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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 | The narrator has passed by a “watchman on his beat.” His “beat” is his designated territory as watchman, but could also refer to the continuous, repetitive motion of his feet pacing back and forth. The watchman’s steady “beat” is analogous to the narrator’s continuous walking as both the watchman and the narrator’s actions seem to be endless motions that will not change; the narrator will always walk at night and the watchman will always walk to a steady beat. “Beat” may even evoke the speaker’s own heartbeat and how the sound is mimicked by the watchman’s feet.
| Robert Frost | Acquainted with the Night |
And she is not English,
Historic with guns and vermin
And the cold renown
Of a fragment of Church latin,
Of an oratorical phrase.
But oh the days are soft,
Soft enough to forget
The lesson better learnt,
The bullet on the wet
Streets, the crooked deal,
The steel behind the laugh,
The Four Courts burnt. | Fort of the Dane,
Garrison of the Saxon,
Augustan capital
Of a Gaelic nation,
Appropriating all
The alien brought, | You give me time for thought
And by a juggler's trick
You poise the toppling hour - | Throughout Dublin’s history, it has been dominated by a variety of cultures, including:
The Viking, after the Norse invasion in the 9th century. The ‘fort’ may refer to the walled city that grew up around Wood Quay in Dublin 8, the original site of Viking settlement.
The Norman, whose centre of power was located at Dublin Castle, still inside the walled city.
The English and British, who also used Dublin Castle as a military fortification (“garrison”).
The “Gaelic nation”, or those who sought independence from Britain at the beginning of the 20th century. Their nationalist rhetoric emphasised certain elements of Irish culture, especially Gaelic language and literature. After independence was achieved, Dublin remained Irelands’s capital despite its being the city where these elements were perhaps least in evidence.
Here, MacNeice is suggesting that Dublin is able to appropriate all these influences, and maintain its singular identity.
| Louis MacNeice | Dublin |
Vaguely life leaks away,
And Time will have his fancy
To-morrow or to-day.
'Into many a green valley
Drifts the appalling snow;
Time breaks the threaded dances
And the diver's brilliant bow.
'O plunge your hands in water,
Plunge them in up to the wrist;
Stare, stare in the basin
And wonder what you've missed.
'The glacier knocks in the cupboard, | The desert sighs in the bed, | And the crack in the tea-cup opens
A lane to the land of the dead.
'Where the beggars raffle the banknotes | Deserts are barren and lonely like glaciers , both adjectives being side effects of what Time can do to one.
Time takes away lives the same way deserts do.
| W. H. Auden | As I Walked Out One Evening |
There is a change--and I am poor;
Your love hath been, nor long ago,
A fountain at my fond heart's door,
Whose only business was to flow;
And flow it did; not taking heed
Of its own bounty, or my need.
What happy moments did I count!
Blest was I then all bliss above!
Now, for that consecrated fount
Of murmuring, sparkling, living love,
What have I? Shall I dare to tell?
A comfortless and hidden well. | A well of love--it may be deep-- | I trust it is,--and never dry:
What matter? If the waters sleep
In silence and obscurity. | This contrasts the original metaphor for their love which was a ‘fountain’. A fountain suggests an overflow of positive emotions. A ‘well’ is ‘deep’ and suggests hidden sadness. One thinks of expressions like ‘well of loneliness’. This shows how their relationship has changed over time. | William Wordsworth | A Complaint |
From my bed | I watch
3 birds
On a telephone
Wire. | One flies
Off.
Then | Interestingly, birds were a reoccuring theme of Bukowski poems; Bluebird , The Girls and the Birds , and The Mockingbird all show his preoccupation with the animal, possibly shedding light on the fact that Bukowski spent much of his time alone in his one bedroom apartments , only able to draw inspiration from the chattering birds outside. | Charles Bukowski | 8 Count |
I remember you well in the Chelsea Hotel
You were talking so brave and so sweet
Givin' me head on the unmade bed | While the limousines wait in the street | Those were the reasons, that was New York
We were runnin' for the money and the flesh
And that was called love for the workers in song | Being two well known musicians, Leonard and Janis are taken from place to place in limousines. Notice the contrast between their mode of transportation – usually seen as classy and elegant – and the
The waiting limousines (two) also emphasize the briefness of the encounter and the different routes they would take in life. they both went on their own ways – as Leonard said in an interview. | Leonard Cohen | Chelsea Hotel No. 2 |
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.
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: | Despite the troubles he’s probably already overcome and those that will come in the future, the speaker is not afraid to face them. He uses both the present and future tenses—he’s confident that this is how he is and will be. He doesn’t fear what may come, no matter how dangerous, frightening or violent.
He seems to be setting up the last part of the poem here; he will always stand unafraid. | William Ernest Henley | Invictus |
In the ‘94
We all sang
Skipping and dancing hand in hand
Yeah with all the boys together
And all the girls together
[Chorus]
She's the last of the English roses
She's the last of the English roses
(She hardly spoke a word of the language)
She knows her Rodneys from her Stanleys
And her Kappas from her Reeboks
And her tit from her tat | And Winstons from her Enochs | It's fine and take what I
Coming out, coming alive
Round the Snooker table | refers to English politicians Winston Churchill and Enoch Powell
| Pete Doherty | The Last of the English Roses |
Wee, sleekit, cowrin, tim'rous beastie
O, what panic's in thy breastie!
Thou need na start awa sae hasty
Wi' bickering brattle!
I wad be laith to rin an' chase thee
Wi' murd'ring pattle! | I'm truly sorry Man's dominion
Has broken Nature's social union
An' justifies that ill opinion
Which makes thee startle
At me, thy poor, earth-born companion
An' fellow-mortal! | I doubt na, whyles, but thou may thieve;
What then? poor beastie, thou maun live!
A daimen-icker in a thrave | Rough English translation:
I’m truly sorry man’s dominion Has broken Nature’s social union, And justifies that ill opinion Which makes thee startle At me, thy poor, earth born companion And fellow mortal!
Burns acknowledges that the mouse is abiding nature by being in the ground, while he’s trying to control nature’s course by planting the field. Thus the mouse’s anguish is justified. He takes the relationship with the mouse to a personal level by apologizing for the entirety of mankind. The speaker represents all of mankind while the mouse represents the whole natural world. The old English use of the word “thee” shows friendliness and familiarity the speaker as with the mouse.
Burns refers to"Man’s dominion" compromising the integrity of nature, and the specific instance of the speaker destroying the mouse’s home. He also identifies an “ill opinion” of the mouse “at me,” suggesting the mouse as being predisposed against man——nature predisposed against man.
The poem was composed during the Industrial Revolution , furthering the idea of man disturbing the natural environment.
