this earth, so
even though the lovers of this poem are long dead, their love lives on, in a way.
Auden must have been aware of this when he was writing the poem. I wonder if
he ever said anything in letters, essays, or speeches about art and immortality? If
so, I think I’ll write a paper on that topic as addressed in this poem.

Bordland 4

Works Cited

Auden, W. H. “Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone.” The Norton Introduction
to Literature, edited by Kelly J. Mays, shorter 12th ed., W. W. Norton, 2017,
pp. 802-03.
Hartill, Lane. “Sky Writer.” Christian Science Monitor, 25 Jan. 2000, www
—-1
.csmonitor.com/2000/0125/p22s1.html.
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-1—
0—
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007-67831_ch04_1P.indd 812 11/17/16 10:58 PM

 Family
AN ALBUM

F amilies are the groundwork of society, and most people’s earliest memories
involve family members. Families may be nuclear or extended, biological or
adoptive, emotionally demonstrative or distant. Families may pass down tra-
ditions that younger generations may choose to abandon, embrace, or simply
tolerate. Adults who have left home may dwell on memories, good or bad, of their
mothers, fathers, brothers, or sisters. Each renewed contact with family can spark
conflicting thoughts and feelings. Hope, disappointment, or grief for one’s child can
find expression as a concentrated moment in a poem. A spouse or a child can
remind the speaker of the passage of time and mortality.
Because the family is such a basic unit of social interaction, many poems explore
family relations. The following poems are all, in different ways, about family. What
do these poems have in common? How do they differ? Which best capture your feel-
ings and ideas about family relationships? Can you find two poems that express the
same theme—in other words, can you accurately state their themes in the same way?
How do any two poems compare in tone? Which poems have surprising shifts in
tone? Do any poems express surprising or disturbing attitudes toward loved ones?

SIMON J. ORTIZ
My Father’s Song
Wanting to say things,
I miss my father tonight.
His voice, the slight catch,
the depth from his thin chest,
5 the tremble of emotion
in something he has just said
to his son, his song:
We planted corn one Spring at Acu1—
we planted several times
10 but this one particular time
I remember the soft damp sand
in my hand.
My father had stopped at one point
to show me an overturned furrow;
15 the plowshare had unearthed
the burrow nest of a mouse
in the soft moist sand.

1. Alternative name for Acoma village and/or pueblo, about sixty miles west of Albuquerque, New
Mexico. Sometimes translated as “the place that always was,” it is the oldest continuously inhabited —-1
community in the United States. —0
—+1
813

007-67831_ch04_1P.indd 813 11/17/16 10:58 PM

 814 FA MILY: A N A LBUM

Very gently, he scooped tiny pink animals

into the palm of his hand
20 and told me to touch them.
We took them to the edge
of the field and put them in the shade
of a sand moist clod.
I remember the very softness
25 of cool and warm sand and tiny alive mice
and my father saying things.
1976

• What are the “things” that the speaker wants to say (line 1)? Are they the
same “things” he remembers his father saying (line 26)? Does the poem itself
say these things?

ROBERT HAYDEN
Those Winter Sundays
Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
5 banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.
I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he’d call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house,
10 Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love’s austere and lonely offices?
1966

• Why does the poem begin with the words “Sundays too” (rather than, say,
“On Sundays”)? What are the “austere and lonely offices” to which the poem’s
final line refers?

ELLEN BRYANT VOIGT

My Mother
my mother my mother my mother she
could do anything so she did everything the world
was an unplowed field a dress to be hemmed a scraped knee it needed
a casserole it needed another alto in the choir her motto was apply
-1— yourself
0—
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007-67831_ch04_1P.indd 814 11/17/16 10:58 PM

