Casey Rush, English Teacher
Mount Desert Island High School
288-5011, ext. 118
crush@mdirss.org


Quotables

"Language, like a hammer, belongs to whoever picks it up to build or demolish. Whether we take language in hand to deconstruct itself, to confess a real experience or an imagined one, or to meditate upon the relationship between the individual and the political, social, historical, or cosmological, ownership of our language need not be bound up with the history of that language. Whether I choose to pound on the crooked nail of race or gender, self or Other, whether I decide on some obscure subject while forgoing the other obvious one, when I write, the hammer belongs to me."



    "Just as there are physical monsters, can there not be mental or psychic monsters born? The face and body may be perfect, but if a twisted gene or malformed egg can produce physical monsters, may not the same process produce a malformed soul?

    Monsters are variations from the accepted normal to a greater or a less degree. As a child may be born without an arm, so one may be born without kindness or the potential of conscience. A man who loses his arms in an accident has a great struggle to adjust himself to the lack, but one born without arms suffers only from people who find him strange. Having never had arms, he cannot miss them. To a monster the norm must seem monstrous, since everyone is normal to himself. To the inner monster it must be even more obscure, since he has no visible thing to compare with others. To a criminal, honesty is foolish. You must not forget that a monster is only a variation, and that to a monster the norm is monstrous."

— John Steinbeck, East of Eden

"You must pay for everything in this world one way and another. There is nothing free except the Grace of God. You cannot earn that or deserve it."

— Charles Portis, True Grit


The Virtual English Notebook


Courses and Lesson Plans                Features

  • Course Description - Sophomore English

Cloning Resources

Cloning - University of Utah
Click and Clone - University of Utah 


Why Punctuation is Important:


The Poets' Corner

"The Second Coming" by William Butler Yeats (1919)

    Turning and turning in the widening gyre
    The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
    Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
    Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
    The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
    The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
    The best lack all conviction, while the worst
    Are full of passionate intensity.

    Surely some revelation is at hand;
    Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
    The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
    When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
    Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
    A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
    A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
    Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
    Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.

    The darkness drops again but now I know
    That twenty centuries of stony sleep
    Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
    And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
    Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

__________


Three Poems by Gerard Manley Hopkins


"Spring" by Gerard Manley Hopkins (1918)

   Nothing is so beautiful as spring —
     When weeds, in wheels, shoot long and lovely and lush;
     Thrush’s eggs look little low heavens, and thrush
    Through the echoing timber does so rinse and wring
    The ear, it strikes like lightnings to hear him sing;
     The glassy peartree leaves and blooms, they brush
     The descending blue; that blue is all in a rush
     With richness; the racing lambs too have fair their fling.

    What is all this juice and all this joy?
     A strain of the earth’s sweet being in the beginning
    In Eden garden. — Have, get, before it cloy,
     Before it cloud, Christ, lord, and sour with sinning,
    Innocent mind and Mayday in girl and boy,
     Most, O maid’s child, thy choice and worthy the winning.

"Pied Beauty" by Gerard Manley Hopkins (1918)

    Glory be to God for dappled things—
        For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
            For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
    Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches' wings;
        Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough;
            And áll trades, their gear and tackle and trim.

    All things counter, original, spáre, strange;
        Whatever is fickle, frecklèd (who knows how?)
            With swíft, slów; sweet, sóur; adázzle, dím;
    He fathers-forth whose beauty is pást change:

                                                Práise hím.

"The Windhover" by Gerard Manley Hopkins (1918)

  To Christ our Lord

   I caught this morning morning's minion, king- 
       dom of daylight's dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding 
       Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding
   High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing 
   In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,
       As a skate's heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding
       Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding
   Stirred for a bird, – the achieve of, the mastery of the thing!

   Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here
       Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion 
   Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!
     
      No wonder of it: shéer plód makes plough down sillion
   Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear, 
       Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermilion. 






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