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Course: Writing 5
Instructor: Prof. Michael Chaney
Assignment: Interpretation of a Poem
Students are to collaboratively make short digitial-videos that interpret a poem. The directions are challenging in
that students are asked not simply to produce a 5-7 min. long film that REFLECTS images in a poem, but to produce
a film that PERSUADES its viewer to see the poem's imagery in a particular way, according to reigning scholarly
interpretations of the poem in question. After making the film (not for credit) they are then asked to write a
research paper on the poem that comments on their filmic adaptation as a mode of interpreting the poem's embedded
representation of visual experience (all the poems chosen for this assignment have something to do with seeing, sight,
the visual, or the visionary).
They will be working in four groups of four and each group will have someone in it with some experience shooting and editing digital motion images.
The Poems
"Fall of Icarus" by Breughel
Mus»e des Beaux Arts WH Auden (1938)
About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters; how well, they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.
This Is A Photograph Of Me
From The Circle Game by Margaret Atwood. Copyright © 1998
It was taken some time ago.
At first it seems to be
a smeared
print: blurred lines and grey flecks
blended with the paper;
then, as you scan
it, you see in the left-hand corner
a thing that is like a branch: part of a tree
(balsam or spruce) emerging
and, to the right, halfway up
what ought to be a gentle
slope, a small frame house.
In the background there is a lake,
and beyond that, some low hills.
(The photograph was taken
the day after I drowned.
I am in the lake, in the center
of the picture, just under the surface.
It is difficult to say where
precisely, or to say
how large or small I am:
the effect of water
on light is a distortion
but if you look long enough,
eventually
you will be able to see me.)
Before I got my eye put out by Emily Dickinson.
Before I got my eye put out
I liked as well to see --
As other Creatures, that have Eyes
And know no other way --
But were it told to me -- Today --
That I might have the sky
For mine -- I tell you that my Heart
Would split, for size of me --
The Meadows -- mine --
The Mountains -- mine --
All Forests -- Stintless Stars --
As much of Noon as I could take
Between my finite eyes --
The Motions of the Dipping Birds --
The Morning's Amber Road --
For mine -- to look at when I liked --
The News would strike me dead --
So safer -- guess -- with just my soul
Upon the Window pane --
Where other Creatures put their eyes --
Incautious -- of the Sun -