In the last two lines, as follows … “At me, thy poor, earth-born companion And fellow mortal!” … Burns gives the speaker a voice similar to the tone commonly used by the Romantic poets. Throughout the poem there is an emphasis on the strained relationship between nature and man. The speaker desires a stronger relationship with nature, and shows it by considering one of its smallest creatures as a fellow mortal and companion worthy of his empathy.
It is also worth noting, here, that the mouse in the poem is female. This stanza, in itself, is not specific in any way to mice or animals: indeed, it can be read as a statement from a human man to a human woman, expressing sorrow for the true threat men represent to women. This could be seen as an early form of male feminism. | Robert Burns | To a Mouse |
If but some vengeful god would call to me
From up the sky, and laugh: "Thou suffering thing,
Know that thy sorrow is my ecstasy,
That thy love's loss is my hate's profiting!"
Then would I bear it, clench myself, and die,
Steeled by the sense of ire unmerited;
Half-eased in that a Powerfuller than I
Had willed and meted me the tears I shed.
But not so. How arrives it joy lies slain,
And why unblooms the best hope ever sown?
—Crass Casualty obstructs the sun and rain, | And dicing Time for gladness casts a moan. . . . | These purblind Doomsters had as readily strown
Blisses about my pilgrimage as pain. | Time, much like Fate, is a slashing killer, here laying to waste gladness while offering a guttural eulogy on its behalf:
| Thomas Hardy | Hap |
"Such, such were the joys
When we all, girls and boys
In our youth time were seen
On the Echoing Green."
Till the little ones, weary
No more can be merry
The sun does descend
And our sports have an end
Round the laps of their mothers
Many sisters and brother
Like birds in their nest
Are ready for rest | And sport no more seen | On the darkening Green | This is an odd line, in which there is a transition. If the Green is ‘Echoing’ it should surely refer to the next community celebration. But maybe, from the point of view of the old people, this is the reality. | William Blake | The Echoing Green |
Elizabeth it is in vain you say
'Love not' — thou sayest it in so sweet a way:
In vain those words from thee or L. E. L. | Zantippe's talents had enforced so well: | Ah! if that language from thy heart arise,
Breathe it less gently forth — and veil thine eyes.
Endymion, recollect, when Luna tried | You can tell Poe is struggling here. He’s spelling “Elizabeth” with the first letter of each line, so instead of going with the less-than-romantic “zebra,” he chose to use this ( very ) alternative spelling of Xanthippe , the wife of Socrates.
| Edgar Allan Poe | An Acrostic |
Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun,
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. | Compare the Greek legend of Sisyphus, condemned to push a boulder to the top of a mountain, only to have it roll back down each time. (See Homer’s Odyssey, Book XI.)
Every year at “spring mending-time” the two neighbors return to repair the wall that doesn’t need to be there in the first place–on and on, endlessly. One gets the sense that the speaker may be feeling frustrated (walled in?) by the nature of his task.
Titian, Sisyphus, c. 1548 | Robert Frost | Mending Wall |
When I think about myself,
I almost laugh myself to death,
My life has been one great big joke,
A dance that's walked | A song that's spoke, | I laugh so hard I almost choke
When I think about myself.
Sixty years in these folks' world | A song is meant to be vibrant, soulful, happy, and sung loud. The speaker views their life as a song that has been spoken, slow with no emotion and a complete failure.
| Maya Angelou | When I Think About Myself |
Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.
My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake | The darkest evening of the year. | He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound's the sweep | On the surface this refers to the winter solstice here, but upon closer examination it may have, well, darker connotations.
The “darkest evening of the year” could suggest the speaker’s own psychological state. Perhaps he has something negative weighing on him, taking his mind to darker places than it’s gone before. Some critics have even read this as a reference to suicidal despair–a reading that Frost publicly resisted:
Indeed, critics sometimes set his teeth on edge with intimations about personal themes in the poem, as if it expressed a wish quite literally for suicide or marked some especially dark passage in the poet’s life. Louis Mertins quotes him in conversation (and similar remarks may be found in transcripts of a number of Frost’s public readings):
“I suppose people think I lie awake nights worrying about what people like [John] Ciardi of the Saturday Review write and publish about me [in 19S8]….He makes my ‘Stopping By Woods’ out a death poem. Well, it would be like this if it were. I’d say, ‘This is all very lovely, but I must be getting on to heaven.’ There’d be no absurdity in that. That’s all right, but it’s hardly a death poem. Just as if I should say here tonight, "This is all very well, but I must be getting on to Phoenix, Arizona, to lecture there.”
–Mark Richardson, The Ordeal of Robert Frost: The Poet and His Poetics (1997)
| Robert Frost | Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening |
I climb to greet the war in which I have no heart but only
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, | Upheaval: a violent or sudden change or disruption to something.
War created a cleanliness, after the war so much has been destroyed it is basically like a new beginning, like spring. The snow melts, and sun comes out and it is a new beginning of life. | Dylan Thomas | Holy Spring |
Made my heart swell, and still it grew
While I debated what to do.
That moment she was mine, mine, fair,
Perfectly pure and good: I found
A thing to do, and all her hair
In one long yellow string I wound
Three times her little throat around,
And strangled her. No pain felt she;
I am quite sure she felt no pain.
As a shut bud that holds a bee,
I warily oped her lids: again
Laughed the blue eyes without a stain. | And I untightened next the tress | About her neck; her cheek once more
Blushed bright beneath my burning kiss:
I propped her head up as before | The narrator tells the story in a methodical manner, as if he is, say, unplaiting her hair to make her prettier. This is another manifestation of his madness. | Robert Browning | Porphyria’s Lover |
I said to Love,
"It is not now as in old days
When men adored thee and thy ways
All else above;
Named thee the Boy, the Bright, the One
Who spread a heaven beneath the sun,"
I said to Love. | I said to him, | "We now know more of thee than then;
We were but weak in judgment when,
With hearts abrim, | Having given the allegorical Love a capital letter, Hardy now refers to ‘him’; an ordinary pronoun. This is the point where we can speculate that the older Hardy is referring to his younger self.
The poet repeats ‘I said to him’ at the end of the stanza, establishing the same pattern as the first, so that the rhythmic quality is reinforced. | Thomas Hardy | I Said to Love |
Drink to me only with thine eyes,
And I will pledge with mine;
Or leave a kiss but in the cup,
And I'll not look for wine. | The thirst that from the soul doth rise
Doth ask a drink divine; | But might I of Jove's nectar sup,
I would not change for thine.
I sent thee late a rosy wreath, | His thirst is a spiritual one; he seeks not liquid but the ‘divine’ drink that derives from the soul; in other words ‘love’. Interestingly, there is no hint in this stanza of a sexual attraction. The noun ‘soul’ and the adjective ‘divine’ place his emotions on a level beyond that of the corporeal.
| Ben Jonson | Song To Celia |
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.
Then must I knock, or call when just in sight?
