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He kindly stopped for me –
The Carriage held but just Ourselves –
And Immortality
We slowly drove – He knew no haste
And I had put away
My labor and my leisure too
For His Civility –
We passed the School, where Children strove
At Recess – in the Ring –
We passed the Fields of Gazing Grain –
We passed the Setting Sun –
Or rather – He passed us – | The Dews drew quivering and chill –
For only Gossamer, my Gown –
My Tippet – only Tulle – | We paused before a House that seemed
A Swelling of the Ground –
The Roof was scarcely visible – | The speaker here really shows how unprepared she was for this ride with death. She was not properly dressed for a funeral but more of a wedding. The fact that she is dressed for a wedding can maybe suggest that the speaker was to be married, but death stepped in and chose a different path for her. | Emily Dickinson | Because I Could Not Stop for Death |
I ordered this, this clean wood box
Square as a chair and almost too heavy to lift.
I would say it was the coffin of a midget
Or a square baby | Were there not such a din in it. | The box is locked, it is dangerous.
I have to live with it overnight
And I can't keep away from it. | Plath’s humour emerges with the phrase ‘din in it’. The assonant letter ‘i’ throughout the stanza — in ‘I’, ‘lift’, ‘midget’ — appears again in the last line. The effect of the assonance at the end of the stanza, in particular, forces you to slow down and enunciate each word carefully. | Sylvia Plath | The Arrival of the Bee Box |
and hanging, a record spinning
on the console, the whole house
dancing. She raises the shades,
washes the rooms in light,
buckets of water, Octagon soap.
Cleanliness is next to godliness...
Windows and doors flung wide,
curtains two-stepping
forward and back, neck bones
bumping in the pot, a choir
of clothes clapping on the line.
Nearer my God to Thee... | She beats time on the rugs, | blows dust from the broom
like dandelion spores, each one
a wish for something better. | She beats out the dust from the rugs rhythmically, like a metronome.
And, as with a metronome, or a heart, there’s a finite number of beats per minute –only so many beats in a song, only so many beats in a life before the “dust” settles and we return to silence, to the earth (i.e., death). | Natasha Trethewey | Domestic Work 1937 |
One face looks out from all his canvasses,
One selfsame figure sits or walks or leans;
We found her hidden just behind those screens,
That mirror gave back all her loveliness.
A queen in opal or in ruby dress, | A nameless girl in freshest summer greens, | A saint, an angel;— every canvass means
The same one meaning, neither more nor less.
He feeds upon her face by day and night, | The girl in all of the artist canvass is nameless. Saying that these camasses are not of someone that the artist knows or sees but it is how he hopes to see a girl or as in imagines to see her. | Christina Rossetti | In An Artists Studio |
null | I play it cool | I dig all jive
That's the reason
I stay alive | L. Clifton? Anyone? We real cool/We skip school | Langston Hughes | Motto |
Where can I go
without my mount
all eager and quick
How will I know
in thicket ahead
is danger or treasure
when Body my good
bright dog is dead
How will it be
to lie in the sky
without roof or door
and wind for an eye | With cloud for shift
how will I hide? | null | The concluding lines suggest that utter nakedness, total exposure, is an integral part of our fear of death. Even a naked physical body helps to “hide” us: our guts, our thoughts, our feelings. When we’re dead and part of the air around us, nothing but the “shift” (thin underdress) of cloud will stand between us and the world–which is to say, nothing at all.
| May Swenson | Question |
Even sunlight dares
and trembles through
my bars
to shimmer
dances on
the floor.
A clang og
lock and
keys and heels
and blood-dried
guns. | Even sunshine dares | It's jail
and bail
then rails to run. | In the closed room of a jail cell, you see little from the outside world. In rare occasions, sunlight sometimes shimmers it’s glow through the cell bars over the window, almost dancing on the floor as the sunlight shines on.
| Maya Angelou | Prisoner |
With that lawless crowd
While the killers in high places
Say their prayers out loud
But they've summoned, they've summoned up
A thundercloud
And they're going to hear from me
Ring the bells that still ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack, a crack in everything
That's how the light gets in
You can add up the parts
You won't have the sum | You can strike up the march | There is no drum
Every heart, every heart
To love will come | As in Hallelujah: “Love is not a victory march” | Leonard Cohen | Anthem |
Sadie scraped life
With a fine-tooth comb.
She didn't leave a tangle in.
Her comb found every strand.
Sadie was one of the livingest chits
In all the land.
Sadie bore two babies
Under her maiden name.
Maud and Ma and Papa
Nearly died of shame.
Everyone but Sadie
Nearly died of shame. | When Sadie said her last so-long | Her girls struck out from home.
(Sadie had left as heritage
Her fine-tooth comb.) | Presumably death | Gwendolyn Brooks | Sadie and Maud |
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odour of death
Offends the September night.
Accurate scholarship can
Unearth the whole offence
From Luther until now
That has driven a culture mad,
Find what occurred at Linz,
What huge imago made | A psychopathic god: | I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done | ‘A Psychopathic god’ refers to Hitler, “Psychopathic” is an important word choice as it portrays the relentless and hysterical nature of the god-like figure and cult that developed around Hitler at the time, as well as the mindset of the man himself.
| W. H. Auden | September 1 1939 |
Show me the place where you want your slave to go
Show me the place I've forgotten I don't know
Show me the place where my head is bendin' low
Show me the place where you want your slave to go
Show me the place, help me roll away the stone
Show me the place, I can't move this thing alone
Show me the place where the word became a man
Show me the place where the suffering began
The troubles came I saved what I could save | A thread of light, a particle, a wave | But there were chains, so I hastened to behave
There were chains, so I loved you like a slave
Show me the place where you want your slave to go | Referring to the dual nature of light as both particle and wave. | Leonard Cohen | Show Me the Place |
Ere russet fields their green resume,
Sweet flower, I love, in forest bare,
To meet thee, when thy faint perfume
Alone is in the virgin air.
Of all her train, the hands of Spring
First plant thee in the watery mould,
And I have seen thee blossoming
Beside the snow-bank's edges cold.
Thy parent sun, who bade thee view
Pale skies, and chilling moisture sip,
Has bathed thee in his own bright hue,
And streaked with jet thy glowing lip. | Yet slight thy form, and low thy seat,
And earthward bent thy gentle eye, | Unapt the passing view to meet
When loftier flowers are flaunting nigh.
Oft, in the sunless April day, | Another reference to the violet being modest as mentioned before. Modest in a sense of sitting low and bending gently. | William Cullen Bryant | The Yellow Violet |
It seems you inwardly grin as you pass
Strong eyes, fine limbs, haughty athletes,
Less chanced than you for life,
Bonds to the whims of murder,
Sprawled in the bowels of the earth,
The torn fields of France.
What do you see in our eyes
At the shrieking iron and flame
Hurled through still heavens?
What quaver—what heart aghast?
Poppies whose roots are in man's veins
Drop, and are ever dropping; | But mine in my ear is safe— | Just a little white with the dust. | In a quiet, understated conclusion Rosenberg takes us back to the earlier line when he ‘stuck’ the poppy behind his ear. He claims that his poppy is safe and so is he.
Note the dash that ends the line, forming a thoughtful caesura , a pause in which the reader knows that he is either fooling himself or being ironic. | Isaac Rosenberg | Break of Day in the Trenches |
Now put that worm on your hook,
throw it out and wait.
She sat spitting tobacco juice
into a coffee cup.
Hunkered down when she felt the bite,
jerked the pole straight up
reeling and tugging hard at the fish
that wriggled and tried to fight back.
A flounder, she said, and you can tell
'cause one of its sides is black.
The other side is white, she said.
It landed with a thump. | I stood there watching that fish flip-flop,
switch sides with every jump. | null | This poem is named after the flounder, a typically black and white spotted fish. These two lines at the end are significant for this poem because although it seems the narrator is simply talking about the fish, it has a double meaning. The girl notices that one side of the fish is black while the other is white. As the fish flip-flops it changes from one side to the other, white then black. It is symbolic of the struggle of the girl being of a mixed race (“You ‘bout as white as your dad” line 3). She struggles with a strong identity in either race because she does not want to pick one particular side. | Natasha Trethewey | Flounder |
A wind is ruffling the tawny pelt
Of Africa, Kikuyu, quick as flies,
Batten upon the bloodstreams of the veldt.
