Post by François Laffont on Sept 23, 2014 21:02:02 GMT -6
Franck groaned as he put the book down. He didn't think his English was bad. He normally understood everything he read and when there was a word he wasn’t sure of, he always had a dictionary around to help. But poetry didn’t fall under the same rules of prose. That just killed him. It had been hard enough at first to learn the verb tenses or that adjectives always came before the noun but when he was forced to read something that chose it could be written pretty much the way it wanted, every word meaning both what it was supposed to and its opposite, it just had the poor boy completely lost.
How hard was Poe, really? Everyone had to read him and he felt like he was the only one unable to get it. He didn't like the metaphors. He tended to take it literally what was figurative and to imagine it was a figure of speech when it meant what it was really written. He knew The Raven was his most famous piece of work but Franck barely understood it. Did anyone know what Pallas or Plutonian shores were? He sure didn’t. This part of his English lesson would be very difficult for him.
He took a deep breath, brushed his hands through his hair for a moment, to give him courage. He could do it. Opening the book again, he forced himself to try and understand what was written. He could recite it with the rhymes, making it sound almost like a song, a tad weird with his French accent. But that didn’t help him understand it better. “I give up,” he let out, a little too loud considering where he was, as he dropped the book on the table once again and looked at the work he had to do about it, still blank. How was he supposed to write about Poe’s poetry when he could not understand it?