ENGL 364 Dr. Helen Bittel Wordsworth Study Guide Instructions: Complete any 4 of the following 8 question clusters. Please note that these questions were designed to accommodate a diverse group with different types and levels of prior experience, and not every student will feel well prepared to answer every cluster. Use your best judgment to choose the clusters that seem most likely to enhance your understanding of the particular poem we are studying and to best address your own interests. FYI, the "smaller" questions within each cluster are intended as prompts or suggestions and not as a definitive outline. You are not expected to answer each systematically (or to cover as much ground as the prompts themselves), but only to provide substantive and well-supported responses to the poems, responses that goes beyond "what" and into "why it matters" (i.e. go beyond identifying the rhyme scheme or recurrent imagery and speculate on their significance within the poem). "The World is Too Much With Us" 1. What does Wordsworth mean by "the world" in this poem? What is the problem that he identifies in the octave (first 8 lines)? In the sestet (last 6 lines), what advantage does the "Pagan suckled in a creed outworn" have over the speaker and his contemporaries? "Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood" Who? 2. What does the poem reveal about the speaker? What is he concerned or regretful about? What does he idealize? What? 3. Argument. What, exactly, does the speaker believe is so admirable and wondrous about childhood? What is it, exactly, that we inevitably lose as we grow older? How? 4. Opening. What are "intimations" and why might Wordsworth have chosen that word rather than a synonym? What might he mean by "The Child is Father of the Man" in the poem's famous epigraph? 5. Sound and sense. Can you identify the rhyme and meter of the first 2 stanzas? Do they seem appropriate to the subject or situation? How so (or how not)? How do variations of line length affect the feeling of the poem? Which lines, if any, receive special emphasis? 6. Special effects. What kinds of words does Wordsworth choose to capitalize? Why do you think he does this? What are the effects on the reader? How does he make use of caesura, enjambment, and punctuation? Again, what are the effects on the reader? Both Poems 7. Implications for readers today. Choose one of the poems and consider the following questions: Is there anything in the poem that you think might speak especially powerfully to people in our own time and culture? What and why? Do you think that it speaks to today's readers for similar reasons and in similar ways, or in different ones? How so? Is there anything in the poem that---due to differences in cultural context---might be especially difficult for contemporary readers to appreciate or sympathize with? What and why? 8. Potpourri. Is there any else that you think might be important in understanding how the poem works that we have not covered above? What and why? Contact the English Department at: 570-348-6219. E-mail: English@marywood.edu.

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Last update August 20, 2004
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