Corpses are scattered through a paradise.
Only the worm, colonel of carrion, cries:
"Waste no compassion on these separate dead!"
Statistics justify and scholars seize
The salients of colonial policy.
What is that to the white child hacked in bed? | To savages, expendable as Jews? | Threshed out by beaters, the long rushes break
In a white dust of ibises whose cries
Have wheeled since civilizations dawn | Use of the rhetorical device of Pathos to invoke a connection between the Nazi’s extermination of the Jews in World War II and British imperialism. | Derek Walcott | A Far Cry From Africa |
UP with the sun, the breeze arose,
Across the talking corn she goes,
And smooth she rustles far and wide | Through all the voiceful countryside. | Through all the land her tale she tells;
She spins, she tosses, she compels
The kites, the clouds, the windmill sails | Now it is not just the corn but the entire countryside that the breeze has made voiceful .
| Emily Dickinson | An English Breeze |
943
A Coffin — is a small Domain
Yet able to contain
A Citizen of Paradise
In it diminished Plane
A Grave — is a restricted Breadth
Yet ampler than the Sun
And all the Seas He populates
And Lands He looks upon
To Him who on its small Repose | Bestows a single Friend | Circumference without Relief
Or Estimate — or End | The dead are all alone and their only companionship is their surroundings. Thier coffin is all they will know for all of eternity.
| Emily Dickinson | A Coffin — is a small Domain |
Acacia, burnt myrrh, velvet, pricky stings
—I'm not so young but not so very old | Said screwed-up lovely 23 | A final sense of being right out in the cold
Unkissed
(—My psychiatrist can lick your psychiatrist.) Women get under | When someone reaches their mid 20s, they often experience a quarter-life crisis: it’s a time when many graduate college and move out on their own, get a job, and enter the “real world” officially. As Taylor Swift puts it, that age is a time of both freedom and confusion.
| John Berryman | Dream Song 3 A Stimulant for an Old Beast |
The cat in the paper-bag, the corset, the box
From Esthonia: the tiger chest, for tea.
The freshness of night has been fresh a long time.
The freshness of morning, the blowing of day, one says
That it puffs as Cornelius Nepos reads, it puffs
More than, less than or it puffs like this or that.
The green smacks in the eye, the dew in the green
Smacks like fresh water in a can, like the sea
On a cocoanut—how many men have copied dew
For buttons, how many women have covered themselves
With dew, dew dresses, stones and chains of dew, heads
Of the floweriest flowers dewed with the dewiest dew. | One grows to hate these things except on the dump. | Now in the time of spring (azaleas, trilliums,
Myrtle, viburnums, daffodils, blue phlox) ,
Between that disgust and this, between the things | Wallace Stevens seems to embrace the trash as the source of creativity.
(Source: Open Yale Courses. ) | Wallace Stevens | The Man on the Dump |
Out of the night that covers me, | Black as the pit from pole to pole, | I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.
In the fell clutch of circumstance | Darkness here is associated with evil (“the pit” as in the pit of hell), which covers the world from pole to pole (North and South and everywhere in between).
‘Pole to pole’ is a reference not only to the external world, but could be a metaphor for every aspect of the poet, physically, emotionally and spiritually.
The imagery here is biblical, maybe alluding to the notion that we were all born sinners ‘— out of the night that covers me’: night being associated with original sin and the Fall of man. However, the following line makes it clear that the speaker is not a specifically alluding to the conventional Victorian Christian beliefs. | William Ernest Henley | Invictus |
When the green woods laugh with the voice of joy
And the dimpling stream runs laughing by
When the air does laugh with our merry wit
And the green hill laughs with the noise of it
When the meadows laugh with lively green
And the grasshopper laughs in the merry scene
When Mary and Susan and Emily
With their sweet round mouths sing "Ha, ha he!" | When the painted birds laugh in the shade | Where our table with cherries and nuts is spread
Come live, and be merry, and join with me
To sing the sweet chorus of "Ha, ha, he!" | That the birds are ‘painted’ is a metaphor that suggests bright colours, but also the possibility of a higher power that is responsible for their creation.
The Romantic poets , notably Blake, Shelley and Wordsworth, wrote poetry in praise of nature. Keats' Ode to a Nightingale , and Shelley’s To a Skylark are examples. Blake, however, places his depiction within the Pastoral tradition. | William Blake | Laughing Song |
null | Out of your whole life give but one moment! | All of your life that has gone before,
All to come after it, – so you ignore,
So you make perfect the present, – condense, | The opening sentence is short and abrupt, with an exclamation mark to emphasise the importance of the imperative; it is what the poem will be about, the focus of a single moment of perfect love.
In terms of construction, Browning begins with a preposition and reverses the usual syntax of the two clauses. If this were re-worded colloquially it would read “Just give me a moment of your life”. The device anastrophe surprises the reader and draws them in. | Robert Browning | Now |
Ah, Douglass, we have fall'n on evil days,
Such days as thou, not even thou didst know,
When thee, the eyes of that harsh long ago
Saw, salient, at the cross of devious ways,
And all the country heard thee with amaze.
Not ended then, the passionate ebb and flow,
The awful tide that battled to and fro;
We ride amid a tempest of dispraise.
Now, when the waves of swift dissension swarm, | And Honour, the strong pilot, lieth stark, | Oh, for thy voice high-sounding o'er the storm,
For thy strong arm to guide the shivering bark,
The blast-defying power of thy form, |
Going into the future, Dunbar suggests that we let honor serve as a moral compass for us to overcome the turmoil that has resulted from injustice. | Paul Laurence Dunbar | Douglass |
Barque of phosphor
On the palmy beach,
Move outward into heaven,
Into the alabsters
And night blues.
Foam and cloud are one.
Sultry moon-monsters
Are dissolving. | Fill your black hull
With white moonlight. | There will never be an end
To this droning of the surf. | These lines continue the dual meaning of “barque”– it can mean the palm trees disappearing as the sun goes down, or the voyage away from earth, into the moonlight and beyond.
| Wallace Stevens | Fabliau of Florida |
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;
A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,
Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam,
A body of England's, breathing English air, | Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home. | And think, this heart, all evil shed away,
A pulse in the eternal mind, no less
Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given; | This line has religious implications, ‘washed by the rivers’ and ‘blest’ recalling the Christian rite of baptism. This would fit Brooke’s mindset as a conventional young man of his time.
The final phrase ‘suns of home’ ends the section with a sense of optimism and emotional resilience, despite the subject matter of death through conflict. | Rupert Brooke | The Soldier |
In trembling zeal he seized his hair,
He led him by his little coat,
And all admired his priestly care.
And standing on the altar high,
‘Lo, what a fiend is here!' said he:
‘One who sets reason up for judge
Of our most holy mystery.'
The weeping child could not be heard,
The weeping parents wept in vain:
They stripped him to his little shirt,
And bound him in an iron chain,
And burned him in a holy place | Where many had been burned before; | The weeping parents wept in vain.
Are such things done on Albion's shore? | The punitive practices of the Church were clearly common. Note the ironic pattern of these two lines; its sing-song rhythm and repetition of ‘burns’ recalls a nursery rhyme. | William Blake | A Little Boy Lost |
I came by myself to a very crowded place; | I was looking for someone who had lines in her face | I found her there but she was past all concern;
I asked her to hold me, I said, "Lady, unfold me,"
But she scorned me and she told me | The narrator looks for someone with experience, wisdom, someone older. This reading supports the view that this song is not about an actual woman but an allegory, maybe a muse, maybe faith, maybe poetry herself. | Leonard Cohen | Lady Midnight |
null | I look at the world | From awakening eyes in a black face—
And this is what I see:
This fenced-off narrow space | This line refers to looking out and observing life around you. Specifically Hughes is referring to Harlem, where he lived for the latter part of his life.
| Langston Hughes | I Look At The World |
null | Give me your hand | Make room for me
to lead and follow
you | She asks her lover to hold her hand, a sign of trust and a symbol of unity. | Maya Angelou | A Conceit |
Remember me when I am gone away,
Gone far away into the silent land;
When you can no more hold me by the hand,
Nor I half turn to go yet turning stay.
