美国文学课件.ppt

* * “After Apple-Picking” After a long days work, the speaker is tired of apple picking. He has felt drowsy and dreamy since the morning when he looked through a sheet of ice lifted from the surface of a water trough. Now he feels tired, feels sleep coming on, but wonders whether it is a normal, end-of-the-day sleep or something deeper. * * IV. Writing Style 1) Frosts themes: a serious poet. Though he is generally considered a regional poet whose subject matters mainly focus on the landscape and people of New England, he wrote many poems that investigate the basic themes of human life. He wrote about the daily life of ordinary people—farmers, shepherds: small rural events, fence mending, apple picking, good and evil, all the matters of life and death. Some were not frequent poetical subjects for his time, but he insisted on them, not as ways to escape from modern society, but as ways to understand life better. 2) Frosts style: Frost had long been well known as a poet who can hardly be classified with the old or the new. Unlike most of his contemporaries in the early 20th century, Frost did not break with the older poetic tradition, nor did he make many experiments with form. Instead, Frost learned from tradition and made the colloquial New England speech into a poetic expression (new wine in an old bottle; new concepts in an old framework). Frosts poems are full of life, truth, and wisdom. Compared with his contemporaries, his poems are filled with more energy and loaded with more pleasure, while those of the latter are often too obscure to be understood by the average reader. * * This poem is a typical monologue in line with John Donne’s tradition, seeming like a dialogue with one mock listener in the poem. In the title of the poem, “Alfred” is the name of the first English King, which implies the social status of the major character or may remind the reader of somebody of a heroic figure. However, Prufrock, with striking Germanic features, is said to be the na