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you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror
and each will smile at the other's welcome,
and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you
all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,
the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
|
Sit. Feast on your life.
| null |
This final line echoes line three of the second stanza in its short, choppy sentences and its reference to food as fulfillment. Jesus offered bread and wine for spiritual enrichment, and this last line does the same. The ‘feast’ is the capacity to grasp life in full; the ‘life’ belongs to a complete, joyful person.
|
Derek Walcott
|
Love After Love
|
Lilian and Lilias smiled in trudging by,
Their heaped-up basket teased me like a jeer;
Sweet-voiced they sang beneath the sunset sky,
Their mother's home was near.
Plump Gertrude passed me with her basket full,
A stronger hand than hers helped it along;
A voice talked with her through the shadows cool
More sweet to me than song.
Ah, Willie, Willie, was my love less worth
Than apples with their green leaves piled above?
I counted rosiest apples on the earth
Of far less worth than love.
|
So once it was with me you stooped to talk
|
Laughing and listening in this very lane:
To think that by this way we used to walk
We shall not walk again!
|
The verb ‘stooped’, in literal terms, means that she was smaller than him and he had to bend. But it symbolises that she is lower status, that he condescended to talk to her and maybe took advantage of her.
|
Christina Rossetti
|
An Apple Gathering
|
null |
It is the pain, it is the pain endures.
|
Your chemic beauty burned my muscles through.
Poise of my hands reminded me of yours.
What later purge from this deep toxin cures?
|
[Refrain 1] The way this line is repeated mimics a throbbing pain, coming in and out of focus. Just like the throbbing follows a rhythm, this refrain is expected to show up where it does.
|
William Empson
|
Villanelle It is the pain...
|
I watch
3 birds
On a telephone
Wire.
One flies
Off.
Then
Another.
One is left,
Then
It too
Is gone.
|
My typewriter is
Tombstone
Still.
|
And I am
Reduced to bird
Watching.
|
Since he is having trouble writing (ironic..since, you know, he is writing this poem), his typewriter has become no more useful that a giant paperweight, like that of a tombstone.
|
Charles Bukowski
|
8 Count
|
Purpling the landscape, far and wide,
On the dark promontory's side
I'll gather wild flow'rs, dew besprent,
And weave a crown for THEE,
GENIUS OF HEAV'N-TAUGHT POESY!
While, op'ning to my wond'ring eyes,
Thou bidst a new creation rise,
I'll raptur'd trace the circling bounds,
Of thy RICH PARADISE extended,
And listen to the varying sounds
Of winds, and foaming torrents blended.
And now, with lofty tones inviting,
|
Thy NYMPH, her dulcimer swift smiting,
Shall wake me in ecstatic measures!
|
Far, far remov'd from mortal pleasures!
In cadence rich, in cadence strong,
Proving the wondrous witcheries of song!
|
This line refers to the dulcimer that Robinson and Coleridge both refer to. This is a string instrument that resembles a violin. She is trying to describe how beautiful this sound is and how she enjoys it so much listening to it in the middle of the night.
|
Mary Robinson
|
To the Poet Coleridge
|
null |
After R S Thomas
|
From my father a stammer
like a stick in the spokes of my speech.
A tired blink,
|
This is a dedication to RS Thomas, who was one of the leading poets of modern Wales. In his poetry Thomas focuses on the difficulties of rural existence. By dedicating this poem to him, Sheers establishes his Welsh tradition and suggests that Thomas has played a part in helping him to understand his identity.
|
Owen Sheers
|
Inheritance
|
null |
In secret place where once I stood
Close by the Banks of Lacrim flood,
I heard two sisters reason on
Things that are past and things to come.
|
One Flesh was call'd, who had her eye
On worldly wealth and vanity;
The other Spirit, who did rear
|
The concept of this poem, seemingly “material wealth vs. spiritual salvation,” I believe can be better analyzed with some historical context – particularly biographical information pertaining to the author herself. Regarding her religion, biographer Cheryl Walker writes “Throughout her life Bradstreet recorded intense periods of self-examination with regard to her religious shortcomings. In order to under-stand the urgency with which she felt these spiritual tensions, it is necessary to reconstruct not only Puritan sentiments in general but also Bradstreet’s particular relationship to the sociopolitical system under which she lived. Self-scrutiny was part and parcel of Puritan existence; and there is certainly no evidence that Bradstreet was any less a Puritan because she had periods of internal debate concerning such matters as atheism, the Trinity, and the legitimacy of Puritanism itself” (American Writers: A Collection of Literary Biographies). So, this particularly “involved” form of religion may certainly have had an effect on Bradsteet’s themes in this, along with many of her works. Also, I feel it important to note here that Bradstreet comes from a particularly privileged background, having lineage to the renowned author Sir Philip Sidney, as well as financial security, in her marriage to Thomas Dudley. Walker continues “Thomas Dudley was a man who possessed not only mental talents but material wealth as well; and the Bradstreets no doubt continued to benefit from his secure financial status, even after he moved to Roxbury in 1639 (American Writers). Taking this history into account, one may not only be able to better understand Bradstreet’s conflict between her own wealth and beliefs; but also, given her financial status (and respected status),how she may have felt secure enough to contemplate and analyze such quandaries.
Here is a link to Walker’s entire essay (however you will need a login code for Gale Virtual):
I’ve found a great website that gives access to some Puritan documents and essays composed by some of Bradstreet’s contemporaries, and may help better understand the historical context of this poem. Here is the link:
|
Anne Bradstreet
|
Flesh and the Spirit The
|
Yes to the hopes of government
Of the people by the people for the people,
No to debauchery of the public mind,
No to personal malice nursed and fed,
Yes to the Constitution when a help,
No to the Constitution when a hindrance
Yes to man as a struggler amid illusions,
Each man fated to answer for himself:
Which of the faiths and illusions of mankind
Must I choose for my own sustaining light
To bring me beyond the present wilderness?
Lincoln? Was he a poet?
|
And did he write verses?
|
“I have not willingly planted a thorn
in any man's bosom.”
I shall do nothing through malice: what
|
Sandburg questions the reader about Abraham Lincoln in a form of an illusion. Being a poet, Sandburg ironically uses the example of poet and a poet’s verse to reference distinguished beings and their famous accomplishments.
Although childish, this video maturely and clearly provides an answer to this question, along with parallels to Sandburg’s thought and writing. It even makes us consider if a shared birth state accounted for part of Sandburg’s fascination with Lincoln:
|
Carl Sandburg
|
The People Yes
|
A drop fell on the apple tree
Another on the roof
A half a dozen kissed the eaves
And made the gables laugh
A few went out to help the brook
That went to help the sea
Myself conjectured, Were they pearls
What necklaces could be!
|
The dust replaced in hoisted roads
|
The birds jocoser sung
The sunshine threw his hat away
The orchards spangles hung
|
The rain washes away the dust on the roads.
Here, the rain is a means through which the old is washed out and a clean start can begin; the dust that has accumulated on the roads is replaced by the fresh water. This is often an image that is associated with rain – wiping the slate clean, bringing new life, etc. It is yet another very positive view of the weather.
|
Emily Dickinson
|
Summer Shower
|
And I be riding on the wings of eternity like
CLA CLA CLA SHA KLACK KLACK
GET ME THE FUCK OFF THIS TRACK
As if the heart beat wasn't enough
They got us using drum machines now
Drums live in machines
Tryin' to make our drums humdrums
Tryin' to mute our magic
Instruments be political prisoners up inside computers
As if the heart were not enough
As if the heart were not enough
And as heart beats bring percussions
|
Fallen trees bring repercussions
|
Cities play upon our souls like broken drums
Re-drum the essence of creation from city slums
But city slums mute our drums and our drums become humdrums
|
Williams references the impact of deforestation , and industrialization in general, on the global ecosystem and subsequently human life.
|
Saul Williams
|
Twice the First Time
|
null |
I felt a Funeral, in my Brain,
And Mourners to and fro
Kept treading − treading − till it seemed
That Sense was breaking through −
|
And when they all were seated,
A Service, like a Drum −
Kept beating − beating − till I thought
|
The use of repetition is both structurally and metaphorically important; by using the word “treading” twice, Dickinson creates a sort of syncopation within the poem that mimics the way that “mourners [walk] to and fro.” Imagistically, “treading” ties in with the sorrowful visual of a “Funeral in [the speaker’s] Brain.“ The speaker’s grim procession of thoughts and questions do not cease until "Sense”–rationality and pragmatism–finally takes over. The end of the stanza suggests a positive outcome, as if the speaker’s search for closure has been successful. However, by placing a dash at the end of the stanza, Dickinson creates ambiguity and suggests a potential turn of events.
|
Emily Dickinson
|
280
|
I did but prompt the age to quit their clogs
By the known rules of ancient liberty,
When straight a barbarous noise environs me
Of owls and cuckoos, asses, apes and dogs:
As when those hinds that were transform'd to frogs
Rail'd at Latona's twin-born progeny
Which after held the sun and moon in fee.
But this is got by casting pearl to hogs,
That bawl for freedom in their senseless mood,
|
And still revolt when truth would set them free.
|
Licence they mean when they cry liberty;
For who loves that, must first be wise and good.
