If you have not yet purchased and received your text book, you can still read the material for Wednesday’s class. Please read Chapter 3: Word Choice, Word Order, and Tone, as well as the love poems named on your syllabus.
If you would like to add a love poem to our reading list, please link us to the poem by writing a short comment to this post.
Please note: You will notice a section at the end of Chapter 3 that there is a section called “A Note on Reading Translations.” We will not be able to address translations on Wednesday, but will instead return to it later in the semester. You can omit that section from your reading for Wednesday.
“Romance”
by: Edgar Allan Poe
Romance, who loves to nod and sing,
With drowsy head and folded wing,
Among the green leaves as they shake
Far down within some shadowy lake,
To me a painted paroquet
Hath been–a most familiar bird–
Taught me my alphabet to say–
To lisp my very earliest word
While in the wild wood I did lie,
A child–with a most knowing eye.
Of late, eternal Condor years
So shake the very Heaven on high
With tumult as they thunder by,
I have no time for idle cares
Though gazing on the unquiet sky.
And when an hour with calmer wings
Its down upon my spirit flings–
That little time with lyre and rhyme
To while away–forbidden things!
My heart would feel to be a crime
Unless it trembled with the strings.
1829.