Post #3 - Poetry Benchmark Essay and Reflection

Reflection:
In the first Benchmark Poetry Essay, we were analyzing the poem, "For That He Looked Not Upon Her" by George Gascoigne.

If I were to grade my own essay, I would score myself a 3, because I wasn't able to interpret the poem correctly, and that resulted in an incorrect analysis. The writing itself I felt was solid and well-organized, which is why I felt like my essay could be a 3 and not a 2, but because I significantly misread the prompt, I can't classify my analysis as adequate and can't give it a higher score.

The grade I received from Mrs. Wilson was a 4. The feedback received was that my essay contained a good academic tone and insightful understanding of the speaker's perspective.

I think that I was able to provide a high level of analysis and deep thinking, but struggled to grasp the figurative meaning of the poem and made the mistake of latching too heavily on the literal meaning. I believe that had I interpreted the meaning correctly, I would have been able to earn a higher score because the organization and writing were solid. Like other essays on the AP Lit and AP Comp exams, the interpretation is critical towards the effectiveness of the essay, as it helps the writer develop a "clear and effective" essay that will score high. (CollegeBoard). Therefore, if there are mistakes in its interpretation, I don't think the essay score can be higher than a 3. Overall, this benchmark provided an indication that I need to improve my poetry reading skill in order to improve my analysis and score higher and achieve more success.

Original Essay:

In his poem, English poet George Gascoigne, as a single father to a child, reflects on his despair in life. He shows the readers his change from being naive and content to being cynical and miserable. Gascoigne conveys his change of attitude through the ue\se of imagery, contrasting diction, and purposeful structure.

The analogies Gascoigne make in his poem to represent his current emotional state reveals his harsh attitude towards life and his cynicism towards his past. He uses an example of a “scorched fly” and a “mouse who hath broken out of a trap”as characters who have made a wrong choice once and suffered, and shows how afterward, they will never “play again with fire” or will lie “aloof in fear of more  mishap”, to explain his approach to life. He has made a mistake int he past with his love life, and now that he has made that mistake, he will be like the fly and the mouse and never go down that road again, now that he has learned that “grievous is the game”. Just like the fly and the mouse, the speaker was once naive; but now that he’s been burned or caught, he has learned and closed himself off so that he can’t get hurt again.

The speaker’s change from naive to cynical is further illustrated but he use of line pairs, Gascoigne structures his poem so that one line represents his previous naive thinking, and the other represents his current cynical view.H shows that previously in his life  he enjoyed “fancy dazzled by desire”, but has now learned that “grievous is the game”. The speaker reveals that because of this shift in stature, he is unable to find the joy to look up and the delight to the fancy things he used to be entranced to the point where he can’t feel his child's happiness.

Gascoigne makes the point of emphasizing the shift in the speaker’s personality and the extent of which it has impacted the speaker by showing the contrast of the speaker and his child through the use of juxtaposition in diction. The child is described to have “gleams” on their face, and “blazing eyes” while the narrator “hold[s] down [his] head” and “take[s] no delight to range”. The contrast shows how much the narrator’s attitude has been affected that he has fallen so hard in his misery because of his mistakes.