Being Creative

Lesson with Words

2 and Phrases

APPLICATION

Instructions: Analyze the poem below; apply what you have learned in this lesson. In addition,
there are questions and suggestions that would help you to analyze.

1. Are there any sentences in the poem?

2. What kinds of phrases are used?
3. What can you say about the internal structure of the phrases?
4. What graphological features do you notice, and how do they affect the poem?
5. Are there any lexical patterns in the poem (e.g., repetitions, words that 'go together' or
clash with one another in terms of meaning)?
6. How do the features we have noticed help us to interpret the poem?

When explaining our comprehension of the text, we'll have to account for this at some point. In
terms of pragmatics, we could want to think of each phrase as the 'equivalent' of a sentence.
Nevertheless, the graphological representation of the poem in the anthology we initially
encountered it in is an approximate dynamic approximation of the on-screen display. Each noun
phrase is graphologically isolated from the others, prompting us to approach them pragmatically
as if they were sentences.
Hence, there's a textual counterpart to the typical approach of graphologically identifying written
sentences because they're all separated by lineation and within-line spacing. You can read each
noun phrase as if it were a conventional sentence by adding structural fillers' as you go (for
example, 'There is the golden flood'). The poem is entirely made up of noun phrases. Each noun
phrase in the poem is made up of a head noun pre-modified by the definite article and an adjective
(for example, 'the golden flood') or a noun modifier (for example, 'the cabin song'). We must
account for this in our interpretation because the grammatical structure of this poem is relatively
constricted. Thus, the floating song, for example, is a noun phrase in which the most important
word is a noun and all of the other words and sub-words are related to it. (The)(floating)song.

When comparing the final seven lines (the indented lines) to the first fourteen, we can observe that
the relationships between the lexical items have changed. Thus, while the poem's left-hand edge
is justified, the poem's final seven lines are indented to the right. This means that the following
seven lines should be considered distinct from the first 14 lines and that the difference between
lines 14 and 15 should be explained, maybe by looking for correlations at higher levels of structure.
In the poem, almost every lexical item is repeated.

In the first fourteen lines, the link between the adjective/noun modifier and the head noun in the
noun phrases appears to be usual, given the predicted situation of space flight. In this context,
many of the terms seem literal (for example, 'the floating crumb, “space junk,' and 'the space
stroll.') In the context of space travel, metaphorical terms (for example, 'the golden flood,' which
can easily be interpreted as a stream of sunlight) are easy to understand. Furthermore, the
graphological change in line 15 indicates a possible situational change, and we must explain the
anomaly because the frequency of strange semantic connections inside noun phrases increases
dramatically in this last section.