Group Activity: Deeper Meanings

Give your summary of the poem’s meaning to another group:

Group 1 give your summary to group 3
Group 2 give your summary to group 6
Group 3 give your summary to group 4
Group 4 give your summary to group 2
Group 5 give your summary to group 1
Group 6 give your summary to group 5

Work through steps 2-13 to identify other important patterns in your new poem. Some of the steps may require a lot of attention, some you may move through very quickly since they might not be as important for each poem.

For each step, think about how your recognition of this patterns deepens, complicates, underscores, or contradicts the statement of the poem’s meaning that you got from the other group.

Once you have gone through all the steps, work together to compose a 5-7-minute presentation for the rest of the class in which you:

1. Read the other group’s statement of the poem’s meaning
2. Summarize your discussion of Vendler’s 12 other steps, focusing on those steps that were most important to your new interpretation of the poem and omitting those that weren’t very helpful.
3. Present a new thesis about the poem’s meaning based on how the patterns you identified in the poem shed new light on the other group’s statement of meaning.