I Hate Poetry Month Assignments

As we move from mid-semester toward our final weeks, we'll be examining a few poems, including this one by Mary Oliver entitled "The Summer Day." (To view the poem, click on the link.)

Here below are some questions to think about after you have read the poem a couple of times and perhaps printed the poem out:

1. What connections might this poem have to the study of ecology?
2. Does the poem raise any ethical questions? If so, what are they? If not, why not?
3. What events, stories, ideas, and things do we commonly associate with swans, black bears, and grasshoppers? What might each animal symbolize?
4. If you were forced, on pain of death, to find connections between this poem and the literature of the Bible, to which parts of the Bible would you point and why?
5. How would you describe the subject of the poem?
6. How would you describe the tone of the poem?
7. Someone (Billy Collins?) has written above the poem, "Today's poem holds that the act of attention is a form of prayer." Do you agree? If not, why not? If so, why (and where is your evidence)?
8. Can you make any connection between the abrupt subject shift from the subject of the grasshopper in line 10 to the subject of prayer in line 11?
9. What, if anything, does being "blessed" have to do with being "idle"?
10. What do we generally mean by the word "attention"?
11. Why do you suppose the phrase "pay attention" has been used so often that it has now become a cliche? How do we literally "pay attention"? What do we pay? How do we pay?
12. How do you suppose the mavens and pundits of popular American culture would answer Oliver's question in line 16: "What else should I have done?" What has she done and why?
    
13. What, in fact, do you plan to do "with your one wild and precious life"?
14. Is "wild" the right word to describe your life? If not, why not? If so, why?
15. In Oliver's view of the world as you imagine it, could writing be a form of prayer?
16. What other activities do you imagine that Oliver might consider "prayer"?

After you've thought about these questions, post your answers them on your blog. Be sure to restate the question before you answer it.