assignment 2

English 2020 (American Nature Writing)

Essay II

Short Essay Portion

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:

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 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. The shore has a dual nature, changing with the swing of the tides, belonging now to the land, now to the sea. On the ebb tide it knows the harsh extremes of the land world, being exposed to heat and cold, to wind, to rain, and drying sun. On the flood tide it is a water world, returning briefly to the relative stability of the open sea.

Source:

Explication:

Score:

2. I picked and flung another star. Perhaps far outward on the rim of space a genuine star was similarly seized and flung. I could feel the movement in my body. It was like a sowing -- the sowing of life on an infinitely gigantic scale.  I looked back across my shoulder. Small and dark against the receding rainbow, the star thrower stooped and flung once more. I never looked again.  The task we had assumed was too immense for gazing. I flung and flung again while all about us roared the insatiable waters of death.

Source:

Explication:

Score:

3. At the end of the lake I turned and saw the glittering lights of Winton far behind me. I lay down on the ice to rest. The sky was still bright and I watched the shifting lights come and go. I knew what the astronomers and the physicists said, that they were caused by sunspots and areas of gaseous disturbance on the face of the sun that bombarded the earth’s stratosphere with hydrogen protons and electrons which in turn exploded atoms of oxygen, nitrogen, helium, and the other elements surrounding us. Here were produced in infinite combinations all the colors of the spectrum. It was all very plausible and scientific, but tonight that explanation left me cold. I was in no mood for practicality, for I had just come skating down the skyways themselves and had seen the aurora from the inside. What did the scientists know about what I had done? How could they explain what had happened to me and the strange sensations I had known?

Source:

Explication:

Score:

4. As the years passed, and the centuries, and the millions of years, the stream of life grew more and more complex. From simple, one-celled creatures, others that were aggregations of specialized cells arose, and then creatures with organs for feeding, digesting, breathing, reproducing. Sponges grew on the rocky bottom of the sea’s edge and coral animals built their habitations in warm, clear waters, Jelly fish swan and drifted in the sea. Worms evolved, and starfish, and hard-shelled creatures with many-jointed legs, the arthropods. The plants, too, progressed, from the microscopic algae to branched and curiously fruiting seaweeds that swayed with the tides and were plucked from the coastal rocks by the surf and cast adrift. Source:

Explication:

Score:

5. In the middle of the night the wind passed on and left the land quiet. The dust-filled air muffled sound more completely than fog does. The people, lying in their beds, heard the wind stop. They awakened when the rushing wind was gone. They lay quietly and listened deep into the stillness. Then the roosters crowed, and their voices were muffled, and the people stirred restlessly in their beds and wanted the morning. They knew it would take a long time for the dust to settle out of the air. In the morning the dust hung like fog, and the sun was as red as ripe new blood. All day the dust sifted down from the sky, and the next day it sifted down. An even blanket covered the earth. It settled on the corn, piled up on the tops of fence posts, piled up on the wires, it settled on roofs, blanketed the weeds and trees. Source:

Explication:

Score:

6. Now the spoiler has come: does it care?

Not faintly, it has all time. It knows the people are a tide

That swells and in time will ebb, and all

Their works dissolve. Meanwhile the image of the pristine

Beauty

Lives in the very grain of the granite,

Safe as the endless ocean that climbs our cliff.

Source:

Explication:

Score:

7. That primeval ocean, growing in bulk as the rain slowly filled its basins, must have been only faintly salt. But the falling rains were the symbol of the dissolution of the continents. From the moment the rain began to fall, the lands began to be worn away and carried to the sea. It is an endless, inexorable process that has never stopped—the dissolving of the rocks, the leaching out of their contained minerals, the carrying of the rock fragments and dissolved minerals to the ocean. And over the eons of time, the sea has grown ever more bitter with the salt of the continents.

Source:

Explication:

Score:

8. Bearing in his right paw the Shovel that digs to the truth

beneath appearances, cuts the roots of useless attachments, and

flings damp sand on the fires of greed and war.

His left paw in the Mudra of Comradely Display—indicating

that all creatures have full right to live to their limits and that

deer, rabbits, chipmunks, snakes, dandelions, and lizards all grow

in the realm of the Dharma.

Source:

Explication:

Score:

English 2020, Essay II

Longer Essay Portion

Choose any one prompt from the three below and write in response to it. To begin, please clearly identify the prompt that you’re writing in response to. Please compose an essay somewhere between 250-400 words (roughly between 1.5 and two pages according to standard default fonts), and please use quotes where relevant to develop your points .

1. Referring to any one of the works by Carson (PDFs) and Eiseley (PDF, 337-47) attempt to understand nature as a continually changing and adapting process rather than as a single, fixed entity. Compare the skill with which these two writers present their attempt to understand the world before them offers each a window into the deep, evolutionary, pre-historical past. Be sure to “judge” one writer over the other by any criteria you see fit.

2. In different but overlapping ways, the poetry of Jeffers and Snyder (473-79) portrays nature as a powerful force, one eternally capable of overcoming temporary human interventions and developments, which stand subordinate to its larger powers. Comparing single poems by each of these writers in light of specific points and themes, judge the effectiveness by which one of these two poets, more so than the other, captures the power of nature.

3. In very different ways, the works by Jeffers (251-53) and Olson (PDF and 323-26) both feature the author’s attempt to develop an intimate connection with a particular stretch of land and piece of landscape. Compare how effectively these authors expresses this connection, judging the skills by which one writer, more so than the other, captures it effectively.