Assignment: Pg. 87; "A Writing Exercise"

A Writing Exercise: Write a weighted comparison essay that develops a claim about Williams's poem by bringing up Wordsworth's The Solitary Reaper or Kooser's Four Secretaries.

A claim that I can make from reading The Singing is that singing can make people feel certain ways and have an affect on them. The man speaking in the poem tells us that he saw a young man that was "black speaking black," and he could not really understand him. However, when he realized the black man was singing or as he said, "shouted-sang," he understood what he meant. The black man then expressed to him that he was "not a nice person." The sentence sung to the other man affected him. Perhaps if the black man was not singing he would not have been so affected by the sentence. Just like the singing affected the man in The Singing, the man in the poem Four Secretaries describes the secretaries around him to be singing, affecting him in a different way. If the secretaries were not being described as singing, they might perhaps be less interesting and have no importance to the man observing them. Singing affected both men in the poems in different ways.