Remember me when no more, day by day,
You tell me of our future that you planned: | Only remember me; you understand | It will be late to counsel then or pray.
Yet if you should forget me for a while
And afterwards remember, do not grieve: | The narrator ends the first eight lines, the octet, by telling her love to do no more than remember her.
Note that Rossetti’s poem ‘Song’ (‘When I am dead, my dearest’), also focuses on a natural mourning period, with no elaborate gestures.
The semi-colon separates ‘me’ and ‘you’, symbolising the distance between the dead and the living. This caesura also separates her emotional plea for him to “remember” her, and her more logical explanation of what he should “understand”, mirroring her conflicting passionate and clinical approaches to death and separation throughout poem.
‘Only’ is an important word, adding to the comforting tone of the poem. Rossetti is asking her lover to forget the pain and “only” remember the positive memories they have with her. But depending on how one interprets it, it could also suggest a note of desperation and pleading. | Christina Rossetti | Remember |
Take up the White Man's burden--
Send forth the best ye breed--
Go bind your sons to exile
To serve your captives' need;
To wait in heavy harness,
On fluttered folk and wild--
Your new-caught, sullen peoples,
Half-devil and half-child.
Take up the White Man's burden--
In patience to abide, | To veil the threat of terror | And check the show of pride;
By open speech and simple,
An hundred times made plain | In this line the speaker indicates colonialists' spoken altruistic motives serve to obscure more violent intentions, and the anxiety that other cultures are a moral threat to western culture. | Rudyard Kipling | The White Mans Burden |
What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why,
I have forgotten, and what arms have lain
Under my head till morning; but the rain
Is full of ghosts tonight, that tap and sigh
Upon the glass and listen for reply,
And in my heart there stirs a quiet pain
For unremembered lads that not again
Will turn to me at midnight with a cry.
Thus in winter stands the lonely tree,
Nor knows what birds have vanished one by one,
Yet knows its boughs more silent than before: | I cannot say what loves have come and gone, | I only know that summer sang in me
A little while, that in me sings no more. | I can not tell who the lovers that I have had are. | Edna St. Vincent Millay | What lips my lips have kissed and where and why Sonnet XLIII |
Made Nature different
We noticed smallest things—
Things overlooked before
By this great light upon our Minds
Italicized—as 'twere.
As We went out and in
Between Her final Room
And Rooms where Those to be alive
Tomorrow were, a Blame
That Others could exist
While She must finish quite
A Jealousy for Her arose | So nearly infinite— | We waited while She passed—
It was a narrow time—
Too jostled were Our Souls to speak | This is obscure and open to interpretation. Is the jealousy infinite? Or is the woman herself — her soul that is — infinite? Most likely the latter; the soul is the part of any human who physcially dies but enables that person to live on. | Emily Dickinson | The last Night that She lived 1100 |
———A simple Child, dear Brother Jim,
That lightly draws its breath,
And feels its life in every limb,
What should it know of death? | I met a little cottage Girl: | She was eight years old, she said;
Her hair was thick with many a curl
That clustered round her head. | A cottage girl, a young woman from the farming class community. William Wordsworth, being apart of romanticism, enjoyed nature and the rural areas surrounding London. Many of his writings are about the beauty of nature, he sets up the meeting of the little girl by providing a denomination to where she is from and his predisposition towards rural areas makes him appreciate her more from the beginning. | William Wordsworth | We Are Seven |
They stir in honest labour.
They tread the fields where honour calls;
Their voices sound through senate halls
In majesty and power.
To right they cling; the hymns they sing
Up to the skies in beauty ring,
And bolder grow each hour.
Be proud, my Race, in mind and soul;
Thy name is writ on Glory's scroll
In characters of fire.
High 'mid the clouds of Fame's bright sky
Thy banner's blazoned folds now fly, | And truth shall lift them higher. | Thou hast the right to noble pride,
Whose spotless robes were purified
By blood's severe baptism. | The more the truth is accepted the more freedom they will have
| Paul Laurence Dunbar | Ode To Ethiopia |
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. | As Spring subsides and seasons pass, the fresh, golden green fades.
Brown consumes the earth in fall. Gray consumes the earth in winter. Even in spring and summer, only the “first green” sprouts with golden promise.
This line may also call back to Frost’s poem “The Road Not Taken,” published 7 years earlier. In “The Road Not Taken,” the narrator stands at the divergence of two roads in a “yellow wood.” He can’t stand there forever, and must choose a road. Frost may be suggesting that the early spring of our lives is the most valuable because we are not yet forced to choose a path to follow, as we are in the early fall of our lives.
Correspondingly, the beginning of our lives is “gold” because we have the whole world open to us. It’s the “hardest to hold” because it doesn’t last forever: we grow up and have to make decisions about which roads to follow.
“Gold” may suggest other natural colors as well, including the color of sunrise, which lasts for a very short time. | Robert Frost | Nothing Gold Can Stay |
It seems so long ago
Nancy was alone
Looking at the Late Late show | Through a semi-precious stone | In the House of Honesty
Her father was on trial
In the House of Mystery | It’s likely that this is a romanticized description of a television set; like a quartz crystal.
Nancy was suffering from bipolar depression, a mood disorder that, among other things, distorts the way that people see reality.
During a manic period, this “looking through a semi-precious stone” would result in a colorful and exciting view of the world. During a depressive period, everything that the person sees would feed into their sense of despair.
Semi-precious stones are generally cloudy, implying a hazy view of the world.
| Leonard Cohen | Seems So Long Ago Nancy |
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.
The work of hunters is another thing:
I have come after them and made repair
Where they have left not one stone on a stone,
But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,
To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean,
No one has seen them made or heard them made,
But at spring mending-time we find them there.
I let my neighbor know beyond the hill;
And on a day we meet to walk the line
And set the wall between us once again.
We keep the wall between us as we go. | To each the boulders that have fallen to each. | And some are loaves and some so nearly balls
We have to use a spell to make them balance:
'Stay where you are until our backs are turned!' | Though they are working at the same time, together, they tend only to the rocks that are on their respective sides of the fence.
Again, the mending of the wall brings them together, however temporarily, but the basic purpose and outcome of the wall is separation. There is a sense here of “every man for himself.” | Robert Frost | Mending Wall |
null | My Bengal of Gold, | I love you.
Forever your skies,
Your air set my heart in tune | Rabindranath used the word ‘Gold’ as a metaphor: Bengal is as prosperous as gold. He loves the natural beauty of the landscape as a woman loves his gold.
Also, all the rice fields turn to golden color when they are fully grown.
| Rabindranath Tagore | My Golden Bengal |
Last night, ah, yesternight, betwixt her lips and mine
There fell thy shadow, Cynara! thy breath was shed
Upon my soul between the kisses and the wine;
And I was desolate and sick of an old passion,
Yea, I was desolate and bowed my head:
I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion.
All night upon mine heart I felt her warm heart beat,
Night-long within mine arms in love and sleep she lay; | Surely the kisses of her bought red mouth were sweet; | But I was desolate and sick of an old passion,
When I awoke and found the dawn was gray:
I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion. | The ‘kisses of her bought red mouth …’ are clearly those of a prostitute. Dowson has used a woman for physical relief, but his mind is on his ‘old passion’. This is a contrast to what went before; definitely not a poem of courtly love.
| Ernest Dowson | Non sum qualis eram bonae sub regno Cynarae |
I have desired, and I have been desired;
But now the days are over of desire,
Now dust and dying embers mock my fire; | Where is the hire for which my life was hired? | Oh vanity of vanities, desire!
Longing and love, pangs of a perished pleasure,
Longing and love, a disenkindled fire, | She is wondering what her purpose in life is. By describing her life as ‘hired’, it indicates that it is only temporarily hers, and must be returned. Her life belongs to God, she has no real ownership of it. | Christina Rossetti | Soeur Louise De La Misericorde |
Besides the Autumn poets sing | A few prosaic days
A little this side of the snow
And that side of the Haze - | A few incisive mornings -
A few Ascetic eves -
Gone - Mr Bryant's "Golden Rod" - | The days are “prosaic” (normal or unassuming) in this case, because they’re in between seasons.
