If time permits, project the sonnet on a “smart board” and number the lines.How does the poet share her emotions with the reader? What is the role of the rain, tree, and bird imagery? Have students write reactions to the poem for 2-3 minutes and share responses. As a class, collectively paraphrase the poem.Here you illustrate the dialectical nature of a sonnet: not the rhyme scheme per se, but the turn, the volta, the change in thought, direction and emotion. Have one student read the first eight lines and another the final six.This will illustrate Millay’s rhyme scheme, a pattern more typical of the Petrarchan sonnet but with an internal logic more similar to Shakespeare’s. Ask one student to read the first four lines, another the next four, a third the next three and a fourth student the final three lines.Is Millay wistful, revengeful, coy or angry? Which words and images support students’ opinions about the writer’s state of mind? Can they relate to a poem in which the poet seems to be older than they are and thinking back to a time when she had former loves?
A photo of Millay, wisely accessible on Millay’s website or elsewhere on the web.Copies of the Millay poem for everyone, double spaced, so that students can mark it up.See Living Pentameter on the Folger YouTube channel. Possible Prequel: A lesson on iambic pentameter. Examining her techniques prepares the way for reading sonnets by writers of the past. Modern sonnets can be more accessible than Shakespeare’s to most students, and one of Millay’s can be a good introduction to both a classic form of the sonnet and to one of its most recurrent and popular themes, lost love. Vincent Millay, as an illustrative example. Text: Use “ What My Lips Have Kissed, And Where And Why," a modern sonnet by Edna St. Gigi Bradford, former director of the NEA Literature Program and Folger Poetry Series, also taught the Folger's "Shakespeare's Sisters" seminar.Ĭommon Core Anchor Standards: R.1, R.2, R.5, R.9 She leads workshops on sonnets for teachers.
She wrote "Nice Guys Finish Dead: Teaching Henry IV, Part I in High School" for the Shakespeare Set Free series. Authors: Louisa Newlin taught high school English for more than 40 years.