They will not keep you standing at that door.
Shall I find comfort, travel-sore and weak? | Of labour you shall find the sum. | Will there be beds for me and all who seek?
Yea, beds for all who come. | This may mean that the sum of all labour on earth will be considered to test the traveller’s suitability for heaven..
It could also mean that the speaker will find rest in heaven for all the work you have done in life. | Christina Rossetti | Up-hill |
null | 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 | Not a TV screen or a laptop screen – it’s a needlepoint work. It would look a bit like this, except with tigers and hunters on it instead of two women and some flowers:
The opening line paints an embroidered picture of a lush, colorful environment and of tigers, a majestic, strong, and respected creature. The subject on the screen is critical in this poem as tigers are known for their beauty, great strength, and fearlessness. Their prancing across the screen shows that they’re lively and free. There is an implication that Aunt Jennifer wishes she could possess some of these qualities herself.
Denizens refers to “an inhabitant or occupant of a particular place”. | Adrienne Rich | Aunt Jennifers Tigers |
O
Out of a bed of love
When that immortal hospital made one more moove to soothe
The curless counted body,
And ruin his causes
Over the barbed and shooting sea assumed an army
And swept into our wounds and houses,
I climb to greet the war in which I have no heart but only
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 |
A simile and a pun:
Simile: The “holy marker by the sun” is the moon, and since there’s is no life on the moon it is lonely.
Pun: The moon has craters, making it full of holes or “holy.”
It is the marker because we have always used the moon as a calendar. | Dylan Thomas | Holy Spring |
What is this, behind this veil, is it ugly, is it beautiful?
It is shimmering, has it breasts, has it edges?
I am sure it is unique, I am sure it is what I want. | When I am quiet at my cooking I feel it looking, I feel it thinking | 'Is this the one I am too appear for,
Is this the elect one, the one with black eye-pits and a scar?
Measuring the flour, cutting off the surplus, | Internal rhyme or assonance is used in the words ‘cooking’ and ‘looking’. The gift is personified as something that observes and thinks about her, suggesting that she is preoccupied with her ‘gift’ – a metaphorical representation of death. | Sylvia Plath | A Birthday Present |
THE lark is silent in his nest,
The breeze is sighing in its flight,
Sleep, Love, and peaceful be thy rest.
Good-night, my love, good-night, good-night.
Sweet dreams' attend thee in thy sleep,
To soothe thy rest till morning's light, | And angels round thee vigil keep. | Good-night, my love, good-night, good-night.
Sleep well, my love, on night's dark breast,
And ease thy soul with slumber bright; | It is possible that Dunbar is referring to the age-old children’s bedtime prayer, “Now I lay me down to sleep.”
| Paul Laurence Dunbar | Good-Night |
Indeed
Now your age. Perhaps you feel able
To make your own comment about that,
Too? We are conscious ourselves
Of the need for a candidate with precisely
The right degree of immaturity.
So glad we agree
And now a delicate matter: your looks.
You do appreciate this work involves
Contact with the actual public? Might they,
Perhaps, find your appearance
Disturbing? | Quite so | And your accent. That is the way
You have always spoken, is it? What
Of your education? Were | Another meaningless comment to ensure the candidate is undermined. | U. A. Fanthorpe | You will be hearing from us shortly |
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 | The mirror is saying that it will never lie. Nothing the mirror says is personal and everything it will say is what the person looking in already knows.
The dash shortens the line and creates a caesura . The poet is definite and wants no debate. | Sylvia Plath | Mirror |
Parents were afar,
Strangers came not near,
And the maiden soon forgot her fear.
Tired with kisses sweet,
They agree to meet
When the silent sleep
Waves o'er heaven's deep,
And the weary tired wanderers weep.
To her father white
Came the maiden bright;
But his loving look,
Like the holy book | All her tender limbs with terror shook. | 'Ona, pale and weak,
To thy father speak!
Oh the trembling fear! | The repressive nature of convention, which sees sin in the purity of their love-making, has a terrible negative affect on her. She now ‘with terror shook’. Societal constraints destroy her joy. | William Blake | A Little Girl Lost |
I have sharpened my knives, I have
Put on the heavy apron.
Maybe you think life is chicken soup, served
In blue willow-pattern bowls.
I have put on my boots and opened
The kitchen door and stepped out
Into the sunshine. I have crossed the lawn. | I have entered | The hen house. | Mary Oliver is suggesting the person in this poem is going out to kill her chickens for her soup. Life isn’t easy and you have to work for what you create. She has entered her work and struggles. | Mary Oliver | Farm Country |
Earth hath not anything to show more fair:
Dull would he be of soul who could pass by
A sight so touching in its majesty:
This City now doth, like a garment, wear
The beauty of the morning; silent, bare,
Ships, towers, domes, theatres and temples lie
Open unto the fields, and to the sky;
All bright and glittering in the smokeless air. | Never did sun more beautifully steep
In his first splendor, valley, rock, or hill; | Ne'er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep!
The river glideth at his own sweet will:
Dear God! The very houses seem asleep; | Steep means to drop into (like a tea-bag into a cup)—Wordsworth proclaims that the sun has never before shone as beautifully.
The ‘valley, rock, or hill’ makes up another lexical field , this time of the countryside. Wordsworth is saying that the sun bathes the city as beautifully as it does the countryside. | William Wordsworth | Composed upon Westminster Bridge September 3 1802 |
Till you fix this house up new.
What? You gonna get eviction orders?
You gonna cut off my heat?
You gonna take my furniture and
Throw it in the street?
Um-huh! You talking high and mighty.
Talk on-till you get through.
You ain't gonna be able to say a word
If I land my fist on you.
Police! Police!
Come and get this man!
He's trying to ruin the government | And overturn the land! | Copper's whistle!
Patrol bell!
Arrest. | Hughes presents a situation where the tenant threatens to fight back against his landlord’s treatment. This stanza represents the predominantly white society’s reaction to the threat of change, specifically in regards to a movement against the oppression and prejudice inflicted on the black man. | Langston Hughes | The Ballad Of The Landlord |
TELL me not, Sweet, I am unkind,
That from the nunnery
Of thy chaste breast and quiet mind
To war and arms I fly.
True, a new mistress now I chase,
The first foe in the field; | And with a stronger faith embrace
A sword, a horse, a shield. | Yet this inconstancy is such
As thou too shalt adore;
I could not love thee, Dear, so much, | The nouns ‘faith’ and ‘nunnery’ have religious overtones. The poet conflates religion and his desire to fight.
There is a rhythmic neatness abut the triplet of nouns in the last line. a lexical field relating to war. There are no conjunctions, so this forms a concise asyndetic list . | Richard Lovelace | To Lucasta Going to the Wars |
And mark in every face I meet
Marks of weakness, marks of woe.
