Written Assignment: Close Reading #2

Close Reading / Poem Analysis #2: A close and careful reading of a poem considers both the parts of the poem and the whole poem. Choose one of the following poems. Then examine all of the important aspects of the poem as well as you can. Write a 600+ word essay in which you offer a close reading of one of of the poems.

• William Shakespeare, Sonnet #94
• John Donne, “A Valediction Forbidding Mourning”
• Andrew Marvell, “On a Drop of Dew”
• John Keats, “Lamia”
• Lord Alfred Tennyson, “Charge of the Light Brigade”
• Walt Whitman, “When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer”
• William Butler Yeats, “Easter, 1916”
• W.H. Auden, “Musée des Beaux Arts” and William Carlos Williams, “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus”