Summer in the Yakima Valley

In an effort to continue to practice both close reading and organization in literary response, we will be focusing today on the poem below. We will work together. Your task, today, is to answer the multiple choice questions and to complete the Contrast Analysis Chart. (Handout)

Summer in the Yakima Valley by Ruth Roach Pierson By day I loved the farmhouse on the hill the dust haze the pickup raised plying the dirt roads the orchard trees in even 5 rows down the slopes and out in all directions the sigh of apricots Santa Rosa plums, Bing and Queen Anne cherries 10 ripening in the dry heat the long-short snick snick of the sprinklers’ jerky rotation hum and hiss of a low-flying spray plane 15 In over-the-knees rubber boots my cousin and I stomped the uneven ground careful of cow pies and Canadian thistles plucked alfalfa shoots 20 to stick between our teeth swaggered like cowboys to the edge of the irrigation ditch and stripped to swim in its muddied water giddy on the danger of going too near 25 the whirlpool pull of the main pipe’s undertow But after dark in the attic room in that house on the top of the hill 30 he always fell asleep first, my cousin, leaving me to listen alone to the sounds of the night the valley now as alien 35 as the other side of the moon— a coyote’s hungry cry the twist and scrape of tumbleweed like a wind-tossed tangle of bones over clay-dry earth 40 a jackrabbit caught in the beam from a jeep’s headlight Exiled in the moon-engorged room I lay prey to the sick ache, the hunger for home 45 as nightmare shadows slid across the floor, loomed on the wall over my head and everywhere the eerie whine of the wind aprowl 50 in the Yakima Valley by night— weedy, persistent, atonal 52 The paragraph question will ask you to discuss contrast in the poem.

Reviewed Terms

Dissonance/ Cacophony: use of harsh, clashing, inharmonious sounds.

Euphony: use of harmonious sounds.

Hyperbole: is an exaggeration or bold overstatement for the sake of emphasis.

Understatement: is a figure of speech in which a writer or speaker deliberately makes a situation seem less important or serious than it is.

Metonymy: is speaking of a thing by the name of some other thing closely related to it.

Synecdoche: is when a part is used to signify the whole and the whole for a part.

Narrative Poetry: a recording of events, sometimes brief, sometimes long; is highly objective, told by a speaker detached from the action.

Lyric Poetry: a subjective, reflective poem expressing the thoughts and especially the feelings of a single speaker; has a regular rhyme scheme.