In every cry of every man,
In every Infant's cry of fear,
In every voice: in every ban,
The mind-forged manacles I hear.
How the Chimney-sweeper's cry
Every blackning church appalls;
And the hapless Soldier's sigh
Runs in blood down Palace walls.
But most thro' midnight streets I hear
How the youthful Harlot's curse | Blasts the new-born Infant's tear, | And blights with plagues the Marriage hearse.
| The harlot’s curse from the line before even sullies the cry of the innocent. Babies born to syphilitic mothers (who had been infected by husbands who frequented brothels) had painful seeping eyes. Of course, new born babies cry, but Blake is suggesting that even this is connected to the oppression endured by those living in London— through syphilis and sexually transmitted diseases that found their way into the “marriage hearse”, connecting the sex trade to the bonds of wedlock and childhood. | William Blake | London |
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 | Law 47. Do Not Go Past The Mark You Aimed For; In Victory, Learn When To Stop | Law 48. Assume Formlessness | “The moment of victory is often the moment of greatest peril. In the heat of victory, arrogance and overconfidence can push you past the goal you had aimed for, and by going too far, you make more enemies than you defeat. Do not allow success to go to your head. There is no substitute for strategy and careful planning. Set a goal, and when you reach it, stop.” – Robert Greene | Robert Greene | 48 Laws of Power |
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
Where Security Councils gather to preserve comfort | Kant may have given us too much credit when he said all humans are rational beings . Many people depend on cognitive biases more often than logic, usually resulting in prejudice and misplaced judgment. They are heavily dependent on environment, i.e., culture and society. Our mind naturally forms biases, but they are not innate.
Biases are mental shortcuts that are highly adaptive for simple problems, but when things become more complex they can be devastating if not recognized and compensated for. There are hundreds of biases that have all been well-established by empirical studies. Don’t think you have any? Yup, that’s called illusory superiority.
Many biases help us save face in our own mind. | Saul Williams | FCK THE BELIEFS |
null | The night has a thousand eyes, | And the day but one;
Yet the light of the bright world dies
With the dying sun. | This can be interpreted as referring to the stars in the night sky, reflections of the sun’s light when it is on the opposite hemisphere. They are eyes because they are how we would see, given that his context was the 19th century without light pollution from street lights. Currently, it is estimated that our universe has anything from 400 billion stars to a septillion The scientists of those times could have recorded 9,000 stars, therefore describing the number as a thousand is a definitely quasi-quantifiable statement.
| Francis William Bourdillon | The Night Has a Thousand Eyes |
THE YOUNG MASTER ASKS FOR A STORY
Whut you say, dah? huh, uh! chile,
You 's enough to dribe me wile.
Want a sto'y; jes' hyeah dat!
Whah' 'll I git a sto'y at?
Di'n' I tell you th'ee las' night? | Go 'way, honey, you ain't right.
I got somep'n' else to do, | 'Cides jes' tellin' tales to you.
Tell you jes' one? Lem me see
Whut dat one's a-gwine to be. | The speaker is dismissing the person because he already told them the night before, and he has something more important to do than repeat the tale.
| Paul Laurence Dunbar | A Cabin Tale |
His groping dreams with grinding claws and fangs.
But someone was beside him; soon he lay
Shuddering because that evil thing had passed.
And death, who'd stepped toward him, paused and stared.
Light many lamps and gather round his bed.
Lend him your eyes, warm blood, and will to live.
Speak to him; rouse him; you may save him yet.
He's young; he hated war; how should he die
When cruel old campaigners win safe through?
But death replied: “I choose him.” So he went,
And there was silence in the summer night;
Silence and safety; and the veils of sleep. | Then, far away, the thudding of the guns. | null | But it is not a resolution. The final line alerts the reader to what will continue for the rest of the War and for future wars to come. The simple line “… far away, the thudding of the guns” resumes the horror, picks up again the harsh, onomatopoeic sounds of violent conflict. | Siegfried Sassoon | The Death Bed |
Little poppies, little hell flames,
Do you do no harm?
You flicker. I cannot touch you.
I put my hands among the flames. Nothing burns. | And it exhausts me to watch you | Flickering like that, wrinkly and clear red, like the skin of a mouth.
A mouth just bloodied.
Little bloody skirts! | She is depressed by watching happy people around her. Finding ways to be happy herself exhausts her. | Sylvia Plath | Poppies in July |
null | Thank Heaven! the crisis-
The danger is past, | And the lingering illness
Is over at last-
And the fever called "Living" | He is finally dead, and doesn’t face the pain of dying anymore. | Edgar Allan Poe | For Annie |
Do you know the warm progress under the stars?
Do you know we exist?
Have you forgotten the keys to the kingdom?
Have you been born yet, and are you alive?
Let's reinvent the gods, all the myths of the ages
Celebrate symbols from deep elder forests
Have you forgotten the lessons of the ancient war?
We need great golden copulations
The fathers are cackling in trees of the forest
Our mother is dead in the sea
Do you know we are being lead to slaughter by placid admirals
And that fat slow generals are getting obscene on young blood? | Do you know we are ruled by T.V.? | The moon is a dry blood beast
Guerrilla bands are rolling numbers
In the next block of green vine |
In this line, Morrison talks about the enslavement of people’s mind, induced by the exposure to filtered information present on every households' TV. This message of closure and of us being prisioners of our own mechanized brains is conveyed throughout the poem.
Jim Morrsion also used to shout “Wake up” in many Doors' concerts, inciting his audience to refresh their mind and free themselves from the ties enclosing it. | Jim Morrison | An American Prayer |
The darkness crumbles away.
It is the same old druid Time as ever,
Only a live thing leaps my hand,
A queer sardonic rat,
As I pull the parapet's poppy
To stick behind my ear. | Droll rat, they would shoot you if they knew | Your cosmopolitan sympathies.
Now you have touched this English hand
You will do the same to a German | The poet begins to address the rat, who is now ‘droll’, a sardonic example of anthropomorphism . A rat doesn’t have a human sense of humour.
This echoes the style of John Donne, who would address the ‘unruly sun’ or the flea in the poem of the same name. | Isaac Rosenberg | Break of Day in the Trenches |
The Soul selects her own Society —
Then — shuts the Door —
To her divine Majority —
Present no more —
Unmoved — she notes the Chariots — pausing —
At her low Gate —
Unmoved — an Emperor be kneeling
Upon her Mat —
I've known her — from an ample nation —
Choose One —
Then — close the Valves of her attention — | Like Stone — | C. 1862 | The simile helps to emphasize and dramatize the ending. Dickinson leaves the poem without a full stop and with an incomplete line, leaving us to assume this is not fully concluded. The reader might wonder if the poet is hesitating about becoming a recluse, And yet this isn’t likely, as implied by the unfeeling, abrupt nature of the “Stone” referred to at the end. | Emily Dickinson | The Soul selects her own Society 303 |
null | One is a creeper who's sleepy in his shell | Two is a hopper and he hops very well
Three is a flopper and his flippers flap
Four is a jumper with a jump-in lap | An aptly described snail (a snail with no shell is a slug.)
| John Ciardi | Guess |
This light conducts
The thoughts of drunkards, the feelings
Of widows and trembling ladies,
The movements of fishes.
