Sonnet XLVII, ‘I see you, Juliet’, from ‘Love Sonnets of Proteus’, by Wilfrid Scawen Blunt Lesson plan Introduction Look up the words ‘Proteus’ and ‘protean’ in a dictionary. What do they mean? Does ‘protean’ have positive or negative connotations? Use it in a sentence. Development You are going to read a poem by a 19th century English poet named Wilfrid Scawen Blunt. The poem is a sonnet from a collection called Love Sonnets of Proteus. What is a sonnet? How many lines does it contain? What is special about the last two lines of a sonnet? Why is the sonnet an effective form of verse? What does the title, Love Sonnets of Proteus, suggest to you? What might the author mean to say about the nature of love? Dictation. Read the poem aloud slowly and have students transcribe it. Emphasise the iambic pentameter rhythm as you read. Swap your work with a partner. Compare your spelling and punctuation. Distribute the full poem. Read it aloud several times. Then have students read it individually. Vocabulary In the first eight lines which words create a sense of innocence? Pale, lightly, white, muslin, lace, crossed, white, virginally. In lines 8-­‐12 which words or images create a sense of doom? Shouting, hands clasped, pray / Patience of fate, heaving bosom. Who do you think ‘they’ are? What do they want? Why might Juliet be praying, or seeming to pray? Structure How many sentences are in the poem? Count the number of lines in each and plot them on a graph. Why is the brevity of the penultimate sentence effective? © Education Umbrella 2017 1 Do you think the last line is more effective for being comprised of one sentence? Meaning What is effective about the use of ‘red’ in the superlative form in the final line? What might the redness of the rose symbolise? What is protean about the incident that the poem describes? Write Write a précis of the poem. © Education Umbrella 2017 2