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Copywork
About This Passage
This is the chapter's intellectual climax, where Poe lends mere birds the deliberation of statesmen. The long periodic first sentence suspends its main clause through a chain of qualifications — 'with one accord,' 'with mathematical accuracy,' 'and no more' — so that the prose enacts the very planning it describes, building toward the startling claim that the birds bar 'future stragglers who have not participated in the labor.' Copying it trains the periodic sentence and the diction of reason ('actuated,' 'mathematical accuracy,' 'ingress or egress'), and shows how syntax can confer intellect on instinct.
This matter being arranged, the birds proceed, with one accord, and actuated apparently by one mind, to trace out, with mathematical accuracy, either a square or other parallelogram, as may best suit ...
Full copywork activity with handwriting lines available in the complete study guide.
Discussion Questions
Narration Prompt
Reconstruct the chapter's design: the rescue and recovery aboard the Jane Guy and the 'partial oblivion' that settles over the survivors, the near-fatal squall off the Cape of Good Hope, the arrival at deceptive Kerguelen, or Desolation Island, and the long naturalist study of the royal penguins and the strikingly ordered rookery the penguins and albatrosses build. Mark the point where Poe abandons adventure for documentary observation, and weigh what the shift accomplishes.
Discussion Questions
- On Kerguelen Land, surveying the rookery, the narrator finds 'nothing can be more astonishing than the spirit of reflection evinced by these feathered beings,' a faculty he says should 'elicit reflection in every well-regulated human intellect.' What claim about the boundary between instinct and reason is Poe advancing here, and how do the chapter's details argue for it? Use details from the chapter.
- Poe interrupts the adventure to catalog the ideal sealing vessel, the navigational route, and the Kerguelen rookery's architecture with the dry authority of a logbook. What might this documentary style contribute to the rhetorical effect of a narrative built on mutiny and miracle, and why might Poe adopt it? Use details from the chapter.
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Vocabulary Builder
Item 1
The state of being forgotten, or of forgetting; nothingness.
Item 2
Refined, polished courtesy of manner.
Item 3
Lacking some necessary quality or element; insufficient.
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Critical Thinking
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