12th Grade English Literature and Composition by Benjamin Morrison

Standard and Description

bengmon134 — 2025-06-20 03:11:41 UTC

11-12.RI.4: Determine the meaning of words and phrases as they are used in a text,

including figurative, connotative, and technical meanings; analyze how an author uses and refines the

meaning of a key term or terms over the course of a text.

This is the primary standard we will be focusing on in our unit on Victorian Poetry, which will highlight some of the Victorian Era's most influential poets. The unit's goal is for students to understand where poetry has been so that they may understand where poetry is now.

Our Textbook!

bengmon134 — 2025-06-20 03:15:17 UTC

"As Kingfishers Catch Fire" by Gerard Manley Hopkins (beautifully read by Jonathan Roumie)

bengmon134 — 2025-06-20 03:30:42 UTC

Gerard Manley Hopkins is my favorite poet, and one of the most prolific Victorian authors. Here is a beautiful reading of his poem "As Kingfishers Catch Fire", which we will be going through as a class.

"Dover Beach" by Matthew Arnold (beautifully read by John Neville)

bengmon134 — 2025-06-20 03:39:49 UTC

Whew. This poem is deep, and difficult, and somber. We can still feel its message echoing through the centuries, whispering soft warnings and hard reminders.

"Dover Beach" is the quintessential Victorian Poem; we will find out why when we enter into its churning depths together.

Photograph of Dover Beach

bengmon134 — 2025-06-20 03:42:41 UTC

As you read/listen to the poem, consider this photograph.

Compare "A Triad" by Christina Rossetti and "How do I love thee? Let me count the ways" by Elizabeth Barrett Browning

bengmon134 — 2025-06-21 18:46:39 UTC

These two sonnets are both about love, but--at least at first glance--they could not be more different. One is a proclamation by a woman who loves so purely and deeply--an almost impossible kind of love, at least by human standards. She proclaims: "I love thee to the depth and breadth and height / My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight / For the ends of Being and ideal Grace" (3-5). The other is an exasperated lament about three women who "sang of love together" (1). Nothing good comes from this song: "One shamed herself in love; one temperately / Grew gross and soulless in love, a sluggish wife; / One famished died for love... (9-11).

We will explore more in class.

This stirring first paragraph of The Poetry Foundation's introduction to the Victorian Era seems a fitting one to include here.

bengmon134 — 2025-06-21 18:55:09 UTC

“The sea is calm tonight,” observes the somber speaker of Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach” (1867), listening to “the grating roar / Of pebbles” at the shore, “The eternal note of sadness” over the waters. In Arnold’s mid-19th-century Britain, another metaphorical sea, “The Sea of Faith,” was ebbing irretrievably: “But now I only hear / Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar”; once seemingly “So various, so beautiful, so new,” Arnold’s world had “really neither joy, nor love, nor light, / Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain.” More than a century and a half after its publication, “Dover Beach” remains a durable expression of Victorian poetics: its intricate patterning and stagy theatrics, its nostalgia for simpler times, and its uncertainties about an increasingly mechanized modernity. Arnold once wrote that “poetry is at bottom a criticism of life,” an enterprise of the utmost artistic and moral stakes. Over the course of Queen Victoria’s long reign (1837–1901), Arnold and his contemporary British poets criticized contemporary life amid its epochal changes: the radical ideas of evolution and materialism, shifting understandings of gender and class, and an economic and industrial explosion that helped make the British Empire the largest in history.

-The Editors of The Poetry Foundation

As you read, write, ponder, and discuss, prepare.

bengmon134 — 2025-06-21 19:03:20 UTC

At the end of the unit, each one of you will write a poem of your own in the Victorian style, and give a short presentation about its significance. I encourage you to be brainstorming and considering as we dive in to the Era's most influential poems. Find a poet or poem or issue that especially touches you, and use it as inspiration. The issues that Victorian poets were wrestling with are in many ways the same issues we face today. Try to put yourself in their shoes, and read with curiosity, grace, and a sense of humor. You never know what beautiful things will come of that.

bengmon134 — 2025-06-21 19:20:59 UTC

Poetry is full of figurative language, and it is paramount that you strive to understand what the words and phrases of a given poem are doing. One word may change the tone of a poem. One phrase has the power to convey the message of a poem. Many Victorian poems are difficult precisely because of the ways they are worded. This is why it is so important to find words you know, cling to them, and keep them in mind as context and cornerstones of meaning as you look up words you do not know.

Supporting Standard (for poetry write)

bengmon134 — 2025-06-21 19:30:44 UTC

11-12.W.3: Write narratives or other creative texts to develop real or imagined

experiences or events using effective technique, well-chosen details, and well-structured event

sequences.

Essential Questions (Primary Standard)

bengmon134 — 2025-06-21 19:33:11 UTC

How do authors’ choices regarding words, point of view, structure, and use of rhetoric advance the

author’s purpose and affect readers’ ability to comprehend the text?

Why is it necessary to analyze how style and content create effective rhetoric?

How do these choices affect the message of the text?

With poetry specifically in mind, how does each part of a poem (word choice, point of view, form

and structure, rhetoric, rhyme and meter (or lack thereof), syllables, message/moral) play an

integral role in the process of piecing together the whole text?

Essential Questions (Supporting Standard)

bengmon134 — 2025-06-21 19:34:20 UTC

What are the different purposes and types of writing, and how do writers structure and support

different types of writing?

Why is it important to adjust the text type according to the purpose of the writing?

How do specific types of writing forms (like poetry) communicate meaning in different ways?

How does poetry utilize emotion to transmit a meaningful message?