38 pages • 1 hour read
Maya AngelouA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
For this activity, students will write a poem in response to another poem.
There is a popular trend in literature to write poems in response to other poems. Angelou responds to Dunbar’s poem “Sympathy.” Sir Walter Raleigh, in “The Nymph’s Reply to the Shepherd,” responds to Christopher Marlowe’s “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love.”
o In what way might the response continue commentary on an issue such as oppression, as Angelou does?
o In what way might the response agree or disagree with the message of the first poem, as Raleigh imagines?
After writing a response, reflect on the theme and structure of the original poem. Are those represented in your poem in a similar way, or are they quite different? In your notes or a reading journal, reflect on the effectiveness of your response, and speculate how the writer of the poem you responded to might reply.
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