Primrose Road

Assignment: for one of three poems (Fenton, "God, A Poem"; Winters, "At The San Francisco Airport"; Shakespeare, "Sonnet 134"), identify and discuss the effects of three of the following, making specific references to the text of the poem: enjambment, irony (dramatic, situational verbal), parallelism/juxtaposition, catalog, paradox, metaphor, allusion.

25% of the students in my class identified the lines "I didn't exist at Creation, / I didn't exist at the Flood" (Fenton) as situational irony, i.e. the speaker says what he or she can't possibly mean. Y'know, because gee-dash-dee did exist at creation and all.

(Don't worry parents and administrators, I don't grade based on belief, and they got full credit for understanding what situational irony is.)