SOPH Homework, Oct. 7

Here's what you MUST do over the long weekend:

1. Check the final soph #5 journal that is posted. Complete and post by Thursday, October 13.

2. Begin to review all of your literature notes from Why Don't You Look Where You're Going? up to and including Jonathan Edwards. We'll end our unit on the Puritans by studying a minister-poet named Edward Taylor who wrote religious conceits. I foresee a test sometime next week ... Thursday or Friday?

3. Check StudyWiz for two examples of pretty good student-written CONCEITS. You'll have to write one for your #5 journal. This is explained below and in that journal post, too.

4. Look over your classmates' posts to the in-class work assigned Thursday to learn about blue laws and honor codes.

5. MAYBE begin to finish and tidy up all five of your journals. The end of the first quarter of your tenth grade nears.

What did you miss in class?

Well, we discussed our favorite pizza parlors (Valle's, Anthony's Coal Fire) and our favorite types of pizza (ham and pineapple topping or Eggplant Marino) in one class. In the other, we learned that one of your classmates "represents" NYC--Yonkers (she's a mourning Yankees fan who refuses to wear Phillies red) and another lives by the big "doctor's bag" over by Route 7.

Heavy stuff.

We also discussed the concept of the metaphysical conceit, a far-fetched, often complex, extended metaphor popularized in the 16th and 17th centuries by writers.

One of the most famous is by the English poet John Donne, which begins,"No man is an island." Each man is, in fact, "a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less." Donne uses a basic knowledge of geography to compare the death of a man to a piece (clod) of the shore being washed away by the sea. When this happens, Donne continues, the entire continent (Europe) is lessened because "any man's death diminishes me because I am involved in mankind." His conceit is a simple but effective way to teach that we all are an essential part of mankind.

The conceit ends with these famous words: "Never send to ask for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee." Or, to "translate," there's no need to ask whom the church bell is tolling for (as the bell would at a funeral) because a little piece of us all has died.

Ernest Hemingway, a 20th century American writer, named one of his novels, For Whom the Bell Tolls, alluding to Donne's conceit. The novel's theme presents the universal destruction of war that transcends the battlefields.