Class Notes of June 5, 2009

This is what we discussed today in class about the Bermudas Poem by Andrew Marvell:

• The first 4 lines step up the setting of the song, and the last 4 lines end the song.
• Bermudas is an English colony in the Caribbean.
• They are going to the Bermudas by a big boat, then getting off a small boat and rowing to the shore.
• They rowed a longboat and a longboat requires a lot of people to row it.
• They sing a song to keep in rhythm, to go at the same place otherwise they would never reach the shore and they would spin in circles.
• This poem is a replication of a song sailors sang to pass time.
• The song is about God, and how they got to the Bermudas by His grace.
• The Puritans escaped from England to a place uninhibited by Anglicans because it was too crowded in England.
• This is a Puritan poem. Written by him when he was a Puritan.
• The Puritans believed that the Bermudas was the closest thing next to the Garden of Eden because it was so serene and beautiful.
• This poem was not written as an personal experience, but he wrote it because he read it from letters that he traded from Puritans that traveled to the Bermudas.
• The theme is "God made everything, and He is glorious, and how God does everything for a reason".
• One of the first things they would have built would be a church to God.

-Final Exam Format ( Everything from the 2nd half of the year and on.)

• 11 Questions on the historical background of the English civil war.
• 15 Biographical questions on the poets we've studied.
• 8 Questions from 8 poems, 1 question from each of the 8 poems. Mr. Laz will select special sections of certain poems and make us analyze them.
• 5 Questions from Paradise Lost
• 1 Sonnet to read and analyze.
• 18+ Hamlet questions (Act II - V)
• 1 Essay (Comprehensive Essay on the WHOLE year)

-June 5, 2009 Friday's Review Session

• We reviewed nothing.

-Piero Benites