Explication: Things to consider

1. Explication: Things to consider • Tone: • The author’s attitude toward the subject. How does the author feel about it? • The tone is expressed through word choice

2. Word choice • Denotation: the explicit or direct meaning or set of meanings of a word or expression (the dictionary definition). • Connotation: a : the suggesting of a meaning by a word apart from the thing it explicitly names or describes. b : something suggested by a word or thing. (How does that word make you feel?)

3. “Pilgrimage” by Natasha Trethewey Here, the Mississippi carved its mud-dark path, a graveyard for skeletons of sunken riverboats. Here, the river changed its course, turning away from the city as one turns, forgetting, from the past— the abandoned bluffs, land sloping up above the river's bend—where now the Yazoo fills the Mississippi's empty bed.

4. the Yazoo fills the Mississippi's empty bed. Here, the dead stand up in stone, white marble, on Confederate Avenue. I stand on ground once hollowed by a web of caves; they must have seemed like catacombs, in 1863, to the woman sitting in her parlor, candlelit, underground. I can see her listening to shells explode, writing herself into history, asking what is to become of all the living things in this place?

5. This whole city is a grave. Every spring— Pilgrimage—the living come to mingle with the dead, brush against their cold shoulders in the long hallways, listen all night to their silence and indifference, relive their dying on the green battlefield. At the museum, we marvel at their clothes— preserved under glass—so much smaller than our own, as if those who wore them were only children. We sleep in their beds,

6. than our own, as if those who wore them were only children. We sleep in their beds, the old mansions hunkered on the bluffs, draped in flowers—funereal—a blur of petals against the river's gray. The brochure in my room calls this living history. The brass plate on the door reads Prissy's Room. A window frames the river's crawl toward the Gulf. In my dream, the ghost of history lies down beside me, rolls over, pins me beneath a heavy arm.

7. Translations By Adrienne RichYou show me the poems of some womanmy age, or youngertranslated from your language Certain words occur: enemy, oven, sorrowenough to let me knowshe's a woman of my time obsessed with Love, our subject:

8. with Love, our subject:we've trained it like ivy to our wallsbaked it like bread in our ovensworn it like lead on our ankleswatched it through binoculars as ifit were a helicopterbringing food to our famineor the satelliteof a hostile power

9. I begin to see that womandoing things: stirring riceironing a skirttyping a manuscript till dawn trying to make a callfrom a phonebooth

10. The phone rings endlesslyin a man's bedroomshe hears him telling someone elseNever mind. She'll get tired.hears him telling her story to her sister

11. The phone rings endlesslyin a man's bedroomshe hears him telling someone elseNever mind. She'll get tired.hears him telling her story to her sister

12. hears him telling her story to her sister who becomes her enemyand will in her own waylight her own way to sorrow ignorant of the fact this way of griefis shared, unnecessaryand political