Notes for "The Last Hour" Ethel Clifford [18 - )

     Eighth graders will not appreciate this poem as much as someone approaching sixty does, but they should be able to see the love of nature expressed in it. The colon at the end of the first stanza introduces the two following stanzas which are built entirely upon nine appositives to "beauty." In discussing the poem, you might also want to point out the personification of "joys," and of the "gale," the "sail," the "leaves," and the "heat." Then too, there is the fascinating oxymoron in "glad sob of the filling sail." (Why is it both glad and sobbing?)
     Syntactically, I would expect many students to be stumped by the relatively infrequent "lest" as a subordinating conjunction.

     Have the students use the poem as a model for a poem, or if not a poem, a sentence, in which the idea in one word is further developed by nine? appositives to it.