How pleasant an existence it is
That this emerald charms philosophers,
Until they become thoughtlessly willing
To bathe their hearts in later moonlight,
Knowing that they can bring back thought
In the night that is still to be silent,
Reflecting this thing and that,
Before they sleep. | It is better that, as scholars,
They should think hard in the dark cuffs
Of voluminous cloaks,
And shave their heads and bodies. | It might well be that their mistress
Is no gaunt fugitive phantom.
She might, after all, be a wanton, | Stevens offers a conflated image of philosophers like Plato, who sought to strip away the faculties of human perception to get the essence of things (his idea of the “Forms”), and religious philosophers, who sought to deny outright sensual pleasures in an effort to get closer to God.
| Wallace Stevens | Homunculus et La Belle Etoile |
The highway is full of big cars going nowhere fast
And folks is smoking anything that'll burn
Some people wrap their lives around a cocktail glass
And you sit wondering
where you're going to turn.
I got it.
Come. And be my baby.
Some prophets say the world is gonna end tomorrow
But others say we've got a week or two | The paper is full of every kind of blooming horror | And you sit wondering
what you're gonna do.
I got it. | The newspaper tells a lot of news that is frightening.
| Maya Angelou | Come And Be My Baby |
So, we'll go no more a-roving
So late into the night,
Though the heart be still as loving,
And the moon be still as bright.
For the sword outwears its sheath,
And the soul wears out the breast,
And the heart must pause to breathe,
And Love itself have rest. | Though the night was made for loving, | And the day returns too soon,
Yet we'll go no more a-roving
By the light of the moon. | This is a sentiment that has existed for as long as human beings exist. It has now become a cliche, repeated in pop songs, though it may not have been when Byron wrote this.
| Lord Byron | So well go no more a-roving |
null | The fire in leaf and grass | so green it seems
each summer the last summer.
The wind blowing, the leaves | Here, the speaker places us in the most poetic of seasons, autumn, by describing leaves turning red while the grass is not yet brown.
Describing the color as “fire” also evokes the apocalyptic tone of the entire poem, which seeks to elevate the beauty of the everyday by pointing out its ephemerality.
We also see how Levertov uses enjambment to create ambiguity and tension–in the first line, the fire seems to be in the grass, but no, it is still “so green.” We can see the end, but it has not yet come. She will do this again, and use caesura to complicate matters further. This can be seen as form echoing content–the world may seem simple, but it is riddled with connections and miracles. | Denise Levertov | Living |
New burnished joys,
Which yellow gold and pearls excel!
Such sacred treasures are the limbs in boys,
In which a soul doth dwell;
Their organizèd joints and azure veins
More wealth include than all the world contains.
From dust I rise,
And out of nothing now awake;
These brighter regions which salute mine eyes,
A gift from God I take.
The earth, the seas, the light, the day, the skies,
The sun and stars are mine if those I prize. | Long time before
I in my mother's womb was born,
A God, preparing, did this glorious store,
The world, for me adorn. | Into this Eden so divine and fair,
So wide and bright, I come His son and heir.
A stranger here | Traherne’s speaker is confidently declaring that God created the world all that is in it long before his birth.
“In my mother’s womb” is a reference from several Bible verses, especially Psalm 139:13-14: “For thou hast possessed my reins: thou hast covered me in my mother’s womb. I will praise thee; for I am fearfully and wonderfully made: marvellous are thy works; and that my soul knoweth right well.” | Thomas Traherne | The Salutation |
Many fine speeches (oh yeah)
From the White House desk (uh huh)
Written on the cue cards
That were never really there
Yes, but the heat and the summer were there
And the freezing winter's cold
Now tell me,
Who'll pay reparations on my soul?
Call my brother a junkie cause he ain't got no job (no job, no job)
Told my old man to leave me when times got hard (so hard)
Told my mother she got to carry me all by herself
And now that I want to be a man (be a man) who can depend on no one else (oh yeah) | What about the red man
Who met you at the coast?
You never dig sharing,
Always had to have the most | And what about Mississippi,
The boundary of old?
Tell me, | Amerika’s conquering of North America was possible only through the extermination of the Native Americans. Regardless of how schools in Amerika today portray this history, there is only one word to describe what happened – genocide.
| Gil Scott-Heron | Wholl Pay Reparations on My Soul? |
Of heaven's meditation, yoking wave
To kneeling wave, one song devoutly binds—
The vernal strophe chimes from deathless strings!
O Thou steeled Cognizance whose leap commits
The agile precincts of the lark's return;
Within whose lariat sweep encinctured sing
In single chrysalis the many twain,—
Of stars Thou art the stitch and stallion glow
And like an organ, Thou, with sound of doom—
Sight, sound and flesh Thou leadest from time's realm
As love strikes clear direction for the helm.
Swift peal of secular light, intrinsic Myth | Whose fell unshadow is death's utter wound,— | O River-throated—iridescently upborne
Through the bright drench and fabric of our veins;
With white escarpments swinging into light, | “Fell” is used here in the archaic sense of “fierce, terrible.” Compare Hamlet’s death speech:
…as this fell sergeant, death, / Is strict in his arrest…
“Unshadow” is light, but light conceived as the opposite of shadow, a negation of shadow. It is fierce and terrible toward death–in fact, it kills death and affirms life. “Utter wound” means a fatal wound (as in the archaic expression “to the utterance”: to the death), but also suggests the uttering of speech, myth, poetry, which (Crane implies) is what slays death.
…death, thou shalt die. –John Donne | Hart Crane | Atlantis |
The plaster dropping, even dripping, down,
The mouse, the moss, the woman on the shore . . .
III
If the mouse should swallow the steeple, in its time . . .
It was a theologian's needle, much
Too sharp for that. The shore, the sea, the sun,
Their brilliance through the lattices, crippled
The chandeliers, their morning glazes spread
In opal blobs along the walls and floor.
IV
Look down now, Cotton Mather, from the blank.
Was heaven where you thought? It must be there. | It must be where you think it is, in the light | On bed-clothes, in an apple on a plate.
It is the honey-comb of the seeing man.
It is the leaf the bird brings back to the boat. | An example of Stevens’s idea that man should worship reality and nature rather than something beyond our own existence. | Wallace Stevens | The Blue Buildings in the Summer Air |
They kneel beside each other
As if they were in a trance,
Then Jane lifts up her dress
And John pulls down his pants.