They don’t have the defining characteristics of summmer, or those of winter, and are more indistinct and mundane. Instead of attacking this normality, Dickinson argues that it should be celebrated.
The way she describes the fall as “prosaic” is important here, because it literally means “akin to prose, not poetic”, even though the autumn is the subject of the poem.
| Emily Dickinson | Besides the Autumn poets sing 131 |
The sea so deep and blind
The sun, the wild regret | The club, the wheel, the mind | O love, aren't you tired yet?
The blood, the soil, the faith
These words you can't forget | The club and the wheel are two symbols of the Hindu god Vishnu , who rests in a “deep blind sea” .
The wheel (discus) is a weapon that symbolizes the purified spiritualized mind. The club symbolizes Vishnu’s divine power and is the source of all spiritual, mental and physical strength. It also signifies Vishnu’s power to destroy materialistic or demonic tendencies that prevent people from reaching god.
Additionally, the club, wheel, and mind can be seen as examples of increasingly complex technologies used by mankind. | Leonard Cohen | The Faith |
A still—Volcano—Life—
That flickered in the night—
When it was dark enough to do
Without erasing sight—
A quiet—Earthquake Style— | Too subtle to suspect
By natures this side Naples— | The North cannot detect
The Solemn—Torrid—Symbol—
The lips that never lie— | The volcanic energy (Dickinson’s inner self), described throughout the poem, is mentioned as being “too subtle to suspect”, a reference to her self-control and silence. In this way, the use of “natures” would refer to the contrasting qualities of the speaker; that is quiet but eruptive, which go unsuspected by others. This includes those closest to her. Hence, “this side Naples”, would reference proximity to the volcano, as Naples is the Italian city closest to the volcano Vesuvius (Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women).
Vesuvius (picture from Swide, “The 10 best Volcano tours in the world”):
| Emily Dickinson | A still—Volcano—Life 601 |
Like vibrations of a bell,
And fashionable madmen raise
Their pedantic boring cry:
Every farthing of the cost,
All the dreaded cards foretell,
Shall be paid, but from this night
Not a whisper, not a thought,
Not a kiss nor look be lost.
Beauty, midnight, vision dies:
Let the winds of dawn that blow
Softly round your dreaming head
Such a day of welcome show | Eye and knocking heart may bless, | Find the mortal world enough;
Noons of dryness find you fed
By the involuntary powers, | By virtue of being alive the speaker will be able to bless the winds of dawn, as he comes through his night of sleep and is reborn into the new day.
The ‘knocking’ heart is an imaginative description, with its hint of danger and fear. It suggests time intruding or ‘knocking’. | W. H. Auden | Lullaby |
null | Fame is a fickle food | Upon a shifting plate
Whose table once a
Guest but not | Dickinson describes “fame” as “fickle” to illustrate how it has the ability to change a person instantly, as well as its often fleeting nature. For more see, this page. | Emily Dickinson | Fame is a fickle food 1659 |
My black face fades,
Hiding inside the black granite.
I said I wouldn't,
Dammit: No tears. | I'm stone. I'm flesh. | My clouded reflection eyes me
Like a bird of prey, the profile of night
Slanted against morning. I turn | The names of the fallen soldiers from the Vietnam War are inscribed on a black granite wall.
Komunyakaa feels like he’s a part of the wall with the fallen soldiers – like he died with them. That’s why he says he’s a stone.
But at the same time he didn’t actually die so he reminds himself:
I’m flesh
Notice he must say he is flesh, as if reassuring himself that he lived; this also simultaneously enhances the sense of the dead feeling he has inside. | Yusef Komunyakaa | Facing It |
"Ceasefire" by Michael Longley | I | Put in mind of his own father and moved to tears
Achilles took him by the hand and pushed the old king
Gently away, but Priam curled up at his feet and | Instead of writing an epic poem in the style of Homer, Longley structures his poem as a traditional English or “Shakespearian” sonnet composed of three quatrains and a couplet. However, he does not adhere to the classic Shakespearian rhyme scheme and meter. The poem is not written in iambic pentameter, and the quatrains do not follow ababcdcdefef rhyme scheme. However, the final couplet does rhyme, and is written in iambic hexameter. | Michael Longley | Ceasefire |
Some thoughts traveled from distant places
Are not born within our borders
And must pass through heightened security fortified by age old tradition | The norms of societal culture | The misgivings of prejudice and misplaced judgement
In order to arrive peacefully in our minds
Our minds are high-walled fortresses | Culture is a way for people to make sense of the world and adjust to large societies. The U.S. has a relatively rich culture that developed out of a long tradition of immigration.
On the other hand, many Americans would be hard pressed to uniquely define this culture, and unfortunate intellectuals like Samuel Huntington even blame immigration for the loss of American Identity.
In reality, our culture has always and will always be there. But it’s become difficult to claim in a society run by mass producing institutions that gobble up anything with a hint of profit potential, superficialize it, and aggressively push it out to millions. Is it really a surprise we grasp at cliches?
| Saul Williams | FCK THE BELIEFS |
Invisible, as Music -
But positive, as Sound -
It beckons, and it baffles -
Philosophy—don't know
And through a Riddle, at the last -
Sagacity, must go -
To guess it, puzzles scholars -
To gain it, Men have borne
Contempt of Generations
And Crucifixion, shown
Faith slips—and laughs, and rallies -
Blushes, if any see - | Plucks at a twig of Evidence - | And asks a Vane, the way -
Much Gesture, from the Pulpit -
Strong Hallelujahs roll - | The fragility is developed and doubt is encompassed in this line. “Plucks at a twig of Evidence” brings to mind “clutching at straws”. This may have seemed shockingly dismissive in an age where religious belief was almost universal and taken for granted. | Emily Dickinson | This World is not Conclusion |
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; | The co-writer, producer and player of all the instruments on the original recording – Sharon Robinson – Leonard Cohen’s “feminine half” over the years, gives a fantastic rendition of the song in Lisbon, 2009 –
Leonard Cohen preferred her vocals over instrumental pieces that were originally planned to be incorporated in the recording, stating that the song would be “lost” without all her contributions to it and the rest of the album’s pieces. | Leonard Cohen | Boogie Street |
null | Spare Ass Annie | When I became captain of the town, I decided to extend asylum to certain citizens who were persona non grata elsewhere in the area because of their disgusting and disquieting deformities.
One was known as Spare Ass Annie. She had an auxiliary asshole in the middle of her forehead, like a baneful bronze eye.
Another was a scorpion from the neck down. He had retained the human attribute of voice and was given to revolting paroxysms of self-pity and self-disgust during which he would threaten to kill himself by a sting in the back of the neck. He never threatened anyone else, though his sting would have caused instant death. | An abridged version of a section from William S Burroughs' book Interzone .
| William S. Burroughs | Spare Ass Annie |
We have come so far, it is over.
Each dead child coiled, a white serpent,
One at each little
Pitcher of milk, now empty.
She has folded
Them back into her body as petals
Of a rose close when the garden
Stiffens and odors bleed
From the sweet, deep throats of the night flower.
The moon has nothing to be sad about,
Staring from her hood of bone.
She is used to this sort of thing. | Her blacks crackle and drag. | null | As women continue to fight for their rightful freedom and honor, they will endlessly endure the witch-hunting, and the slow, dragging process of social change.
The reference to “blacks” contrasts with the earlier “white”. The black colour might represent sadness and mourning, or even witch’s clothing— a reference to the historical practice of men in power accusing women of witchcraft. | Sylvia Plath | Edge |
We were very tired, we were very merry—
We had gone back and forth all night on the ferry.
It was bare and bright, and smelled like a stable—
But we looked into a fire, we leaned across a table,
We lay on a hill-top underneath the moon;
And the whistles kept blowing, and the dawn came soon.
We were very tired, we were very merry—
We had gone back and forth all night on the ferry;
And you ate an apple, and I ate a pear,
From a dozen of each we had bought somewhere; | And the sky went wan, and the wind came cold, | And the sun rose dripping, a bucketful of gold.
