LANGUAGE ARTS ONLINE LESSON: T3 Wk 5

Poem: Snapshotland

In Snapshotland everyone is happy all the time.
It is the promised land where people sit with flasks of tea
on smooth sand by a flat sea and smile and smile and smile.

The sun shines all day long and every day in Kodachrome
or sepia on sandboys and sandgirls who never
stop smiling from the time they first appear, with buckets,
in crisp, gingham pinafores and bonnets on the sea-shore.

Lovers stay in love forever; married couples never
grow tired of each other; everything is always just right.
The dolphins know exactly when to leap into the air
and stay there for the permanent delight of passengers
aboard the pleasure-boat which never passes out of sight.

Nobody in Snapshotland grows old unless they want to,
judging by the way they go on smiling so, in deck-chairs,
on the beach, or in old-fashioned gardens with lavender
and grandchildren here and there - and no one dies, ever.

Even if they don't appear later, the people are still
always there, smiling through the lavender and dolphins
and the buckets full of pebbles on the same sea-shore.

By
Sylvia Kantaris

Step1: Forget what the poem may or may not mean, or what it may be about.

Step 2: cameras, pictures. a unique place, a moment, flash, certain time.

Step 3: Read the poem once quickly, and then several times more slowly. Try to hear the poem aloud in your head. DO NOT recite the poem aloud in class; if you must hear it aloud, read it quietly to yourself.

Step 4:
Promised land
Kodachrome
Sepia
in crisp gingham pinafores and bonnets
all the time
forever
stay there
permanent delight
never passes out of side
always

Step 5: Every stanza has only one or two full stops.
There is alot of use of adjectives and adverbs.

Step 6: The words that describe never happening or happens the whole time
are "all the time", "forever", "stay there", "permanent", "never" and "always".

Step 7: Every sentence describes a place.

Step 8: The poem means that photos always depict a scene and the scene will never change. Photos will bring back memories.

Step 9:
a) Persona
b)The audience are people who like photos.
c)He is friendly and showing his liking to photos.
d)He is friendly to the audience, he wants eveyone to treasure the photos.
e) It wants to show the different scene and moments in photos such as happy moments.
f) It is to help me understand more about the poem.

Step 10:
I guess he hoped to tell everyone that photos were very precious as they could depict the wonderful moments of the past.