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3 pages/≈825 words
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Literature & Language
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English (U.S.)
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Formal analysis of Pale Fire line 58-70. Literature & Language Essay

Essay Instructions:

Introduction
In the introduction of your paper, you should begin with descriptive claims specific to the section of the poem that you have chosen. You do not need to introduce the poem to the reader as if she has never read it, as you can assume that all your readers (me and your classmates) have already done so. You also do not need to start with generic statements like "Throughout history..." or "Everyone experiences...." I recommend getting started with something like, "In lines 49-60 of '[Poem],' [poet] claims that..." Go on to describe some of the analytical discoveries you made about the poetic meter and form in this section. Then, in your thesis statement, which I expect to see at the end of the first paragraph, you should attempt to make a strong interpretive claim about poetic style in the section you have chosen, and a suggestion about what this would contribute about your reader's understanding of the poem. Keep in mind that the thesis is often the first line of a paper to be drafted, and the last to be revised. Performing a good formal analysis will force your thesis to change, so do not expect to turn in your first draft. You will be making an argument, not writing a proof.

Body
In the body of your paper, you should use evidence from the text to support the claims of your thesis. Each paragraph should work with a single quotation from the section you've chosen, usually one line at a time. After each quotation, but before the period, there should be a parenthetical citation listing the line number (l. 49). A body paragraph should introduce the quotation in its context, describe its content, provide the quotation, explicate it from a formal perspective, and show how it relates to your thesis. Each paragraph should carefully explicate some relationship between the formal poetic properties of a quoted line to the meaning. Be sure to employ the terminology of poetic analysis that we have learned in class. Feel free to mark the meter of the quoted lines using a pen after printing your paper. This will enable me to follow your argument when you refer to a particular metrical foot.

Conclusion
In the conclusion, you should not feel the need to review everything you've already said. Rather, finish your paper by showing how this kind of analysis contributes to a fuller (or usefully nuanced) understanding of the text as a whole.

Keep in mind
It will never be your job in this course to evaluate a text. I am not grading you on your opinions about the text or your appraisal of it, though of course your own interests and skills will guide your choice of material and attention to it. You also should avoid, in this paper especially, the temptation to draw connections between the text and "truth" or "the world." Over the course of the semester, we will be discussing how and when literary scholars pull evidence from sources outside the text to guide their explication, but for this particular assignment, you should focus narrowly on the formal properties of the text itself as they relate to meaning. If you have other questions about my expectations for college writing, please feel free to ask.

Essay Sample Content Preview:

Formal Analysis Of Pale Fire Line 58-70
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  In lines 58-70 of ‘Pale Fire’ by Vladimir Nabokov, John Shade is the fictional poet and Charles Kinbote is the narrator who reviews Shade’s poem. Nabokov’s work contains elements of a poem and poetry, and in embedding the poem into a novel the poet explored. Nabokov’s stanzas as rhythm and rhyme are not prioritized in the poem. The narrator as the only source of information, makes the narrative poem less structured compared to the English Sonnets and couplets.  Pale Fire mainly uses the iambic pentameter, with various variations, where the lines are rhymed and there are elements of decasyllabic couplets. 
Varying the meter and form in the poem allows the poet to explore the life of Stone, and focus on how his experiences influenced his life. For instance, he wrote “It is now stout and rough; it has done well, White butterflies turn lavender as they” (I. 54-55).   Stone was preoccupied with describing his surroundings including his house and garden and the variation in the rhyme and rhythm helped depict his homestead.  Stones interest in understanding nature is underscored in other stanzas and his description of the butterflies turning lavender shows he was a keen observer. As such the narrative poem is free flowing since Stone scrutinized his observations and the idea is to describe the house and garden as best as possible.   Nature is mysterious and by utilizing various forms in the poem, the poet recognizes that there are many things that we do not know and need to be explored.
  As the poem has various iambic pattern substitutions this helps tell apart Stone’s and Kinbote’s narrations. “Often, almost nightly, throughout the spring of 1959, I had feared for my life. Solitude is the playfield of Satan. I cannot describe the depths of my loneliness and distress” (I. 62-64). Kinbote described torment one night in 1959 mentioning his place of origin Zembla, which may be fictional, but still manages to contrast with Stone’s. Nabokov cross-references the poem with the commentary and other lines in different cantons of the poem. In other stanzas, Stone focused on the life of Hazel his daughter and underscore her place in his life that life became rough without her. In choosing an unstructured form,   the poet noted downs his recollections about Hazel. Stone’s...
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