We were very tired, we were very merry,
We had gone back and forth all night on the ferry. | The description of the cold, with the alliterative ‘w’s isn’t to be taken seriously, especially in the light of the following line, which contradicts it. | Edna St. Vincent Millay | Recuerdo |
A Route of Evanescence
With a revolving Wheel--
A Resonance of Emerald--
A Rush of Cochineal--
And every Blossom on the Bush
Adjusts its tumbled Head-- | The mail from Tunis, probably, | An easy Morning's Ride-- | Dickinson feels as though the scene is as foreign and mysterious as Tunis (also called Tunisia), a country in northeast Africa.
| Emily Dickinson | A Route of Evanescence |
Wanted my name
To put it down.
I said, Johnson,
Alberta K.
But he hated to write
The K that way.
He said, What
Does K stand for?
I said, K--
And nothing more.
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 | The census conductor insists on lengthening Alberta’s middle name so that it will better match the format of the other names in the census. She questions his integrity when he refuses to record the correct spelling of her middle name.
| Langston Hughes | Madam and the Census Man |
null | THE artist is the creator of beautiful things. To reveal art and conceal the artist is art's aim. | The critic is he who can translate into another manner or a new material his impression of beautiful things.
The highest as the lowest form of criticism is a mode of autobiography.
Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault. | Wilde believes that the artist must only create art, not try to overwhelm his art with his own personality or other futile subjects. The artist must conceal himself in what T. S. Eliot later called a “gradual extinction of personality.” Here you can see the influence on Wilde of the “Art for art’s sake” credo, or “l'art pour l'art” in the original French. | Oscar Wilde | The Picture of Dorian Gray Preface |
Mean to be free
And this was the way of it, brethren brethren,
way we journeyed from Can't to Can.
Moon so bright and no place to hide,
the cry up and the patterollers riding,
hound dogs belling in bladed air.
And fear starts a-murbling, Never make it,
we'll never make it. Hush that now,
and she's turned upon us, levelled pistol
glinting in the moonlight:
Dead folks can't jaybird-talk, she says;
you keep on going now or die, she says. | Wanted Harriet Tubman alias The General
alias Moses Stealer of Slaves | In league with Garrison Alcott Emerson
Garrett Douglass Thoreau John Brown
Armed and known to be Dangerous | Slave ad that was sent out for the capture of Tubman.
| Robert Hayden | Runagate Runagate |
And all my good is but vain hope of gain.
The day is gone and I yet I saw no sun,
And now I live, and now my life is done.
The spring is past, and yet it hath not sprung,
The fruit is dead, and yet the leaves are green,
My youth is gone, and yet I am but young,
I saw the world, and yet I was not seen,
My thread is cut, and yet it was not spun,
And now I live, and now my life is done.
I sought my death and found it in my womb,
I look't for life and saw it was a shade,
I trode the earth and knew it was my tomb, | And now I die, and now I am but made. | The glass is full, and now the glass is run,
And now I live, and now my life is done. | This suggests that his execution for his religious and political beliefs are what have ‘made’ him; defined him and given meaning to his existence. As with all martyrs, his death is the culmination of his life. | Chidiock Tichborne | Tichbornes Elegy |
Stick my legs in plaster
Tell me lies about Vietnam.
Where were you at the time of the crime?
Down by the Cenotaph drinking slime
So chain my tongue with whisky
Stuff my nose with garlic
Coat my eyes with butter
Fill my ears with silver
Stick my legs in plaster
Tell me lies about Vietnam.
You put your bombers in, you put your conscience out,
You take the human being and you twist it all about | So scrub my skin with women | Chain my tongue with whisky
Stuff my nose with garlic
Coat my eyes with butter | And so, the solution for the speaker is to have sex with women as a distraction from the horror. In Vietnam, however, burning chemicals destroyed the skin of civilian victims. | Adrian Mitchell | To Whom It May Concern |
null | For Paul | Your hands easy
weight, teasing the bees
hived in my hair, your smile at the | This line before the poem begins, “For Paul,” sets the whole tone for the poem of remembrance, as “For [insert name]” is usually used for a person who has passed on. | Maya Angelou | Remembrance |
She walks in beauty, like the night
Of cloudless climes and starry skies;
And all that's best of dark and bright | Meet in her aspect and her eyes: | Thus mellow'd to that tender light
Which heaven to gaudy day denies.
One shade the more, one ray the less, | You can see by the expression of her face and look in her eye that she is full of good and evil.
The writer is fixated on the physical aspects and beauty of the woman he writes of, ignoring aspects of her character. He is attracted by looks and not who she is. This could be suggestive of the belittlement of women, reducing them to objects, or could be written in order to allow the creation of a person Byron finds most attractive. | Lord Byron | She Walks in Beauty |
null | The rhythm of life
Is a jazz rhythm, | Honey.
The gods are laughing at us.
The broken heart of love, | Hughes' poetry was heavily influenced by jazz music. Hughes' diction sometimes even imitated the sound of the music. | Langston Hughes | Lenox Avenue: Midnight |
Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone, | Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone, | Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.
Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead | The next line begins with another imperative; ‘prevent’. The idea of giving the pet dog a ‘juicy bone’ is wryly humorous. For all his grief, the speaker is still alive to reality; the dog has to be dealt with. It is an attempt to gain order out of emotional confusion.
Works Cited: “W.H. Auden: 1907-1973.” The Poetry Foundation. Harriet Monroe Poetry Institute. Web. 22 October 2014. | W. H. Auden | Funeral Blues Stop all the clocks |
Here come real stars to fill the upper skies,
And here on earth come emulating flies,
That though they never equal stars in size, | (And they were never really stars at heart) | Achieve at times a very star-like start.
Only, of course, they can't sustain the part. | In Reality…
Fireflies are just bugs.
Often, they’re not even glowing bugs. Most of the time, they simply look like any other beetle.
But for a moment, Frost allows the reader to disregard reality; he hides away the true nature of fireflies within parentheses. | Robert Frost | Fireflies in the Garden |
I doubt na, whyles, but thou may thieve;
What then? poor beastie, thou maun live!
A daimen-icker in a thrave
'S a sma' request
I'll get a blessin wi' the lave
An' never miss't!
Thy wee-bit housie, too, in ruin!
It's silly wa's the win's are strewin!
An' naething, now, to big a new ane
O' foggage green!
An' bleak December's winds ensuin
Baith snell an' keen! | Thou saw the fields laid bare an' wast
An' weary Winter comin fast
An' cozie here, beneath the blast
Thou thought to dwell
Till crash! the cruel coulter past
Out thro' thy cell | That wee-bit heap o' leaves an' stibble
Has cost thee monie a weary nibble!
Now thou's turn'd out, for a' thy trouble | Rough English translation:
You saw the fields laid bare and wasted, And weary winter coming fast, And cozy here, beneath the blast, You thought to dwell, Till crash! the cruel plough passed Out through your cell.
The mouse thought herself safe for the coming cold months. But Burns' plow has completely dashed her hopes of survival.
The “coulter” (plow) used by the farmer is accurately described as “cruel”. The curved edge of the plow blade would not only break apart the earth in preparation for agriculture but would make short work of any small animals unfortunate enough to cross paths with it. In a deeper analytical reading, the plow serves as a metaphor for the industrial revolution while the mouse is symbolic of those poor farmers displaced by urban expansion and industry.
There is a mood shift after the third line in this stanza. The word “cozie” represents peacefulness. In line 5 of the stanza, words such as “crash” and “cruel coulter” shift the mood towards restlessness, which is what the mouse is experiencing without a home. The comparison of the mouse to a monk is seen in the last line in which the speaker calls the house a “cell” referring to the simple homes that holy people live in. | Robert Burns | To a Mouse |
Don't really have the courage
To stand where I must stand
Don't really have the temperament
To lend a helping hand
Don't really know who sent me
To raise my voice and say: | May the lights in The Land of Plenty | Shine on the truth some day
I don't know why I've come here
Knowing as I do | The idiom probably starts with the phrase “land of milk and honey” for Israel:
Exodus 3:7-8: Then the Lord said, “I have surely seen the affliction of my people who are in Egypt and have heard their cry because of their taskmasters. I know their sufferings, and I have come down to deliver them out of the hand of the Egyptians and to bring them up out of that land to a good and broad land, a land flowing with milk and honey, to the place of the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Amorites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites.
