ENGLISH DOSSIER

Type of Title Author

document
Poem Those Winter Sundays Robert Hayden

Short-story My Old Man Ernest Hemingway

Short-story A Rose for Emily William Faulkner

Poem My Papa's Waltz Theodore Roethke

1.Robert Hayden's "Those Winter Days''

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
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,

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?
2. "My Old man" by Ernest Hemingway
When I’d sit watching him working out in the hot sun I sure felt fond of him. He
sure was fun and he done his work so hard and he’d finish
up with a regular whirring that’d drive the sweat out on his face like water
and then sling the rope at the tree and come over and sit down with me
and lean back against the tree with the towel and a
sweater wrapped around his neck.“Sure is hell keeping it down,
Joe,” he’d say and lean back and shut his eyes and breathe long and deep,
“it ain’t like when you’re a kid.” Then he’d get up before he started to
cool and we’d jog along back to the stables.

3. "A Rose for Emily" by William Faulkner

For a long while we just stood there, looking down at
the profound and fleshless grin. The body had apparently once lain in the
attitude of an embrace, but now the
long sleep that outlasts love, that conquers even the grimace of
love, had cuckolded him. What was left of him, rotted beneath what was left of
the night shirt, had become inextricable from the bed in which he lay;
and upon him and upon the pillow beside him lay that even coating of the
patient and biding dust. Then we noticed that in the
second pillow was the indentation of a head. One of
us lifted something from it, and leaning forward, that faint and
invisible dust dry and acrid in the nostrils, we saw a long strand of iron-
gray hair.
4.Theodore Roethke's "My Papa's Waltz"
The whiskey on your breath
Could make a small boy dizzy;
But I hung on like death:
Such waltzing was not easy.

We romped until the pans

Slid from the kitchen shelf;
My mother’s countenance
Could not unfrown itself.

The hand that held my wrist

Was battered on one knuckle;
At every step you missed
My right ear scraped a buckle.

You beat time on my head

With a palm caked hard by dirt,
Then waltzed me off to bed
Still clinging to your shirt.

5.Personal writing