Daily Log

Tuesday, March 16

In the first half of our extended class period we finished our examination of "O Captain" by observing how disruptions in the poem's meter are used to evoke the poet's uncontainable grief, and we considered more generally how sound echoes sense in poetry, referring to the important passage on that topic in Alexander Pope's Essay on Criticism.

In the second half of the class we observed tomorrow's holiday -- St. Patrick's Day -- by saluting our Irish-American President O'Bama and by examining the racism which Irish people encountered in this country in the 19th century.