● Tips for Reading Poems:

● look up words you don’t know

● read it twice
● read it out loud
● paraphrase, then compare back to text

Countee Cullen / “For a Lady I Know

● African American Renaissance writer
● Makes fun of a Southern white woman
● Uses oxymorons (“celestial chores”)

Robert Frost / “Out, Out-”

● The saw is personified and is said to “leap” at the boy
● Frost often suggests the supernatural, then backs away
● Has a tone of naturalism - people die, others don’t stop their lives because of it
● Frost was the first to read a poem at a president’s inauguration (JFK)
● He wanted to read “Dedication”, a poem he wrote specifically for the event, but ended up
reciting “The Gift Outright” from memory when his paper containing “Dedication”
crumpled

Robert Frost / “Mending Wall”

● Pun: “give offense” (give a fence)
● Supernatural elements:
○ “My apple trees will never get across / and eat the cones under his pines” (25-26)
○ Reference of the possibility of elves
● Destructive hunters and the weather cause the wall to fall into disrepair
● Points to the idea that sometimes we do things that are outdated or not necessary
because they are a tradition
● “Writing free verse is like playing tennis with the net down” (Robert Frost)

- Blank Verse: unrhymed lines of iambic pentameter

- Iambic Pentameter: [ ߎ / ] x5
- Trochaic Octameter: [ / ߎ ] x8
- Retronym: a name for old technology used to distinguish it from a newer version (analog
clock, dirt road, landline, paper map, desktop computer, wooden pencil, snail mail, cloth
diaper, acoustic guitar, face-to-face school, quill pen)