Ode on a Grecian URL

Your hebdomadal is due, via email, no later than a minute past midnight Friday September 16. (For most of us that means Thursday night.)

Compose your hebdomadal in a word processor but please send it in the text of the email, not as an attachment.

Choose either one Wordsworth poem that we will have covered in lecture by Sept. 16 - "Tintern Abbey," "Michael," or "Ode: Intimations of Immortality" - or a favorite song of your choice* and answer one of the following groups of questions about it:

1. Who narrates or speaks this text? Are there many "I's" or only one? What does the text tell us about what a self can know or do?


2. Does the text address a "you"? If so, does it mean to address you, the reader, or some other audience, a "you" within the text? What does the text ask the reader to do and to know? Does it imagine "you" as sympathetic or as distant, and how can you tell?


3. Does the text imagine an "us" - a group? If so, what are the boundaries of this "us"? Who is included?


4. Does the text imagine a "them" - an other - something or someone that cannot be assimilated or absorbed? What kinds of groups or figures does the text go out of its way to exclude?

* I find that songs by The Killers work extremely well for these questions. In any case, if you choose to analyze one of your favorite songs please include a copy of the lyrics in your hebdomadal.