The Vacuum By Howard Nemerov

Do Now: Using at least five wintery images, write a poem about yesterday.  Then, using at least five springtime images, write a poem about today.

AIM: What is the point of view in the poem?

HOMEWORK: Thinking about winter?

Skipping a line, write four sentences ending each with any of the words listed below:
bleak, cold, chilly, chill, frosty, freezing, icy, snowy, blizzardy, arctic, glacial, bitter, raw 

What does winter look like? What does winter smell like? What does winter feel like? Write 4 sentences, skipping a line, using the words bleak, cold, chilly, chill, frosty, freezing, icy, snowy, blizzard, arctic, glacial, bitter, raw. Then, in between, make your rhymes!
Now, write about what winter feels like?
In between your answers, write 4 more sentences but rhyme your answer with the words your picked.



The Vacuum

By Howard Nemerov

The house is so quiet now

The vacuum cleaner sulks in the corner closet,   

Its bag limp as a stopped lung, its mouth   

Grinning into the floor, maybe at my

Slovenly life, my dog-dead youth.

I’ve lived this way long enough,

But when my old woman died her soul

Went into that vacuum cleaner, and I can’t bear   

To see the bag swell like a belly, eating the dust   

And the woolen mice, and begin to howl

Because there is old filth everywhere

She used to crawl, in the corner and under the stair.   

I know now how life is cheap as dirt,   

And still the hungry, angry heart   

Hangs on and howls, biting at air.

Questions on the poem:

1. What hint does the poet give us to help us understand why the house is quiet now?
2. What are some of the interesting ways the narrator describes the stuff a vacuum cleaner is designed to clean up?
3. Slovenly, when describing a person means messy, dirty, it can also mean lazy, and careless.  What judgment does the narrator of the poem think the vacuum makes about him?
4. Personification is when you give human qualities to something nonhuman.  Can you find an example of personification in the first group of the poem?
5. Personification is when you give human qualities to something nonhuman.  Can you find an example of personification in the second group of the poem?
6. The last group of lines in the poem suggest that the narrator may not be a person.  What are the hints and what do you guess?
7. We all know what a vacuum cleaner is, right?  Is a description of one in the poem?  Find it.  
8. In addition to vacuum cleaner being a thing, there is also evidence in that the poem that the words vacuum and vacuum cleaner are being used to represent something emotional.  Can you find those instances in the poem?
9. What is the point of view of the poem?  Is the poem being shared by a person, an object, a ghost, a mineral, or an animal?  Explain how you know, using evidence from the poem.
10. Compare and contrast"The Vacuum" with "The Snow Man"
11. How does the point of view differ?

The Snow Man - by Wallace Stevens

One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,

Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.