Work Without Hope

Today in class, we analyzed Samuel Taylor Coleridge's sonnet "Work Without Hope." Kamala Markandaya used an image from the poem as the title of "Nectar in a Sieve" and included the last two lines of Coleridge's sonnet as the epigraph of the novel.

Before analyzing the poem students compared and contrasted the concepts hope and despair in a double bubble map. After discussing the poem in class, we returned to the double bubble map and added connections from the poem in the frame, answering the question: How did our ideas at the beginning of the hour play out in the poem?

Work Without Hope

Lines composed 21st February, 1825

All Nature seems at work. Slugs leave their lair -
The bees are stirring -birds are on the wing -
And Winter slumbering in the open air,
Wears on his smiling face a dream of Spring!
And I the while, the sole unbusy thing,
Nor honey make, nor pair, nor build, nor sing.

Yet well I ken the banks where amaranths blow,
Have traced the fount whence streams of nectar flow.
Bloom, O ye amaranths! bloom for whom ye may,
For me ye bloom not! Glide, rich streams, away!
With lips unbrightened, wreathless brow, I stroll:
And would you learn the spells that drowse my soul?
Work without Hope draws nectar in a sieve,
And Hope without an object cannot live.

Ahkmatova Poetry

Everything is plundered, betrayed, sold,


Everything is plundered, betrayed, sold,
Death's great black wing scrapes the air,
Misery gnaws to the bone.
Why then do we not despair?

By day, from the surrounding woods,
cherries blow summer into town;
at night the deep transparent skies
glitter with new galaxies.

And the miraculous comes so close
to the ruined, dirty houses --
something not known to anyone at all,
but wild in our breast for centuries.


I Am Not One of Those Who Left the Land

I am not one of those who left the land
to the mercy of its enemies.
Their flattery leaves me cold,
my songs are not for them to praise.

But I pity the exile's lot.
Like a felon, like a man half-dead,
dark is your path, wanderer;
wormwood infects your foreign bread.

But here, in the murk of conflagration,
where scarcely a friend is left to know,
we, the survivors, do not flinch
from anything, not from a single blow.

Surely the reckoning will be made
after the passing of this cloud.
We are the people without tears,
straighter than you...more proud...

Lagaan PowerPoint

To view the PowerPoint on India, Bollywood, and Lagaan, visit Edline. Sorry for the extra step, but Blogger does not allow PowerPoints to be uploaded.

The PowerPoint also contains slides that describe the assignments that go along with viewing the film.