Student Name: Danielle Ngambia Tchetmi

Words on Fire Poem Analysis

DIRECTIONS: Use the steps below to decide if “The Whole Story” is a poem or a short story.

Suggested Project Steps

1 Review the module’s content related to analyzing narrative and lyric poems.
2 Read “The Whole Story” a few times, looking for clues about its form.
3 Decide whether the entry is a narrative poem or a short story.
4 Write a brief analysis of the entry that includes your decision regarding the controversy.
5 Identify and display parts of the poem that support your decision.

Step 1: Review the module’s content related to analyzing narrative and lyric. Use the chart
below to record notes from the module’s lessons on poetry.

Concept or Skill Description

Rhythm The repetition of accents or stressed syllables

Rhyme The repetition of the sound of words

Alliteration, Consonance, The repetition of constant/vowel sounds in a word (beginning,

Assonance middle or, end).

Literary tools like similes, metaphors, personification, and

Figurative language
more.

Step 2: Read “The Whole Story” a few times, looking for clues about its form. (See page 2 of
this worksheet.) As you read the entry, write notes about parts of the piece that are
characteristic of poetry versus a short story, or vice versa.
Step 3: Decide whether the entry is a narrative poem or a short story. Make a list of
characteristics that make it poetry or not-poetry.

Step 4: Write a brief analysis of the entry that includes your decision regarding the
controversy. Use what you learned from your careful reading of the contest entry and your
review of the concepts and skills from this module to explain the thinking behind your decision.

Step 5: Identify and display parts of the poem that support your decision. Include direct
quotes from the entry in your analysis, or make a copy of the entry and mark it up with notes
that show the process you used to make your decision.
 Words on Fire Poem Analysis

The Whole Story

In the attic, I find piles of small things

in boxes. Like this: a photo of my first friend
in our new town, her sharp laugh, the spools
of printer paper we used to make our secret
plans. How she hated her brother, how when
his face crumpled in a sob she laughed with glee.
The phrase I was trying on how to be cruel floats up
out of the attic dust and unsettles me.
Then this: my own brother, only three
and clumsy in his little limbs, wanting to join us
as we hover over our games. Only slightly
older, there I am, wondering what it might be like
to laugh mercilessly, then trying it out
on him. Then there are these
empty boxes where a memory should be:
whatever words I said to the other first graders
the day my mom brought my brother to school
to visit me, whatever made them point at him
and tease and tease. The story part of the story
has gone missing. What’s left is one scene—
my classmates crowd his still-small face
like petals on a daisy, and laugh until they transform
into the sound itself—which I can still hear
now, which drowns out the other sounds,
which is why I can’t remember why I did it
or what I did, just how I knew it wasn’t right.

Laura Eve Engel