Words of the week, in order, are 'pithy,' 'narcissistic,' and 'nonconformist.'
Today we read the poem "NonConformist" in our textbooks.
We did our best to understand the poem together
Then we discussed what good literary writing looks like (this took some time).
Finally, we began working on question #1 on p. 31 -- a literary response to "Nonconformist." This was handed in at the end of class.
Here are the two example paragraphs I went over during class. (guess which one is the better one)
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Topic: Discuss how the John Donne uses the ‘island’ metaphor in
Meditation XVII.
The author talks about a lot of things. He says that nobody
is an island and that’s pretty famous and also so true. Like, WTF! Of course no one is an island, duh! My dad once challenged me to swim out to
Copper Island when we were camping on the Shuswap and I almost made it but I
had to turn back because I got a cramp.
OK, back to the topic. So, yeah, John Donee is a famous author and he probably
uses an island as a metaphor and says nobody should be one because we are all
continents and when a part of a continent gets washed away, a clod, then the
continent is a bit smaller and that’s why we are all like islands and continents.
Sometimes I feel like an island, tho, like last night when I was babysitting
and I felt all alone because I got Becka to sleep but Netflix wasn’t working so
I just sat there. Then at the end of the
poem he talks about a bell tolling (that means ringing). I think he’s probably saying that sometimes
when bells ring that signals something you should do but I’m not sure what that
means. Islands are like metaphors.
In “Meditation XVII” John Donne compares all of humanity to
an island to reinforce the theme that all of mankind is connected to one
another. The famous line “No man is an
island” effectively conveys that people cannot isolate themselves from one
another, and that, no matter how hard some may try, the connection people have
for one another is a really key part of being human. Donne reinforces that
connectedness by extending the metaphor; that is, he uses the continent of
Europe as a metaphor for all of humanity.
It’s ironic that while Donne’s message to the reader is that we need to
be inclusive of everyone in the world, he only refers to one continent, “Europe”,
by name. Of course in the 17th Century, when this was written, the
Euro-centric view of the world was anything but inclusive of all mankind. John
Donne uses metaphor effectively to explore the theme of the connection of
mankind and, no matter who we are, our humanity binds us all together into one
tapestry.
