assignment 2

English 2020 (American Nature Writing)

Exam-Essay I

Short Essay Portion

Exam/Essay I: Identification/Short Essay Portion (pages 1-3)

and Longer Essay Portion (page 4)

(Note: please submit both portions as a single Word document

to the indicated dropbox when finished)

First Instruction: Please type your name here: Tala Hassan

Identification/Explication (15 pts. each, 75 pts. possible). Instructions: To begin, please download this document and type your answers in the spaces provided. In this first section, please identify any five of the eight passages below. Each correct identification (last name of author and work) is worth 3 pts and should be placed next to "Source." After you've identified the passage, discuss it in a mini essay of up to five sentences. In the brief explication essay, begin by reading the passage itself, commenting on its basic message and its importance. Then place it within the context of the work, and/or in the larger consideration of the relations between individuals and the natural world. Focus on key details, highlighting what passage reveals about connections between the speaker, his/her culture, and his/her views of nature. You might consider what contemporary readers "see" in the passage as well. Each mini essay is up to worth up to 12 pts.

Note: You are welcome to try your hand at identifying and discussing more than five of the passages; in that case I will read over and score each reply you provide and will calculate your grade based on your five highest scores.

1. At home, one should see and hear with more fondness and sympathy. Nature should touch him a little more closely there than anywhere else. He is better attuned to it than to strange scenes. The birds about his own door are his birds, the flowers in his own fields and wood are his, the rainbow springs its magic arch across his valley, even the ever-lasting stars to which one lifts his eye, night after night, and year after year, from his own doorstep, have something private and personal about them. The clouds and the sunsets one sees in strange lands move more like the clouds and sunsets one has become familiar with at home. The wild creatures about you become known to you as they cannot be known to a passer-by. The traveler sees little of Nature that is revealed to the home-stayer.

Source: Burroughs; Nature: Nature Near Home.

Explication:

Burroughs appreciates the Novelty that a person who stays at home gets to see daily. The passage describes the beauty of nature from the viewpoint of a person who observes it every day. The passage reveals the importance that the speaker's culture pays to nature. Further, the importance of appreciation of home is another message that is communicated. Burroughs's appreciation for home is apparent.

Score: 3/8 Some good points hinted at, but fuller development/focus possible

2. To these questions, a sufficient answer can, we believe, be found in the expectation that the whole island of New York, would, but for such a reservation, before many years be occupied by buildings and paved streets; that millions upon millions of men were to live their lives upon this island, millions more go out from it, or it's immediate densely populated suburbs, only occasionally and at long intervals, and that all its inhabitants would assuredly suffer, in greater or less degree, according to their occupations and the degree of their confinement to it, from influences engendered by these conditions.

Source: Olmstead, Parks, and recreation

Explication:

The passage describes life in the city of New York and the peak of her growth. Olmstead describes the rate at which the city is growing, and as a result, change is being evidenced. It is not only the buildings whose rate of growth is remarkable in the narrative but also the growing population rate. As a result of the growth, however, the city is turning into a concrete jungle. There are no longer parks to observe ad enjoy nature as they have all been replaced.

Score: 3/8 Some good points hinted at, but fuller development/focus possible

3. How fiercely, devoutly wild is Nature in the midst of her beauty-loving tenderness! —painting lilies, watering them, caressing them with a gentle hand, going from flower to flower like a gardener while building rock mountains and cloud mountains full of lightning and rain. Gladly we run for shelter beneath an overhanging cliff and examine the reassuring ferns and mosses, gentle love tokens growing in cracks and chinks. Daisies too, and invests, confiding wild children of light, too small to fear. To these, one's heart goes home, and the voices of the storm become gentle.

Source: Muir, My First Summer in the Sierra.

Explication:

The passage is a description of Muir's perception of Sierra. He paints a vivid picture of the beauty of the countryside, the beauty of the rain, and the river watering the land. Muir's description is a sign of the deep love that he holds for nature and everything to do with it. Nature is beautiful, and this beauty is best expressed through observation of the country. It is a description of a person to whom the beauty of nature by far surpasses any other form of beauty.