But from that mark how far they rove we see,
|
Like the men who remain chained in Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, the “hogs” to which the “pearls” are cast revolt against the truth brought by the speaker.
|
John Milton
|
Sonnet 12: I did but prompt the age to quit their clogs
|
If we should weep when clowns put on their show,
If we should stumble when musicians play,
Time will say nothing but I told you so.
There are no fortunes to be told, although,
Because I love you more than I can say,
If I could tell you I would let you know.
The winds must come from somewhere when they blow,
There must be reasons why the leaves decay;
Time will say nothing but I told you so.
Perhaps the roses really want to grow,
The vision seriously intends to stay;
If I could tell you I would let you know.
|
Suppose the lions all get up and go,
|
And all the brooks and soldiers run away;
Will Time say nothing but I told you so?
If I could tell you I would let you know.
|
This line may bring us back to the clown metaphor from a few lines ago. For a lion to be put in a cage is viewed as cruelty and not being in their natural environment, which may be how Auden felt. A lion must be very brave to escape from the circus, which may be what Auden himself wants.
|
W. H. Auden
|
If I Could Tell You
|
I wait for the holiday crowd to clear the beach
before stepping onto the first wave.
|
Soon I am walking across the Atlantic
|
thinking about Spain,
checking for whales, waterspouts.
I feel the water holding up my shifting weight.
|
In the first part of the poem, the speaker imagines himself walking across the Atlantic. This is an act of magical realism, as the reader can imagine what it might look like, even if s/he knows that it’s impossible. This imbues the speaker with supernatural or God-like powers – after all, Jesus himself walked on water. The speaker plays on the reader’s impression of this fantastical power at the end of the poem.
|
Billy Collins
|
Walking Across the Atlantic
|
13. Remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition
14. Like Proust be an old teahead of time
15. Telling the true story of the world in interior monolog
16. The jewel center of interest is the eye within the eye
17. Write in recollection and amazement for yourself
18. Work from pithy middle eye out, swimming in language sea
19. Accept loss forever
20. Believe in the holy contour of life
21. Struggle to sketch the flow that already exists intact in mind
22. Don't think of words when you stop but to see picture better
23. Keep track of every day the date emblazoned in yr morning
24. No fear or shame in the dignity of yr experience, language & knowledge
|
25. Write for the world to read and see yr exact pictures of it
|
26. Bookmovie is the movie in words, the visual American form
27. In praise of character in the Bleak inhuman Loneliness
28. Composing wild, undisciplined, pure, coming in from under, crazier the better
|
Writing is a personal art form, and it should reflect the writer’s (yr) worldview. It should offer a unique perspective for the reader.
|
Jack Kerouac
|
Belief Technique For Modern Prose
|
The light came through the window
Straight from the sun above
And so inside my little room
There plunged the rays of love
In streams of light I clearly saw
The dust you seldom see
Out of which the nameless makes
A name for one like me
I'll try to say a little more
|
Love went on and on
|
Until it reached an open door
Then love itself, love itself was gone
All busy in the sunlight
|
The ray of light from the sun (symbol for God) now is identified with love which fluctuates, fills the room and then leaves through the open door (sign for the wish to communicate) to other rooms and creatures.
|
Leonard Cohen
|
Love Itself
|
Worshiped as Jesus resurrected
Like Lazarus
But you can call me lazzy, lazy
Yea I'm lazy cause I'd rather sit and build
Than work and plow a field
Worshiping a daily yield of cash green crops
STEALING US WAS THE SMARTEST THING THEY EVER DID!
Too bad they don't teach the truth to their kids
Our influence on them is the reflection they see
When they look into their minstrel mirror and talk about
"Their" culture
Their existence is that of a schizophrenic vulture
|
Yea there's no repentance
|
They are bound to live an infinite consecutive executive life sentence
So what are you bound to live nigga
So while you're out there serving the time
|
The colonial consequences, such as cultural genocide, afro-american and native americans living as second rate citizens etc.,know NO forgiveness and NO repentance.
|
Saul Williams
|
Amethyst Rocks
|
[Saul Williams]
I'm falling up flights of stairs, scraping myself from the sidewalk
Jumping from rivers to bridges, drowning in pure air
Hip hop is lying on the side of the road, half dead to itself
Blood scrawled over its mangled flesh, like jazz
Stuffed into an oversized record bag
Tuba lips swollen beyond recognition
|
Diamond studded teeth strewn like rice at Karma's wedding
|
The ring bearer bore bad news
Minister of information wrote the wrong proclamation
Now everyone's singing the wrong song
|
All these rappers diamond caps have been punched out and look like confetti at a wedding. The wedding is Karma’s, for they have brought this punishment on themselves for their ridiculous rhymes and attitudes.
|
Saul Williams
|
Telegram
|
Summer is fading:
|
The leaves fall in ones and twos
|
From trees bordering
The new recreation ground.
In the hollows of afternoons
|
The idea of leaves falling in “ones and twos” suggests the obvious loss of vigorous life experienced by the young mothers referred to later. That it is summer compounds the tragedy; this should be a time of energy and happiness.
Note that this line is a monosyllablic string , with elongated vowels. The effect is to slow the pace and suggest tedium.
|
Philip Larkin
|
Afternoons
|
Yes
Glad to get high and see the slow-motion world
Just to reach and touch the half notes floating
World spinning, orbit quicker than 9/8th Dave Brubeck
We come now frantically searching for Thomas More, rainbow villages
Upon suddenly Charlie Mingus and Ahmed Abdul-Malik
To add base to a bottomless pit of insecurity
You may be plastic because you never meditate about the bottom of glasses,
The third side of your universe
|
Add on Alice Coltrane and her cosmic strains
|
Still no vocal on blue-black horizons
Your plasticity is tested by our formless assault
The sun can answer questions in tune to all your sacrifices
|
Alice Coltrane was a prolific musician. She is known for her singing and proficiency with jazz piano, organ, and harp. Coltrane is also the second wife John Coltrane, jazz saxophonist and composer.
|
Gil Scott-Heron
|
Plastic Pattern People
|
Of many a thorny shire tell you notes,
Some let me make you of the water's speeches.
Behind a pot of ferns the wagging clock
Tells me the hour's word, the neural meaning
Flies on the shafted disk, declaims the morning
And tells the windy weather in the cock.
Some let me make you of the meadow's signs;
The signal grass that tells me all I know
Breaks with the wormy winter through the eye.
Some let me tell you of the raven's sins.
Especially when the October wind
(Some let me make you of autumnal spells,
|
The spider-tongued, and the loud hill of Wales)
|
With fists of turnips punishes the land,
Some let me make you of the heartless words.
The heart is drained that, spelling in the scurry
|
I have no idea what this means. This, again, may be the point.
The rationalistic explanation is that the ‘spider-tongued’ (a substantive plural, as in ‘(those) who have tongues like spiders’) are the poets who “weave” words together to make ‘spells’. (This is the etymology of ‘rhapsody’, which Thomas was, as an adorer of words, inclined to know).
‘loud’ is yet another adjective used to give a regularly unspeaking thing, like a hill or a tree, a voice. A hill is the most ‘loud’ when the wind (maybe the harsh October wind?) runs over it.
|
Dylan Thomas
|
Especially when the October wind
|
For her this rhyme is penned, whose luminous eyes,
Brightly expressive as the twins of Leda,
Shall find her own sweet name, that nestling lies
|
Upon the page, enwrapped from every reader.
|
Search narrowly the lines!- they hold a treasure
Divine- a talisman- an amulet
That must be worn at heart. Search well the measure-
|
The clues are in the poem, “enwrapped” or hidden.
|
Edgar Allan Poe
|
A Valentine
|
By day she wooes me, soft, exceeding fair:
But all night as the moon so changeth she;
Loathsome and foul with hideous leprosy,
|
And subtle serpents gliding in her hair.
|
By day she wooes me to the outer air,
Ripe fruits, sweet flowers, and full satiety:
But through the night, a beast she grins at me,
|
This alludes to Medusa, the Gorgon of Greek mythology, whose ill-treatment by a man resulted in her transformation to a serpent-haired monster who could kill with a glance. In her ‘The World’s Wife’ collection, Carol Ann Duffy re-cast this story in kinder terms from the wronged Medusa’s point of view.
It also alludes to the serpant in Genesis 3:1 , the representation of the devil who ensnares Eve first, before she urges Adam to sin.
Note the sinister, hissing alliterative ’s’s in ‘subtle serpent.
|
Christina Rossetti
|
The World
|
To such as see thee not my words were weak;
To those who gaze on thee what language could they speak?
Ah! may'st thou ever be what now thou art,
Nor unbeseem the promise of thy spring,
As fair in form, as warm yet pure in heart,
Love's image upon earth without his wing,
And guileless beyond Hope's imagining!
And surely she who now so fondly rears
Thy youth, in thee, thus hourly brightening,
Beholds the rainbow of her future years,
Before whose heavenly hues all sorrow disappears.
Young Peri of the West!-'tis well for me
|
My years already doubly number thine;
|
My loveless eye unmov'd may gaze on thee,
And safely view thy ripening beauties shine;
Happy, I ne'er shall see them in decline,
|
In 1814, when the dedication was published, Byron was twenty-six, Ianthe was thirteen.
|
Lord Byron
|
Childe Harolds Pilgrimage To Ianthe
|
Thy ever-blooming mead, whose flow'r
Waves to the cold breath of the moonlight hour!
