REMINDER: On Tuesday, January 21 you have a test on the literary terms. This is matching and will involve only 20 of the 32 you were assigned.
REGENTS EXAM: afternoon session on Monday, January 27
In class: we are reviewing task 3 of the ELA REGENTS.
This involves reading two passages, in this case an excerpt from a short story and a poem, but it could be two pieces of prose or two poems. You have already analyzed the poem yesterday. You will answer some multiple choice questions and write a paragraph using specific examples from both passages, discussing the controlling idea, also known as the theme.
This is a class handout with a copy below. This is a graded, writing assignment.
Part 3 (Questions 21–27)
Directions:On the following pages read Passage I (an excerpt from a short story) and Passage II (a poem) about
growing old. You may use the margins to take notes as you read. Answer the multiple-choice questions on the
answer sheet provided for you. Then write your response for question 26 on page 1 of your essay booklet
Passage I
I’m old, they say. The calendar says so, too. But consider me not a humble man, if you
wish, the mirror does not say so, and sometimes in my veins I feel youth like a streak of
forked lightning. It travels fast, this old youth, and strikes as it never did at twenty or even
forty, a little fisted heart of springtime distilled out of all time and no time. Then I feel shot
through with a sudden psalm,1 and a tiger pursues the field mouse of my pastured old age.
All the pictures that once unloosed themselves on my fire-eating brain stop, still as
mountains with morning drawn up in their valleys. I walk back across my own history.
I do not say it is all pleasant. There is a saying that what you lose in one place you make
up in another, which with the proper forbearance can, I suppose, become a truth. But no
one escapes life, and no one beats it, and every loss is a tear in the heart’s tender flesh.
“Give me rain and I will make flowers,” my mother said, and she did. But I am a man,
an old and impatient one, no doubt, and I resent not being a god, expect too much,
weaken with the perfidy2 of friends and the trickery of the flesh, lost frontiers, blind alleys,
the death of dreams, solitude, pain, the heroes climbing up the stairs and flinging back dust
into the eyes.
I was thinking about all this the other evening. It was the hour that belongs to me. You
see I have my little bag of tricks too, like any old peddler. It is a foolishness what I do, the
last thing, I believe, that anyone would suspect.
The lights have been turned out in my shop (it is really a gallery of pictures) and my
people have gone out into the dusk, and the blind spots of the rooms are washed in
a curious game of hide-and-seek before the total darkness. In the blue and lilac the pictures
die. I can wander through these rooms alone as a ghost or an actor saying his lines to an
empty house. Up the stairs I roam in the scent of turpentine and old fires and dust, through
the gilder’s3 room with the laid aside tools and droppings of gold, and down again crossing
the holes of light that once were doors.
It pleases me to do this on certain evenings in the spring when the light spreads out so
softly over the town, and I can see a mile outward from my uppermost room. Most of the
time, though, I would rather stand, well hidden by the draperies, at an enormous window
which fronts the sidewalks and the street. At this hour no one goes by. The traffic has
become a flutter, the pigeons assemble on the cornices, and the tight clang of the daytime
bells tolling the hour becomes suddenly as spun of dreams as the party-day sashes of girls
adrift in the wind. It is six o’clock. I have become a poet.
1 psalm — sacred song or poem
2 perfidy — disloyalty
3 gilder — one who works with layered gold
Passage II
On Our Dog’s Birthday
Throughout the day,
he’ll press his wet nose
against the floor to ceiling
window and watch anything
that passes by, now and
then falling asleep. When
the cats come in, they’ll
nuzzle their cold faces
against the soft warmth
of his forehead. We’ll
also look into the day,
watch the thick gray
beech trees’ branches
sway in the coming
winter storm. Today
our dog is ten. When
we go to another room,
he’ll follow. When later
we take our walk, he will
wander off after smells
he finds along the way.
After we return, if I toss
his ragged stuffed lion,
he’ll look at me, seem
to want to say, “You
don’t have to play with me.
I’m fine,” then mosey
over, and take the toy
back to his spot. Tonight,
if he needs to go out, he
will sit by the side of the bed,
my wife and I sleeping deep
in our marriage, and woof
softly, clear his throat,
as if he doesn’t want to be a bother.
—Jack Ridl
Harpur Palate, Summer 2004
26 Write a well-developed paragraph in which you use ideas from both passages to
establish a controlling idea about work. Develop your controlling idea using
specific examples and details from each passage.
No comments:
Post a Comment