LITEN 21 Second Paper Assignment: Explication
DUE Wed. November 28 in lecture
What’s an explication?
If you turn to the Oxford English Dictionary, you will find that the verb “explicate” has many related meanings. It comes from the Latin roots, ex- (out) and plicare (to fold). It’s a kind of unfolding, unrolling, a smoothing out of wrinkles, an expansion, as a bud expands into a flower or a leaf unfurls. It also means to disentangle, unravel and to unfold in words, to give a detailed account, to make clear the meaning of (anything), to remove difficulties or obscurities from; to clear up, explain.
In Poetry: An Introduction, Michael Meyer tells us that an explication is
a detailed analysis of a passage of poetry or prose. Because explication is an intensive examination of a text line by line, it is mostly used to interpret a short poem in its entirety or a brief passage from a long poem, short story, or play ... An explication pays careful attention to language: the connotations of words, allusion, figurative language, irony, symbol, rhythm, sound, and so on. These elements are examined in relation to one another and to the overall effect and meaning of a work. (583)
Poetry condenses reality. Even a single word can have two, three, ten meanings (just look at those selections from the OED on “explicate” above); it’s your job to show the richness of those layers of meaning to your reader.
What’s the relationship between explication and analysis?
Analysis comes from Greek and Latin roots meaning to “break down.” An analysis breaks something into its component parts and looks at the relationship between them. You analyze all the time without giving it a second thought. For example you analyze as you decide which class you’ll take in a given semester. You break up information to simplify the decision. What requirements do you have to fill this quarter? How many semesters do you want to stay? Who’s the professor? How many books? Any friends in the class? What’s the topic? And so on. You’re analyzing. The same thing happens when you analyze literature. You decide what you think about a particular piece. Then ask WHY you think this way? Break up all the reasons you have for thinking so, turn those ideas into paragraphs and you have an analytical essay. This oversimplifies things, of course, but this is the essence of the process.
When you explicate, you analyze everything in great detail. You might think of it like analysis, but as even more intense. You could not, however, fit everything you find into a single short paper. A single Shakespeare sonnet could take thirty pages to explicate. The best strategy is to explicate fairly thoroughly during your brainstorming phase, decide on the three or four features which most interest you or best explain the poem, and then focus on those three or four features in your paper.
Guidelines for Explicating a Poem
1. Read the poem several times. Be sure to read it out loud as well.
2. Look up difficult or unknown words. The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) will help for a more thorough explication. For example, the OED helps you learn the history of the word and its meaning in the time the poem was written. The OED can be found online through the Geisel Library homepage (you need a UCSD connection to access it). If you need help, a reference librarian should be able to explain this to you, but consulting the OED should NOT be left until the last minute. You may also encounter unknown terms or figures. Access to a bible and a dictionary of classical mythology in addition to your handbook of literary terms is also very useful.
3. Paraphrase the poem. What, in your own words, do you think the poem is saying? You need this step for your own understanding; do not include it in your essay.
4. What is the poem’s theme? What is the poem’s main point? Again, though you may mention the theme in your introduction, the theme is more a starting point rather than an example of analysis. The theme may be similar to but is NOT the same as your thesis.
5. How does the poet use the poem’s structure? Consider the stanzas, refrains and the arrangement of lines on the page. If the poem has a traditional structural pattern, for example a Petrarchan sonnet, does the poet conform to that tradition precisely? Where does the poem not conform? What is the effect?
6. Analyze the poem’s rhythms--its stress and pause pattern, things like stress variation, endstopped lines, caesura, enjambement. Never heard of these terms? They are in Murfin and Ray. Try to scan your poem. Never scanned a poem before? See Murfin and Ray under meter and bring questions to office hours.
7. Who is the speaker in the poem? The speaker in a poem can be as important as in prose fiction. Remember–the speaker is never to be confused with the author. Even if a poem seems like it must be autobiographical, don’t treat the speaker as though he or she were the author.
What is the dramatic situation of the poem? What is the poet’s tone, or attitude towards his or her theme or subject? Does the poem have any verbal ironies (words which say one thing but mean something else, generally just the opposite)? Is there an ironic point of view (poet/speaker discrepancy)? dramatic irony (discrepancy between the character’s knowledge and the reader’s)?
8. Examine the poem’s language. Is the diction concrete or abstract? Formal or informal? Dialect? Jargon? What connotations do the words have? Has the poet used unconventional syntax (sentence structure)? Often syntax suggests emphasis.
Examine the poem’s imagery. X.J. Kennedy defines imagery as a “word or sequence of words that refers to any sensory experience.” What does the poet help you to see, hear, touch, smell, taste?
Imagery may well provide you with the bulk of your essay material. Remember the absence of something can be just as significant as the presence of something. A vacuum of imagery deserves analysis.
What figures of speech has the poet used, and to what purpose? Do you find use of: metaphor, simile, personification, allusion, overstatement (hyperbole), understatement (litotes), paradox, puns?
9. Look for sound patterns: alliteration (repetition of initial consonants, but also of medial and final ones) assonance, (vowel sound repetitions), rhyme, euphony and cacophony (pleasant sounds and harsh sounds), onomatopoeia (words that imitate the sounds of a thing or action).
THE THESIS:
So, now you’ve looked at all these poetic parts. How do you put this all together into a thesis?
