QUESTIONS AND SUGGESTIONS
POETRY.—Compare Emerson's Woodnotes with Bryant's Thanatopsis and A Forest Hymn. Make a comparison of these three poems of motion: The Evening Wind (Bryant), The Humble-Bee (Emerson), and Daybreak (Longfellow), and give reasons for your preference. Compare in like manner The Snow-Storm (Emerson), the first sixty-five lines of Snow-Bound (Whittier), and The First Snow-Fall (Lowell). To which of these three simple lyrics of nature would you award the palm: To the Fringed Gentian (Bryant), The Rhodora (Emerson), To the Dandelion (Lowell)? After making your choice of these three poems, compare it with these two English lyrics of the same class: To a Mountain Daisy (Burns), Daffodils (Wordsworth, the poem beginning "I wandered lonely as a cloud"), and again decide which poem pleases you most.
Compare the humor of these two short poems describing a wooing: The
Courtin' (Lowell), The Ballad of the Oysterman (Holmes). Discuss the
ideals of these four poems: A Psalm of Life (Longfellow), For an
Autograph (Lowell), An Autograph (Whittier), The Chambered Nautilus
(Holmes).
What difference in the mental characteristics of the authors do these two retrospective poems show: My Lost Youth (Longfellow), Memories (Whittier)? For a more complete answer to this question, compare the girls in these two poems: Maidenhood (Longfellow):—
"Maiden, with the meek, brown eyes,
In whose orbs a shadow lies,"
and In School Days (Whittier), beginning with the lines where he says of the winter sun long ago:—
"It touched the tangled golden curls,
And brown eyes full of grieving."
Matthew Arnold, that severe English critic, called one of these poems perfect of its kind, and Oliver Wendell Holmes cried over one of them. The student who reads these carefully is entitled to rely on his own judgment, without verifying which poem Arnold and Holmes had in mind.
Compare Longfellow's ballads: The Skeleton in Armor, The Birds of
Killingworth, and The Wreck of the Hesperus, with Whittier's Skipper
Ireson's Ride, Cassandra Southwick, and Maud Muller.
Compare Whittier's Snow-Bound with Burns's Cotter's Saturday Night. In Whittier's poem, what group of lines descriptive of (a) nature, and (b) of inmates of the household pleases you most?