Pgs. 88 - 94

Pg. 89

1.) As I read the first line, I imagine a person dying in the arms of another. At the end of the first line, I imagine the speaker is using a sad tone.

2.) After reading lines 2 - 4 I now perceive the speaker's tone as more happy now, and maybe sarcastic. The words "cleanly" and "free" suggest the speaker has a clear conscious and has nothing holding him back.

3.) The repetition is used because the speaker is happy about his decision and wants to make his point proven. The extreme declaration that not "one jot of former love" should remain is used because the speaker wants to pretend like the love never existed, and to not recall any pain or sorrow there might have been during the relationship.

4.) After line 8, I would feel a bit broken hearted. To be wanted to be forgotten by somebody would be quite depressing.

5.) My view of the relationship changes in the last six lines in that there was happiness in the relationship, bu now it is diminishing, or dying. Presenting "Love" as a dying person shows me that the speaker's love was not "undying," or he doesn't feel as strongly anymore.

6.) This "you" is the speaker's former lover. Clues that the poem gives about the character of "you" is that the speaker refers to "us" and "our." This suggests that the poem was intended for the former lover.

7.) The information affects my response to the poem in that the poem was probably written for Anne Goodere. After she married someone else, he may have wrote the poem as a reassurance to himself that their former relationship was now over. He might not have wanted to remember anything about it.

Pg. 94

1.) The associations the first two paragraphs bring to my mind are of relaxing and taking time to enjoy life. I can imagine myself in a similar scene, where I would feel very comfortable. The suggestion that she ended up more the dog's protector "than the other way around" makes me believe that the dog was either small, and/or skittish .

2.) Paragraphs 3 - 6 do alter the mood created by the first two paragraphs because it sets a scene of wild animals, rather than domesticated like the dog.

3.) The sentence, "Her hands lift to cover her breasts," suggests that she might be fragile, or maybe she just froze in fear. I expected her to get mauled by the bear here.

4.) Paragraphs 12 - 16 affect the reader's understanding of her attitude towards bears because they suggest that she has a love for bears.

5.) The construction of her porch, and the movement of her sofa onto the porch helped me imagine the bear as irritated and angry that she was moving into his territory. The bear's smell further influences the "beast" that I imagined the bear to be. As for the gender, I would assume that a female bear might be more territorial than a male bear.

6.) The reader's sense of danger builds in the seventh section because it displays the ferocity that bears can show.

7.) The summer days might be marked with an X because this might be the time in which she had sighted he bear, or is when the bear is out versus the winter when the bear would be hibernating.

8.) During paragraphs 32 - 41, I was surprised how well she handled the situation. I thought she might have freaked out, causing the bear to go into a frenzy. But she managed to take down the bear once and for all, despite the suffering the bear received due to her poor accuracy. But better the bear than her suffering from deep gashes from the bear's claws, I suppose.

9.) I didn't find the final sentence surprising. She obviously wants the claws as a sort of trophy, however I wonder why she doesn't just take the claws right away instead of waiting until the next summer.