Rotation 6 Blog 3
“The Farm on the Great Plains” by William Stafford
There are seven stanzas with four lines in each stanza making it a quatrain. Euphony is very present in this poem; the lines flow very well. I found a lot of assonance. For example: the first line – telephone, goes, and cold, sixth line- ringing, listening, still, tenth line, night and right (also internal rhyming there). There are rhyming couplets in each stanza, however they are slant rhymes. The way I read this poem was in iambic pentameter.
“Grass” by Carl Sangburg
This was a very interesting poem to me because grass is being personified in a morbid but interesting way. The diction is very repetitive because the poem keeps going back to the piling of bodies, and I think repeating it makes it stronger. It shows that this must have been during the time of the war since there are so many bodies coming and being piled in certain landmarks like Gettysburg and Austerlitz. It shows how time has passed and how the grass really does cover everything at the end when it says “Two years, ten years, and passengers ask the conductor What place is this? Where are we now?”. There is cacophony in this poem because it is not a very pleasant poem especially when it comes to the repeating of “pile the bodies high”.
