homework

[scarfman]

qtrhorserider is taking the bar exam. I'm across the street in the state law library in the state capitol building, doing homework. Not Windows Programming homework - I'll worry about that over spring break next week (though there's a test tomorrow afternoon I'll want to do review for before then) - World Lit homework. Yesterday I wrote two pages on Gilman's The Yellow Wallpaper in compensation for missing the discussion in class today. Today I'm working on the term paper due Friday, for which we're to write a one-page Romantic poem or short story (quality optional) and then spend four pages describing why it's Romantic. This is my poem.

The clerk sits in the C.O.'s tent and pushes papers through.
No soldier's loss or doctor's lack escapes his process (due).

The wounds, the deaths, the lives undone when not just whisked away
Reduced to words, or numbers, are. That's where his duties lay.

The doctors do the best they can the horrors to defray.
No doctor, he. To him it falls to log, not save, the day.

An envelope to headquarters he folds the war into.
Then goes out to the crates in back and feeds those in his zoo.

Comments

[pedanther]

I have a feeling that it should be "where his duties lie", but of course I quite see that that would ruin the rhyme scheme.

(I would ask you where you score on John Sutherland's yellow wallpaper test, but I don't suppose you know.)

[scarfman]

"where his duties lie" You're right, I think, but I'm not going to sweat a grammatical error in a poem about Radar O'Reilly.

John Sutherland's yellow wallpaper test I haven't heard of it, and a websearch doesn't enlighten me.

[pedanther]

The relevant essay isn't online, as far as I know. (And I don't own a copy, so the rest of this is from memory:)

John Sutherland remarks in one of his essays that in his experience there are two types of fiction readers: those to whom only the events of the story are significant; and those who also pay attention to how the events are presented (is the story told by an omniscient impersonal narrator directly addressing the reader? if not, who is supposedly telling it? and to whom?).

He goes on to say that the quickest and simplest test he has ever found for determining which type a given reader is, is to get them to read "The Yellow Wallpaper" and then ask them what they noticed about it.