One useful way to think about your analysis is to concentrate on “movement.” What does this mean? Poems can be said to “move.” Think about the way that certain poems are analyzed in lecture. For example, an analysis of Jonson’s “To Penshurst” suggests how the poem divided up into different parts, beginning with a six-line implicit negative contrast to other houses (and noble families); it then moves into a discussion of the estates filled with allusions to classical myth, then a discussion of the bounty produced on the estate that was ordered by the seasons. After that there is a discussion of social order, moving from peasant to poet-guest, to king (which implied something about the poem’s view of the “order of things.). The poem next began a treatment of the Sidney family through praise and negative contrast, finally ending with those final two lines in which other lords merely “built” but Lord Sidney “dwells.” This is a rough breakdown of the different sections of the poem and how it built up to this kind of climax of praise. A real explication would get down “closer to the poem” looking more closely at specific lines and images with the same kind of careful eye that pointed out the importance of tense in that last line. This is what I mean by “movement.”
Another example of “movement ” are the kinds of “punch” that I pointed out in the last line of some of the Sidney and Shakespeare sonnets. Think of Sidney’s concluding line to AS 71, “‘But, ah,’ Desire still cries, ‘give me some food.’ The turn in this dramatic last line works with poem’s questioning or examination of the Neoplatonic ideal of a transcendence of earthly desires.
A thesis for an explication could usefully analyze the “movement” in a poem, showing the relationship between structure and meaning. The core of a thesis about “To Penshurst” could argue that the poem’s ordering moving through the grounds of Penshurst, through the seasons and through social ordering demonstrates the essence of the poem’s praise and its social ideal, the well-ordered running of an ordered world by the noble Sidney family. A real explication of the poem, which would run many pages, would not only suggest these movements and show how they function in the “ordering” of the poem, but go into much more detail about things like imagery, sound, diction, speaker, etc., using these elements as points to support the central thesis.
Works Cited
Michael Meyer. Poetry: An Introduction. 2nd edition. Boston: Bedford Books, 1998.
This handout is adapted from Shelby Popham’s “The 10 Series: A Guide,” UCLA Department of English.
Paper Assignment: Consult the late paper policies previously distributed. It is your responsibility to get your paper in on time and to plan ahead to leave yourself enough time to make sure that your paper is submitted punctually. Let us know if you require any further explanation of the policy and how it will be enforced.
Papers shorter than five pages will be graded down accordingly. You are responsible for making an additional hard copy/back-up of your paper.
Length: 5 pages, double-spaced typed (about 1500 words).
12 point font and 8 ½ by 11" paper.
All margins must be 1". (We need room for comments).
Please hold to these guidelines to make the papers easy to read. We are all master manipulators of font and margin, so don’t bother trying to fool us. If your paper is too long or too short, then it’s time to edit.
Presentation: The guidelines for paper formatting are, contrary to popular belief, written not to torment you, but to make it easier for us to see range and variations of responses within and across paper topics and to share student papers, working collectively on fair and equivalent grading standards, so please FOLLOW THESE FORMATTING GUIDELINES:
A. No cover sheet or folder.
B. On the first page in the upper left-hand corner please provide:
1) your name, 2) the name of your discussion leader,
3) course and section number,
4) paper topic number and 5) date
C. Put your name and a page number on each page.
D. Staple your paper together.
E. Give your paper a title. A good title gives some indication of the paper’s content.
Center your title on the first page above the beginning of your introductory paragraph.
F. Proofread your paper carefully for spelling, typographical and grammatical errors. One or two minor hand-written corrections are acceptable on the final draft. A paper that is not carefully proofread is not acceptable and sloppiness may have a negative impact on your paper grade.
Topics: Write an explication of one of the following poems. In addition to the steps suggested for an explication in the handout, there are also some questions that you should consider in writing your paper. I strongly recommend you read the Norton headnotes on the author you choose and any headnotes/notes related to the poem you choose. In addition to Murfin and Ray, which should definitely be consulted regarding elements of poetic form, there is also good explanation of poetic terms at the back of your Norton.
1. Sidney, Sonnet 39: You won’t be able or necessarily want to address all these questions in your paper, but I feel the following questions are important to this poem: What is the dramatic situation of the poem? Who is the speaker addressing and what is the relationship between the speaker and the addressed? How does the poet use apostrophe and personification in the poem? How is Sidney utilizing the sonnet form? What form of sonnet is this? How does the sonnet form impact the meaning of the poem? Be sure to (re) read the rest of the Astrophil and Stella poems included in the Norton. You may take the overarching idea of “Astrophil and Stella” into account in your reading and may very well need to do so, given the direct mention of Stella in the poem, but this background alone is not enough for a good reading and an excellent reading can be made without extended contexualization. Make this sonnet the main focus of your paper.
2. Ben Jonson, “On my First Son.” You won’t be able or necessarily want to address all these questions in your paper, but I feel the following questions are important to this poem: What is the dramatic situation of the poem? Who is the speaker addressing and what is the relationship between the speaker and the addressed? What is the tone of this poem? How does the poet create that tone? What is the relationship between the speaker and the author? How would you characterize the poem’s imagery? What type of poetic form is this? How does the poem’s form shape its meaning?
3. Milton, “When I Consider How My Light is Spent.” You won’t be able or necessarily want to address all these questions in your paper, but I feel the following questions are important to this poem: What is the dramatic situation of the poem? Who is the speaker addressing and what is the relationship between the speaker and the addressed? What form of sonnet is this? How does the sonnet form impact the meaning of the poem? We do know that Milton himself went blind and this poem clearly reflects that autobiographical element. You may well want to reference the poet’s own blindness in your essay, but remember, as we saw with Chaucer, we cannot simply equate the persona created in a literary work with the author of the work. If you do choose to reflect on Milton’s blindness it should not be the main focus of your paper. Make your close reading of his sonnet your focus.