Analyzing a Poem: Lelawattee Manoo-Rahming PASSING PLACES
Diana Hacker notes, “All good writing about literature attempts to answer a question, spoken or unspoken, about the text” (646). A concise and insightful literature paper should provide a “meaningful interpretation, presented forcefully and persuasively” (646).
Before you start composing your paper, please read the attached poem, “Passing Places” by the contemporary Indo-Caribbean writer Lelawatee Manoo-Rahming and our student sample paper on poetry. For the literary analysis, please check the handout ?The Elements of Poetry” and the assigned pages on poetry (especially 858-859) in Literature.
The final draft of your paper should be a 3- to 4-page essay (12 point font, 1” margins, double-spaced) that analyzes “Passing Places.”
Key Features:
An introduction that leads gracefully to the thesis. Please make sure that your thesis will answer the central question you have asked about the poem(s). Your thesis should be analytical and say in a nutshell what you wish to emphasize – your central idea, the point you want to make about your topic. Your thesis should be as specific as possible and foreshadow the body paragraphs.
The body should elaborate your thesis, providing evidence in form of textual support. Please show how the most significant literary devices used in the poem reinforce meaning. The body paragraphs should be appropriately organized, including use of clear topic sentences. The paragraphs should be in logical order and use transitions to show links between ideas.
Analysis and interpretation that is supported with specific textual evidence from the poem (minimum four quotes or references to the poem). Please list a number of crucial poetic devices used in the poem and explain how they reinforce meaning. Please document your source by using the MLA format (compare Rules for Writers 406-413).
A conclusion that provides closure to the essay.
MLA Style (heading, margins, title, line spacing, page numbering, parenthetical citation, and a Works Cited Page, RW 444-455).
Observance of the conventions of standard written English.
Poem for Analysis (Paper #2):
Lelawattee Manoo-Rahming
PASSING PLACES
But we
Who live in that soil
Still have our invisible
Passing places
Like these pages of words
Where we retreat
To let those we would love
Slip away
You first brought me
to this country
your Highlands of Scotland
five years ago
I felt I’d returned home
at last after millennia of watching
mountains grow old and die
And in the blair
where I had hidden
in my primordial existence
I wanted you
to stop the car
to hold you
in the darkness
of the Black isle
but my arms stayed
wrapped around my breasts
and for five years
I have wondered
if you ever knew
Now we are here again
in the Highlands of Scotland
driving from Dingwall
to Shieldaig
You tell me about
these passing places
on this one car road
from East to West
I think about all the times
we were on collision courses
like these cars
rushing in opposite directions
and how we always found
a passing place
where one of us
would step into this bulge
to let the other slip away
without touching
with no joining
Here in this land
Of brown heather-covered beinns
And stark snow-capped
Peaks of monroes
I weep
I see an old woman
bent huddled
from the bitter wind
scouring this Hebridian coast
dispossessed of her croft
that will now shelter sheep
She is me
standing in this passing place
in the dark northern days
never crossed by a winter sun
I stand aside
and watch you cold
but we never hug each other
never let the fires in our soul
mingle and explode
Now I drink tea from cupped hands
eat Marks and Spencer cherry pie
on the marsh of Shieldaig
and watch you feed pastry crums
to hens prancing around you
like puppies on two legs
The rooster crows
and takes me back to a native land
heavy with heat
where the sun doesn’t care
about us toiling bareback
on treeless roads
where there are no signs
proclaiming passing places
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