Read the poem “Speaker, listener and situation” and answer the following questions:

1. What conclusions do you make about the poem’s speaker, listener, and situation?

2. What connotative words do you find here? Consider “dying,” the “good” of “good night,” “gentle,” “Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray, “And “grave.”

3. What five different kinds of men does the speaker discuss in stanzas 2-5? What do they have in common? Of what value are they to the speaker’s father?

4. Compare the form of this poem with the poems by Bishop and Roethke in this chapter.