Or when the day-star, peering bright
On the grey wing of parting night;
While more than vegetating pow'r
Throbs grateful to the burning hour,
As summer's whisper'd sighs unfold
Her million, million buds of gold;
Then will I climb the breezy bounds,
Of thy NEW PARADISE extended,
And listen to the distant sounds
Of winds, and foamy torrents blended!
|
SPIRIT DIVINE! With THEE I'll trace
Imagination's boundless space
|
With thee, beneath thy sunny dome,
I'll listen to the minstrel's lay,
Hymning, the gradual close of day;
|
This line is a perfect example that ties Robinson’s and Coleridge’s view of the mind together. They both have similar feelings that the mind has no limitations. It is not bound by petty things that humans are physically hindered from doing.
|
Mary Robinson
|
To the Poet Coleridge
|
A hundred, a thousand to one; even so;
Not a hope in the world remained:
The swarming, howling wretches below
Gained and gained and gained.
Skene looked at his pale young wife:--
"Is the time come?"--"The time is come!"--
Young, strong, and so full of life:
The agony struck them dumb.
Close his arm about her now,
Close her cheek to his,
Close the pistol to her brow--
|
God forgive them this!
|
"Will it hurt much?"--"No, mine own:
I wish I could bear the pang for both."
"I wish I could bear the pang alone:
|
The Church deemed it sinful to commit suicide. But the couple would rather commit a sin, than become victims.
|
Christina Rossetti
|
In The Round Tower At Jhansi June 8 1857
|
Like strings of broken lyres,
And all mankind that haunted nigh
Had sought their household fires.
The land's sharp features seemed to be
The Century's corpse outleant,
His crypt the cloudy canopy,
The wind his death-lament.
The ancient pulse of germ and birth
Was shrunken hard and dry,
And every spirit upon earth
Seemed fervourless as I.
At once a voice arose among
|
The bleak twigs overhead
|
In a full-hearted evensong
Of joy illimited;
An aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small,
|
These two juxtaposed lines bring in a change. The stark, spare, percussive ‘bleak twigs’ is in contrast to the rising ‘voice’ of the bird.
|
Thomas Hardy
|
The Darkling Thrush
|
Lord, to Thine own grant watchful hearts and eyes;
Hearts strung to prayer, awake while eyelids sleep;
Eyes patient till the end to watch and weep.
So will sleep nourish power to wake and rise
With Virgins who keep vigil and are wise,
To sow among all sowers who shall reap,
From out man's deep to call Thy vaster deep,
And tread the uphill track to Paradise.
Sweet souls! so patient that they make no moan,
So calm on journey that they seem at rest,
So rapt in prayer that half they dwell in heaven
|
Thankful for all withheld and all things given;
|
So lit by love that Christ shines manifest
Transfiguring their aspects to His own.
|
Another balanced line juxtaposes the opposites “withheld” and “given”. This leads up to the resolution in the last two lines.
|
Christina Rossetti
|
Vigil of St Bartholomew
|
Let's have it right
We all know the score
Been up for three nights
Stuck behind the door
|
Chewing off your jaw
|
The fame they stoned you with
You soldiered it
And made your fortune
|
Clenching or grinding your teeth is caused by anxiety, stress and sometimes the use of drugs
|
Pete Doherty
|
Flags Of the Old Regime
|
I, too, sing America.
I am the darker brother.
They send me to eat in the kitchen
When company comes,
But I laugh,
|
And eat well,
|
And grow strong.
Tomorrow,
I'll be at the table
|
The narrator is making the most of the current circumstance. Instead of expressing anguish or defeat, he is the taking the time to compose himself.
|
Langston Hughes
|
I Too
|
null |
Methought I saw my late espoused saint
|
Brought to me like Alcestis from the grave,
Whom Jove's great son to her glad husband gave,
Rescued from Death by force, though pale and faint.
|
John Milton went blind in 1652. The late espoused saint is one of two possibilities: either his first wife, Mary Powell, who died in childbirth the same year that he went blind, or his second wife Katherine Woodcock, who died in 1658, two years after they married. Since they met in 1656, John would have never seen his second wife’s face.
|
John Milton
|
On His Deceased Wife
|
After all, the sky flashes, the great sea yearns,
we ourselves flash and yearn,
and moreover my mother told me as a boy
(repeatingly) ‘Ever to confess you're bored
means you have no
Inner Resources.' I conclude now I have no
inner resources, because I am heavy bored.
Peoples bore me,
literature bores me, especially great literature,
Henry bores me, with his plights & gripes
as bad as achilles,
who loves people and valiant art, which bores me.
|
And the tranquil hills, & gin, look like a drag
|
and somehow a dog
has taken itself & its tail considerably away
into mountains or sea or sky, leaving
|
The “tranquil hills” and “gin” are artificial paradises that Henry finds boring as he tries to alienate himself.
“Dream Songs and Nightmare Songs: The Balance of Style in the Later Poems of John Berryman.”
|
John Berryman
|
Dream Song 14
|
But ther-of nedeth nat to speke as nowthe,—
And thries hadde she been at Jerusalem;
She hadde passed many a straunge strem;
At Rome she hadde been and at Boloigne,
In Galice at Seint Jame, and at Coloigne,
She koude muchel of wandrynge by the weye.
Gat-tothed was she, soothly for to seye.
Upon an amblere esily she sat,
Ywympled wel, and on hir heed an hat
As brood as is a bokeler or a targe;
A foot mantel aboute hir hipes large,
And on hir feet a paire of spores sharpe.
|
In felaweshipe wel koude she laughe and carpe;
|
Of remedies of love she knew per chaunce,
For she koude of that art the olde daunce.
|
In company she knew well how to laugh and chatter
She’s a sociable, friendly character.
|
Geoffrey Chaucer
|
The Wife of Baths Portrait
|
That one dark I owe my light,
Call for confessor and wiser mirror but there is none
To glow after the god stoning night
And I am struck as lonely as a holy marker by the sun
No
Praise that the spring time is all
Gabriel and radiant shrubbery as the morning grows joyful
Out of the woebegone pyre
And the multitude's sultry tear turns cool on the weeping wall,
My arising prodgidal
Sun the father his quiver full of the infants of pure fire,
But blessed be hail and upheaval
|
That uncalm still it is sure alone to stand and sing
|
Alone in the husk of man's home
And the mother and toppling house of the holy spring,
If only for a last time.
|
The “uncalm” could be loneliness. The loneliness the war creates because of the mass amounts of death it brings will stand and sing, or spread all over, creating a world of loneliness.
Also could mean that the loneliness, restlessness, anxiety the speaker feels because of his friends death will be prominent in his life.
|
Dylan Thomas
|
Holy Spring
|
A blue sky out of the Oresteia
Arches above us. O father, all by yourself
You are pithy and historical as the Roman Forum.
I open my lunch on a hill of black cypress.
Your fluted bones and acanthine hair are littered
In their old anarchy to the horizon-line.
It would take more than a lightning-stroke
To create such a ruin.
Nights, I squat in the cornucopia
Of your left ear, out of the wind,
Counting the red stars and those of plum-color.
The sun rises under the pillar of your tongue.
|
My hours are married to shadow.
|
No longer do I listen for the scrape of a keel
On the blank stones of the landing.
|
This gives us an image of time slowly, painfully, crawling in agony.
|
Sylvia Plath
|
The Colossus
|
And now deemed come,
Came not: within his hold
Love lingered numb.
Why cast he on our port
A bloom not ours?
Why shaped us for his sport
In after-hours?
As we seemed we were not
That day afar,
And now we seem not what
We aching are.
O severing sea and land,
|
O laws of men,
|
Ere death, once let us stand
As we stood then!
|
Hardy is angered by the restricting man-made laws that suppress human joy, the particularly restrictive conventions of late Victorian and Edwardian England.
Note the two lines begin with an exclamatory ‘O’, an emotional appeal to the elements and to man. The device of repeating a word or phrase at the beginning of lines of poetry is known as anaphora .
|
Thomas Hardy
|
At An Inn
|
Raging inside his 6-foot-two frame because he couldn't
Understand what was attacking him from within
My mother, poor fish
Wanting to be happy, beaten two or three times a
Week, telling me to be happy: "Henry, smile!
Why don't you ever smile?"
And then she would smile, to show me how, and it was the
Saddest smile I ever saw
One day the goldfish died, all five of them
They floated on the water, on their sides, their
Eyes still open
And when my father got home he threw them to the cat
|
There on the kitchen floor and we watched as my mother
Smiled
| null |
To escape their cycle, the fish had to die. At this point, she realizes that she has a way out. As morbid as it is, she still has to smile at the mere existence of a way out. Also, through her conditioning, she has little reaction to anything other than putting on her smile and facing the horrors of her days.
|
Charles Bukowski
|
A smile to remember
|
Why do you play such dreary music
on Saturday afternoon, when tired
mortally tired I long for a little
reminder of immortal energy?
