Page 107 - SpringBoard_ELA_Grade8_Flipbook

aCTIvITy 1.14
continued
Historical Heroes: examples
poetry
diastole: the act of the heart filling with blood
systole: the act of the heart pumping blood
gaudy: showy in a tasteless way exiled: forced to leave one’s native land
rhetoric: language or speech
my Notes
Frederick Douglass
by Robert Hayden
When it is finally ours, this freedom, this liberty, this beautiful and terrible thing, needful to man as air,
usable as earth; when it belongs at last to all,
when it is truly instinct, brain matter, diastole, systole,
5 reflex action; when it is finally won; when it is more than the gaudy mumbo jumbo of politicians:
this man, this Douglass, this former slave, this Negro beaten to his knees, exiled, visioning a world
where none is lonely, none hunted, alien, 10 this man, superb in love and logic, this man
shall be remembered. Oh, not with statues’ rhetoric,
not with legends and poems and wreaths of bronze alone, but with the lives grown out of his life, the lives
fleshing his dream of the beautiful, needful thing.
Second Read
• Reread the excerpt to answer these text-dependent questions.
• Write any additional questions you have about the text in your Reader/Writer Notebook.
6. Craft and Structure: In the first six lines, circle all the uses of the word “it” and “thing.” What is “it”? How is it described?
7. Knowledge and Ideas: How is the cause of both Lincoln and Douglass the same according to these tributes?
80 SpringBoard® English Language Arts Grade 8
© 2017 College Board. All rights reserved.