English Literature 12

Hi everyone,
Here are my rough reading notes for these poems. I have also included vocabulary stuff.
Donne – A Valediction, Forbidding Mourning
First off, the title really strikes me here. I have to admit, I had to look up valediction in the dictionary.
“Valediction: saying farewell; a taking leave, an instance of this, a speech made [...]

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Here’s my rough notes on these:
Donne – A Valediction, Forbidding Mourning
First off, the title really strikes me here. I have to admit, I had to look up valediction in the dictionary.
“Valediction: saying farewell; a taking leave, an instance of this, a speech made at this time” (Webster’s New English Dictionary and Thesaurus, [...]

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Aside : used during a play to allow the audience to ‘overhear’ the character’s thoughts. An aside occurs when other actors are on stage, but the person speaking does so as if it is ‘under their breath’ or, spoken so the audience hears, but not the other characters on stage. This enables the [...]

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Shakespearean Sonnet: A twist on the sonnet…Shakespeare’s sonnet is composed of 3 quatrains followed by a rhyming couplet. Usually, the third quatrain will alter the general direction the poem is taking, and the rhyming couplet (two rhymed lines of poetry) will sum it all up.
rhyme scheme (the [...]

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Sonnet = 14 line poem that usually uses iambic pentameter and follows a specific form.
Iambic Pentameter = 5 groups of words, each = 2 syllables. The last syllable of each is stressed or given an accent.
Petrarchan Sonnet Also known as the Italian sonnet, because Petrarch came from [...]

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Ballad
“a narrative poem, intended to be sung without a known author. [...] Most ballads include these features:
- Four-line stanzas in whicn the second and fourth lines rhyme
- Repeated key phrases or a regularly repeated section, called a refrain
- Dialogue. ( Prentice Hall Literature: The British Tradition 189)

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Genre– the epic : this involves several things:
1. a hero who does heroic things (usually represents a battle between good and evil) these things are usually pretty big and overblown, such as Beowulf’s fighting Grendel’s mother without his sword, or being able to go into the underwater world for quite some time without drowning…still trying [...]

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