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[Intro: Tom Lehrer]
Every evening you will find him around our neighborhood
It's the old dope peddler doing well by doing good 2 Chainz – Dope Peddler
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Sample taken from “The Old Dope Peddler” by Tom Lehrer.

Tom Lehrer was a musical satirist who juxtaposed traditional song forms and styles with racy material. When asked permission to use the sample, the 84-year-old Lehrer gave the following official response:

As sole copyright owner of ‘The Old Dope Peddler’, I grant you motherfuckers permission to do this. Please give my regards to Mr. Chainz, or may I call him 2?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=qNWvdtt5sxs

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Notes on "The Waste Land" T.S. Eliot – Notes on "The Waste Land"
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Eliot provided this set of original notes on his masterpiece The Waste Land, partly to pad out the poem (which was published as a single book), partly to clear up some of its obscurities, and partly to drop red herrings (see the note on line 357, for example).

Many of these notes are also incorporated into our annotations on the full text of the poem.

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We real cool. Gwendolyn Brooks – We Real Cool
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Significantly, this is the only syntactical unit in the poem not broken by the end of the line. All other lines are examples of enjambment in this regard. The enjambment throughout, the repeated syntactical units broken by the ends of lines, suggests a brokenness to the lifestyle described. The unbroken line, however, presents a complete statement of how these characters view themselves.

This first statement also helps in setting the tone of the poem because it is spoken in AAVE. One prominent theme throughout the poem and Brooks’s work is an empathetic understanding of and pride in marginalized individuals (i.e. Black people).

“We Real Cool” is notable for consisting entirely of monosyllabic words. 24 words, 24 syllables.

The monosyllables help make the language crisp, clear, unpretentious–the kind of speech that young people might use in real life. Because the speech sounds “young,” it also conveys a certain innocence beneath the tough exterior. And since these kids are dropouts, it might hint at the ways in which their vocabulary has been limited by leaving school.

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011a781af3d7ef8c1535dc0b193ea052

145

2 years

The narrator is describing his social status and he is implying that it is important to him.

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9b397e7cde4afe16551191edfb75e843

118

3 years

The speaker suggests that he is cool implying that he cares about how he is perceived by others. He wants to be someone others want to be and that is important to him.

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Miss Walls would tell us how
The daddy frog was called a bullfrog
And how he croaked and how the mammy frog
Laid hundreds of little eggs and this was
Frogspawn. You could tell the weather by frogs too,
For they were yellow in the sun and brown
In rain. Seamus Heaney – Death of A Naturalist
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The childlike speech takes us deeper inside the flashback to Heaney’s childhood. His schoolteacher taught him how frogs reproduce, but made the process sound a little cuter than it actually is… The sexual nature of the process is side-stepped, and the teacher moves coyly on to how they change colour in different conditions.

There is a rhythmic flow to this section, where Miss Walls' speech is mimicked.

In other words, her explanation was not unlike this video:

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5 years

Also notice the title given to the teacher – Miss “Walls” – a wall being a barrier or barricade. This title she is given symbolizes the veils of ignorance that the children are taught under, and how their education is somewhat held back and filtered. This has the drastic consequences of a sudden loss of innocence in the final stanza.

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17

7 years

This is also syndetic listing, which when read aloud increases the pace of the poem, possibly reflecting the child’s excitement and awe

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7 years

Perhaps his childlike dialect could be reflective of the naivety and innocence Heaney still possesses at this point in the poem. He is still inquisitive and curious at this stage, a budding naturalist. However, in the final stanza of the poem his language matures, possibly due to the traumatising experience that he has will the bullfrogs that takes away that childlike innocence, and replaces his curiosity with fear, hence the ‘Death of a Naturalist’

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bluebottles
Wove a strong gauze of sound around the smell. Seamus Heaney – Death of A Naturalist
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Bluebottles are common flies. Their buzzing mingles with the smell of the flax to create an impression of strength and intensity, while at the same time has a strange, “gauzy”, flimsy beauty to it.

The mix of sound and smell and texture is an example of synaesthesia.

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7 years

Heaney uses synaesthesia here (where a sense in one part of the body triggers another sense) as the smell of the rotting flax combined with the insistent buzzing of the bluebottles thicken the air so as to create the sense of an almost tangible gauzy haze or mesh in the air around the pool.

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7 years

They are flies buzzing round because they are bored

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Than any other man on Toner's bog. Seamus Heaney – Digging
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Toner’s bog isn’t an official place on a map; presumably it’s the nickname that area was given by Heaney’s neighbors in his childhood, meaning dweller by the bog..

The name “Toner” is a “reduced Anglicized form of Gaelic Ó Tomhrair ‘descendant of Tomhrar’, a Norse personal name” (source). In other words, it’s a name deeply rooted in the region, one that carries a rich history of its own: Scandinavian turned Gaelic, then Anglicised.

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Jeremy Toner
7 years

Toner means dweller by the bog

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One Sister have I in our house - Emily Dickinson – One Sister have I in our house (14)
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Dickinson is referring to her sister Lavinia, as opposed to her sister-in-law Susan Gilbert, mentioned in the next line. The “house” is the Dickinson Homestead or Dickinson House in Amherst, Massachusetts, now part of the Emily Dickinson Museum.

Whatever you call it, Emily didn’t leave it much.

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May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame. W. H. Auden – September 1, 1939
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These lines perhaps illuminate Auden’s intent in wanting to change the last line of the previous stanza to “We must love one another and die.” In this stanza the lines “…composed / Of Eros and of dust” remind us that we are composed of love and also death, love’s negation. (Compare Freud’s theory of the death drive that complements Eros.)

The last lines are offered like a prayer, if only to the poet’s own self, that he not give in to despair and instead “show an affirming flame.”

The image of the intellect, especially the poetic intellect, as a flame is an ancient one. Compare Ralph Waldo Emerson’s statement: “A scholar is a candle which the love and desire of all men will light.”

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We must love one another or die. W. H. Auden – September 1, 1939
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This may be the dramatic climax of the poem, but its romanticism was subsequently rejected by Auden. Later in life, he organized campaigns to have this line reprinted as the more skeptical, anti-romantic “We must love one another and die,” which reminds us of the inevitability of death regardless of circumstance. Not satisfied with this reading either, he eventually disclaimed the line and the poem altogether, including it among a group of poems he called “trash” he was “ashamed to have written.”

Most anthologists have gone on to print the poem with the original reading intact.

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