Professor Mable Weatherby
English 111
03/24/13
In a Common Tavern Response Paper
Audience Analysis
My target audience will be my classmates and my professor. Unfortunately, I don’t know any of these people personally, so I would have to be broad and unspecific when describing them. I know that we have all read the same material, so we have that. I hope that my audience, especially my professor, has experience with poetry. Whether that is from taking English classes in the past, or just reading it or writing it as a hobby. I myself enjoy reading poetry much more than writing it. My classmates will have read the assigned poem (probably several times) so they will have formed their own opinion about it. They have probably looked over our other classmates’ responses to find what their opinions are.
I imagine that most of my classmates probably read this poem the first time and when they were finished thought to themselves, “What the…?”. I know I did! I re-read the poem several times and eventually deciphered most of it. I think that we all probably have that in common. To my dismay, I will, in all probability, never meet my classmates or professor in person.
My goal when writing this paper is to get my opinion and perspective on the poem across to my classmates so they know where I stand, but also to remain broad enough in my writing so that my readers can compare their own response to mine. Maybe in doing that, I can help a fellow classmate or two who has a block and is stuck in the middle of the assignment.
“In a Common Tavern” by Thomas Thornburg is a poem about a woman and her daughter bravely fleeing from an abusive man. In this poem, Thornburg does a wonderful job of telling this woman’s story, by starting with the reasons she isn’t running away. It is not because that woman has a home in the north, or that she was originally from the north. He then backtracks to describe how the couple (woman and daughter) was happy