Petrarch

This will be a hybrid blog covering Tuesday & Wednesday's classes.

Flashing back to Tuesday - memories of grading just came flooding back to haunt me - we started our poetry unit by looking at Petrarchan sonnets, those of 14 lines with an abbaabba octave, cdecde (or near variant) sestet, and a volta changing things up at line 9. After working with 2 of Petrarch's poems, your homework was to read the third poem, annotate, and jot down notes regarding the overlap and differences between all of the poems thus far.

For today, we returned back to Petrarch poem #3, using this as a participation grade, to allow all of you to share your ideas on the poem and his works as a whole. Then, you and a partner/partners were assigned a Petrarchan sonnet to analyze for structure, literary elements, and commonalities with other poems. For homework, read the 3 pages in your packet regarding John Donne - he's next in line for puns in class.

Oh, I have it on the board, but I did not verbalize it - your second book card will be due on the next block day. You may choose Grendel or a novel of your choice.

Second hour Thursday - same stuff from the aforementioned fifth hour, including participation points for the third Petrarch poem, with the addition of looking at 2 translations of the same Petrarch poem and how a switch of phrasing can make an entirely different tone, mod, and poetic presentation. Make sure to read all the Donne biographical pages in the packet - we will be done with Petrarch tomorrow.