“Land of plenty” has no single author but was famously used by Edgar Rice Burroughs in his 1918 novel “The Land That Time Forgot”:
“We haven’t one chance for life in a hundred thousand if we don’t find food and water upon Caprona. This water coming out of the cliff is not salt; but neither is it fit to drink, though each of us has drunk. It is fair to assume that inland the river is fed by pure streams, that there are fruits and herbs and game. Shall we lie out here and die of thirst and starvation with a land of plenty possibly only a few hundred yards away?”
The phrase “land of plenty” and “America” are closely connected today. Merriam-Webster’s uses the sentence “They thought of America as the land of plenty” to explain the verb “plenty”. | Leonard Cohen | The Land of Plenty |
After great pain, a formal feeling comes –
The Nerves sit ceremonious, like Tombs –
The stiff Heart questions ‘was it He, that bore,'
And ‘Yesterday, or Centuries before'?
The Feet, mechanical, go round –
A Wooden way
Of Ground, or Air, or Ought – | Regardless grown, | A Quartz contentment, like a stone –
This is the Hour of Lead –
Remembered, if outlived, | This has two possible meanings.
The narrator’s life/nature continue to “grow” regardless of the fact that she has suffered this tragedy.
The idea that the narrator is becoming “regardless.” That is, the narrator may be losing regard for their surroundings. This supports the first stanza, where the narrator is stiffening and growing cold due to the agony they are suffering.
| Emily Dickinson | After great pain a formal feeling comes J341 F372 |
We have a poem here, it's called "Whitey On The Moon"
It was inspired by some whiteys on the moon
So I wanna give credit where credit is due | A rat done bit my sister Nell | With whitey on the moon
Her face and arms began to swell
And whitey's on the moon | Rodent infestation is prominent in low income neighborhoods. In fact, the top ten cities in America with the worst rodent problems are all locations with a high black population. Among the top 10 cities with the worst rat problem also happens to be the birthplace of Gil Scott-Heron, Chicago. It’s also worthy to note that people residing in poor neighborhoods with rodent problems shows a relationship to fostering depressive symptoms which can also take a toll on productivity and well-being.
| Gil Scott-Heron | Whitey on the Moon |
Way Down South in Dixie | (Break the heart of me) | They hung my black young lover
To a cross roads tree.
Way Down South in Dixie | A phrase of exasperation, much like: “Lord, have mercy…” | Langston Hughes | Song for a Dark Girl |
For my unconquerable soul.
In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.
Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds and shall find me unafraid.
It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll.
I am the master of my fate: | I am the captain of my soul. | null | The speaker can be anyone he wants to be. The idea of the poet asserting his strength so that he is the ‘captain’ of his soul — bringing to mind the person in command of a ship — would have chimed with the Victorian English people. Note that the patriotic song Rule Britannia suggests that Britons saw themselves as ‘ruling the waves’.
The two last lines are syntactic parallels . This has a powerful, emphatic, rhythmic impact. Ultimately, you are in charge of your essence. You control your thoughts and your destiny despite seeming to be helpless. | William Ernest Henley | Invictus |
RAPT in the visionary theme!
SPIRIT DIVINE! with THEE I'll wander,
Where the blue, wavy, lucid stream,
'Mid forest glooms, shall slow meander!
With THEE I'll trace the circling bounds
Of thy NEW PARADISE extended;
And listen to the varying sounds
Of winds, and foamy torrents blended. | Now by the source which lab'ring heaves
The mystic fountain, bubbling, panting,
While Gossamer its net-work weaves, | Adown the blue lawn slanting!
I'll mark thy sunny dome, and view
Thy Caves of Ice, thy fields of dew! | Robinson talks about something that Coleridge talks about in “Kubla Khan”, describing the “stately pleasure-dome” built in Xanadu, in the place where Alph, the sacred river, ran “through caverns measureless to man / Down to a sunless sea. | Mary Robinson | To the Poet Coleridge |
[Instrumental]
[Outro]
I wish there was a treaty we could sign | It's over now, the water and the wine | We were broken then but now we're borderline
And I wish there was a treaty
I wish there was a treaty between your love and mine | The water and the wine here are a repetition of the water and the wine in Treaty , the second song on this album of which this song is a reprise .
The first miracle Jesus performed, according to the Christian Bible, was turning water into wine at the Wedding at Canaa (John 2: 1-11). The miracle may be interpreted as the opposite to Moses' first public miracle of changing water (the Nile river) into blood (Ex. 7: 14-24). The Bible further links wine to blood in Jesus' “Bread of Life Discourse” (John 6: 22-59). In the Catholic Eucharist, the gesture of the Last Supper is repeated when wine is ritualistically transformed into Jesus' blood and shared by the believers.
Perhaps what the author is saying is “No more miracles are possible”.
Furthermore, there is an ancient Greek proverb which says “Blood will never become water” meaning: being related to someone by blood will always form a strong connection between the two even if they have, for some reason, become strangers. When the author compares wine to blood, he may be stating a wish, that he had “signed” a treaty with the people he loved as his life is near to its end and the water and the “wine”(blood) are over now. | Leonard Cohen | String Reprise/Treaty |
List of Essentials
1. Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for yr own joy
2. Submissive to everything, open, listening
3. Try never get drunk outside yr own house
4. Be in love with yr life
5. Something that you feel will find its own form
6. Be crazy dumbsaint of the mind
7. Blow as deep as you want to blow
8. Write what you want bottomless from bottom of the mind
9. The unspeakable visions of the individual | 10. No time for poetry but exactly what is | 11. Visionary tics shivering in the chest
12. In tranced fixation dreaming upon object before you
13. Remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition | Kerouac says that poetry is not worth the time, but then questions what poetry is exactly, leaving “poetry” as an open-ended form of expression, as evidenced in his style of writing “for yr own joy.” | Jack Kerouac | Belief Technique For Modern Prose |
Clean the spittoons, boy.
Detroit,
Chicago,
Atlantic City,
Palm Beach. | Clean the spittoons. | The steam in hotel kitchens,
And the smoke in hotel lobbies,
And the slime in hotel spittoons: | Once again Hughes highlights the boy’s lower class job. Hughes uses repetition here to emphasize the repetitive nature of the tasks assigned to the boy. | Langston Hughes | Brass Spittoons |
Did not seem able to accuse.
It was too dead. Just so much
A poundage of lard and pork.
Its last dignity had entirely gone.
It was not a figure of fun.
Too dead now to pity.
To remember its life, din, stronghold
Of earthly pleasure as it had been,
Seemed a false effort, and off the point.
Too deadly factual. Its weight
Oppressed me—how could it be moved?
And the trouble of cutting it up! | The gash in its throat was shocking, but not pathetic. | Once I ran at a fair in the noise
To catch a greased piglet
That was faster and nimbler than a cat, | Once more the speaker can’t stimulate emotional involvement in the life fo the pig, though he is prepared to accept that the gash is “shocking”. The adjective “pathetic” is emotionally loaded, but pathos isn’t what Hughes identifies. | Ted Hughes | View of a Pig |
Oh, give us pleasure in the flowers to-day;
And give us not to think so far away
As the uncertain harvest; keep us here
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. | It give’s him pleasure to watch the birds and the bees fly around the orchard in harmony. | Robert Frost | A Prayer in Spring |
anything like that,
so part I must, and quickly. There are things
I cannot suffer
any longer: Mother, you never, ever said
a kind word
or a thank-you for all the tedious chores I have done;
Father, your breath
smells like a camel's and gives me the hump;
all you ever say is:
‘Are you off in the cream puff, Lady Muck?'
In this day and age?
I would be better off in an orphanage. | I want a divorce. | There are parents in the world whose faces turn
up to the light
who speak in the soft murmur of rivers | This reads like an imitation of a novel or a television drama. It’s short sharp demand contrasts with the oddly lyrical nature of what follows. | Jackie Kay | Divorce |
Silver foil
I could throw oranges, bananas, tomatoes
Through the air, I could take cans of
Beer from the refrigerated section and
Start gulping them, I could pull up
Women's skirts, grab their asses
I could ram my shopping cart through
The plate-glass window...
