Honors 9 Homework for 11/16/18


Read: Jack London's "To Build a Fire" Twice

Write: Finish paragraph packets (add to Google Doc)

Due Monday

Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening by Robert Frost

Whose woods these are I think I know.   

His house is in the village though;   

He will not see me stopping here   

To watch his woods fill up with snow.   

My little horse must think it queer   

To stop without a farmhouse near   

Between the woods and frozen lake   

The darkest evening of the year.   

He gives his harness bells a shake   

To ask if there is some mistake.   

The only other sound’s the sweep   

Of easy wind and downy flake.   

The woods are lovely, dark and deep,   

But I have promises to keep,   

And miles to go before I sleep,   

And miles to go before I sleep.

This is a narrative poem – it tells a story. There is a denotative meaning (literal), and also a deeper, more symbolic meaning.

Words have certain associations. We have the concept of something that goes beyond its literal meaning. The better the symbol, the more associations it invites.

There are universal, cultural, and personal symbols. We decipher personal symbols by looking at how the author uses the symbol in the poem/literary work.

Ask yourself what the poem means, but also how the author establishes that meaning. Where do you get a sense of where the poem is not just a simple, denotative story.

One literary device is simple repetition. In the last line, Frost repeats the line “And miles to go before I sleep”.  Might this be suggestive of something more? What do you associate with sleep? Death.

What does Frost mean when he refers to the “darkest evening of the year”? What do you associate with “deep”? Profundity or wisdom. The poem establishes and strengthens its symbolic meaning through the use of figurative language and word choice.

When the poem starts, the author has a moment of self-consciousness, meaning he has a moment of awareness where he sees himself and asks why has he been sitting in the snow. What kind of being is he that sees these trees as woods?

The foil between the author and the horse establishes the author’s consciousness as separate from that of the horse. People have a different type of consciousness. We are aware that we are aware. Animals do not have this sense of their own being. This is an existential poem.

We have been introduced to Existentialism before now. We saw it in both “Old Man and the Sea” and “Siddhartha”.

Jack London (1876-1916) only lived to be 40 years old. Read more about his life online.

Man’s reach should exceed his grasp. We are self-surpassing beings. We are able to surpass ourselves because we have an awareness of ourselves.

Literary periods are spans of time in which literature shared intellectual, linguistic, religious, and artistic influences.

Romanticism à Realism à Naturalism à Existentialism

Herman Hesse was a neo-Romantic writer. They saw nature as everything and believed we are not able to logically understand nature. We are meant to go too far. This is how man becomes self-surpassing. We are the ones that create the idea of how or what heaven is, in order to reach for it.

In Naturalism, we exceed the bounds meant for us by nature, instead of the gods or fates. In Naturalism, there is an inevitable outcome – nature always wins. There are some Naturalists who say that there is nothing that is not natural. There is nothing that goes beyond the material. It is called Naturalism because of Charles Darwin’s natural selection (1859). Darwin is saying that we all are descended from one common progenitor. We are all objects. Naturalism is extreme objectivity. We are all just material things.

Existentialism: Descartes came up with the concept of “cogito, ergo sum” (I think, therefore, I am). We have, thus, the idea of mind vs. matter, or mind/body dualism. Descartes has to negate, or doubt, the existence of everything in the universe. However, he cannot doubt himself, because he experiences his own mind. Therefore, he can only confirm the existence of himself. That which transcends matter is the mind. 

It is called Existentialism because people are the only beings whose existence comes before their essence. This leads to the idea that our existence pre-supposes our essence, which feeds into the Existential belief that we do not have any inherent meaning; rather, we create our own meaning (essence).