All
week long while I trudge fatiguingly
from desk to desk in the museum
you spill your miracles of Grieg
and Honegger on shut-ins.
|
Am I not
shut in too, and after a week
of work don't I deserve Prokofieff?
|
Well, I have my beautiful de Kooning
to aspire to. I think it has an orange
bed in it, more than the ear can hold.
|
After a long hard working week, doesn’t Frankie O deserve some good old Peter and the Wolf?
|
Frank O'Hara
|
Radio
|
Past lake and rockery
Laughing when he shook his paper
Hunchbacked in mockery
Through the loud zoo of the willow groves
Dodging the park keeper
With his stick that picked up leaves.
And the old dog sleeper
Alone between nurses and swans
While the boys among willows
Made the tigers jump out of their eyes
To roar on the rockery stones
And the groves were blue with sailors
|
Made all day until bell time
|
A woman figure without fault
Straight as a young elm
Straight and tall from his crooked bones
|
The hunchback exists in his fantasy world ‘until bell time’. The bell is clearly the only reality he knows, the only meaningful time in his day.
|
Dylan Thomas
|
The Hunchback in the Park
|
I
He disappeared in the dead of winter:
The brooks were frozen, the airports almost deserted,
And snow disfigured the public statues;
The mercury sank in the mouth of the dying day.
What instruments we have agree
The day of his death was a dark cold day.
Far from his illness
The wolves ran on through the evergreen forests,
The peasant river was untempted by the fashionable quays;
|
By mourning tongues
|
The death of the poet was kept from his poems.
But for him it was his last afternoon as himself,
An afternoon of nurses and rumours;
|
This is an example of synecdoche ; the tongues represent the people who are speaking.
|
W. H. Auden
|
In Memory of W. B. Yeats
|
An entrance there, which they deny ;
Whereat she frowns, threat'ning to fly
Home to her stream, and 'gins to swim
Backward, but from the channel's brim
Smiling returns into the creek,
With thousand dimples on her cheek.
Be thou this eddy, and I'll make
My breast thy shore, where thou shalt take
Secure repose, and never dream
Of the quite forsaken stream:
Let him to the wide ocean haste,
There lose his colour, name, and taste;
|
Thou shalt save all, and, safe from him,
|
Within these arms forever swim.
|
The speaker claims to protect her from such a fate, where her pleasures will be obliterated.
|
Thomas Carew
|
To My Mistress Sitting by a Rivers Side: An Eddy
|
Pretty women wonder where my secret lies
I'm not cute or built to suit a fashion model's size
But when I start to tell them
They think I'm telling lies
|
I say
|
It's in the reach of my arms
The span of my hips
The stride of my step
|
This “I say” is repeated in every stanza of the poem, emphasizing the speaker’s voice and her outspoken attitude. She is confident and not afraid to share her opinion aloud, even when it goes against societal standards. She clearly does not follow to the misogynist expectation that women should be seen–and look a certain way–and not heard.
|
Maya Angelou
|
Phenomenal Woman
|
Aunt Jennifer's tigers prance across a screen,
Bright topaz denizens of a world of green.
They do not fear the men beneath the tree;
They pace in sleek chivalric certainty.
Aunt Jennifer's fingers fluttering through her wool
|
Find even the ivory needle hard to pull.
|
The massive weight of Uncle's wedding band
Sits heavily upon Aunt Jennifer's hand.
When Aunt is dead, her terrified hands will lie
|
Literally, Aunt Jennifer is having trouble with her work because of the heavy ring.
Figuratively, Aunt Jennifer is having a hard time pulling the ivory through because she is nervous.
Ivory is symbolic, because that material comes from animals who have been hunted by men.
|
Adrienne Rich
|
Aunt Jennifers Tigers
|
null |
About suffering they were never wrong,
|
The Old Masters; how well they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
|
The reader assumes from the title that the ‘they’ must be the paintings in the Museum. In the second line Auden confirms this. This device, of using a pronoun before the subject to which it refers is known as cataphora , and will be repeated throughout the poem.
Note also the unusual word order, with the object clause preceeding the main clause, a device known as anastrophe . This emphasises ‘suffering’ as the subject matter of the poem.
|
W. H. Auden
|
Musée des Beaux Arts
|
null |
One must have a mind of winter
|
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;
And have been cold a long time
|
“A mind of winter” may imply a mind that is numb, hardened, indifferent (as lines 7-8 go on to explain) to natural realities like wind and cold. Throughout this poem, Stevens endorses complete objectivity—as opposed to the sentimentality (see note on the “pathetic fallacy” below ) that people, and especially poems, so often exhibit.
However, a “mind of winter” doesn’t need to be numb, hardened, or indifferent, words with more negative than neutral connotations. The phrase may simply imply stillness or blankness.
|
Wallace Stevens
|
The Snow Man
|
In eastern skies.
Out of a grave I come to tell you this, —
Out of a grave I come to quench the kiss
That flames upon your forehead with a glow
That blinds you to the way that you must go.
Yes, there is yet one way to where she is, —
Bitter, but one that faith can never miss.
Out of a grave I come to tell you this —
To tell you this.
There is the western gate, Luke Havergal,
There are the crimson leaves upon the wall.
Go, — for the winds are tearing them away, —
|
Nor think to riddle the dead words they say,
|
Nor any more to feel them as they fall;
But go! and if you trust her she will call.
There is the western gate, Luke Havergal —
|
Compare P. B. Shelley, “Ode to the West Wind”:
Drive my dead thoughts over the universe Like withered leaves to quicken a new birth!
Shelley’s image is one of prophetic inspiration: he is asking the divine “wind” or breath to animate his ideas and carry them across the world.
Whatever the leaves are “saying” here (perhaps as reminders of past words between lovers?) will be unavailable to Luke Havergal’s understanding.
|
Edwin Arlington Robinson
|
Luke Havergal
|
I have been one acquainted with the night.
I have walked out in rain—and back in rain.
I have outwalked the furthest city light.
|
I have looked down the saddest city lane.
|
I have passed by the watchman on his beat
And dropped my eyes, unwilling to explain.
I have stood still and stopped the sound of feet
|
A city contains many people that usually fill the streets during the day and bring life to the city. However, when the narrator looks down the street he sees no one. This, to the narrator, is the “saddest city lane,” as he is alone and feeling isolated in a place that would not normally be devoid of life. It may be also incites feelings of sadness in the narrator as there is nobody in the city who is looking for him or wants to keep him company. However, since the narrator goes on walks at night there is less likelihood that he would socialize with someone, again indicating that the narrator chooses to put distance between himself and others.
|
Robert Frost
|
Acquainted with the Night
|
We've been a long time together now
Time together on the Snakey Road
There ain't no time together
Like time spent together on the Snakey Road
Winding on through the hills forever
Winding on at Snakey Road
Winding on forever
Winding on at Snakey Road
What's that they're telling you?
That's your future, I'm telling you
|
You gotta pick a pocket or two
|
We've been a long time together
Time together on the Snakey Road
There ain't no time together
|
Cf., the song You’ve Got to Pick a Pocket or Two from the Lionel Bart musical Oliver!
|
Pete Doherty
|
Palace of Bone
|
I am silver and exact. I have no preconceptions.
Whatever you see I swallow immediately
Just as it is, unmisted by love or dislike.
I am not cruel, only truthful---
|
The eye of a little god, four-cornered.
|
Most of the time I meditate on the opposite wall.
It is pink, with speckles. I have looked at it so long
I think it is a part of my heart. But it flickers.
|
A mirror is timeless, possessing an eternal gaze. Like a god, the mirror is omniscient, as it is able to see and reflect the truth.
The lack of a capitalization in “god” suggests that it could even be any god, not just God Himself.
Note that ‘little god’ is an oxymoron . It is powerful but with limitations and walls to contain its vision.
|
Sylvia Plath
|
Mirror
|
null |
Twas on a Holy Thursday, their innocent faces clean
|
The children walking two & two in red & blue & green
Grey headed beadles walked before with wands as white as snow
Till into the high dome of Pauls they like Thames waters flow
|
Blake begins in story-telling mode, setting the tone of spirituality and purity. Ascension Day , when Christ rose to heaven, is appropriate for this idealised event involving the children. There is irony in that they would have been far from ‘innocent’, having experienced parental abandonment and ill-treatment. Given the appalling conditions in which they lived, the children may not have been clean either.
|
William Blake
|
Holy Thursday Songs of Innocence
|
Not every man knows what he shall sing at the end,
Watching the pier as the ship sails away, or what it will seem like
When he's held by the sea's roar, motionless, there at the end,
|
Or what he shall hope for once it is clear that he'll never go back.
|
When the time has passed to prune the rose or caress the cat,
When the sunset torching the lawn and the full moon icing it down
No longer appear, not every man knows what he'll discover instead.
|
This is fairly self explanatory but if you’re having trouble comprehending, this refers to the question that Mark Strand believes all people wonder… What do we want when we know death is quickly approaching?
|
Mark Strand
|
The End
|
And I am dumb to tell the crooked rose
My youth is bent by the same wintry fever.
The force that drives the water through the rocks
Drives my red blood; that dries the mouthing streams
Turns mine to wax.
And I am dumb to mouth unto my veins
How at the mountain spring the same mouth sucks.
The hand that whirls the water in the pool
Stirs the quicksand; that ropes the blowing wind
Hauls my shroud sail.
And I am dumb to tell the hanging man
How of my clay is made the hangman's lime.
|
The lips of time leech to the fountain head;
|
Love drips and gathers, but the fallen blood
Shall calm her sores.
