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Teaching Tips: Belle Isle, 1949, by Philip Levine

How does the setting of the poem—both time and place—amplify its main ideas or suggest additional implications for the story the poem tells? How would the poem be different with a different title?
Levine uses few obviously "poetic" gestures in the poem. In that context, what do alliteration and other poetic elements add to the poem? Are there any lines or passages that stand out as either lovelier or more "anti-poetic" in their style? Why those? Why there?
At first glance, Levine's free verse can look like prose chopped into lines. Give your students this poem as a block paragraph and ask them to divide it into lines. Compare their lineation with the poet's. What seems to have guided Levine in his choices of where and how to break the lines?
What kinds of feelings does the speaker experience in this poem? How can you tell?
How does the substitution of the word "breath" for "voice" in line eight—a figure of speech called metonymy—affect the image?
Think about "Belle Isle, 1949" as a spring poem. What are the traditional connotations of spring in poetry? Which, if any, does Levine include in his poem? How does he revise them, or what does he substitute for them? Other famous spring poems include:

"Sumer is i-cumin in" (anonymous, medieval)
"When daisies pied, and violets blue..." from Love's Labors Lost, by Shakespeare
"The Human Seasons," by John Keats
"Lines Written in Early Spring," by William Wordsworth
"Spring," by Gerard Manley Hopkins
"In just-Spring," by e. e. cummings

The poem contains only four sentences, yet each of them is long and full of complication. Treat each sentence as a section and explain how it functions.
Write a description of a favorite spring memory. Using only one sentence, see how much of your story you can convey.
Think about "Belle Isle, 1949" as a border poem. Compare it with William Stafford's "Fifteen" or Naomi Shihab Nye's "Cross That Line."