Practice
The practice cycle
Unseen skill is built in cycles, not crammed: a timed poem, an honest look at what the annotation produced, one thing to do differently, and another poem. The sonnet below is out of copyright and stands here as the shape of the exercise; the poems set in class follow.
A poem to work on
Christina Rossetti, ‘Remember’ (1862), public domain:
Remember me when I am gone away,
Gone far away into the silent land;
When you can no more hold me by the hand,
Nor I half turn to go yet turning stay.
Remember me when no more day by day
You tell me of our future that you plann’d:
Only remember me; you understand
It will be late to counsel then or pray.
Yet if you should forget me for a while
And afterwards remember, do not grieve:
For if the darkness and corruption leave
A vestige of the thoughts that once I had,
Better by far you should forget and smile
Than that you should remember and be sad.
Three prompts to annotate against
First, the speaker and the addressed: who holds the power in this farewell, and how can you tell? Second, the turn: what changes at ‘Yet’, and what does the sonnet form let the poem do at that moment? Third, the close: how does the final couplet’s concession, forgetting forgiven, change your reading of the imperative ‘Remember’ that began the poem?
Further poems and full timed tasks follow from the class materials.
The cycle
Time the reading and plan strictly; write; then mark your own answer against one question: where did an observation fail to become an argument? Carry that one repair into the next poem. Improvement in unseens is nearly always one habit at a time.