 ELLEN BRYA NT VOIGT My Mother 815

5 the secret of life was spreading your gifts why hide your light
under a bushel2 you might
forget it there in the dark times the lonely times
the sun gone down on her resolve she slept a little first
so she’d be fresh she put on a little lipstick drawing on her smile
10 she pulled that hair up off her face she pulled her stockings on she
stepped
into her pumps she took up her matching purse already
packed with everything they all would learn
they would be nice they would
apologize they would be grateful whenever
15 they had forgotten what to pack she never did
she had a spare she kissed your cheek she wiped the mark
away with her own spit she marched you out again unless you were
that awful sort of stubborn broody3 child who more and more
I was who once had been so sweet so mild staying put
20 where she put me what happened
must have been the bushel I was hiding in
the sun gone down on her resolve she slept a little first
so she’d be fresh she pulled her stockings on she’d packed
the words for my every lack she had a little lipstick on her teeth the
mark
25 on my cheek would not rub off she gave the fluids from her mouth
to it she gave the tissues in her ample purse to it I never did
apologize I let my sister succor those in need and suffer
the little children4 my mother
knew we are self-canceling she gave herself
30 a lifetime C an average grade from then on out she kept
the lights on day and night a garden needs the light the sun
could not be counted on she slept a little day and night she didn’t need
her stockings or her purse she watered she weeded she fertilized she
stood
in front the tallest stalk keeping the deer the birds all
35 the world’s idle shameless thieves away
2011

• How might the poem’s form, especially its lack of punctuation and capi-
talization, contribute to tone? to its characterization of the speaker’s
mother?

2. See the Sermon on the Mount (Matt. 5.15–16): “Neither do men light a candle, and put it under a
bushel, but on a candlestick; and it giveth light until all that are in the house. / Let your light so shine
before men, that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father which is in heaven.”
3. Thoughtful and unhappy, given to brooding or worrying.
4. See Matthew 19.14: “But Jesus said, Suffer little children, and forbid them not, to come unto me: for
of such is the kingdom of heaven.” —-1
—0
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007-67831_ch04_1P.indd 815 11/17/16 10:58 PM

 816 FA MILY: A N A LBUM

MARTÍN ESPADA
Of the Threads That Connect the Stars
Did you ever see stars? asked my father with a cackle. He was not
speaking of the heavens, but the white flash in his head when a fist burst
between his eyes. In Brooklyn, this would cause men and boys to slap
the table with glee; this might be the only heavenly light we’d ever see.
5 I never saw stars. The sky in Brooklyn was a tide of smoke rolling over us
from the factory across the avenue, the mattresses burning in the
junkyard,
the ruins where squatters would sleep, the riots of 19665 that kept me
locked in my room like a suspect. My father talked truce on the streets.
My son can see the stars through the tall barrel of a telescope.
10 He names the galaxies with the numbers and letters of astronomy.
I cannot see what he sees in the telescope, no matter how many eyes
I shut.
I understand a smoking mattress better than the language of galaxies.
My father saw stars. My son sees stars. The earth rolls beneath
our feet. We lurch ahead, and one day we have walked this far.
2013

• How does the poem differentiate and connect three generations of one family
by describing the stars each did or didn’t, do or don’t, see?

EMILY GROSHOLZ
Eden
In lurid cartoon colors, the big baby
dinosaur steps backwards under the shadow
of an approaching tyrannosaurus rex.
“His mommy going to fi x it,” you remark,
5 serenely anxious, hoping for the best.
After the big explosion, after the lights
go down inside the house and up the street,
we rush outdoors to find a squirrel stopped
in straws of half-gnawed cable. I explain,
10 trying to fit the facts, “The squirrel is dead.”
No, you explain it otherwise to me.
“He’s sleeping. And his mommy going to come.”
Later, when the squirrel has been removed,
“His mommy fi x him,” you insist, insisting
15 on the right to know what you believe.

-1— 5. In July 1966, violent confl ict repeatedly erupted between blacks and Puerto Ricans in Brooklyn’s
0— troubled Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood.
+1—

007-67831_ch04_1P.indd 816 11/17/16 10:58 PM

 PHILIP L A RK IN This Be the Verse 817

The world is truly full of fabulous

great and curious small inhabitants,
and you’re the freshly minted, unashamed
Adam in this garden. You preside,
20 appreciate, and judge our proper names.
Like God, I brought you here.
Like God, I seem to be omnipotent,
mostly helpful, sometimes angry as hell.
I fi x whatever minor faults arise
25 with bandaids, batteries, masking tape, and pills.
But I am powerless, as you must know,
to chase the serpent sliding in the grass,
or the tall angel with the flaming sword
who scares you when he rises suddenly
30 behind the gates of sunset.
1992

• How does Grosholz use language to elevate the poem’s subject matter from
the trivial and childish to the biblical and profound?

