Whitman’s “Song of Myself”: “I celebrate myself, and sing myself, / And what I assume you shall assume.” What does the parallel opening structure establish?

Donne’s “Holy Sonnets: Batter my heart”: “Batter my heart, three-person’d God; for you / As yet but knock.” How does the opening turn the sonnet’s prayer?

Shakespeare’s Sonnet 73 begins, “That time of year thou mayst in me behold / When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang.” What does the first quatrain’s season-image do?

Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale” starts, “My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains / My sense.” How does this opening syntax shape the ode?

Frost’s “Out, Out—”: “And they, since they / Were not the one dead, turned to their affairs.” What is the effect of ending on this sentence?

Dickinson’s “I heard a Fly buzz—when I died—” opens in a death-room: “The Stillness in the Room / Was like the Stillness in the Air—.” What does this framing do?

Poe’s “The Raven” repeatedly closes stanzas with “Nevermore.” How does that placement affect the poem’s movement?

Hopkins’s “God’s Grandeur” turns at “And for all this, nature is never spent.” What does that structural turn accomplish?

Millay’s “I, being born a woman and distressed”: “let me make it plain: / I find this frenzy insufficient reason.” What does the pause before “I find” sharpen?

Hughes’s “The Weary Blues”: “He did a lazy sway . . . / He did a lazy sway . . .” What do the repeated line and pause imitate?

Whitman’s “When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer” repeats “When” across the opening lines. What does that anaphora build?

Dickinson’s “A narrow Fellow in the Grass” begins, “A narrow Fellow in the Grass / Occasionally rides—.” What does the line break after “Grass” do?

Hopkins’s “Pied Beauty” opens, “Glory be to God for dappled things—” and later lists “Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings.” What is the effect of the sound pattern?

Frost’s “Stopping by Woods”: “The woods are lovely, dark and deep, / But I have promises to keep.” How does the pause at the line break matter?

Tennyson’s “Ulysses”: “To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.” What does the infinitive sequence create at the close?

Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn” asks, “What men or gods are these? What maidens loth?” What does this questioning leave unresolved?

Dickinson’s “Tell all the truth but tell it slant—” ends, “The Truth must dazzle gradually / Or every man be blind—.” What ambiguity remains?

Wordsworth’s “My heart leaps up” says, “The Child is Father of the Man.” What does the paradox leave open?

Dickinson’s “My Life had stood—a Loaded Gun—” ends, “For I have but the power to kill, / Without—the power to die—.” What does the ending refuse to settle?

Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” ends, “Till human voices wake us, and we drown.” What remains unresolved?