Then another thought occurred to me:
People generally consider something
Before they do it
I pushed my cart along... | A woman in a checkered skirt was
Bending over the pet food section
I seriously considered grabbing her
Ass
But I didn't, I rolled on
By | I had the items I needed and I rolled
My cart up to the checkout stand
A lady in a red smock with a nameplate | This is the climax of his internal struggle. His primal side got him to the point to where he considered doing something completely inappropriate, only to finally decide not to. His socially constructed ego won the conflict. | Charles Bukowski | A Close Call While Shopping |
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
When company comes.
Nobody'll dare | He’s referring to the future – his use of “Tomorrow” implies that of an immediate nature. | Langston Hughes | I Too |
null | All things within this fading world hath end, | Adversity doth still our joys attend;
No ties so strong, no friends so dear and sweet,
But with death's parting blow are sure to meet. | Anne Bradstreet realizes that nothing is permanent in this world. This is a dark image especially when she is talking about the coming birth of her childern. She is already afraid of being hurt by any loss that may happen to her childern.
| Anne Bradstreet | Before the Birth of One of Her Children |
null | O | Out of a bed of love
When that immortal hospital made one more moove to soothe
The curless counted body, | “O” is placed at the beginning of the first stanza as a woeful cry to establish the first stanza’s depressing images that follow. | Dylan Thomas | Holy Spring |
The weddings made
Each station we stopped at: sun destroys
The interest of what's happening in the shade,
And down the long cool platforms whoops and skirls
I took for porter larking with the mails
And went on reading. Once we started, though,
We passed them, grinning and pomaded, girls
In parodies of fashion, heels and veils,
All posed irresolutely, watching us go,
As if out on the end of an event
Waving goodbye
To something that survived it. Struck, I leant | More promptly out next time, more curiously, | And saw it all again in different terms:
The fathers with broad belts under their suits
And seamy foreheads; mothers loud and fat; | This indicates growing interest. At this point it is worth noting Larkin’s view of poetry of which, he claimed, he aimed to achieve results that “offered something nothing else could, something more than reading, watching television or going out with some girl … compulsive contact between reader and writer.”
This stanza, however, seems to do the opposite. Larkin’s curiosity is expressed in detached observation, a distance that led him to a reductive process that presents people as stereotypes and parodies.
Foucault wrote of Larkin’s writing that it “functions as a procedure of objectification and subjection” As can be seen in this stanza, people blend together as undifferentiated stereotypes. | Philip Larkin | The Whitsun Wedding |
And flee the swarming wisdom of the streets.
The barns have stormed
The windows kept,
And only one of all the rest
To dance and save us
From the divine mockery of words,
Music inflames temperament.
Ooh great creator of being
Grant us one more hour,
To perform our art
And perfect our lives.
We need great golden copulations, | When the true kings murderers | Are allowed to roam free,
A thousand magicians arise in the land
Where are the feast we are promised? | Kennedy Conspiracy anyone? “What really happened?”
Jim also references this assassination in his song, Not to touch the Earth :
Dead president’s corpse in the driver’s car The engine runs on glue and tar C'mon along, we’re not going very far To the East to meet the Czar | Jim Morrison | The Ghost Song |
Will soon be under snow.
The sun sets in a cloud
And is not seen.
Beauty, that spoke aloud,
Addresses now only the remembering ear.
The heart begins here
To feed on what has been.
Night falls fast.
Today is in the past.
Blown from the dark hill hither to my door
Three flakes, then four
Arrive, then many more. | II | Branch by branch
This tree has died. Green only
Is one last bough, moving its leaves in the sun. | Part II illustrates Millay darkly observing a dying/dead tree, which may be a metaphor for Hope. | Edna St. Vincent Millay | Not So Far as the Forest |
The season's ill—
We've lost our summer millionaire,
Who seemed to leap from an L. L. Bean
Catalogue. His nine-knot yawl
Was auctioned off to lobstermen.
A red fox stain covers Blue Hill.
And now our fairy
Decorator brightens his shop for fall;
His fishnet's filled with orange cork,
Orange, his cobbler's bench and awl;
There is no money in his work,
He'd rather marry. | One dark night,
My Tudor Ford climbed the hill's skull;
I watched for love-cars. Lights turned down,
They lay together, hull to hull,
Where the graveyard shelves on the town. . . .
My mind's not right. | A car radio bleats,
“Love, O careless Love. . . . I hear
My ill-spirit sob in each blood cell, | Robert Lowell is essential stalking a couple being intimate (possibly voyeurism) in a car, he acknowledges his strange behaviour stating ‘My mind’s not right’ Robert Lowell suffered from bipolar disorder | Robert Lowell | Skunk Hour |
We were very tired, we were very merry—
We had gone back and forth all night on the ferry.
It was bare and bright, and smelled like a stable—
But we looked into a fire, we leaned across a table,
We lay on a hill-top underneath the moon;
And the whistles kept blowing, and the dawn came soon.
We were very tired, we were very merry—
We had gone back and forth all night on the ferry;
And you ate an apple, and I ate a pear,
From a dozen of each we had bought somewhere;
And the sky went wan, and the wind came cold, | And the sun rose dripping, a bucketful of gold. | We were very tired, we were very merry,
We had gone back and forth all night on the ferry.
We hailed "Good morrow, mother!" to a shawl-covered head, | Just like the end of the previous stanza, the sun rises, yet again, symbolizing the end of yet another adventure. Except this time, the sunrise is described in a more languid way, giving us an image of a honey hive rather than a sun.
The “bucketful of gold” gives us an image of the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, a symbol for wealth, as well as luck. It is also a fantasy belonging to fairy-tales. | Edna St. Vincent Millay | Recuerdo |
Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole, | I thank whatever gods may be | For my unconquerable soul.
In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud. | “Gods” is written with no capital letter and “whatever” and “may” strengthen the idea that the author wants the readers to refer to their own beliefs, rather than assume or impose a universal religion. It’s not important which God or entity you believe in, as long as it’s your point of reference when in need. | William Ernest Henley | Invictus |
Reule weel thiself, that other folk canst reede;
And trouthe schal delyvere, it is no drede.
Tempest the nought al croked to redresse,
In trust of hire that tourneth as a bal.
Myche wele stant in litel besynesse;
Bywar therfore to spurne ayeyns an al;
Stryve not as doth the crokke with the wal.
Daunte thiself, that dauntest otheres dede;
And trouthe shal delyvere, it is no drede.
That the is sent, receyve in buxumnesse;
The wrestlyng for the worlde axeth a fal.
Here is non home, here nys but wyldernesse. | Forth, pylgryme, forth! forth, beste, out of thi stal! | Know thi contré! loke up! thonk God of al!
Hold the heye weye, and lat thi gost the lede;
And trouthe shal delyvere, it is no drede. | “Stal” means stall evoking to the reader a sense that they are stuck in their present state and can’t remove themselves from it. Chaucer urges them to move away from their stable existences and experience something out of their comfort zone. He also refers to his readers as pilgrims, which means persons who are on a journey ( ). He refers to them as though they have already undergone this journey to inspire them more. | Geoffrey Chaucer | Truth |
What I am telling you is real and is printed in a warning on the
map. Our forgetfulness stalks us, walks the earth behind us, leav-
ing a trail of paper diapers, needles, and wasted blood.
An imperfect map will have to do, little one.
The place of entry is the sea of your mother's blood, your father's
small death as he longs to know himself in another.
There is no exit.
The map can be interpreted through the wall of the intestine—a
spiral on the road of knowledge.
You will travel through the membrane of death, smell cooking
from the encampment where our relatives make a feast of fresh
deer meat and corn soup, in the Milky Way. | They have never left us; we abandoned them for science. | And when you take your next breath as we enter the fifth world
there will be no X, no guidebook with words you can carry.
You will have to navigate by your mother's voice, renew the song | Greater spiritual connection that humanity can no longer see/recognize has been abandoned because of the prevalence of science in our culture | Joy Harjo | A Map to the Next World |
He knew in the hour he died
That his heart had never spoken
In eighty years of days.
O for the tall tower broken
Memorial is denied: | And the unchanging cairn | The pipes could set ablaze
An aaronsrod and blossom.
They stood by the graveside | A ciarn is an ancient burial mound, a pile of stones, appropriate to a poem about the death of a once formidable man. That it is ‘unchanging’ implies the grandfather’s implacability.
| James K. Baxter | Elegy for My Fathers Father |
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
When far away an interrupted cry
Came over houses from another street
But not to call me back or say good-bye; | And further still at an unearthly height | One luminary clock against the sky
Proclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right.
