Name ____________________________________ Class Color _____________________

Analyzing Quotations in Detail

First, go to the website Writing Review and read the page on Analysis. Then add analytical sentences to the following imbedded quotations.

1. Rainer Maria Rilke opens his poem "Archaic Torso of Apollo" by naming what the viewer of the headless statue cannot see: "We cannot know his legendary head / With eyes like ripening fruit" (1-2).

2. Rilke ends his poem on the statue of Apollo with an abrupt shift in point of view: "for here there is no place / That does not see you.  You must change your life" (13-14).

3. In his "Sunday Morning," Wallace Stevens asks the plaintive question of the seemingly perfect paradise of Christianity: "Is there no change of death in paradise? / Does ripe fruit never fall? Or do the boughs / Hang always heavy in that perfect sky [ . . . ]" (81-83).

4. Stevens opens his poem with the luxuries of a languorous Sunday Morning: "Complacencies of the peignoir, and late / Coffee and oranges in a sunny chair [ . . . ]" (1-2).

5. Mary Oliver suggests that the human spirit "at night / lights up the deep and wondrous / drownings of the body / like a star" (10-14).

End.