Rodgers, HC 421H
Assignment for Monday, October 12 (graded)
Commentary on phonemes in “Full Fathom Five Thy Father Lies”
This assignment has two main goals: (1) to give you more practice with the analysis of
phonemes, and (2) to challenge you to improve upon the writing you did for your last graded
assignment.
1. Read Shakespeare’s poem aloud many, many times; only after you have done
that, mark up the poem liberally and gather as much information as possible about
the poem’s repeated consonants and vowels. Listen carefully to the sounds that stand out
to your ear.
2. Then, pick a few of these sounds and dig deeper. Note what kinds of consonants and
vowels you hear. Find the vowels on the vowel chart, find the consonants on the consonant
chart, and remember the idea from last class about the “consonant gradient”: if you read down
the chart (from stops to fricatives to affricatives to nasals to approximants) you will note a
general progression from harsher to smoother consonants.
3. Finally, write a two-page, double-spaced, 12-point-font commentary on the
poem. Your commentary should begin with a clearly stated claim about a phenomenon in the
poem that you find particularly striking. I will leave it to you to determine what that claim will
be, but strive for something that is neither too specific (allowing you only to discuss two lines of
the poem) nor too broad (preventing you from focusing on the most significant aspects of the
poem).
Your claim may focus on phonemes or it may relate phonemes to other elements (rhythm and
meter, punctuation and syntax, meaning and tone, etc.).
PLEASE INCLUDE AN ANNOTATED POEM WITH YOUR COMMENTARY.
Your commentary will be graded according to the following rubric:
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the “cleanliness” of your writing (the number of grammatical and stylistic errors it
contains)
the clarity and cogency of your claim (does it make sense? is it compelling?)
the specificity of your analytical evidence
the effectiveness of your analytical terms
Your commentary doesn’t need a title; in the upper left corner just type
YOUR NAME
Graded assignment #2
Rodgers, HC 421H
You do not need to use International Phonetic Alphabet Symbols unless you want to. Instead,
just write the consonant or vowel in italics, as Pinsky and others do in their writing. For
example: the a vowel in “bat” echoes the same vowel at the start of “afternoon.” If you want to
use IPA symbols, go to this website: http://ipa.typeit.org/full/. There, you can select symbols
and then paste them into your document. Please put the symbols in square brackets, like this:
[æ].
Some food for thought:
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The poem comes from act I, scene ii of The Tempest. It is the second stanza of what is known
as “Ariel's song,” in which Ariel (a spirit who is the servant of the magician Prospero)
addresses Ferdinand (the Prince of Naples), who with his father has just gone through a
shipwreck in which the father supposedly drowned.
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The poem is famously difficult to scan metrically—and aroused many a scholarly scuffle as a
result. There’s no one “right” way to scan it. If you feel like discussing the metrical aspects of
the poem—which you are welcome to do!—just trust your own instincts.
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Linking the sound of phonemes with the meaning of the words that contain them can be a
tricky endeavor; sometimes it works well, and other times it doesn’t. In this poem, however,
I think there are instances where (to quote Abrams on “On This Island”) the phonemes
“replicate the sounds that the words signify.”
Full Fathom Five Thy Father Lies
William Shakespeare (from The Tempest)
Full fathom five thy father lies;
Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes:
Nothing of him that doth fade,
But doth suffer a sea change
Into something rich and strange.
Sea nymphs hourly ring his knell:
Ding-dong.
Hark! now I hear them—Ding-dong, bell.