And I am dumb to tell a weather's wind
|
Finally “The force” is revealed: it is in fact Time. And not only does Time have hands , they also have lips.
This means they have a mouth, the same way the speaker and wildlife does , thus connecting all three elements together.
|
Dylan Thomas
|
The Force That through the Green Fuse Drives the Flower
|
Piteous my rhyme is
What while I muse of love and pain,
Of love misspent, of love in vain,
Of love that is not loved again:
|
And is this all then?
|
As long as time is,
Love loveth. Time is but a span,
The dalliance space of dying man:
|
A rhetorical question that implies that love doesn’t give much. The short line suggests its limitations, as if there is nothing more to say.
|
Christina Rossetti
|
Piteous my rhyme is
|
It is this deep blankness is the real thing strange.
The more things happen to you the more you can't
Tell or remember even what they were.
|
The contradictions cover such a range.
|
The talk would talk and go so far aslant.
You don't want madhouse and the whole thing there.
|
In a review of Cleanth Brooks’s Modern Poetry and Tradition from 1939, Empson expands on what he might mean by “contradictions”, challenging Brooks’s reading of what he called
the frozen agony of The Waste Land … He denies that there is any “despair” in the poem, and thinks critics who have said there was have misunderstood it. To be sure, it does not say that people can never be happy, but the poetry of flat contradiction is almost a clinical thing; it can only be done well as a way of treating yourself for a terrible state of mind. We had a lot of people trying to do that in England after Eliot… it seems to me that Mr Brooks’s approach tends to treat the concentration of horror as no more than the balanced tone of good sense
(emphasis added)
Put more simply in the context of this poem: Empson didn’t much fancy experiencing the same despair as T.S. Eliot .
|
William Empson
|
Let It Go
|
"hello," I say
Gathering up my Visa card bill, my Pennysaver coupons
A Dept. of Water and Power past-due notice
A letter from the mortgage people
Plus a demand from the Weed Abatement Department
Giving me 30 days to clean up my act
I mince back again over the small sharp rocks
Thinking, maybe I'd better write something tonight
They all seem
To be
Closing in
There's only one way to handle those motherfuckers.
|
The night harness races will have to wait
| null |
He is going to write instead of going to the tracks, he loved betting on horses.
|
Charles Bukowski
|
Back to the machine gun
|
Nentis Nan, he's my man,
I go do im each chanz I gan.
He sicks me down an creans my teed
Wid mabel syrub, tick an' sweed,
|
An ten he filks my cavakies
|
Wid choclut cangy-- I tink he's
The graygest nentis in the Ian.
Le's hear free jeers for Nentis Nan.
|
And then he fills my cavities
|
Shel Silverstein
|
Dentist Dan
|
Some Kind of love, Some Say
|
Is it true the ribs can tell
|
The kick of a beast from a
Lover's fist? The bruised
Bones recorded well
|
The women has been injured by her abusive man in the past. Maya uses a lot of imagery, in this part to show that she has bruised ribs, a common place for a man to hit a person in.
|
Maya Angelou
|
Some Kind of Love Some Say
|
Nature's first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
|
Her early leaf's a flower;
But only so an hour.
|
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
|
Flowers Blooming
In Spring, flowers, not just leaves, blossom on the branches of trees. Soon, though, these flowers disappear in the sweep of passing time.
|
Robert Frost
|
Nothing Gold Can Stay
|
A fool I was to sleep at noon,
And wake when night is chilly
|
Beneath the comfortless cold moon;
|
A fool to pluck my rose too soon,
A fool to snap my lily.
My garden-plot I have not kept;
|
The moon has multiple associations. Most commonly it is thought romantic and mysterious, but is also associated with madness and sinister forces. In Gothic terms the moon is associated with werewolves and magic.
Here Rossetti subverts our expectations. The moon is ‘comfortless’ and ‘cold’. The hard, percussive ‘c’s emphasise its hostility to humans.
|
Christina Rossetti
|
A Daughter of Eve
|
The shattered water made a misty din.
Great waves looked over others coming in,
And thought of doing something to the shore
That water never did to land before.
The clouds were low and hairy in the skies,
Like locks blown forward in the gleam of eyes.
|
You could not tell, and yet it looked as if
|
The shore was lucky in being backed by cliff,
The cliff in being backed by continent;
It looked as if a night of dark intent
|
Frost is reiterating that something is concealed; the observer cannot see how the event will end.
|
Robert Frost
|
Once by the Pacific
|
And they tell me you are brutal and my reply is: On the faces of women and children I have seen the marks of wanton hunger.
And having answered so I turn once more to those who sneer at this my city, and I give them back the sneer and say to them:
Come and show me another city with lifted head singing so proud to be alive and coarse and strong and cunning.
Flinging magnetic curses amid the toil of piling job on job, here is a tall bold slugger set vivid against the little soft cities;
Fierce as a dog with tongue lapping for action, cunning as a savage pitted against the wilderness,
Bareheaded,
Shoveling,
Wrecking,
Planning,
Building, breaking, rebuilding,
Under the smoke, dust all over his mouth, laughing with white teeth,
Under the terrible burden of destiny laughing as a young man laughs,
|
Laughing even as an ignorant fighter laughs who has never lost a battle,
|
Bragging and laughing that under his wrist is the pulse, and under his ribs the heart of the people,
Laughing!
Laughing the stormy, husky, brawling laughter of Youth, half-naked, sweating, proud to be Hog Butcher, Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat, Player with Railroads and Freight Handler to the Nation.
|
Sandburg’s use of simile here evokes Chicago’s supposed arrogance – like someone who has never lost a fight.
|
Carl Sandburg
|
Chicago
|
With labyrinths of wayward love,
Where roam the lion, wolf, and boar.
Till he becomes a wayward Babe,
And she a weeping Woman Old.
Then many a lover wanders here;
The sun and stars are nearer roll'd;
The trees bring forth sweet ecstasy
To all who in the desert roam;
Till many a city there is built,
And many a pleasant shepherd's home.
But when they find the Frowning Babe,
Terror strikes thro' the region wide:
|
They cry ‘The Babe! the Babe is born!'
|
And flee away on every side.
For who dare touch the Frowning Form,
His arm is wither'd to its root;
|
A grotesque version of the Nativity. The Christlike child is born again, not as a savior but as a monster. Compare W. B. Yeats' “The Second Coming” (1919):
The darkness drops again; but now I know That twenty centuries of stony sleep Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle, And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
|
William Blake
|
The Mental Traveller
|
null |
If I should die, think only this of me:
|
That there's some corner of a foreign field
That is for ever England. There shall be
In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;
|
Brooke opens his poem with the conditional command ‘If I should die … ‘ He clearly accepts the possibility of his own death. It establishes immediately a tone of bravery and assertiveness yet resignation that continues throughout the poem.
This line seems particularly poignant because Brooke did indeed die, not far into the war; although, it was of an infected mosquito bite , and occurred before he’d actually entered combat.
The qualification ‘only’ establishes the patriotism that motivated Brooke, as well as other young soldiers at the early, idealistic stage of the war. He wants to be seen as devoted to his country and not mourned. As the poem will go on to explain, he values his country’s blessings.
|
Rupert Brooke
|
The Soldier
|
Does the road wind up-hill all the way?
Yes, to the very end.
Will the day's journey take the whole long day?
From morn to night, my friend.
But is there for the night a resting-place?
A roof for when the slow dark hours begin.
|
May not the darkness hide it from my face?
|
You cannot miss that inn.
Shall I meet other wayfarers at night?
Those who have gone before.
|
The ‘darkness’ might represent the problems encountered on this journey which generate despair, and therefore exclusion from salvation. In this case the questioner fears losing their way, maybe being tempted by sin, and missing the opportunity of heaven.
|
Christina Rossetti
|
Up-hill
|
Sweat, and a clinging sheet.
My flesh was its own shield:
Where it was gashed, it healed.
I grew as I explored
The body I could trust
Even while I adored
The risk that made robust,
A world of wonders in
Each challenge to the skin.
I cannot but be sorry
The given shield was cracked,
My mind reduced to hurry,
|
My flesh reduced and wrecked.
|
I have to change the bed,
But catch myself instead
Stopped upright where I am
|
All that he was, is gone. His formal self is lost, gone with tides and everything from past taken away.
|
Thom Gunn
|
The Man with Night Sweats
|
He said, I'm gonna put it
KÐAÐY.
I said, If you do,
You lie.
My mother christened me
Alberta K.
You leave my name
Just that way!
He said, Mrs.,
(With a snort)
Just a K
Makes your name too short.
|
I said, I don't
Give a damn!
Leave me and my name
Just like I am!
|
Furthermore, rub out
That MRS., too--
I'll have you know
|
She is fine with her naming being what it is, she didn’t ask for any change.
|
Langston Hughes
|
Madam and the Census Man
|
Though for years I have eaten dust
And dried plates with my dense hair.
And seen my strangeness evaporate,
Blue dew from dangerous skin.
Will they hate me,
These women who only scurry,
Whose news is the open cherry, the open clover?
It is almost over.
I am in control.
Here is my honey-machine,
It will work without thinking,
Opening, in spring, like an industrious virgin
|
To scour the creaming crests
|
As the moon, for its ivory powders, scours the sea.
A third person is watching.
