activities

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My Fun Activities

Activity 1

Sterling A. Brown attended Williams College and was first introduced to great authors including T.S. Elliot and Ezra Pound. Though he studied their works, he was heavily influenced by Robert Frost. Robert Frost had a notable impact in some aspects of Brown’s style. Read “Out, Out” by Robert Frost and then go back through “Southern Cop.” Compare and contrast the rhetorical strategy within each poem and analyze each poem’s audience, tone, and purpose. Try to identify how Brown utilizes some of Frost’s techniques within aspects of his poetry.

"Out, Out - "
by: Robert Frost The buzz saw snarled and rattled in the yard
And made dust and dropped stove-length sticks of wood,
Sweet-scented stuff when the breeze drew across it.
And from there those that lifted eyes could count
Five mountain ranges one behing the other
Under the sunset far into Vermont.
And the saw snarled and rattled, snarled and rattled,
As it ran light, or had to bear a load.
And nothing happened: day was all but done.
Call it a day, I wish they might have said
To please the boy by giving him the half hour
That a boy counts so much when saved from work.
His sister stood beside him in her apron
To tell them "Supper." At the word, the saw,
As if it meant to prove saws know what supper meant,
Leaped out at the boy's hand, or seemed to leap -
He must have given the hand. However it was,
Neither refused the meeting. But the hand!
Half in appeal, but half as if to keep
The life from spilling. Then the boy saw all -
Since he was old enough to know, big boy
Doing a man's work, though a child at heart -
He saw all was spoiled. "Don't let him cut my hand off -
The doctor, when he comes. Don't let him, sister!"
So. The hand was gone already.
The doctor put him in the dark of ether.
He lay and puffed his lips out with his breath.
And then - the watcher at his pulse took a fright.
No one believed. They listened to his heart.
Little - less - nothing! - and that ended it.
No more to build on there. And they, since they
Were not the one dead, turned to their affairs.

Activity 2

The first line of each stanza is a repetition noted to signify a shift in tone. The words forgive, understand, condone, and pity all have similar denotations but different connotations. Create a list of words with similar denotations and replace them with the four words and note the change or the similarity in the connotations.

Activity 3

Read To An Athlete Dying Young by A. E. Housman. Then relate Housman’s message to Brown’s. Include in the analysis both poets’ uses of rhetoric and identify the audience, tone, and purpose. Address the sympathy associated within in each poem and aspects of irony.

The time you won your town the race
We chaired you through the market-place;
Man and boy stood cheering by,
And home we brought you shoulder-high.

To-day, the road all runners come,
Shoulder-high we bring you home,
And set you at your threshold down,
Townsman of a stiller town.

Smart lad, to slip betimes away
From fields were glory does not stay
And early though the laurel grows
It withers quicker than the rose.

Eyes the shady night has shut
Cannot see the record cut,
And silence sounds no worse than cheers
After earth has stopped the ears:

Now you will not swell the rout
Of lads that wore their honours out,
Runners whom renown outran
And the name died before the man.

So set, before its echoes fade,
The fleet foot on the sill of shade,
And hold to the low lintel up
The still-defended challenge-cup.

And round that early-laurelled head
Will flock to gaze the strengthless dead,
And find unwithered on its curls
The garland briefer than a girl's.