Christian Belief and Practice:
Ron Rash's "Revival" and "White Wings," and Robert Morgan's "The Gift of Tongues"

Conservative Christianity has long been a part of Southern and rural American culture. Ron Rash’s “Revival” and “White Wings” and Robert Morgan’s “The Gift of Tongues” are all built around Christian imagery and themes. How do these three poems explore the tensions between human experience and Christian belief and practice?

Primary Sources

• Morgan, Robert. "The Gift of Tongues." The Strange Attractor: New and Selected Poems. Louisiana State UP, 2004.

Resources

In this assignment, students are comparing and contrasting poems around a common theme.

• Essay map on how to organize an essay on two poems with a common theme.
• Example of an essay on two poems with a common theme.

Requirements:

• Length: Your essay must be a minimum of 500 words.
• Documentation Format: You must include an MLA formatted Works Cited page that includes correctly formatted internal citations for all source material used.
• Sources: You are restricted to the assigned poems.
• Number of sources: You must make frequent references to specific details in each poem (properly documented).
• Format: The essay must be in MSWord format (.doc or .docx)
• Warning: Do not read or refer to resources beyond those available in our course.

For this essay, do not use any sources other than the poems themselves. You may use a dictionary to help you with words with which you are not familiar, but do not refer to the dictionary definitions in your essay. Base your discussion of the theme on your own close reading of the poems you have selected.

Document your sources by identifying the poems (titles in quotation marks) and the authors. When referring to lines within each poem, you may identify them by line number. When quoting from the poems, quote exactly. Do not change punctuation or capitalization except, as needed, end punctuation. Be sure to use a slash ( / ) to indicate a line break in the original poem. Remember, if you do not need the punctuation at the end of your quote, you may eliminate it or replace it with the punctuation you need to end your sentence. For example, in the following sentence about Shakespeare's poem, "That Time of Year Thou Mayst in Me Behold," the comma at the end of the line from the poem is unneeded, but a period is needed to end the sentence:

Shakespeare compares his life to "the twilight of such day / As after sunset fadeth in the west."
Notice the / indicating the line break and the period which ends the sentence replacing the comma in the original.

Proofread carefully the final draft for spelling, grammar, and punctuation as well as clarity, conciseness, and completeness. The final draft should be typed, double spaced, one inch margins, in Arial or Times Roman 12 pt. Your essay should be a minimum of 600 words (two typewritten pages, about five handwritten pages) in length.