He has nothing to do with the bee-seller or with me.
|
Plath enjambs the two stanzas to convey the smoothness of the operation she is in command of.
The ‘creaming crests’ is obscure, but could refer to the bees hovering above the flowers to ‘cream’ off the nectar. Note the construction of the line. The vowels are long to suggest the slow hovering movement of the bees. There are alliterative ‘cr’ sounds in ‘scour’, ‘creaming’ and ‘crests’ to give the line unity. The sibilant ’s’s may suggest the buzzing sound of the bees.
|
Sylvia Plath
|
Stings
|
It sifts from Leaden Sieves -
It powders all the Wood
It fills with Alabaster Wool
The Wrinkles of the Road -
It makes an Even Face
Of Mountain, and of Plain -
Unbroken Forehead from the East
Unto the East again -
It reaches to the Fence -
It wraps it Rail by Rail
|
Till it is lost in Fleeces -
|
It deals Celestial Veil
To Stump, and Stack - and Stem -
A Summer's empty Room -
|
“Fleeces” is another trope for snow, which, as you may have noticed, is fleecy white .
|
Emily Dickinson
|
It sifts from Leaden Sieves - 311
|
Start not -- nor deem my spirit fled;
|
In me behold the only skull
|
From which, unlike a living head,
Whatever flows is never dull.
I lived, I loved, I quaffed, like thee:
|
The reader grasps that it is the skull, anthropomorphised to imitate a human, that is speaking. It is astonishing, so the ‘Start not’ that begins the poem is understandable.
|
Lord Byron
|
Lines Inscribed Upon a Cup Formed from a Skull
|
null |
For three days we waited,
|
a bowl of dull quartz for sky.
At night the valley dreamed of snow,
lost Christmas angels with dark-white wings
|
This poem is quite quiet, and very deliberate. Some of the lines are enjambed , but they all end at least on the end of a phrase, if not with punctuation. We feel like the speaker is using the poetic line to carefully unroll their thoughts.
|
Frances Horovitz
|
New Year Snow
|
I remember rooms that have had their part
In the steady slowing down of the heart.
|
The room in Paris, the room at Geneva,
|
The little damp room with the seaweed smell,
And that ceaseless maddening sound of the tide—
Rooms where for good or for ill—things died.
|
These are exotic locations that may represent love affairs, travel or perhaps emotional experiences. It was unusual for unmarried women to travel in late Victorian and early twentieth century, and the speaker may be indulging her imagination or remembering real events. Paris, particularly, is a city of romance and perhaps clandestine love affairs.
|
Charlotte Mew
|
Rooms
|
Do not go gentle into that good night.
|
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
|
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
|
“The close of day” furthers the conceit of “night” as death and, like the first line, we get an imperative, urging the speaker’s father to not resign himself to death and instead to go out in a blaze of glory.
This line is the first of the ironic contrasts and juxtapositions throughout the poem. ‘Old age’ is associated with passivity and frailty, but the poet is urging his father to ‘burn’ and ‘rave’. In short, he is denying his father’s impending death. ‘Old age’ is personified as a character, suggesting that it is not physically part of his father, but has come upon him. In the mind of the speaker, he can overcome it.
Note the assonant vowels in ‘age’, ‘rave’, ‘day’ and ‘against’ and ‘rage’ in the next line. These give the poem cohesion.
Unlike the first line though, the metre conforms to the more traditional iambic pentameter , which is works well with the villanelle form . This may be ironic, as, while the speaker demands his father to “burn and rave,” the speaker himself reverts to a more measured style, suggesting a latent insecurity within his demands. Furthermore, the short vowel sounds and stresses of the first line is replaced with longer, more sonorous sounds, compounded with the assonance of “age,” “rave,” and “day,” creating phonetic counterpoint and ‘opening’ the poem out. Indeed, the pattern of long and short vowels throughout the poem is reminiscent of breathing, a breathing which is symbolically snuffed out in the final line.
|
Dylan Thomas
|
Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night
|
Maybe I weighed you up, feeling unlikely.
Noted your long hair, loose waves -
Your Veronica Lake bang. Not what it hid.
It would appear blond. And your grin.
Your exaggerated American
Grin for the cameras, the judges, the strangers, the frighteners.
Then I forgot. Yet I remember
The picture: the Fulbright Scholars.
With their luggage? It seems unlikely.
Could they have come as a team? I was walking
Sore-footed, under hot sun, hot pavements.
Was it then I bought a peach? That's as I remember.
|
From a stall near Charing Cross Station.
|
It was the first fresh peach I had ever tasted.
I could hardly believe how delicious.
At twenty-five I was dumbfounded afresh
|
The poet returns the reader to the specific location, Charing Cross Station in the Strand, before developing his lyrical metaphor. Depending on how one reads and interprets this, there could be a ceasura after Station, representing this change of mood.
|
Ted Hughes
|
Fulbright Scholars
|
There are just not enough
straight lines. That
is the problem.
Nothing is flat
or parallel. Beams
balance crookedly on supports
thrust off the vertical.
|
Nails clutch at open seams.
|
The whole structure leans dangerously
towards the miraculous.
Into this rough frame,
|
The personification of ‘Nails clutch’ give the reader a sense of the desperation of the community. These shacks could give way any time.
The fact that the seams are ‘open’ suggests lack of protection, bareness and vulnerability, like their lives.
|
Imtiaz Dharker
|
Living Space
|
This is my letter to the World
That never wrote to Me
The simple News that Nature told,
|
With tender Majesty
|
Her Message is committed
To Hands I cannot see
For love of Her — Sweet — countrymen
|
This line is an instance of Dickinson characteristically rhyming in a hurry–the previous lines in the stanza all seem to have four stresses, whereas “With tender majesty” only has three. Moreover, it rhymes the masculine ending of “Me” with the feminine one of “-ty”, throwing the reader slightly off balance.
In demanding such speed and adjustment from the reader, Dickinson ensures her verse has a special kind of human vitality— it’s a hard technique to pull off without going overboard, but it seems to come naturally to Dickinson.
|
Emily Dickinson
|
This is My Letter to the World
|
All simply in the springing of the year.
Oh, give us pleasure in the orchard white,
Like nothing else by day, like ghosts by night;
And make us happy in the happy bees,
The swarm dilating round the perfect trees.
And make us happy in the darting bird
That suddenly above the bees is heard,
The meteor that thrusts in with needle bill,
And off a blossom in mid air stands still.
For this is love and nothing else is love,
The which it is reserved for God above
To sanctify to what far ends He will,
|
But which it only needs that we fulfill.
| null |
This poem written by Frost is both a love poem to his wife and prayer. He writes about his wife and how he compares her the beautiful ecosystem of the orchard he describes.He believes that in order to have a good future you must not try to shape it for yourself but rather leave the future up to god.
|
Robert Frost
|
A Prayer in Spring
|
We wear the mask that grins and lies,
It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes,—
This debt we pay to human guile;
With torn and bleeding hearts we smile,
And mouth with myriad subtleties.
Why should the world be over-wise
|
In counting all our tears and sighs?
|
Nay, let them only see us, while
We wear the mask.
We smile, but, O great Christ, our cries
|
Exposing your own suffering puts you in a vulnerable position. Why, the poem asks, should anyone be allowed to have that much power over you?
The world is simultaneously “over-wise” and “under-wise” because of the insistence on counting and tallying pain. What do we miss when we count “tears and sighs?” Do we not miss the humanity in these tears and sighs?
Wearing the mask gives power to the powerless. It means denying those whose intentions are to witness “torn and bleeding hearts” the satisfaction of seeing the suffering they mete out.
|
Paul Laurence Dunbar
|
We Wear the Mask
|
She is as in a field a silken tent
At midday when the sunny summer breeze
Has dried the dew and all its ropes relent,
So that in guys it gently sways at ease,
And its supporting central cedar pole,
That is its pinnacle to heavenward
And signifies the sureness of the soul,
Seems to owe naught to any single cord,
But strictly held by none, is loosely bound
By countless silken ties of love and thought
To every thing on earth the compass round,
|
And only by one's going slightly taut
|
In the capriciousness of summer air
Is of the slightest bondage made aware.
|
There is a tension here. The freedom within constraint is a repeated theme; a foundation of Frost’s poetry. In his poem Tree at my Window the tree strains to come in and the speaker wants to go out. This idea appears again in Mending Wall , the idea of coming together in order to stay apart.
This tension is beautifully expressed in the concise form of the sonnet.
|
Robert Frost
|
The Silken Tent
|
He told me how, after soft afternoons
teaching logarithms and waving away
the blackboard's hieroglyphics with a damp cloth
he'd return home to the sweet methane of the chicken sheds.
|
How he'd change from his suit into overalls
|
and how he dug his hand deep into the bucket
to draw out a leaking fist, which he opened,
a sail of grain unfurling to the birds beneath.
|
The change of clothes signifies a change of mood. This is a job that he has been looking foward to.
|
Owen Sheers
|
Equation
|
That lets the trees and water enter
Until the Sunday sombre bell at dark
Eating bread from a newspaper
Drinking water from the chained cup
That the children filled with gravel
In the fountain basin where I sailed my ship
Slept at night in a dog kennel
But nobody chained him up.
