<font size="2" face="Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif">Questions:"To An Athlete Dying Young"
- A.E. Housman
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 where 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.
1. Identify the apostrophe.
When trying to identify the apostrophe throughout the poem, I realized that most of the poem contains apostrophe, therefore, I will select the most notorious apostrophe in the poem, which are the first few lines of the poem.
<font size="2" face="Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif">2.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.
Denotation and Connotation: Select any one (significant/important) word from the poem and give its denotative meaning (its dictionary meaning) and give its connotative meaning(s), those meanings that go beyond the dictionary meaning.
Rose
The dictionary definition is a very beautiful plant, but the connotative meaning is the youth of the athlete. The rose is referring to the beauty of a young man's life that withers to fast. Roses are not supposed to wither fast.
3. Select one image from the poem and explain how it appeals to the senses.
<font size="2" face="Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif">This part of the poem appeals to the auditory sense because the author of the poem, through this imagery describes the excitement of the family and people that surround the athlete. When I read this part, I imagined all the people chanting the athlete, who had just won the race.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.
4. What would you identify as the tone of the poem? (Remember, the tone is the attitude that the writer/speaker has for her subject, audience, or herself).
The tone of poem is one of admiration, but at the same time of nostalgia in that the author is remembering the young athlete's achievements. As the poem progresses, the tone starts to wither away into one of sadness, since the author is remembering the young athlete, but at the same time, through the author's remembrance of the athlete, the tone is also one of joy and admiration.
<font color="#a62a2a"><font size="1">[ February 25, 2008 08:28 PM: Message edited by: montanaro.g ]</font></font>
<font color="#a62a2a" size="1">[ February 25, 2008 08:31 PM: Message edited by: montanaro.g ]</font>
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