Hebdomadal 10

Topic 1:

Read "Come to the Bower" closely. What problem is at its center? If the poem were an answer to a question, what would that question be? Work particularly closely with the language of the text.

You might also consider how "Come to the Bower" is like any poem by Marilyn Hacker, or like Yeats's "The Stolen Child." If you want a bit more of a challenge, you could compare the themes of "Bower" to the themes of Beloved (although you should, as always, be sure to compare specific passages from both texts).

Topic 2:

At the end of discussion last week, we were left with the question of how authors of socially realist fiction work with symbols. Both Seamus Heaney and Toni Morrison confront this problem: pick any Heaney poem or any paragraph or short section from Beloved and begin to answer this question: What is the role of symbolism in a work grounded on historical fact. It might be helpful to you to compare the symbolism you see in Heaney or Morrison with the kind of symbolism we discussed in "The Second Coming."