Like the park birds he came early
Like the water he sat down
And Mister they called Hey Mister
The truant boys from the town
|
Running when he had heard them clearly
|
On out of sound
Past lake and rockery
Laughing when he shook his paper
|
The truants are cowardly, taunting him but running away when the hunchback hears and responds to them.
Alternatively, it is the hunchback who runs when he hears them, running till he can no longer hear them.
The syntax doesn’t make it clear whether the subject is the singular hunchback or the plural boys.
|
Dylan Thomas
|
The Hunchback in the Park
|
Cradled through England between flooded fields
Rocking, rocking the rails, my head-phones on
The black box of my Walkman on the table
Hot tea trembles in its plastic cup
|
I'm thinking of you waking in our bed
|
Thinking of me on the train. Too soon to phone
The radio speaks in the suburbs, in commuter towns
In cars unloading children at school gates
|
The bed and the train are both comforting, safe environments. Clarke’s mind draws parallels between them.
|
Gillian Clarke
|
On The Train
|
In a lonely field the rain
Lashes an abandoned train;
Outlaws fill the mountain caves.
Fantastic grow the evening gowns;
Agents of the Fisc pursue
Absconding tax-defaulters through
The sewers of provincial towns.
Private rites of magic send
The temple prostitutes to sleep;
All the literati keep
An imaginary friend.
Cerebrotonic Cato may
|
Extol the Ancient Disciplines,
But the muscle-bound Marines
Mutiny for food and pay.
|
Caesar's double-bed is warm
As an unimportant clerk
Writes I DO NOT LIKE MY WORK
|
There’s no point getting hung up on Ancient Disciplines – the nobility of warriors – when the state hasn’t even got the money to pay its real-life soldiers, who are pissed off.
We assume that nobody listens to Cato as he drones on about the “Ancient Disciplines” (capitalized ironically) which have ceased to have any bearing on people’s lives.
That’s another feature of the poem: all of the lives Auden describes are isolated and disconnected, unbound by any sense of community. Nobody is paying any attention to Cato; the literati are content to talk to themselves; nobody will read the note the clerk writes; the religion the prostitutes practice is private and insular, not shared. Caesar doesn’t even seem to have somebody to sleep with. The only common purpose in the poem is the purpose of bringing down civilization, which is held by both the mutinous soldiers and the stupid chickens. Otherwise, everybody takes what satisfaction they can from their private distractions.
it could well refer to the devotion of both Cato and the Marines, and therein the ambiguity this poem develops. Each stanza except the the third and the last two contain some specifically modern element: “train,” “evening gowns,” “Marines,” “pink official form.” There is also a movement from “piers” to “provincial towns” to what we suspect is the heart of the city atop Palatine Hill. Then suddenly there are birds well outside the city, and hordes not stopping to stare at a golden ground.
|
W. H. Auden
|
The Fall of Rome
|
null |
As imperceptibly as Grief
|
The Summer lapsed away —
Too imperceptible, at last
To seem like Perfidy —
|
The poet compares the passing of Summer to Autumn to the gradual, subtle way in which grief transitions from the initial sharp pain of loss towards acceptance and resignation. The seasonal change from Summer to Autumn is also symbolic of inner change for the poet.
The interest of the reader is stimulated by the opening sentence beginning with the subordinate clause, with the main clause coming in line two. This creates tension. The five syllable word, ‘imperceptably’ immediately establishes an uneasy rhythm.
The capitalised abstract noun ‘Grief’ is the first of many that appear in the poem. These lift the meaning from the particular to the universal. Grief represents the personal feelings of the poet, and also the universality of loss.
|
Emily Dickinson
|
As Imperceptibly as Grief
|
Well, so that is that. Now we must dismantle the tree,
Putting the decorations back into their cardboard boxes -
Some have got broken - and carrying them up to the attic.
|
The holly and the mistletoe must be taken down and burnt,
|
And the children got ready for school. There are enough
Leftovers to do, warmed up, for the rest of the week -
Not that we have much appetite, having drunk such a lot,
|
‘Burnt’ adds a small frisson of energy to an otherwise mundane sentence. It’s slightly odd that Auden gives us the means of disposal of these festive plants. Of course, new holly and mistletoe will be used next year, but for now, this year’s are destroyed in a permanent chemical reaction.
Ultimately, we’re led to question just how cyclical and unchanging the Christmas tradition is.
|
W. H. Auden
|
Well So That Is That
|
Oh Crown of Light, oh Darkened One
I never thought we'd meet
You kiss my lips, and then it's done:
I'm back on Boogie Street
A sip of wine, a cigarette
And then it's time to go
I tidied up the kitchenette;
I tuned the old banjo
I'm wanted at the traffic-jam
They're saving me a seat
|
I'm what I am, and what I am
|
Is back on Boogie Street
And oh my love, I still recall
The pleasures that we knew;
|
A biblical invocation: When God revealed himself to Moses at the site of the Burning Bush , in a reply to Moses’s inquiry (Exodus 3:14) –
Then Moses said to God, “Behold, I am going to the sons of Israel, and I will say to them, ‘The God of your fathers has sent me to you.’ Now they may say to me, ‘What is His name?’ What shall I say to them?” God said to Moses, “I AM WHO I AM” ; and He said, “Thus you shall say to the sons of Israel, ‘I AM has sent me to you.’
Other versions prefer – “I am that I am”
|
Leonard Cohen
|
Boogie Street
|
toward the sun
the evidence of damage
worn by salt and sway into this threadbare beauty
the ribs of the disaster
curving their assertion
among the tentative haunters.
This is the place.
And I am here, the mermaid whose dark hair
streams black, the merman in his armored body.
We circle silently
about the wreck
we dive into the hold.
|
I am she: I am he
|
whose drowned face sleeps with open eyes
whose breasts still bear the stress
whose silver, copper, vermeil cargo lies
|
Rich seems to be proposing androgyny as a solution to the prejudices women encounter in everyday life, and this is not the only place where she has spoken about a unification of the sexes. The image of an androgynous narrator is also present in her poem “The Stranger” from the same collection as “Diving into the Wreck”.
This sentiment is rejected in her later work “Natural Resources” where one line reads: “There are words I cannot choose again: / humanism androgyny”
|
Adrienne Rich
|
Diving into the Wreck
|
Out walking in the frozen swamp one gray day,
I paused and said, 'I will turn back from here.
No, I will go on farther—and we shall see.'
The hard snow held me, save where now and then
One foot went through. The view was all in lines
Straight up and down of tall slim trees
Too much alike to mark or name a place by
So as to say for certain I was here
Or somewhere else: I was just far from home.
A small bird flew before me. He was careful
To put a tree between us when he lighted,
And say no word to tell me who he was
|
Who was so foolish as to think what he thought.
He thought that I was after him for a feather—
The white one in his tail; like one who takes
Everything said as personal to himself.
|
One flight out sideways would have undeceived him.
And then there was a pile of wood for which
I forgot him and let his little fear
|
The bird is clearly what the speaker has come so far to know best, and he comes to know it by way of what he has previously come to know about himself. As Frost’s deliberately confusing pronoun references in lines 12 and 13 imply, the speaker intimately identifies with the bird at the same time he tries to assert his superiority to it. The condition that allows him this intimacy, however, is his physical separation from the bird, marked by the one tree standing between subject and object. The tree, like the mending wall , signifies one of those barriers without which the world would, for Frost, not make sense. The speaker’s teasing identification with the bird leads to his awareness of himself as the source of the bird’s fearfulness; and this, in turn, clarifies his own relationship with the larger, unredeemed scene, the source of his own fear, which is thus brought further under the control of consciousness. The speaker’s awareness is now many- layered, and he now has words for what is at stake. The bird’s white tail feather is, of course, that by which he is what he is: it is the unmistakable mark of his irreducible identity and, paradoxically, the sign of his surrender. His fear of its loss turns back on and elucidates the speaker’s recognition of his homelessness. “Home” is now understood to mean that point in space where one is at ease, where the self “belongs,” where identity is safe.
|
Robert Frost
|
The Wood-pile
|
Though it still could sing.
The last of the light of the sun
That had died in the west
Still lived for one song more
In a thrush's breast.
Far in the pillared dark
Thrush music went --
Almost like a call to come in
To the dark and lament.
But no, I was out for stars;
I would not come in.
I meant not even if asked;
|
And I hadn't been.
| null |
In the last line, the speaker repudiates the idea that the world is just a shadow of some perfect world that we’ve lost. This idea has a long tradition in the West, at least going back to Plato. See: The Allegory of the Cave .
The birdsong was just birdsong. It wasn’t trying to beckon the speaker to a deeper meaning.
Instead of lamenting the beauty that we’ve lost (the sun), we should appreciate the beauty we have, no matter how fragmented and dispersed it happens to be (the stars).
See Mediations at Lagunitas , a poem in which Robert Hass explores the same theme.
|
Robert Frost
|
Come In
|
flailing the hills.
I dreamed a poem, perfect
as the first five-pointed flake,
that melted at dawn:
a Janus-time
to peer back at guttering dark days,
trajectories of the spent year.
And then snow fell.
Within an hour, a world immaculate
as January's new-hung page.
We breathe the radiant air like men new-born.