PHILIP LARKIN
This Be the Verse
They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.
5 But they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another’s throats.
Man hands on misery to man.
10 It deepens like a coastal shelf.6
Get out as early as you can,
And don’t have any kids yourself.
1971

• This poem opens with one of the most (in)famous lines in all of English-
language poetry. What tone does that line establish, and how so? How does
the rest of the poem either maintain or complicate that tone? How might
the poem’s sound qualities— especially its rhyme and/or meter— contribute to
tone? To what extent is and/or isn’t the poem’s fi rst line an adequate state-
ment of its theme?

6. Part of a continent that lies under the ocean and typically ends in a steep slope down to the —-1
ocean floor. —0
—+1

007-67831_ch04_1P.indd 817 11/17/16 10:58 PM

 818 FA MILY: A N A LBUM

AUTHORS ON THEIR WORK

P H I LI P L AR KI N ( 192 2–85)
From “An Interview with John Haffenden” (1981)*
Was it your intention, in using bad language in one or two poems, to provide a shock
tactic?
Yes. I mean, these words are part of the palette. You use them when you want to
shock. I don’t think I’ve ever shocked for the sake of shocking. “They fuck you up”
is funny because it’s ambiguous. Parents bring about your conception and also
bugger you up once you are born. Professional parents in particular don’t like that
poem. (61)

*“An Interview with John Haffenden.” Further Requirements: Interviews, Broadcasts, Statements
and Book Reviews, edited by Anthony Thwaite, Faber and Faber, 2001, pp. 47–62. Originally
published in Viewpoints: Poets in Conversation with John Haffenden, 1981.

JIMMY SANTIAGO BACA

Green Chile
I prefer red chile over my eggs
and potatoes for breakfast.
Red chile ristras7 decorate my door,
dry on my roof, and hang from eaves.
5 They lend open-air vegetable stands
historical grandeur, and gently swing
with an air of festive welcome.
I can hear them talking in the wind,
haggard, yellowing, crisp, rasping
10 tongues of old men, licking the breeze.
But grandmother loves green chile.
When I visit her,
she holds the green chile pepper
in her wrinkled hands.
15 Ah, voluptuous, masculine,
an air of authority and youth simmers
from its swan-neck stem, tapering to a flowery
collar, fermenting resinous spice.
A well-dressed gentleman at the door
20 my grandmother takes sensuously in her hand,
rubbing its firm glossed sides,
caressing the oily rubbery serpent,
with mouth-watering fulfillment,
-1—
0— 7. Braided strings of dried peppers.
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007-67831_ch04_1P.indd 818 11/17/16 10:58 PM

 PAUL M A RTINEZ POMPA The Abuelita Poem 819

fondling its curves with gentle fingers.

25 Its bearing magnificent and taut
as flanks of a tiger in mid-leap,
she thrusts her blade into
as cuts it open, with lust
on her hot mouth, sweating over the stove,
30 bandanna round her forehead,
mysterious passion on her face
and she serves me green chile con carne
between soft warm leaves of corn tortillas,
with beans and rice—her sacrifice
35 to her little prince.
I slurp from my plate
with last bit of tortilla, my mouth burns
and I hiss and drink a tall glass of cold water.
All over New Mexico, sunburned men and women
40 drive rickety trucks stuffed with gunny-sacks
of green chile, from Belen, Veguita, Willard, Estancia,
San Antonio y8 Socorro, from fields
to roadside stands, you see them roasting green chile
in screen-sided homemade barrels, and for a dollar a bag,
45 we relive this old, beautiful ritual again and again.
1989

• What different qualities do the red and green chiles have? Which words in
the poem help personify the chiles? How fully do these words reflect the dif-
ferences between the speaker and the grandmother?