Score: 3/9 Good points. Fuller context/more accurate/developed reading would be helpful.

4. Father, thy hand  Hath reared these venerable columns, thou  Didst weave this verdant roof. Thou didst look down  Upon the naked earth, and, forthwith, rose  All these fair ranks of trees. They, in thy sun,  Budded, and shook their green leaves in the breeze,  And shot towards heaven. The century-living crow,  Whose birth was in their tops, grew old and died  Among their branches, till, at last, they stood,  As now they stand, massy, and tall, and dark,  Fit shrine for humble worshipper to hold  Communion with his Maker.

Source: Brant, Father, thy hand/ Hath reared Bryant, “A Forest Hymn”

Explication:

Bryant attributes the beauty that he observes in nature to the creative work of God. It is God whom he feels was the reason behind the creation of the trees. For these reasons, the tree shoots towards heaven. The author also focuses on the importance of God. Brant asserts that only when trees grow majestic and tall is the appropriate time to form a shrine. The trees include a shrine from which worshippers can communicate with God.

Score: 1/8 Some good points hinted at, but fuller development/focus possible

5. I well remember with what a sense of freedom and spirit of adventure I used to take my way across the fields with my pail, some years later, toward some distant hill or swamp, when dismissed for all day, and I would not now exchange such an expansion of all my being for all the learning in the world. Liberation and enlargement—such is the fruit which all culture aims to secure. I suddenly knew more about my books than if I had never ceased studying them. I found myself in a schoolroom where I could not fail to see and hear things worth seeing and hearing—where I could not help getting my lesson—for my lesson came to me. Such experience often repeated, was the chief encouragement to go to the Academy and study a book at last.

Source: Thoreau, Seasons of life and Nature. Huckleberries

Explication:

Thoreau is looking back upon the time that he enjoyed spending observing nature. According to him, what he learned from the time spent enjoying nature by far surpasses any other thing that he could have been taught in the class. Every day spent outside he equates with a day spent in the classroom in which he always had something new to learn. The difference is that the lessons were not taught, in nature but instead, they came to him, which made the experience all the more meaningful.

Score: 2/9 Good points. Fuller context/more accurate/developed reading would be helpful.

6. These noxious plants have come unbidden to us, with the grains and grasses of the Old World, the evil with the good, as usual in this world of probation—the wheat and tares together. The useful plants produce a tenfold blessing upon the labor of man, but the weed is also there, ever accompanying his steps, to teach him a lesson of humility. Certain plants of this nature—the dock, thistle, nettle, &c., &c.,--are known to attach themselves especially to the path of man; in widely different soils and climates, they are still found at his door. Patient care and toil can alone keep the evil within bounds, and it seems doubtful whether it lies within the reach of human means entirely to remove from the face of the earth one single plant of this peculiar nature, much less all their varieties. Has anyone, even of the more noxious sorts, ever been utterly destroyed?

Source: Cooper, Small Family Memories. Rural Hours

Explication:

Cooper is describing the occurrence of weeds around man as symbolic. Despite the attempts of man to be good, there can never be a society in which every person is viewed as good. Just like weeds follow man, so too does vices. They are around man, on his doorsteps despite his attempts to get rid of them. Man, too, has the potential to be evil unless he guides himself away from vices using patience and toiling to be acceptable.

Score: 2/8 Some good points hinted at, but fuller development/focus possible

7. We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals. Remote from universal nature, and living by complicated artifice, man in civilization surveys the creature through the glass of his knowledge and sees thereby a feather magnified and the whole image in distortion. We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate of having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein we err, and greatly err. For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendor and travail of the earth.

Source: Beston, the Outermost House.

Explication:

Beston examines the relationship that exists between man and animals. Men's view of animals is a comparison between man and animal. As a result, the animal falls short. According to the standards set by man, animals appear to be incomplete. However, if they were to be judged using a different scale, ten animals would be considered complete beings. They have senses which the humans never picked up or are forgotten. Animals are not underlings, but rather fellow creatures stuck in the cycle of life.

