Task_Ass_Hist

11/4/2020 HUM-200 - Page 2.2.2 - Hass

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Applied Humanities

Themes in Literature Hass By Eric Steineger 2 Module Two: Introduction to the Humanities, continued / Page 2.2.2 Hass On this page: 0 of 4 attempted (0%) | 0 of 2 correct (0%) Objective: Analyze a poem by Robert Hass to identify its theme.

A former poet laureate of the United States, Robert Hass has a reputation as an intellectual; an artist; and an accessible, almost fatherly figure—one who is equally at home discussing 17th-century painters as he is relaying a personal narrative. Words, feelings, and remembrance are discussed in this poem.

Meditation at Lagunitas

By Robert Hass

All the new thinking is about loss. In this it resembles all the old thinking. The idea, for example, that each particular erases the luminous clarity of a general idea. That the clown- faced woodpecker probing the dead sculpted trunk of that black birch is, by his presence, some tragic falling off from a first world of undivided light. Or the other notion that, because there is in this world no one thing to which the bramble of blackberry corresponds, a word is elegy to what it signifies. We talked about it late last night and in the voice of my friend, there was a thin wire of grief, a tone almost querulous. After a while I understood that, talking this way, everything dissolves: justice, pine, hair, woman, you and I. There was a woman I made love to and I remembered how, holding her small shoulders in my hands sometimes, I felt a violent wonder at her presence like a thirst for salt, for my childhood river with its island willows, silly music from the pleasure boat,

11/4/2020 HUM-200 - Page 2.2.2 - Hass

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muddy places where we caught the little orange-silver fish called pumpkinseed. It hardly had to do with her. Longing, we say, because desire is full of endless distances. I must have been the same to her. But I remember so much, the way her hands dismantled bread, the thing her father said that hurt her, what she dreamed. There are moments when the body is as numinous as words, days that are the good flesh continuing. Such tenderness, those afternoons and evenings, saying blackberry, blackberry, blackberry.

“Meditation at Lagunitas” from PRAISE by Robert Hass. Copyright © 1979 by Robert Hass. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers. © Robert Hass.

Response Board What stands out to you after your first reading?

No response saved yet.

Multiple-Choice Question

How does the narrator set up the poem in the first line?

with a belief he will defend throughout the poem with a statement, which he will support in the coming lines with a puzzle, to be solved in the rest of the poem with a question, which he will answer in the coming lines

Short-Answer Question

Quote at least two lines in which the poet defends his claim that the new (and old) thinking is about loss.

No response saved yet. Multiple-Choice Question

Which of these seems MOST likely to be a prominent theme of this poem?

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11/4/2020 HUM-200 - Page 2.2.2 - Hass

https://www.webtexts.com/courses/39511-sanderovsky/traditional_book/chapters/4297817-module-two-introduction-to-the-humanities-continued/page… 3/3

the relationship of words to experience and reality the futility of thinking the pain of lost love from years past blackberries

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