Page 324 - SpringBoard_ELA_Grade8_Flipbook

aCTIVITy 4.9
continued
Of the man who drove a swarm of bees across the Rocky Mountains and the Desert “and didn’t lose a bee,”
Of a mountain railroad curve where the engineer in his cab can touch the caboose and spit in the conductor’s eye,
Of the boy who climbed a cornstalk growing so fast he would have starved to death if they hadn’t shot biscuits up to him,
Word CoNNeCTIoNs
Content Connections
One of the fantastic events in this poem deals with an event common to meteorology: a cyclone. A cyclone is a large, powerful, and destructive
Of the old man’s whiskers: “When the wind was with him his whiskers
arrived a day before he did,” storm with high winds turning
in an area of low pressure.
Grammar UsaGe
Participial Phrases
A participial phrase is a
group of words beginning Of the man so tall he must climb a ladder to shave himself, with a participle and used as
Of the hen laying a square egg and cackling, “Ouch!” and of hens laying eggs with the dates printed on them,
Of the ship captain’s shadow: it froze to the deck one cold winter night,
Of mutineers on that same ship put to chipping rust with rubber hammers,
Of the sheep counter who was fast and accurate: “I just count their feet and divide
Of the runt so teeny-weeny it takes two men and a boy to see him,
Of mosquitoes: one can kill a dog, two of them a man,
Of a cyclone that sucked cookstoves out of the kitchen, up the chimney flue, and on
to the next town,
Of the same cyclone picking up wagon-tracks in Nebraska and dropping them over
in the Dakotas,
Of the hook-and-eye snake unlocking itself into forty pieces, each piece two inches
long, then in nine seconds flat snapping itself together again,
Of the watch swallowed by the cow—when they butchered her a year later the
watch was running and had the correct time,
Of horned snakes, hoop snakes that roll themselves where they want to go, and rattlesnakes carrying bells instead of rattles on their tails,
Of the herd of cattle in California getting lost in a giant redwood tree that had hollowed out,
Of the man who killed a snake by putting its tail in its mouth so it swallowed itself, Of railroad trains whizzing along so fast they reach the station before the whistle, Of pigs so thin the farmer had to tie knots in their tails to keep them from crawling
through the cracks in their pen,
Of Paul Bunyan’s big blue ox, Babe, measuring between the eyes forty-two ax-handles and a plug of Star tobacco exactly,
Of John Henry’s hammer and the curve of its swing and his singing of it as “a rainbow round my shoulder.”
by four,”
an adjective. For example: “laying a square egg” “growing so fast” “chipping rust with rubber hammers”
my Notes
Unit 4 • The Challenge of Comedy 297
© 2017 College Board. All rights reserved.