Everyone knows what happens,
Or what two people do
When one is on top of the other
Making a great to-do.
The wind blows through the tunnel
Trying to find the sky.
Jane is breathing her hardest,
And John begins to sigh: | 'I'm a Princeton professor
God knows what drove me to this.
I have a wife and family;
I've known marital bliss. | 'But things were turning humdrum,
And I felt I was being false.
Every night in our bedroom | This is the “apparent weakness” that John has, this is why he is so willing to accept defeat, because he knows it’s not morally right for him to cheat on his wife.
This is all we needed to know about John to realize that he has established a successful (in society’s terms) life for himself.
He’s known marital bliss but that simply doesn’t fit the amount of pleasure that he desires; he craves something more. | Mark Strand | The Couple |
Away! the moor is dark beneath the moon,
Rapid clouds have drank the last pale beam of even:
Away! the gathering winds will call the darkness soon,
And profoundest midnight shroud the serene lights of heaven.
Pause not! The time is past! Every voice cries, Away!
Tempt not with one last tear thy friend's ungentle mood:
Thy lover's eye, so glazed and cold, dares not entreat thy stay:
Duty and dereliction guide thee back to solitude.
Away, away! to thy sad and silent home;
Pour bitter tears on its desolated hearth;
Watch the dim shades as like ghosts they go and come,
And complicate strange webs of melancholy mirth. | The leaves of wasted autumn woods shall float around thine head:
The blooms of dewy spring shall gleam beneath thy feet: | But thy soul or this world must fade in the frost that binds the dead,
Ere midnight's frown and morning's smile, ere thou and peace may meet.
The cloud shadows of midnight possess their own repose, | A metaphor for the aged disillusionment present in the thoughts of the person Shelley is addressing the poem to, and the contrasting youth and beauty in their body.
| Percy Bysshe Shelley | Stanzas.—April 1814 |
null | Drink to me only with thine eyes, | And I will pledge with mine;
Or leave a kiss but in the cup,
And I'll not look for wine. | The first stanza establishes drink as a metaphor for love. It opens with an imperative; the speaker wants the woman to focus her feelings through her eyes. This follows an age-old concept of the eyes being the means to project emotions, a wordless language. Here, their gazes to each other are so intoxicating that they do not need alcohol.
The word ‘only’ is ambiguous. It could mean ‘drink only to me and no-one else’ or ‘it is only eyes that should be means to convey emotions, not words or actions.’ Both apply. | Ben Jonson | Song To Celia |
And women and Sunday
All mixed with dimes and
Dollars and clean spittoons
And house rent to pay.
Hey, boy!
A bright bowl of brass is beautiful to the Lord.
Bright polished brass like the cymbals
Of King David's dancers,
Like the wine cups of Solomon.
Hey, boy!
A clean spittoon on the altar of the Lord.
A clean bright spittoon all newly polished— | At least I can offer that. | Com'mere, boy! | We get a closing sense that even though we cannot do everything– get all the spittoons shined, or bills paid– we can get some things done and make some progress. The boy in the poem still can get the spittoons shined and can worship the lord and provide offerings no matter how much or how little. While the words appear to be those of a defeated person, there is also a feeling of hope and satisfaction; there is something even the spittoon cleaner can offer to his god.
But notice that this isn’t quite the final line… | Langston Hughes | Brass Spittoons |
The two executioners stalk along over the knolls,
Bearing two axes with heavy heads shining and wide,
And a long limp two-handled saw toothed for cutting great boles,
And so they approach the proud tree that bears the death-mark on its side. | Jackets doffed they swing axes and chop away just above ground, | And the chips fly about and lie white on the moss and fallen leaves;
Till a broad deep gash in the bark is hewn all the way round,
And one of them tries to hook upward a rope, which at last he achieves. | The workmen have taken their jackets off, and begin to chop away at the trunk of the tree, very close to the ground so there is not much of a stump leftover. | Thomas Hardy | Throwing a Tree |
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…”
Hughes makes similar use of parentheses in Let America Be America Again to capture the relative voiceless of African Americans in comparison with the privileged voices of, in this case, popular Dixie music and ideology. | Langston Hughes | Song for a Dark Girl |
The word of a snail on the plate of a leaf?
It is not mine. Do not accept it.
Acetic acid in a sealed tin?
Do not accept it. It is not genuine.
A ring of gold with the sun in it?
Lies. Lies and a grief.
Frost on a leaf, the immaculate
Cauldron, talking and crackling
All to itself on top of each
Of nine black Alps. | A disturbance in mirrors, | The sea shattering its grey one--
Love, love, my season. | That is, a disturbance in the objects used to view oneself. This suggests a disintegration of self as well as a disintegration of love. | Sylvia Plath | The Couriers |
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 - | Wool comes from sheep and is often fluffy and white (alabaster) .
Alabaster is a type of stone. In a single compressed metaphor, Dickinson is implying that that snow feels like wool that’s cold as stone. | Emily Dickinson | It sifts from Leaden Sieves - 311 |
Round the cape of a sudden came the sea,
And the sun looked over the mountain's rim:
And straight was a path of gold for him, | And the need of a world of men for me. | null | The two worlds merge. The speaker who had an adventurous night-time meeting with a lover in the prequal poem “Meeting at Night”, needs to earn a living.
The word “need” is ambiguous. It is not clear if it is a practical requirement for the speaker to return to the “world of men” — this is an era of clear division of gender roles. Or is this “need” an equally urgent desire for a practical challenge, where the romance of a tryst with a woman only satisfies part of his being? This speaker could be keen to return to real life. He seems happy to do so, implying that his night-time adventure sustains him.
So the reader is left with teasing glimpses of a larger story which will never been completed. | Robert Browning | Parting at Morning |
They shut me up in Prose
As when a little Girl
They put me in the Closet
Because they liked me "still" | Still! Could themself have peeped
And seen my Brain — go round | They might as wise have lodged a Bird
For Treason — in the Pound
Himself has but to will | If “they” could see into Dickinson thoughts they would understand that her brain functions correctly. | Emily Dickinson | They Shut Me Up in Prose |
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
But house or hald
To thole the Winter's sleety dribble
An' cranreuch cauld! | But Mousie, thou art no thy-lane
In proving foresight may be vain
The best laid schemes o' Mice an' Men
Gang aft agley
An' lea'e us nought but grief an' pain
For promis'd joy! | Still, thou art blest, compar'd wi' me!
The present only toucheth thee
But Och! I backward cast my e'e | Rough English translation:
But little Mouse, you are not alone, In proving foresight may be vain: The best laid schemes of mice and men Go often awry, And leave us nothing but grief and pain, For promised joy!
