28 Jul Literary poem: “Richard Cory,” “Yesterday,” or “The River.”
create your own discussion question or topic as long as it relates to interpreting one of the assigned songs (the song’s lyrics) as a literary poem: “Richard Cory,” “Yesterday,” or “The River.” Include your discussion topic or question first and then write your Initial Response.
The following are just some possible topics; you can create your own. For example, you can compare and contrast the original poem by E.A. Robinson and Paul Simon’s song adaptation (discuss what is similar and what is different in the way of changes) of “Richard Cory” and explain which one you prefer and why. Another possibility is to answer the three questions in this week’s News: 1. Identify who the speaker in the poem is and what is the situation/explain what is going on; 2. look up/define any unknown vocabulary or references/allusions; and 3. identify specific literary terms and how these terms are meaningful in the poem.
Use several direct quotations from the one assigned song to support your thinking: simply use a line number(s) separated by a dash. For example, from “The River”: …. “No wedding day smiles, no walk down the aisle,/No flowers, no wedding dress” (lines 17-18). Do not include the songwriter, the song’s title, or the anthology title inside citations or provide a Work Cited because of the limited space.
