The title of the poem has to be read as it’s first line. When you get to line 4, stop and decide who “I” – the speaker – is.
If the Owl Calls Again John Haines At dusk from the island in the river and it’s not too cold, 5
I’ll wait for the moon to rise, then take wing and glide to meet him.
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We will not speak, but hooded against the frost soar above the alder flats, searching with tawny eyes And then we’ll sit in the shadowy spruce and pick the bones of careless mice, while the long moon drifts toward Asia and the river mutters in its icy bed. And when morning climbs the limbs we’ll part without a sound,
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fulfilled, floating homeward as the cold world awakens.
“A lamp in the window” is an old and powerful image. It can stand for the security of human company; for a place indoors out of the wind and rain; for a beacon light to guide travelers on their way. It can also stand for a ray of hope shining in the darkness. Here the “lamp in the windo” has become our familiar twentieth-century light bulb.
Poem to Be Read at 3 A.M. Donald Justice
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Excepting the diner On the outskirts The town of Ladora At 3 A.M. Was dark but For my headlights And up in One second-story room A single light Where someone Was sick or Perhaps reading As I drove past At seventy Not thinking This poem Is for whoever Had the light on
Bats are mammals. Like those other mammals, porpoises, bats have long fascinated humans because they behave in ways that most mammals do not. Unlike nearly all other mammals, bats fly and porpoises live under water. It is easy to forget that, like all other mammals, they nourish their young with milk. No matter how much we learn about their habits, bats remain mysterious. Some people once regarded bats as taboo. They shunned them as food because they thought they were a “crossed species” – part bird and part furry animal. Before you read, name all the things you think of when you picture a bat.
The Bat Theodore Roethke By day the bat is cousin to the mouse. He like the attic of an aging house. His fingers make a hat about his head. His pulse beat is so slow we think him dead. 5
He loops in crazy figures half the night Among the trees that face the corner light. But when he brushes up against a screen, We are afraid of what our eyes have seen:
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For something is amiss or out of place When mice with wings can wear a human face.
What is Whitman’s attitude toward the astronomer? What clues from the poem tell you this?
When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer Walt Whitman
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When I heard the learn’d astronomer, When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me, When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them, When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture room, How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick, Till rising and gliding out I wander’d off by myself, In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time, Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.