1. Explication: Things to consider
Tone:
The author’s attitude toward the subject. How does the author feel about it?
The tone is expressed through word choice

2. Word choice
Denotation: the explicit or direct meaning or set of meanings of a word or expression (the dictionary definition).
Connotation: a : the suggesting of a meaning by a word apart from the thing it explicitly names or describes. b : something suggested by a word or thing. (How does that word make you feel?)

3. “Pilgrimage” by Natasha Trethewey
Here, the Mississippi carved its mud-dark path, a graveyard for skeletons of sunken riverboats. Here, the river changed its course, turning away from the city as one turns, forgetting, from the past— the abandoned bluffs, land sloping up above the river's bend—where now the Yazoo fills the Mississippi's empty bed.

4. the Yazoo fills the Mississippi's empty bed
the Yazoo fills the Mississippi's empty bed. Here, the dead stand up in stone, white marble, on Confederate Avenue. I stand on ground once hollowed by a web of caves; they must have seemed like catacombs, in 1863, to the woman sitting in her parlor, candlelit, underground. I can see her listening to shells explode, writing herself into history, asking what is to become of all the living things in this place?

5. This whole city is a grave
This whole city is a grave. Every spring— Pilgrimage—the living come to mingle with the dead, brush against their cold shoulders in the long hallways, listen all night to their silence and indifference, relive their dying on the green battlefield. At the museum, we marvel at their clothes— preserved under glass—so much smaller than our own, as if those who wore them were only children. We sleep in their beds,

6. than our own, as if those who wore them were only children
than our own, as if those who wore them were only children. We sleep in their beds, the old mansions hunkered on the bluffs, draped in flowers—funereal—a blur of petals against the river's gray. The brochure in my room calls this living history. The brass plate on the door reads Prissy's Room. A window frames the river's crawl toward the Gulf. In my dream, the ghost of history lies down beside me, rolls over, pins me beneath a heavy arm.

7. Translations By Adrienne Rich You show me the poems of some woman my age, or younger translated from your language
Certain words occur: enemy, oven, sorrow enough to let me know she's a woman of my time
obsessed
with Love, our subject:

8. with Love, our subject: we've trained it like ivy to our walls baked it like bread in our ovens worn it like lead on our ankles watched it through binoculars as if it were a helicopter bringing food to our famine or the satellite of a hostile power

9. I begin to see that woman doing things: stirring rice ironing a skirt typing a manuscript till dawn
trying to make a call from a phonebooth

10. The phone rings endlessly in a man's bedroom she hears him telling someone else Never mind. She'll get tired. hears him telling her story to her sister

11. The phone rings endlessly in a man's bedroom she hears him telling someone else Never mind. She'll get tired. hears him telling her story to her sister

12. hears him telling her story to her sister
who becomes her enemy and will in her own way light her own way to sorrow
ignorant of the fact this way of grief is shared, unnecessary and political