Here is the general idea of how the last few days of the term will unfold...
Wednesday - poetry and some time to plan your synthesis composition
Thursday - synthesis composition and poetry
Long weekend - writing assignment on Water for Elephants
Tuesday - last literature circle, writing assignment due, vocabulary make up quiz after class (I will not go over these words during class time; so if you have questions about them, ask me before Tuesday.)
Your words are
somber, enmity, interminable, hiatus, ebullience, dilate, myriad, torrid, susurration, oppressive, inscrutable, vicissitudes, tacit, tirade, taboo, and sinewy
Wednesday - poetry "quest", review for final exam
Thursday - Provincial Exam and final exam
Friday - final exam for those who wrote the Provincial Exam, others will work on a poetry presentation
Monday - poetry presentations
Tuesday - last day of classes
For those of you who need a copy of tonight's poetry assignment, here it is. Only the multiple choice questions have been assigned.
Summer in the Yakima Valley
by Ruth Roach Pierson
By day I loved
the farmhouse on the hill
the dust haze the pickup raised
plying the dirt roads
the orchard trees in even 5
rows down the slopes
and out in all directions
the sigh of apricots
Santa Rosa plums, Bing
and Queen Anne cherries 10
ripening in the dry heat
the long-short snick snick
of the sprinklers’ jerky rotation
hum and hiss of a low-flying
spray plane 15
In over-the-knees rubber boots
my cousin and I stomped
the uneven ground careful
of cow pies and Canadian thistles
plucked alfalfa shoots 20
to stick between our teeth
swaggered like cowboys
to the edge of the irrigation ditch
and stripped to swim in its muddied water
giddy on the danger of going too near 25
the whirlpool pull
of the main pipe’s undertow
But after dark
in the attic room
in that house on the top of the hill 30
he always fell asleep first,
my cousin, leaving me
to listen alone
to the sounds of the night
the valley now as alien 35
as the other side of the moon—
a coyote’s hungry cry
the twist and scrape of tumbleweed
like a wind-tossed tangle of bones
over clay-dry earth 40
a jackrabbit caught
in the beam from a jeep’s headlight
Exiled in the moon-engorged room
I lay prey to the sick
ache, the hunger for home 45
as nightmare shadows slid
across the floor, loomed
on the wall over my head
and everywhere the eerie
whine of the wind aprowl 50
in the Yakima Valley by night—
weedy, persistent, atonal 52
1. Which device is employed in line 3, “the dust haze the pickup raised”?
a. assonance
b. alliteration
c. dissonance
d. onomatopoeia
2. Lines 5-11 suggest that the farm is
a. suffering
b. abundant
c. profitable
d. uncontrolled
3. Which literary device is contained in “swaggered like cowboys”? (line 22)
a. simile
b. metaphor
c. hyperbole
d. understatement
4. The speaker and the cousin are described as “giddy” (line 25) which implies that they are
a. lazy
b. eager
c. scared
d. excited
5. In line 26, “the whirlpool pull” contains an example of
a. oxymoron
b. metonymy
c. consonance
d. internal rhyme
6. Lines 43-48 imply that the speaker feels
a. angry
b. indignant
c. distressed
d. disappointed
7. In the context of the entire poem, which word best describes the speaker’s overall attitude toward the Yakima Valley?
a. resentful
b. apathetic
c. appreciative
d. contradictory
8. This poem could best be classified as a
a. lyric
b. ballad
c. sonnet
d. monologue
The paragraph question asks students to discuss contrast in the poem.
