In this post I will be engaging in a few Rhetorical Exercises to demonstrate what I have learned thus far in my study of the Renaissance Teaching Method. I will be following the four categories of change defined in Dr. Burtons summary. While engaging in these practice segments has been a part of my plan for some time now, I was reading in Brooke K’s recent blog regarding the art of Imitation and felt a greater desire to engage the subject directly. I will be demonstrating the art of Imitation in the two forms described in my post Critical Definitions 2. I will be basing my derivatives From Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18:Original:
Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate.
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer's lease hath all too short a date.
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimmed;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance or nature's changing course untrimmed.
But thy eternal summer shall not fade
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st;
Nor shall Death brag thou wand’r’st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st.
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.
Imitation of Subject:
I wonder, could I rightly relate your beauty to the elements of Nature? For, while Nature changes from season to season, you remain constant. The flowers in Spring are often stunted in their growth by unseasonal weather. Summer is either too hot to be enjoyed, or too short when its days are pleasant. Despite these unsteady seasons, when Winter and Fall arrive they take that which is beautiful from the preceding season and remake them in their own lesser magnificence. However, unlike the seasons, your beauty does not change over time, but remains constant. Not even in death will your beauty be diminished. Your beauty will remain perfect because I have written these words that describe how you are now, and in whatever future time that they are read, they will continue to describe you as perfect.
Imitation of Form:
Was it the world that took me for a fool?
Yet, I’m believed to be a cleverer player.
While in the trial of life I used the tool
Of Words in ways so strong they changed my prayer.
I brought my proverbs’ power and bent my psalms
To make my pleasant phrase full of pure grace;
So with smooth words I lulled the Priests through alms,
And took their book of sermons home in haste.
Therein I found the secrets I had sought,
And with a quill in action I obtained
What centuries of "wisdom’s" truth had fought.
My clumsy hand this sacred work profaned
To make for me a book of English lines
More resplendent than their orators’ minds.
Process:
Process:
I have to admit that this exercise was hard. At first it seemed like I was simply writing a sonnet of my own, and writing a description of Shakespeare's Sonnet 18. While those are the essential tasks that I performed, there was a lot that went into getting the final product. The summary of the text was a challenge because I was attempting to ensure that I conveyed an accurate depiction of each line, or ideo-homogeneous group of lines. I had to read the Sonnet multiple times so that I could reduce the meanings to an idiomatic structure. I found that once i could sum up the idea in as few words as possible, it was easier to re-expand the concept in an alternate form. I did at first attempt to simply transfer directly from Prose to Verse, but I noticed that when I did this my sentences tended more towards the conceptual and ethereal, rather than the concrete descriptions of meteorological process. So after several re-workings I draft a synopsis that is rough, but embodies the level of rhetorical detail I was exploring.
To recreate the form of the sonnet, I had to focus not just on the standard end rhyme pattern, but the individual sentence structure, so that I could mimic those internal patterns. There were some places in my rendition that i simply could not figure how to reword in order to maintain that close parallelism that is supposed to be embodied in an imitation of form; nevertheless, the act of attempting to recreate similar internal structures was enlivening, I really enjoyed the challenge that it presented. It was difficult to justify the multiple elements within the text, and focusing in this fashion really brings to light just how many things are going on at a time. After having done this exercise it is no surprise to me that the Renaissance Teaching Method created Shakespeare. If classroom teachers consistently forced these types of exercise on their students I believe that the student would begin to see English writing studies in the more useful light that is currently only really emphasized in advanced education circuits. I especially think that the imitation of subject was a tremendously useful exercise because it broadened my conceptualization of the Sonnet, and developed an intersect between prose and verse. I have talked about this in my post about Critical Definitions 2.
To recreate the form of the sonnet, I had to focus not just on the standard end rhyme pattern, but the individual sentence structure, so that I could mimic those internal patterns. There were some places in my rendition that i simply could not figure how to reword in order to maintain that close parallelism that is supposed to be embodied in an imitation of form; nevertheless, the act of attempting to recreate similar internal structures was enlivening, I really enjoyed the challenge that it presented. It was difficult to justify the multiple elements within the text, and focusing in this fashion really brings to light just how many things are going on at a time. After having done this exercise it is no surprise to me that the Renaissance Teaching Method created Shakespeare. If classroom teachers consistently forced these types of exercise on their students I believe that the student would begin to see English writing studies in the more useful light that is currently only really emphasized in advanced education circuits. I especially think that the imitation of subject was a tremendously useful exercise because it broadened my conceptualization of the Sonnet, and developed an intersect between prose and verse. I have talked about this in my post about Critical Definitions 2.
