What the work shows
b Literature: The student produces work in at least one literary genre that follows the conventions of the genre.

The work orients the reader with the first word but does not name the creature being described except in the title of the poem. This, along with the fall of night, creates a mood of mystery.
The student continued to build up the eerie atmosphere and the suspense by structuring the first three lines of the poem as adjective-noun phrases and not introducing a verb until the last line of the first stanza. The context of the poem shifts from the real to the fantasy at this point which produces a dramatic effect.
The alliteration and assonance in the first stanza imitate the sound of a bat flying through the night air.
The imagery in the second stanza is much more concrete as the student moves to using similes to describe the bat.

The work demonstrates an understanding of the conventions of poetry through the use of: various rhyme forms such as slant rhyme; and straight rhyme; onomatopoeia; similes; and line breaks, and white space.

This work sample illustrates a standard-setting performance for the following part of the standards: b Literature: Produce work in at least one literary genre that follows the conventions of the genre.

The line breaks in the last phrase, along with the “full moon” and the use of ellipsis to lead the reader’s eye to the next line, alludes to the supernatural manifestation of vampires as bats. This reinforces the eerie atmosphere and mimics, in writing, the voice-overs from old horror movies.
The language in the final stanza, however, lightens the mood and gives the poem a much more comedic tone. The use of the phrase, “a wanderin’,” associated with old songs and ballads, along with the shift to straight rhyme in this stanza, adds a sing-song quality which seems much less ominous.

There is a repeated error of punctuation (“It’s” instead of “Its”) in the second stanza. However, this does not detract from the overall quality of the work.