Chanukah Lights Tonight

Like your drama and fiction analysis assignments, your task this time is to choose a poem or song to interpret using the elements particular to poetry in your discussion. Choose one of the following two options (A or B) for this project for an essay of 1,000 words minimum (which means you’ll have to get deep). In your discussion, you determine the most interesting and relevant elements of the poem you have chosen to write about, including theme (an implicit must), image, symbol, metaphor, persona, tone, irony, diction, etc. to reveal the significance of the work. You’re after what makes the poem tick.

Because your audience already knows the elements of poetry in general, you won’t spend any space defining those. Instead, your goal is to analyze how the particular poem works. It’s like looking at the engine of a car. If you point at the parts and identify them, that alone won’t show how the engine drives. Or it’s like looking at the body; you can open the chest and point to the heart and arteries, but if you don’t show how the blood flows you’re missing the beauty of the whole mechanism. Your task is twofold: make a claim of interpretation (arguing for what the poem means) and support that interpretation by identifying the poetic elements that give the poem its meaning. You must choose a poem or a set of song lyrics that has enough poetic elements to work with. In the case of song lyrics (option B), your argument has to show that the language use qualifies as poetic, not just cliché and obvious.

Your essay should be 1000 words, in MLA format: double spaced, with one inch margins, using 12 point Times New Roman font and including a Work(s) Cited page.

The poem I picked is called “Chanukah Lights Tonight”
I got this poem off https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/50031/chanukah-lights-tonight