The mouse surely now realizes that not everything can be prepared for, which Burns himself now ponders. We’re meant to realize that just as the mouse’s best laid plans were dashed by a higher power, so might man’s. Even more so, Burns could easily have never noticed the mouse there after he destroyed her house in his field. Just as a higher power may barely notice destroying the life of a human being.
The line “The best laid schemes o' Mice an' Men” inspired the title of John Steinbeck’s famous 1937 novel Of Mice and Men. | Robert Burns | To a Mouse |
O Mother Race! to thee I bring | This pledge of faith unwavering,
This tribute to thy glory. | I know the pangs which thou didst feel,
When Slavery crushed thee with its heel,
With thy dear blood all gory. | The determination he had for his faith help him succeed to reach his destiny that when the glory game into his life.
| Paul Laurence Dunbar | Ode To Ethiopia |
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said—"Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert . . .Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shatter'd visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read | Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things, | The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings; | Despite collapsing and eroding, the distinct images of power remain. Shelley notes the irony of such powerful, arrogant features appearing on a wasted, broken depiction.
Note the grim finality of the verb ‘stamped’. It almost acts as a form of branding: what is left of Ozymandias is one man’s living characteristics interpreted by others.
This line could be read more optimistically: power may fade, but something does survive the ravages of time, and that is art and the artist’s vision … and also the timelessness and popularity of a poem like Shelley’s. | Percy Bysshe Shelley | Ozymandias |
There is a change--and I am poor;
Your love hath been, nor long ago,
A fountain at my fond heart's door,
Whose only business was to flow;
And flow it did; not taking heed
Of its own bounty, or my need. | What happy moments did I count! | Blest was I then all bliss above!
Now, for that consecrated fount
Of murmuring, sparkling, living love, | The punctuation is worth noting. The exclamation mark suggests energy and a burst of good memories.
The fact that the writer can count the moments of their love suggests the speaker was previously blinded; unable to see the bigger picture. | William Wordsworth | A Complaint |
IV
Those authors I can never love
Who write, "It fit him like a glove."
Though baseballs may be hit, not "hitted,"
The past of "fit" is always "fitted."
The sole exception worth a haricot
Is "Joshua fit de battle ob Jericho."
V
Coin brassy words at will, debase the coinage;
We're in an if-you-cannot-lick-them-join age,
A slovenliness-provides-its-own-excuse age,
Where usage overnight condones misusage. | Farewell, farewell to my beloved language,
Once English, now a vile orangutanguage. | null | The theme of the poem is wrapped up with a bow on it in these last two lines: English, once a noble and fascinating language, has devolved into grunts and groans that might be emitted by our simian cousins.
| Ogden Nash | Laments for a Dying Language |
And
Black Love
We talked about
Women
And Black men
No doubt many important
Resolutions
Were passed
As we climbed Malcolm's ladder
But the most
Valid of them
All was that | Rap chose me | null | Serious political issues take second place in this poem to Giovanni’s relationship with HRB, who became a close personal friend. Giovanni has been criticized for choosing an individual over ideology, which is arguably counter-revolutionary.
On the contrary, Nikki Giovanni could be referencing her love for rap music. Giovanni has stated she has been heavily influenced by African American artists and activists. Giovanni dedicated her book “Love Poems” (1997) to rap artist Tupac Shakur. She even tattooed “Thug Life” on her forearm in tribute to Shakur. She stated: “I rather be with the thugs than the people who are complaining about them.”
Nikki Giovanni displaying her “Thug Life” tattoo:
Fowler, Virginia C. Nikki Giovanni. New York: Twayne, 1992. Print. [ ] | Nikki Giovanni | Detroit Conference of Unity and Art For HRB |
When the voices of children are heard on the green, | And whisperings are in the dale, | The days of my youth rise fresh in my mind,
My face turns green and pale.
Then come home, my children, the sun is gone down, | The ‘whisperings’ are not explained, but these could be the trials that the children will face when they are older. They could also potentially be the children’s subdued voices, reflecting their lack of autonomy and the oppressive control of the Nurse. In Nurse’s Song (Innocence) the children’s voices are clearly heard, indicating equality and harmony.
Furthermore, in ‘Nurse’s Song’ (Innocence) the children are situated on a hill and are therefore closer to God. Here they are in a dale (i.e. a valley) and so are perhaps further away from God, making them vulnerable to corruption and the Nurse’s cynicism. | William Blake | Nurses Song Songs of Experience |
But let them pass.
And, pride, what have I now with thee?
Another brow may ev'n inherit
The venom thou hast pour'd on me—
Be still, my spirit.
The happiest day—the happiest hour
Mine eyes shall see—have ever seen,
The brightest glance of pride and power,
I feel—have been:
But were that hope of pride and power
Now offer'd with the pain
Ev'n then I felt—that brightest hour | I would not live again: | For on its wing was dark alloy,
And, as it flutter'd—fell
An essence—powerful to destroy | The speaker seems to be contemplating suicide: a common thought among those suffering from bipolar disorder. | Edgar Allan Poe | The Happiest Day |
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth.
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 | When a path is less travelled, the grass, weeds and wildflowers can grow in very quickly because they are not being trampled by the footsteps of travelers.
In these lines, Frost describes how – because the path he took was less travelled – the path he took was the better path. He says that, in part, because the path was met by fewer footsteps, it may lead him to more “claim” (or, land) that could be used to build up his own property.
Because the speaker has not travelled the other path, however, he does not know this concretely, and thus these lines exist largely to be undermined by the next two. Through the explanation of the speaker’s reasoning for why he took the path, he shows that, on some level, he wants to pretend that one of the roads was less travelled than the other, even though it is not.
The speaker uses this cognitive dissonance to convince himself that his decisions are much more important and much better informed than they really are. | Robert Frost | The Road Not Taken |
null | 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. | The “night” creates the mood and tone of the poem. It symbolizes hardship or deep unhappiness; perhaps a negative time of the poet’s life.
Another view is that the night is a time of quiet, when the poet can contemplate his life and reason himself into strength and fortitude. | William Ernest Henley | Invictus |
43
Not hers
To win the sense by words of rhetoric,
Lip-blossoms breathing perishable sweets;
But by the power of the informing Word
Roll sounding onward through a thousand years
Her deep prophetic bodements.
44 | Truth I pursued, as Fancy sketch'd the way,
And wiser men than I went worse astray. | null | is a Pre-Socratic philosopher who was known for being obscure. He used paradoxes and mysticism where Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes before him were trying to be more precise and unified.
