This Friday's poem comes from a famous American poetess, Ms. Emily Dickinson. Dickinson lived during the 1800's and had less than twelve poems published during her lifetime. After Dickinson's death, her sister Lavinia found more than 1,800 poems, which have since been published.
As I was looking for potential poems to use in connection with Speak, I came across one of my favorite Dickinson poems. It's called "I'm Nobody! Who are You?" and the speaker's tone in the poem is a good contrast to Melinda's tone in Speak.
We talked about this poem at length after you all took it down from dictation. Most of you noted that the speaker in this poem seems to want to be isolated and ignored, whereas Melinda seeks friendship and attention from peers. We also talked a lot about why Emily Dickinson might not have wanted to befriend the women of her day and why she might've chosen to be alone for much of her life. I had to give a little background about the culture of the 1800's and what was expected of American women of means during this time period. Very, very different from Melinda's situation.
After celebrating Poetry Friday, we moved on to reading from Speak. We read to page thirty and will pick up there next class! Oh, we also had a tiny bit of time for SSR. Most of you are getting pages read outside of class and some of you are close to finishing titles. Good work, readers!
