HARRELL HORNE INTEGRATED SCHOOL

#3 Basa St. Phase 2-A Bahayang Pag-asa Subdivision

Molino 5, Bacoor City, Cavite

Literary Criticism: ( Title of the Poem )

NAME
Grade 7- Froebel

MS. KEITH BEATRIZ S. NAVARRO

English Teacher
 HARRELL HORNE INTEGRATED SCHOOL
#3 Basa St. Phase 2-A Bahayang Pag-asa Subdivision
Molino 5, Bacoor City, Cavite

[ATTACHED THE COPY OF YOUR POEM HERE]

POEM
CHOOSE ONE POEM:

Annabel Lee by Edgar Allan Poe

All the World’s a Stage by William Shakespeare
If You Forget Me by Pablo Neruda (EASIEST!)

[If from online website] Retrieve from: https:///blahblah.com

 HARRELL HORNE INTEGRATED SCHOOL
#3 Basa St. Phase 2-A Bahayang Pag-asa Subdivision
Molino 5, Bacoor City, Cavite

[If from book] Retrieve from: English Spectrum 8, Author

Note: You can’t criticize the poem if you don’t know the background of the author. So…

ATTACHED HERE THE BIOGRAPHY OF THE AUTHOR. MAKE SURE THAT THE
INFORMATION ABOUT THE AUTHOR IS RELATED, SIMILAR OR HAS A
CONNECTION TO THE POEM.
PUT A PICTURE OF THE AUTHOR, IF POSSIBLE (FOR THOSE WHO WILL WRITE IT)
 HARRELL HORNE INTEGRATED SCHOOL
#3 Basa St. Phase 2-A Bahayang Pag-asa Subdivision
Molino 5, Bacoor City, Cavite

SUBJECT

[The following are JUST guide questions. After you answer each question in 1 paragraph ONLY
with 3-5 SENTENCES. ERASE the questions. So… it must be 3 paragraphs]

1. What is its plot or the story that is being depicted by the poem?
2. What is its most important topic?
3. What image does it describe? 

FORM

[The following are JUST guide questions. After you answer each question in 1 paragraph ONLY
with 3-5 SENTENCES. ERASE the questions. So… it must be 2 paragraphs]

1. What is the rhyme scheme of the poem? (e.g. a b a b, a a b b ) or is it a free verse?

2. What problem, question or resolution does the author offer?

WORD CHOICE
[The following are JUST guide questions. After you answer each question in 1 paragraph ONLY
with 3-5 SENTENCES. ERASE the questions. So… it must be 3 paragraphs]

1. What is the word choice of the author? Old English? Many unfamiliar words?
2. If you are reading something longer, are there certain words that come up again and
again?
3. Are there words that stand out?

THEME
[The following are JUST guide questions. After you answer each question in 1 paragraph ONLY
with 3-5 SENTENCES. ERASE the questions. So… it must be 2 paragraphs]

1. What is the text about?

 HARRELL HORNE INTEGRATED SCHOOL
#3 Basa St. Phase 2-A Bahayang Pag-asa Subdivision
Molino 5, Bacoor City, Cavite

2. What is notable about the form, ?

SAMPLE
Frost's speaker brews unlikely associations in the first stanza of the poem. The "Assorted
characters of death and blight / Mixed ready to begin the morning right" make of the grotesque
scene an equally grotesque mockery of a breakfast cereal (4–5). These lines are almost singsong
in meter and it is easy to imagine them set to a radio jingle. A pun on "right"/"rite" slides the
"characters of death and blight" into their expected concoction: a "witches' broth" (6). These
juxtapositions—a healthy breakfast that is also a potion for dark magic—are borne out when our
"fat and white" spider becomes "a snow-drop"—an early spring flower associated with renewal
—and the moth as "dead wings carried like a paper kite" (1, 7, 8). Like the mutant heal-all that
hosts the moth's death, the spider becomes a deadly flower; the harmless moth becomes a child's
toy, but as "dead wings," more like a puppet made of a skull.
The volta offers no resolution for our unsettled expectations. Having observed the scene and
detailed its elements in all their unpleasantness, the speaker turns to questions rather than
answers. How did "The wayside blue and innocent heal-all" end up white and bleached like a
bone (10)? How did its "kindred spider" find the white flower, which was its perfect hiding place
(11)? Was the moth, then, also searching for camouflage, only to meet its end?
Using another question as a disguise, the speaker offers a hypothesis: "What but design of
darkness to appall?" (13). This question sounds rhetorical, as though the only reason for such an
unlikely combination of flora and fauna is some "design of darkness." Some force, the speaker
suggests, assembled the white spider, flower, and moth to snuff out the moth's life. Such a design
appalls, or horrifies. We might also consider the speaker asking what other force but dark design
could use something as simple as appalling in its other sense (making pale or white) to effect
death.
However, the poem does not close with a question, but with a statement. The speaker's "If design
govern in a thing so small" establishes a condition for the octave's questions after the fact (14).
There is no point in considering the dark design that brought together "assorted characters of
death and blight" if such an event is too minor, too physically small to be the work of some force
unknown. Ending on an "if" clause has the effect of rendering the poem still more uncertain in its
conclusions: not only are we faced with unanswered questions, we are now not even sure those
questions are valid in the first place.
Behind the speaker and the disturbing scene, we have Frost and his defiance of our expectations
for a Petrarchan sonnet. Like whatever designer may have altered the flower and attracted the
spider to kill the moth, the poet built his poem "wrong" with a purpose in mind. Design surely
governs in a poem, however small; does Frost also have a dark design? Can we compare a scene
in nature to a carefully constructed sonnet?
 HARRELL HORNE INTEGRATED SCHOOL
#3 Basa St. Phase 2-A Bahayang Pag-asa Subdivision
Molino 5, Bacoor City, Cavite

[LAST PART]

POEM INTERPRETATION

Interpret the poem in 3 sentences EACH stanza. It means if the poem has 8 stanza you will make
3 sentences interpretation which is equivalent to 24 sentences.