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Forms of Verse: Exercise 1.
I've had this book for ten days, and I only just finished the first exercise? Summer vacation is more enervating than I thought!
In any case, I thought that, since I wasn't posting very much on this journal, I'd provide the short essay that was assigned as part of Exercise 1 in the book. The exercise was straightforward: I was to read two passages, the 23rd Psalm from the King James Bible and a quote from John Milton's Areopagitica, and analyze their rhythm and figures of speech in a variety of specific ways. The essay was to present the content of these analyses and to suggest which was more effective in presenting its point.
Before the essay, naturally, comes the texts it analyzes. Then the essay, divided into three (very short) sections.
( The Twenty-Third Psalm )
( Areopagitica excerpt )
( Analysis of 23rd Psalm )
( Analysis of Areopagitica excerpt )
( Conclusions )
Sadly, this is but the first exercise of four in the first chapter. If I want to finish before the semester starts, I'm really going to have to start moving faster. I'm tempted to skip the second one, which is almost exactly like the first, but the passages it asks me to analyze seem even more interesting than the above: they are three excerpts from Virginia Woolf's The Waves.
Ah, well. #3 is an exercise in writing in meter – I'm good at that, and I can probably turn at least one of the lines into a poem to put up here.
In any case, I thought that, since I wasn't posting very much on this journal, I'd provide the short essay that was assigned as part of Exercise 1 in the book. The exercise was straightforward: I was to read two passages, the 23rd Psalm from the King James Bible and a quote from John Milton's Areopagitica, and analyze their rhythm and figures of speech in a variety of specific ways. The essay was to present the content of these analyses and to suggest which was more effective in presenting its point.
Before the essay, naturally, comes the texts it analyzes. Then the essay, divided into three (very short) sections.
( The Twenty-Third Psalm )
( Areopagitica excerpt )
( Analysis of 23rd Psalm )
( Analysis of Areopagitica excerpt )
( Conclusions )
Sadly, this is but the first exercise of four in the first chapter. If I want to finish before the semester starts, I'm really going to have to start moving faster. I'm tempted to skip the second one, which is almost exactly like the first, but the passages it asks me to analyze seem even more interesting than the above: they are three excerpts from Virginia Woolf's The Waves.
Ah, well. #3 is an exercise in writing in meter – I'm good at that, and I can probably turn at least one of the lines into a poem to put up here.