PAUL MARTINEZ POMPA

The Abuelita9 Poem
I. Skin & Corn
Her brown skin glistens as the sun
pours through the kitchen window
like gold leche.1 After grinding
the nixtamal,2 a word so beautifully ethnic
5 it must not only be italicized but underlined
to let you, the reader, know you’ve encountered
something beautifully ethnic, she kneads
with the hands of centuries-old ancestor
spirits who magically yet realistically possess her
10 until the masa is smooth as a lowrider’s
chrome bumper. And I know she must do this
with care because it says so on a website

8. And (Spanish).
9. Grandmother (Spanish). 1. Milk (Spanish). —-1
2. Treated corn to make masa, the dough used in tortillas. —0
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007-67831_ch04_1P.indd 819 11/17/16 10:58 PM

 820 FA MILY: A N A LBUM

that explains how to make homemade corn tortillas.

So much labor for this peasant bread
15 this edible art birthed from Abuelita’s
brown skin, which is still glistening
in the sun.

II. Apology
Before she died I called my abuelita
grandma. I cannot remember
20 if she made corn tortillas from scratch
but, O, how she’d flip the factory fresh
El Milagros3 (Quality Since 1950)
on the burner, bathe them in butter
& salt for her grandchildren.
25 How she’d knead the buttons
on the telephone, order me food
from Pizza Hut. I assure you,
gentle reader, this was done
with the spirit of Mesoamérica4
30 ablaze in her fingertips.
2009

• How does this poem play on the expectations that might be created by
its  title? What does the poem ultimately seem to suggest about those
expectations?

CHARLIE SMITH
The Business
My father and his brother didn’t get along;
for years they kept at it, sniping, digging
out the ground under each other’s feet;
it was a life work more important
5 than family, than community. My grandfather
set them to it, yoked them
into his business, struck one against the other
to make sparks, raise a fire that would warm him.
My grandfather was a brilliant man;
10 he knew what a son will do for a father’s love,
how success is a knife driven into the brother’s chest,
how one must pay with another’s life
for his own; he knew
what a sure thing it was, this jealousy,
15 like a magic bread
that doesn’t run out,
that will feed a man as long as he lives.
-1— 1996
0— 3. An actual brand, but meaning “miracles” (Spanish).
+1— 4. Literally, Middle America (Spanish), a region extending roughly from central Mexico to Nicaragua.

007-67831_ch04_1P.indd 820 11/17/16 10:58 PM

 SUGGESTIONS FOR W RITING 821

• What different meanings might the words “business” (line 6) and “work”
(line 4) take on over the course of the poem, and how do these meanings
interrelate?

ANDREW HUDGINS
Begotten
I’ve never, as some children do,
looked at my folks and thought, I must
have come from someone else—
rich parents who’d misplaced me, but
5 who would, as in a myth or novel,
return and claim me. Hell, no. I saw
my face in cousins’ faces, heard
my voice in their high drawls. And Sundays,
after the dinner plates were cleared,
10 I lingered, elbow propped on red
oilcloth, and studied great-uncles, aunts,
and cousins new to me. They squirmed.
I stared till I discerned the features
they’d gotten from the family larder:
15 eyes, nose, lips, hair? I stared until,
uncomfortable, they’d snap, “Hey, boy—
what are you looking at? At me?”
“No, sir,” I’d lie. “No, ma’am.” I’d count ten
and then continue staring at them.
20 I never had to ask, What am I?
I stared at my blood-kin, and thought,
So this, dear God, is what I am.
1994

• What can you infer from the language in this poem about the speaker’s
attitude toward his life and his family? What does the poem’s title evoke?

SUGGESTIONS FOR WRITING

1. Compare the portrayal of the parent-child relationship in any two poems in this
album, focusing especially on the poems’ tones and themes.
2. What words in Robert Hayden’s Those Winter Sundays suggest the son’s feelings
toward his father and his home? What words indicate that his attitudes have changed
since the time depicted in the poem? Write an essay in which you compare the
speaker’s feelings, as a youth and then later as a man, about his father and his home.
3. Write an essay comparing the way grandmothers and their relationship to food and
family are portrayed in Jimmy Santiago Baca’s Green Chile and Paul Martinez
Pompa’s The Abuelita Poem. How might Pompa’s poem respond to and comment
on Baca’s?
4. Pick the poem in this album that you like most and the one you like least. Write an
informal response paper or essay comparing your reactions to the two poems and
exploring just why and how the poems provoke those disparate reactions. What role —-1
do the poem’s tones and themes play here? What role is played by your own experi- —0
ences of, and feelings and ideas about, family?
—+1

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