Page 44 - SpringBoard_CloseReading_Workshop_Grade7_Flipbook

Second Reading: vocabulary in Context
After reading the poem to yourself, listen and follow along as the poem is read aloud. Again, circle any additional words or images that you don’t know or that you think are important to your understanding of the poem.
Check your Understanding
Using these words and the underlined and bolded vocabulary from the poem, discuss how learning the vocabulary and allusions affects your understanding of the entire poem.
Third Reading: Text-Dependent Questioning
Now read the poem again, this time to respond to the Key Ideas and Details interpretive questions. Write your responses to each question and highlight or underline the textual evidence that supports your answers.
Chicago
by Carl Sandburg
Hog Butcher for the World,
Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat,
Player with Railroads and the Nation’s Freight Handler; Stormy, husky, brawling,
5 City of the Big Shoulders:
They tell me you are wicked and I believe them, for I have seen your painted women under the gas lamps luring the farm boys.
And they tell me you are crooked and I answer: Yes, it is true I have seen the gunman kill and go free to kill again.
And they tell me you are brutal and my reply is: On the faces of women and children I have seen the marks of wanton hunger.
And having answered so I turn once more to those who sneer at this my city, and I give them back the sneer and say to them:
10 Come and show me another city with lifted head singing so proud to be alive and coarse and strong and cunning.
Flinging magnetic curses amid the toil of piling job on job, here is a tall bold slugger set vivid against the little soft cities;
Fierce as a dog with tongue lapping for action, cunning as a savage pitted against the wilderness,
Bareheaded,
key ideas and deTails
What kinds of jobs does the poet begin by describing? What do these jobs have in common?
key ideas and deTails
How does Sandburg respond to the accusations against Chicago, and what tone is he creating by doing this?
key ideas and deTails
Choose one of the images
or similes Sandburg uses Shoveling, to describe Chicago, and
15 Wrecking,
Planning, of the city’s personality.
Close Reading Workshop 3 • Close Reading of Poetry 43
explain how it contributes to
Sandburg’s representation
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