They are to do a close reading of Donne's "A Valediction Forbidding Mourning," perhaps marking up their text (or even recopying it to slow down their reading). Then, they are to compose a bulleted list of observations of form (about 10 items) in the format modeled below.
The 10 items of form should be varied across different types of literary form. However, for this exercise I want all students to begin with the three elements of form recently reviewed in class: genre, narrator/persona, and setting. After that, they are free to select any aspects of form they can observe. (Consult my presentation on formal analysis of literature to get some ideas of the range of formal elements to be identified.)
For format, bold the formal element at the start of the bulleted item, followed by a brief sentence that includes a quotation, as in these examples analyzing a different text, Donne's "Meditation 17":
- Genre / subgenre. As a "meditation," this is a prose genre of tentative, personal, sober reflection, as evident in the opening when the narrator repeats the words "perchance" and "I" and talks about illness: "Perchance he for whom this bell tolls may be so ill, as that he knows not it tolls for him; and perchance I may think myself so much better than I am, as that they who are about me, and see my state, may have caused it to toll for me, and I know not that."
- Narrator / persona. We can assume the narrator to be Donne himself, who was preoccupied with illness and death. In this meditation, the narrator sounds a bit brainy or academic as he is making or explaining an elaborate comparison: "...when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language he is making"; and at other times, the narrator sounds more personally involved: "any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind."
(and so on, making 10 in total)
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