Your prepared comments should be interpretative in nature; that is, they should offer some sort of insight into a specific part of the text or the work as a whole. In terms of length, usually one sentence is not enough to make an adequate point; by the same token, if you have more than 5 sentences, you probably are not being concise enough or are actually dealing with more than one idea.

There are several ways to comment on a work, but if you are stuck, try the following:

Ø       Find a specific part of the text that caught your interest (a line, a word, a paragraph), make a note of it and analyze what it means and how it relates to the overall meaning of the work.

Ø       Locate a particular literary device within the work (metaphor, symbol, alliteration, etc.) and analyze that device both independently and within the context of the entire work.

Ø       Use a form of literary criticism to analyze the work’s meaning.

Ø       Connect an element of the work to another work you are familiar with, then comment on why understanding this connection leads to increased understanding of the assigned work’s meaning.

Below are two sets of sample prepared comments. The poems they refer to are also included.

In the Station of the Metro

by Ezra Pound

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;

Petals on a wet, black bough.

1. An apparition is a ghost. Pound compares the faces of the people waiting on the subway platform to ghosts in order to show how lifeless and transparent they are.
2. The idea of lifelessness is carried into the "petals" metaphor. Petals are only a small part of a flower and they die when they are removed. This metaphor then gives the impression that the faces/people are disconnected from life and are dying (emotionally probably more so than physically).
3. It is ironic that Pound uses what would normally be a beautiful image--flower petals--and associates it with death. I think he is implying that the people could be beautiful if they could break free from their dreary lives.
4. In addition to the associations with death, the dark, somber mood of the poem is shown through the metaphor of the subway platform to a "wet, black bough." Pound is showing how these people are trapped in a dark, dreary place devoid of life.
5. The lack of verbs can also be correlated to the idea that these people are trapped in their existences. Verbs indicate movement and action; without them there is only stagnation. Overall, this poem is about the stagnation of life--how people become trapped in an existence that sucks all the life out of them, leaving them ghostly and dead.

Metaphors

by Sylvia Plath

I'm a riddle in nine syllables.
An elephant, a ponderous house,
A melon strolling on two tendrils.
O red fruit, ivory, fine timbers!
This loaf's big with its yeasty rising.
Money's new-minted in this fat purse.
I'm a means, a stage, a cow in calf.
I've eaten a bag of green apples,

Boarded the train there's no getting off.
 

1. The answer to the "riddle" is that the speaker is pregnant. The nine months of pregnancy appears here in the nine lines of the poem and the nine syllables in each line. Also, depending on how you count them, you count argue that there are nine metaphors describing her pregnant body.
2. The speaker clearly doesn't feel very positively about her pregnancy. She compares herself to animals and equates being pregnant with getting sick from eating too many green apples.
3. She seems jealous of her baby or that she has become less important that the child she's carrying. The baby is "money," which is valuable," while she is just a "means" to an end.
4. The final line could be read as regret for getting pregnant, though the speaker knows there's no way to change her situation. The idea of not being able to get off if you want to has a dark connotation. It could be read that she was pressured into pregnancy or thought it was a good idea at the time, but now she has misgivings and regrets.
5. The negativity could be an example of dramatic irony. Assuming the speaker is Plath (a married women of a certain time period), she would have been expected to be happy about having a baby. In the poem, however, pregnancy and being pregnant is described as something negative.