The children rush before us.
|
As in a dream of snow
we track through crystal fields
to the green horizon
and the sun's reflected rose.
| null |
An intense final sentence, in which the power of the dream is reintroduced, and we are given an extremely bright series of images– the horizon is green, indicating fertility, and sun the sun is fused with the roses it allow to grow.
Essentially, Horovitz throws as many fertility symbols as she can at the reader, and it pretty much works.
|
Frances Horovitz
|
New Year Snow
|
Little Lamb, who made thee?
|
Dost thou know who made thee?
|
Gave thee life, and bid thee feed
By the stream and o'er the mead;
Gave thee clothing of delight
|
Innocence and naïveté are traits often attributed to lambs, and this is why the speaker must ask if the lamb is cognisant of its origin.
|
William Blake
|
The Lamb
|
What is it, in the grape turning raisin,
In the medlar, in the sorb-apple,
Wineskins of brown morbidity,
Autumnal excrementa;
What is it that reminds us of white gods?
Gods nude as blanched nut-kernels,
Strangely, half-sinisterly flesh-fragrant
As if with sweat,
And drenched with mystery.
Sorb-apples, medlars with dead crowns.
I say, wonderful are the hellish experiences,
Orphic, delicate
|
Dionysos of the Underworld.
|
A kiss, and a vivid spasm of farewell, a moment's orgasm of rupture,
Then along the damp road alone, till the next turning.
And there, a new partner, a new parting, a new unfusing into twain,
|
Although usually thought of as simply the God of wine, Dionysus had some darker aspects to him as well. He was also the God of animalistic passion, the incarnate life force in tree sap or blood, a sort of pulsing, God of the id, if you will. As Euripides shows he’s not a one to be messed with. As the god of the vine/plant liquid life force, he is also somewhat Chthonic, hence the underworld associations here. He also, by some accounts went down to Hades to rescue his mother, Semele and his bride, Ariadne, making him a more successful Orpheus.
(Chthonic altar at Agrigento, Sicily)
|
D. H. Lawrence
|
Medlars and Sorb-Apples
|
In secret place where once I stood
Close by the Banks of Lacrim flood,
I heard two sisters reason on
Things that are past and things to come.
|
One Flesh was call'd, who had her eye
On worldly wealth and vanity;
The other Spirit, who did rear
Her thoughts unto a higher sphere.
|
"Sister," quoth Flesh, "what liv'st thou on
Nothing but Meditation?
Doth Contemplation feed thee so
|
It is interesting that Bradstreet would be considered one of America’s first celebrated poets, because it seems that her conflicting viewpoints (particularly here in “The Flesh and The Spirit”),with the didactic relationship between material gain and spiritual enlightenment fit quite seamlessly into the dichotomy of contemporary American ideals. Contemporary America, one might argue, has a vast divide between the “über-religious,” and the “pop culture-consumer.” It remains a country of “extremes,” and it appears that Bradstreet’s proposed conflict is still raging, though I am unaware of any current poet, as celebrated, addressing the topic.
Vs.
|
Anne Bradstreet
|
Flesh and the Spirit The
|
Little Lamb, who made thee?
Dost thou know who made thee?
Gave thee life, and bid thee feed
By the stream and o'er the mead;
Gave thee clothing of delight
Softest clothing, woolly, bright;
|
Gave thee such a tender voice
Making all the vales rejoice?
|
Little Lamb, who made thee?
Dost thou know who made thee?
Little Lamb, I'll tell thee
|
Blake is simply stating that the lamb’s bleating voice is so beautiful that the personified valleys themselves are happy to be in the lamb’s presence.
|
William Blake
|
The Lamb
|
null |
I empty myself of the names of others. I empty my pockets.
|
I empty my shoes and leave them beside the road.
At night I turn back the clocks;
I open the family album and look at myself as a boy.
|
This idea of “emptying the names of others” along with “emptying my pockets” relates to death.
A pocket is something that is used for carrying small personal objects, and in this context Mark uses the emptying of pockets as a metaphor for emptying his life’s work and experiences (he is emptying his remains). Along with emptying his life’s work and experiences through his pockets he is also emptying all of the names of people that he came to know throughout all his life’s work and experiences.
|
Mark Strand
|
The Remains
|
He'd an axe in his hand, not a word he spoke,
But with many a hem! and a sturdy stroke,
At length he brought down the poor Raven's own oak.
His young ones were killed; for they could not depart,
And their mother did die of a broken heart.
The boughs from the trunk the Woodman did sever;
And they floated it down on the course of the river.
They sawed it in planks, and its bark they did strip,
And with this tree and others they made a good ship.
The ship, it was launched; but in sight of the land
Such a storm there did rise as no ship could withstand.
It bulged on a rock, and the waves rush'd in fast:
|
Round and round flew the raven, and cawed to the blast.
|
He heard the last shriek of the perishing souls—
See! see! o'er the topmast the mad water rolls!
Right glad was the Raven, and off he went fleet,
|
The raven witnesses the action of the ship being destroyed and he is happy because the woodman is getting what he deserves for ruining something that did not belong to him, but rather belonged to the raven himself.
|
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
|
The Raven or A Christmas Tale Told by a School-boy to His Little Brothers and Sisters. 1798
|
Twas on a Holy Thursday, their innocent faces clean
The children walking two & two in red & blue & green
Grey headed beadles walked before with wands as white as snow
Till into the high dome of Pauls they like Thames waters flow
O what a multitude they seemed these flowers of London town
Seated in companies they sit with radiance all their own
The hum of multitudes was there but multitudes of lambs
Thousands of little boys & girls raising their innocent hands
Now like a mighty wind they raise to heaven the voice of song
Or like harmonious thunderings the seats of heaven among
Beneath them sit the aged men wise guardians of the poor
|
Then cherish pity, lest you drive an angel from your door
| null |
An interesting line that clinches the veiled irony of the preceding lines. The ‘pity’ is what is needed to rescue these children. Their potential to be ‘angels’ — typical of William Blake’s belief in the spirituality and nobility of humans — can only be realised with compassionate care. The ‘angels’, the good adults, can only develop if properly nurtured as children.
|
William Blake
|
Holy Thursday Songs of Innocence
|
Instead: migration into force and power--
Tuskegee with a new flag on the tower!
on every lynching tree, a poster crying FREE
Because, O poor white workers,
You have linked your hands with me.
We did not know that we were brothers.
Now we know!
out of that brotherhood
Let power grow!
We did not know
That we were strong.
Now we see
|
In union lies our strength.
|
Let unions be
The force that breaks the time-clock,
Smashes misery,
|
Refers to Washington’s concept of prosperity through unity, but with social separation (“separate as the five fingers”). The poem’s speaker takes it further by suggesting that social unity will bring about the ultimate strength and success.
|
Langston Hughes
|
Open Letter to the South
|
Now, ere the twilight tints are flown,
Purpling the landscape, far and wide,
On the dark promontory's side
I'll gather wild flow'rs, dew besprent,
And weave a crown for THEE,
GENIUS OF HEAV'N-TAUGHT POESY!
While, op'ning to my wond'ring eyes,
Thou bidst a new creation rise,
I'll raptur'd trace the circling bounds,
Of thy RICH PARADISE extended,
And listen to the varying sounds
Of winds, and foaming torrents blended.
|
And now, with lofty tones inviting,
|
Thy NYMPH, her dulcimer swift smiting,
Shall wake me in ecstatic measures!
Far, far remov'd from mortal pleasures!
|
The “Nymph” is the same person that Coleridge describes in his poem. She is the damsel that plays the dulcimer. She is described as an “Abyssinian maid, And on her dulcimer she played, Singing of Mount Abora.”
|
Mary Robinson
|
To the Poet Coleridge
|
Law 31. Control The Options: Get Others To Play With The Cards You Deal
Law 32. Play To People's Fantasies
Law 33. Discover Each Man's Thumbscrew
Law 34. Be Royal In Your Own Fashion: Act Like A King To Be Treated like One
Law 35. Master The Art Of Timing
Law 36. Disdain Things You Cannot Have: Ignoring Them Is The Best Revenge
Law 37. Create Compelling Spectacles
Law 38. Disdain Things You Cannot Have: Ignoring Them Is The Best Revenge
Law 39. Stir Up Waters To Catch Fish
Law 40. Despise The Free Lunch
Law 41. Avoid Stepping Into A Great Man's Shoes
Law 42. Strike The Shepherd And The Sheep Will Scatter
|
Law 43. Work On The Hearts And Minds Of Others
|
Law 44. Disarm And Infuriate With The Mirror Effect
Law 45. Preach The Need For Change, But Never Reform Too Much At Once
Law 46. Never Appear Too Perfect
|
“Coercion creates a reaction that will eventually work against you. You must seduce others into wanting to move in your direction. A person you have seduced becomes your loyal pawn. And the way to seduce others is to operate on their individual psychologies and weaknesses. Soften up the resistant by working on their emotions, playing on what they hold dear and what they fear. Ignore the hearts and minds of others and they will grow to hate you.” – Robert Greene
|
Robert Greene
|
48 Laws of Power
|
The modest Rose puts forth a thorn
|
The humble sheep a threat'ning horn
|
While the Lilly white shall in Love delight
Nor a thorn nor a threat stain her beauty bright
|
Sheep have connotations of simpleness, needing direction and herding. However, its horn gives it status to defend itself.
|
William Blake
|
The Lilly
|
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