Visualizing Rhetorical Structure

1. Speaker, Occasion, Audience, Purpose Visualizing Rhetorical Structure

2. Learning to read in chunks of meaning The old dog barks backwards without getting up. I can remember when he was a pup. -Robert Frost

3. Here is a diagram of the rhetorical structure in temporal terms The old dog barks backwards without getting up. I can remember when he was a pup.

4. Here it is in terms of narrator’s tone The old dog barks backwards without getting up. I can remember when he was a pup.

5. Propose a title for the poem The old dog barks backwards without getting up. I can remember when he was a pup. The real title is….

6. “The Span of Life” The old dog barks backwards without getting up. I can remember when he was a pup.

7. Sonnet 29 • Shall I compare thee to a summer's day? Thou art more lovely and more temperate:Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,And summer's lease hath all too short a date: Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,And often is his gold complexion dimm'd; And every fair from fair sometime declines,By chance or nature's changing course untrimm'd;But thy eternal summer shall not fadeNor lose possession of that fair thou owest;Nor shall Death brag thou wander'st in his shade,When in eternal lines to time thou growest: So long as men can breathe or eyes can see, So long lives this and this gives life to thee.

8. How can we represent the rhetorical structure? • Look for two parts

9. One question followed by 13 lines of answers

10. Tension between the here and now and the loved ones’ eternal fate

11. The number of lines in each box is dispensed with. This juxtaposition hypothesizes that the sonnet is a kind of match between nature and art.

12. Now, what is the speaker’s purpose? • This leads to a discussion worth having, hinted at in this diagram:

13. Deepen the analysis…. • What is the purpose of the flattery? • How will the beloved feel when told the speaker’s blazoning will last forever? • Surely the speaker means for the compliment to be felt—and returned.

14. The benefits • Dividing a passage according to its meaning structure suggests a paragraph structure for an essay.

15. Let’s look at another short poem This is an imagist poem (remember “The Red Wheelbarrow” by William Carlos Williams? There are many avenues into the speaker-audience conversation in the following poem, through point of view, subject matter, tone, effect on audience.

16. In a Station at the Metro The apparition of these faces in the crowd; Petals on a wet, black bough. Ezra Pound

17. Each of the following box diagrams express rhetorical choices, suggesting meaning or theme

19. Ah, now we can began an essay…. Ezra Pound’s two-line poem “In a Station of the Metro” functions as a dialogue between mystery and understanding.

20. Sonnet – Billy Collins All we need is fourteen lines, well, thirteen now,
and after this one just a dozen
to launch a little ship on love's storm-tossed seas,
then only ten more left like rows of beans.
How easily it goes unless you get Elizabethan
and insist the iambic bongos must be played
and rhymes positioned at the ends of lines,
one for every station of the cross.
But hang on here wile we make the turn
into the final six where all will be resolved,
where longing and heartache will find an end,
where Laura will tell Petrarch to put down his pen,
take off those crazy medieval tights,
blow out the lights, and come at last to bed.