I have been one acquainted with the night. | “Unearthly” can often be used to mean “haunting” or “ominous” and the word conveys the dark tone that is present in this poem.
This line also leads into the next and follows the double entendre of the clock representing a literal tower clock or the moon. In the case of the moon, it would be literally at an “unearthly hight” because it isn’t on the earth. | Robert Frost | Acquainted with the Night |
My head, my heart, mine eyes, my life, nay more,
My joy, my magazine, of earthly store,
If two be one, as surely thou and I, | How stayest thou there, whilst I at Ipswich lie? | So many steps, head from the heart to sever,
If but a neck, soon should we be together.
I, like the Earth this season, mourn in black, | Bradstreet asks of her absent husband “how can you stay there, away” while she remains home in Ipswich.
Founded in 1630, Ipswich is a coastal town in Essex County, Massachusetts located north of Boston. Ipswich was a town of farmers, fishermen, shipbuilders, and traders that in the latter half of the seventeenth century became known for lace-making. A 1687 tax protest by Ipswich residents led to the ouster of royal governor Sir Edmund Andros and the end of plans to unite the English North American colonies under one administration. | Anne Bradstreet | A Letter to Her Husband Absent upon Public Employment |
And sleepe (deaths Image) did my senses hyre,
From Knowledge of my selfe, then thoughts did move
Swifter than those, most switnesse neede require?
In sleepe, a chariot drawn by wind'd Desire,
I saw; where sate bright Venus, Queen of Love,
And at her feete her Sonne, still adding Fire
To burning hearts, which she did hold above,
But one heart flaming more than all the rest,
The Goddesse held, and put it to my breast,
Dear Sonne, now shut, said she, thus must we winne.
He her obey'd, and martyr'd my poore heart.
I waking hop'd as dreams it would depart, | Yet since, O me, a Lover have I beene. | null | Referencing Amphilantus (Meaning ‘Lover of Two’), Pamphalia’s lover. | Lady Mary Wroth | When nights black mantle could most darkness prove |
The filings from my fingernails are
Semi-precious jewels
On a trip north
I caught a cold and blew
My nose giving oil to the Arab world
I am so hip even my errors are correct
I sailed west to reach east and had to round off
The earth as I went
The hair from my head thinned and gold was laid
Across three continents
I am so perfect so divine so ethereal so surreal
I cannot be comprehended except by my permission | I mean...I...can fly
Like a bird in the sky | null | A play on the pop culture phrase “fly,” meaning amazing/great. The speaker compares herself to a bird to further illustrate her coolness and literary ability to “fly.”
Also a quotation from “ I Can’t Get Next to You ,” a then-recent hit by The Temptations.
| Nikki Giovanni | Ego-Tripping there may be a reason |
Or solemnly
As pines are sober
When they stand etched
Against the sky
Hating you shall be a game
Played with cool hands
And slim fingers
Your heart will yearn
For the lonely splendor
Of the pine tree
While rekindled fires
In my eyes | Shall wound you like swift arrows | Memory will lay its hands
Upon your breast
And you will understand | Here the speaker explicitly identifies the previously implied arrows. However, she no longer needs this weapon since her fire has been “rekindled” and can thus inflict similar damage. | Gwendolyn B. Bennett | Hatred |
Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence: | Two roads diverged in a wood, and I--
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference. | null | These famous final lines are often quoted as presenting a stark choice between originality and conformity, boldness and timidity. As the poem’s context makes clear, though, the situation isn’t that simple: the paths are “really about the same,” with one only slightly less traveled than the other. There’s risk and opportunity cost involved in taking either.
However, although the paths were similar, he imagines himself later telling people that he made a monumental decision. (By taking the perceived “less traveled” path, he believes he’s committed himself to more risk — but also more potential reward.) The poem is in part about randomness and the meaning we attempt to force onto our lives in our desire to see ourselves as masters of our fate.
In the last line of the poem, “And that has made all the difference,” does the narrator mean this in a positive way, or negative? Was it a good difference, or not so good?
Finally, if this poem is read aloud in performance, the last line sounds colloquial; everyday speech. It seems to be addressed personally and teasingly to the reader/listener, as if deliberately provoking a misinterpretation.
| Robert Frost | The Road Not Taken |
Feet seem to be saying:
We have come so far, it is over.
Each dead child coiled, a white serpent,
One at each little
Pitcher of milk, now empty.
She has folded
Them back into her body as petals
Of a rose close when the garden
Stiffens and odors bleed
From the sweet, deep throats of the night flower.
The moon has nothing to be sad about,
Staring from her hood of bone. | She is used to this sort of thing. | Her blacks crackle and drag. | All of these images condemning the dead woman, whom Plath sees as the perfect woman, are no different to the condemnation and oppression women have faced for centuries. | Sylvia Plath | Edge |
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
On a pink official form. | Unendowed with wealth or pity, | Little birds with scarlet legs,
Sitting on their speckled eggs,
Eye each flu-infected city. | Auden is here suggesting that the problems of modern civilization and humanity in general are rooted in wealth. Our greed is poisonous.
The serene birds that are without wealth and civilization feel no pity for our self-destructive behavior. | W. H. Auden | The Fall of Rome |
Evenings during the week he took her to see plays in which the brain-clutching heroine was rescued from the palatial home of her guardian, who is cruelly after her bonds, by the hero with the beautiful sentiments. The latter spent most of his time out at soak in pale-green snow storms, busy with a nickel-plated revolver, rescuing aged strangers from villains
Maggie lost herself in sympathy with the wanderers swooning in snow storms beneath happy-hued church windows. And a choir within singing "Joy to the World." To Maggie and the rest of the audience this was transcendental realism. Joy always within, and they, like the actor, inevitably without. Viewing it, they hugged themselves in ecstatic pity of their imagined or real condition
The girl thought the arrogance and granite-heartedness of the magnate of the play was very accurately drawn. She echoed the maledictions that the occupants of the gallery showered on this individual when his lines compelled him to expose his extreme selfishness
Shady persons in the audience revolted from the pictured villainy of the drama. With untiring zeal they hissed vice and applauded virtue. Unmistakably bad men evinced an apparently sincere admiration for virtue
The loud gallery was overwhelmingly with the unfortunate and the oppressed. They encouraged the struggling hero with cries, and jeered the villain, hooting and calling attention to his whiskers. When anybody died in the pale-green snow storms, the gallery mourned. They sought out the painted misery and hugged it as akin
In the hero's erratic march from poverty in the first act, to wealth and triumph in the final one, in which he forgives all the enemies that he has left, he was assisted by the gallery, which applauded his generous and noble sentiments and confounded the speeches of his opponents by making irrelevant but very sharp remarks. Those actors who were cursed with villainy parts were confronted at every turn by the gallery. If one of them rendered lines containing the most subtile distinctions between right and wrong, the gallery was immediately aware if the actor meant wickedness, and denounced him accordingly | The last act was a triumph for the hero, poor and of the masses, the representative of the audience, over the villain and the rich man, his pockets stuffed with bonds, his heart packed with tyrannical purposes, imperturbable amid suffering | Maggie always departed with raised spirits from the showing places of the melodrama. She rejoiced at the way in which the poor and virtuous eventually surmounted the wealthy and wicked. The theatre made her think. She wondered if the culture and refinement she had seen imitated, perhaps grotesquely, by the heroine on the stage, could be acquired by a girl who lived in a tenement house and worked in a shirt factory | The play seems to embody what most immigrants, like Maggie and Pete, want from America. They have an altruistic dream of the wealth and opportunity that America offers the poor. Their American Dream is the idea that the poor will have a chance to succeed.
Maggie and families like hers are constantly disappointed by the reality of America and the tenements. Where they hoped to find streets paved with gold, they instead found poverty and despair. Their villain is the system that continues to keep them impoverished. However, this play also contributes to Maggie’s situation. Instead of working to escape from the tenements, Maggie is waiting for a hero to conquer poverty for her. Because of this passive lifestyle, she depends too much on Pete and is ultimately ruined. | Stephen Crane | The Theater VIII |
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