Score: 3/8 Some good points hinted at, but fuller development/focus possible

8. Among the Indians, the earth and its productions generally were common and free to all the tribe, as the air and water—but among us who have supplanted the Indians, the public retain only a small yard or common in the middle of the village, with perhaps a grave-yard beside it, and the right of way, by sufferance, by a particular narrow route, which is annually becoming narrower, from one such yard to another. I doubt if you can ride out five miles in any direction without coming to where some individual is tolling in the road—and he expects the time when it will all revert to him or his heirs. This is the way we civilized men have arranged it.

Source: Thoreau, Wild Apples. Huckleberries

Explication:

Thoreau compares the Indian's treatment of nature to how nature is treated in the modern world. To the Indians, all-natural produce was seen to be public goods. All people could enjoy them. However, in the modern-day, the only public goods are roads and graveyards. Even for the use of those, people are expected to pay a toll. The world of civilized man is a world where there are no public goods.

Score: 3/8 Some good points hinted at, but fuller development/focus possible

Score Part I: 55/75

English 2020, Exam Essay I

Longer Essay Portion

Choose any one prompt from the three below and write in response to it. Please clearly identify the prompt that you're writing in response to. Then compose (in the space below) an essay somewhere between 300-400 words (roughly between 1.5 and two pages according to standard default fonts), and please use quotes where relevant to develop your points.

1. Compare the use of religious or "spiritual" imagery (as you see it) in any one work by John Muir of your choosing (be sure to identify) with that of any of the other writers we've considered (i.e. Olmstead, Beston, Burroughs, Bryant) if you see fit.

2. One of the things that distinguishes nature writing is its frequent emphasis on its "teaching" characteristics. Compare the idea of "Nature as Teacher" as developed in any two of the following works: Burroughs' "The Art of Seeing Things" or "Nature Near Home" (choose one); Thoreau's "Huckleberries"; Cooper's "Rural Hours"; or Beston's "Outermost House" (selections).

3. Another distinguishing feature of nature writing is in the author's capacity to reflect intense observation and to find larger meanings in what is observed. Compare the character of observation as is evident in the works of any two of the following writers: Susan Fenimore Cooper, Henry Beston, Robert Marshall, John Burroughs.

Again, when finished: Please save this exam as a single document and repost to the indicated dropbox.

Another distinguishing feature of nature writing is in the author's capacity to reflect intense observation and to find larger meanings in what is observed. Compare the character of observation as is evident in the works of any two of the following writers: Susan Fenimore Cooper, Henry Beston, Robert Marshall, John Burroughs.

Nature writing has been especially pervasive in America for an undeniable explanation. European colonists found here a world intended for them (notwithstanding the Indians they uprooted) void of chronicled or strict religious affiliation. In this world, they overlooked nature itself at their danger. The early Jamestown and Boston pioneers prevailed regarding disregarding it somewhat, which may be why they clung problematically to the coast for the initial hundred years. Yet, by Linnaeus' time, Americans started to notice nature intently and wander into the wild with appreciation. With the onset of nature writing, however, this is changing as Americans start now appreciating the wilderness of the land for the beauty it represents. 3/8 Some good points hinted at, but fuller development/focus possible

One character that marks out nature writing is observation, and none better portrays it than Susan Cooper and John Burroughs. In her work, Small Family Memories, cooper portrays the skill of observation by describing the noxious effects that weeds have and comparing them to people in society. "These noxious plants have come unbidden to us, with the grains and grasses of the Old World, the evil with the good, as usual in this world of probation—the wheat and tares together. (Cooper)" Weeds tend to grow where humans are, which she compares to the tendency of man to have the potential to be evil and carry out evil. Burroughs, on the other hand, in his work Nature; Nature Near Home describes the beauty that a person who gets to observe nature from the same viewpoint enjoys. (More quotes needed)

Both writers show the capacity to observe the environment, and from their observations, they come up with unique information about it. Nature writing as a form of reflection is expressed by the works of both authors and by their comparison of different aspects of nature. (better organization/streamlining of discussion would be helpful)

(try to summarize/reiterate/develop key argument more fully)

Score Part II: 53/75 Score Overall: 108/150