1. Denotation/Connotation and Imagery
Poetry Analysis

2. Crucifix: The speaker hangs nailed to a cross, like Christ, suffering persecution even though he has done no wrong.  
Crossbreed: The speaker is a of mixed heritage.
Anger: The speaker has been angry, or "cross," with his father and mother for passing on to him an amalgam of genes. After his anger subsides, he forgives them but remains in turmoil over his mixed heritage. 
Burden: The speaker "carries a cross," his mixed racial heritage. 
Cross over: The speaker "crosses over" from anger to forgiveness, leaving behind his bitterness. 
Crossroad: After forgiving his father and mother, the speaker stands at a crossroad and faces an uncertain future.
Cross  by By Langston Hughes   My old man's a white old man  And my old mother's black.  If ever I cursed my white old man  I take my curses back.
If ever I cursed my black old mother  And wished she were in hell,  I'm sorry for that evil wish  And now I wish her well.
My old man died in a fine big house.  My ma died in a shack.  I wonder where I'm gonna die,  Being neither white nor black? 
(1926)

3. Title Paraphrase Connotation Organization Attitude
“Cross” – first impression?
Speaker’s father is white and his mother is black ; speaker regrets and recants his harsh judgment of them, if he had judged them so, and states he clearly belongs on neither side of the racial (and consequent social, economic.)
Many connotations of “cross;” “old man” vs. “my mother” and “ma”—disdain for father and affection for mother ; “cursed” in “father’s” stanza (non- Christian belief) and speaker’ merely “takes curses back”/“evil” and “hell” shade “mother’s stanza” with Christian meaning and speaker “wishes her well;” diction is childish, colloquial
3 quatrains; meter and rhyme scheme resemble a nursery rhyme (youthful innocence/ignorance? handed down/generational); 1 stanza for father, mother separate entities/experiences brought together in 3rd stanza which ends in a question.
Detached, cold, disdainful, insincerely remorseful, satiric (sardonic?) questioning; distant, even from self; ends in a definitely direct tone

4. Shifts
Title
Theme
From past to present; from “if ever” to “now;” between stanzas/subjects; from declarative sentences to question, from black to white to “neither”
“Cross” symbolizes the reality of a racially mixed heritage and the speaker’s struggle in coming to terms with that reality
The poem “Cross” by Langston Hughes relies heavily on a sophisticated interpretation of the symbolism of its title, and contrasts that with elements of a children’s schoolyard chant, to illustrate the stark, painful realities of systemic and generational racism, and focuses strongly the estrangement of those who fall on neither side of the racial divide.

5. “Looked into going past” – brief encounter, unplanned?
Desert Places
By Robert Frost
Snow falling and night falling fast, oh, fast In a field I looked into going past, And the ground almost covered smooth in snow, But a few weeds and stubble showing last.  The woods around it have it - it is theirs. All animals are smothered in their lairs. I am too absent-spirited to count; The loneliness includes me unawares.  And lonely as it is, that loneliness Will be more lonely ere it will be less - A blanker whiteness of benighted snow With no expression, nothing to express.  They cannot scare me with their empty spaces Between stars - on stars where no human race is. I have it in me so much nearer home To scare myself with my own desert places. 
“Looked into going past” – brief encounter, unplanned?
Weeds and stubble – both cultivated crops and intrusive weeds (planned and unplanned)
Woods – “uncivilized” space
Absent-spirited – play on “absent-minded” (spirit=emotion, spiritual belief, ghost)
More/less – puts current situation into a framework, a progression or bigger picture; allows for some perspective
Blanker whiteness – redundant
Benighted – night=darkness= ignorance, moral emptiness -- or knighted? (valiant? )
Have it in me – ability, potential; “it” = loneliness, emptiness
Scare – child-like (bravado)

6. Title – Paraphrase – Connotation – Organization – Attitude – Shifts –
They – Upon first read = natural elements? Heavens?
-- With research or familiarity with these works = Astronomers or
followers of Blaise Pascal, who wrote, “The eternal silence of these
infinite spaces terrifies me.”
Title/concluding phrase – from Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (chapter 18) where “desert places” are introduced as a simile to describe the “moral wilderness” into which Hester Prynne is free to wander as the result of her expulsion from society (exile.)
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7. Sound of the wind, a few leaves, the land
Mind of winter – lack of emotion, unaffected OR intentional protective frame of mind? (Others would see the misery)
Crusted with snow, shagged with ice, spruces rough, glitter of January sun – visual images
Sound of the wind, a few leaves, the land
Full of wind blowing in a bare place (allusion to Whitman, Thoreau?)
Listener who listens (repetition suggests emphasis on the action)
“Beholds” (repeated) rather than “see” – to give regard to (active)
“Nothing himself” – allusion to Emerson?
The Snow Man
Wallace Stevens
One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;
And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter
Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,
Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place
For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

8. _________________________
Allusion to Hamlet , 3.4 when the ghost appears to Hamlet in Gertrude’s closet but is invisible to her/ Hamlet asks, “Do you see nothing there?” and she replies, “Nothing at all; yet all that is I see.” A Realist would say, the way to avoid being miserable is to make oneself a snowman, unable to feel.
The suggestion of action and perception, however, leads to a more Romantic?/Transcendentalist? Response, not at all suggesting that one have a “mind of winter.”
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9. Acquainted with the Night
By Robert Frost (1874–1963)
I have been one acquainted with the night.
I have walked out in rain and back in rain.
I have outwalked the furthest city light.
I have looked down the saddest city lane.
I have passed by the watchman on his beat
And dropped my eyes, unwilling to explain.
I have stood still and stopped the sound of feet
When far away an interrupted cry
Came over houses from another street,
But not to call me back or say good-bye;
And further still at an unearthly height,
One luminary clock against the sky
Proclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right
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10. _____________________________
A Dream Within A Dream Edgar Allen Poe
Take this kiss upon the brow! And, in parting from you now, Thus much let me avow- You are not wrong, who deem That my days have been a dream; Yet if hope has flown away In a night, or in a day, In a vision, or in none, Is it therefore the less gone? All that we see or seem Is but a dream within a dream.
I stand amid the roar Of a surf-tormented shore, And I hold within my hand Grains of the golden sand- How few! yet how they creep Through my fingers to the deep, While I weep- while I weep! O God! can I not grasp Them with a tighter clasp? O God! can I not save One from the pitiless wave? Is all that we see or seem But a dream within a dream?
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11. ________________________
The Farewell
Edward Field
They say the ice will hold so there I go, forced to believe them by my act of trusting people, stepping out on it,
and naturally it gaps open and I, forced to carry on coolly by my act of being imperturbable, slide erectly into the water wearing my captain's helmet, waving to the shore with a sad smile, "Goodbye my darlings, goodbye dear one," as the ice meets again over my head with a click.
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12. Invictus by William Ernest Henley
Out of the night that covers me, Black as the Pit from pole to pole, I thank whatever gods may be For my unconquerable soul. In the fell clutch of circumstance I have not winced nor cried aloud. Under the bludgeonings of chance My head is bloody, but unbowed.
Beyond this place of wrath and tears Looms but the Horror of the shade, And yet the menace of the years Finds, and shall find, me unafraid. It matters not how strait the gate, How charged with punishments the scroll. I am the master of my fate: I am the captain of my soul.
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