Thesis and Plan Exercise

29. Develop an embedded thesis and plan of attack:

Exercise #1: Create an embedded plan of attack and thesis statements for the following texts:

1. For an explication of Robert Frost's poem "October."

October

O hushed October morning mild

They leaves have ripened to the fall;

Tomorrow's wind, if it be wild,

Should waste them all.

The crows above the forest call;

Tomorrow they may form and go.

O hushed October morning mild,

Begin the hours of this day slow.

Make the day seem to us less brief.

Hearts not averse to being beguiled,

Beguile us in the way you know.

Release one leaf at break of day;

At noon release another leaf;

One from our trees, one far away.

Retard the sun with gentle mist;

Enchant the land with amethyst.

Slow, slow!

For the grape's sake, if they were all,

Whose leaves already are burnt with frost,

Whose clustered fruit must else be lost--

For the grape's sake along the wall.

2. Write an embedded thesis and plan of attack for an essay on the Richard Wilbur poem "Playboy":

Playboy

High on a stockroom ladder like a dunce

The stockboy sits, and studies like a sage

The subject matter of one glossy page,

As lost in curves as Archimedes once.

Sometimes, without a glance, he feeds himself.

The left hand like a mother bird in flight,

Brings him a sandwich for a sidelong bite,

And then returns it to a dusty shelf.

What so engrosses him? The wild decor

Of this pink-papered alcove into which

A naked girl has stumbled, with its rich

Welter of pelts and pillows on the floor,

Amidst which, kneeling in a supple pose,

She lifts a goblet in her farther hand,

As if about to toast a flower-stand

Above which hovers an exploding rose

Fired from a long-necked crystal vase that rests

Upon a tassled and vermillion cloth

One taste of which would shrivel up a moth?

Or is he pondering her perfect breasts?

Nothing escapes him of her body's grace

Or of her floodlit skin, so sleek and warm

And yet so strangely like a uniform,

But what now grips his fancy was her face,

And now the cunning picture holds her still

At just that smiling instant when her soul,

Grown sweetly faint, and swept beyond control,

Consents to his inexorable will.

-Richard Wilbur

PLAN OF ATTACK AND THESIS:

3. Write an embedded thesis and plan of attack for an essay on Robert Lowell's poem "Watchmaker God":

Say life is the one-way trip, the one way flight,

say this without hysterical undertones-

then you could say you stood in the cold light of science

seeing as you are seen, espoused to a fact.

Strange, life is both the fire and the fuel; and we

the animals and objects, must be here

without striking a spark of evidence

that anything that ever stopped living

ever falls back to living where life stops.

There's a pale romance to the watchmaker God

Of Descartes and Paley; He drafted and installed

us in the Apparatus. He loved to tinker;

but having perfected what he had to do

stood off shrouded in his loneliness.

ANSWERS ARE IN BOLD:

PLAN OF ATTACK AND THESIS:

1. By exploring what the speaker loves about fall, the apostrophe to the season to slow down, and the speaker's realization that his own death is imminent, this essay will develop how Robert Frost's poem "October" addresses time as it relates to human consciousness of mortality.

2. Arguing that this poem purifies the lustful act of looking at nude women in Playboy magazine, this essay will explore the esoteric allusions, vivid imagery, and adolescent imagination developed in the poem.

3. Robert Lowell's poem laments the notion that God is no longer present in the world. By examining his commentary on science and religion, the speaker's concrete observations and the allusions to philosophies of Descartes and Paley, this essay will develop Lowell's fear that "life is a one way trip."