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Teaching Tips: Lines for Winter, by Mark Strand
- Strand uses line breaks to add tension, ambiguity of meaning, suspense, and resolution to the poem. To illuminate his use of this device, give your students "Lines for Winter" as a prose paragraph and ask them to break it into lines. Then compare their line breaks to those in Strand's original. What have they added to or taken away from the poem by breaking up the lines differently?
- Only once in this poem does Strand begin a new sentence in the middle of a line. What is the effect? Why might this occur only here?
- For additional line-break exercises, you could compare and contrast Strand's use of the line break to that in Lucille Clifton's "won't you celebrate with me," or have students break up the lines in this excerpt from "A Passage to India" the way that Strand might do it.
- Identify words with strong connotations and discuss what they add to the poem.
- How does the title relate to the poem? What kind of lines might it refer to? Also, beyond simply referring to "death," what might "winter" represent?
- Throughout history, poets have linked the seasons of the year to the stages in human life. Compare Strand's use of winter to how the season appears in the following poems:
- Could you write a response to this poem, maybe one that accepts, rejects, or looks differently at the speaker's advice? (What would your "Lines for Summer" or "Lines for Spring" advise?) Try to use some of Strand's tools—connotation, repetition, and the line break—in your poem.