IMAGERY

Assignent to read

"Before We Begin" & Chapter 1 "Where Experience Starts: The Image"

Why images matter so much in poetry
¾ of our brains are devoted to receiving images (sight, touch, taste, smell,
hearing) Why does none of us read Neitzsche or Kierkegaard at bedtime?

"The Eagle"

He clasps the crag with crooked hands;
Close to the sun in lonely lands,
Ringed with the azure world, he stands.

The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls;
He watches from his mountain walls,
And like a thunderbolt he falls.

(Tennyson, 1851)

Additional poem handed out and discussed during class

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.

Theodore Roethke (1908-1963)