Heraclitus thinks that his wandering and fluctuating path of knowledge, though it seems like fanciful folly to others, isn’t much worse off than the more scientific minded who try to narrow things down to one consistent definition/logic, thus missing the flux of truth. | Samuel Taylor Coleridge | Translation of a Fragment of Heraclitus |
Rimbaud running off to Africa
to look for gold and finding
an incurable case of syphilis;
Beethoven gone deaf;
Pound dragged through the streets
in a cage;
Chatterton taking rat poison;
Hemingway's brains dropping into
the orange juice;
Pascal cutting his wrists
in the bathtub;
Artaud locked up with the mad; | Dostoevsky stood up against a wall; | Crane jumping into a boat propeller;
Lorca shot in the road by Spanish
troops; | Around 1849, Dostoyevsky was condemned to death for his involvement in the Petrashevsky Circle (a gathering of intellectuals). A last minute order from Nicholas I reduced his sentence to 4 years of hard labour. | Charles Bukowski | What they want |
null | His malice was a pimple down his good | Big face, with its sly eyes. I must be sorry
Mr Frost has left:
I like it so less I don't understood— | Particularly his contempt for poets he considered inferior. According to Jeffrey Meyer’s biography, Frost once interrupted a reading from Archibald MacLeish first with cat-calls, then by setting fire to his program, and, finally, by making a show of eating a handful of cigarettes. | John Berryman | Dream Song 37 |
But ranged as infantry,
And staring face to face,
I shot at him as he at me,
And killed him in his place.
I shot him dead because —
Because he was my foe,
Just so: my foe of course he was;
That's clear enough; although
He thought he'd 'list, perhaps,
Off-hand like — just as I —
Was out of work — had sold his traps —
No other reason why. | Yes; quaint and curious war is! | You shoot a fellow down
You'd treat, if met where any bar is,
Or help to half-a-crown. | The word ‘Yes’ suggests that the speaker is growing more confident of his views, or at least is able to recognise the moral dilemma, even if he lacks the words to express it.
Hardy introduces some wry humour. The word ‘quaint’ is , in itself, quaint — as is the word ‘curious’. Both are ironic understatements — unsuitable descriptions of the vast tragedy of man’s age-old impulse to fight. Even the speaker seems to recognise this, with his ironic exclamation mark. | Thomas Hardy | The Man He Killed |
I've stayed in the front yard all my life.
I want a peek at the back
Where it's rough and untended and hungry weed grows.
A girl gets sick of a rose. | I want to go in the back yard now
And maybe down the alley, | To where the charity children play.
I want a good time today.
They do some wonderful things. | The alley is where children congregate who do not have well-kept areas on their own property to play with.
The term “alley” is important to consider. It is the geographical and social connection to everyone on the block. Rich, poor, or otherwise, the alley connects them. There is no complete separation between the good and bad. | Gwendolyn Brooks | A Song in the Front Yard |
null | Nature's first green is gold, | Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf's a flower;
But only so an hour. | The “first green” of Spring is precious, as valuable as “gold,” bursting with light and promise.
We can interpret this line both literally and figuratively.
Literally, the buds of willow and maple trees appear gold before they turn to green leaves. The line gives the poem a timeframe: the very beginning of spring.
Figuratively, gold is a symbol of wealth and currency. Frost implies that the most valuable aspect of nature is the moment before buds turn to leaves. Perhaps this is a metaphor that the most valuable time in a life occurs after birth, and before maturity sets in: the “early spring” of a lifetime. | Robert Frost | Nothing Gold Can Stay |
I. | We gather at the shore of all knowledge as people who were put here by a god who wanted relatives. | This god was lonely for touch, and imagined herself as a woman, with children to suckle, to sing with--to continue the web of the terrifyingly beautiful cosmos of her womb.
This god became a father who wished for others to walk beside him in the belly of creation.
This god laughed and cried with us as a sister at the sweet tragedy of our predicament--foolish humans-- | Harjo proposes here the link between people, stories, and knowledge. Setting a tone for this collection we see how stories reflect knowledge seeking and making, manifesting relations across peoples. | Joy Harjo | Reconciliation: A Prayer |
Or a sword's sake:
All's the same, whate'er the chance, you know.
And in turn we make you ours, we say—
You and youth too,
Eyes and mouth too,
All the face composed of flowers, we say.
All's our own, to make the most of, Sweet—
Sing and say for,
Watch and pray for,
Keep a secret or go boast of, Sweet!
But for loving, why, you would not, Sweet,
Tho' we prayed you, | Paid you, brayed you | In a mortar—for you could not, Sweet!
So, we leave the sweet face fondly there,
Be its beauty | Secondary meaning of bray: “pound or crush (something) to small pieces, typically with a pestle and mortar.”
Used here figuratively, the same way we speak of “hounding” someone; but also prefigures the poem’s ambiguously violent ending | Robert Browning | A Pretty Woman |
And you don't feel them songs no more
Oh me, oh my, any
You won't be coming down tonight
So let's have it right
We all know the score
Been up for four nights
You're stuck behind the door
Chewing off your jaw
And the fame they stoned you with
Your tiny shoulders soldiered it
And you made your fortune
But you stone cold broke inside | You have to stand up there in front of the whole wide world | And you don't feel them songs no more
Oh me, Amy, any
You won't be coming down tonight | As an artist, especially someone as big as Amy Winehouse, you can’t back down from touring as it would cost immense sums of money and your fans would be disappointed. | Pete Doherty | Flags Of the Old Regime |
Time will say nothing but I told you so,
Time only knows the price we have to pay;
If I could tell you I would let you know.
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, | Unlike the dark metaphors in the previous stanzas, this one has sparks of hope. Though the utilization of “perhaps” expresses doubt, Roses are a widely-known symbol for love, meaning that Auden just MIGHT love again.
| W. H. Auden | If I Could Tell You |
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
Just that way! | He said, Mrs.,
(With a snort)
Just a K | She is proud of her name and if the man doesn’t like it, then that’s just to bad!
| Langston Hughes | Madam and the Census Man |
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 | Hugging my body to me
As if to shield it from
The pains that will go through me, | Even though all is lost, he remains strong. Facing the inevitable, he does that let fate change who he is. | Thom Gunn | The Man with Night Sweats |
Wake to their residue,
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 | His mind, his thoughts, his perception of everything around him, are all reversed. | Thom Gunn | The Man with Night Sweats |
The white cock's tail
Tosses in the wind.
The turkey-cock's tail
Glitters in the sun.
Water in the fields.
The wind pours down.
The feathers flare
And bluster in the wind.
Remus, blow your horn!
I'm ploughing on Sunday, | Ploughing North America.
Blow your horn! | Tum-ti-tum,
Ti-tum-tum-tum!
The turkey-cock's tail | Stevens has said that he was listening to Dvořák’s Symphony Number 9 (“The New World Symphony”) when writing the poem:
This invites reading the poem as a kind of American take on the European folk dance. | Wallace Stevens | Ploughing on Sunday |
With too much weakness for the stoic's pride,
He hangs between; in doubt to act, or rest;
In doubt to deem himself a God, or beast;
In doubt his mind and body to prefer;
Born but to die, and reas'ning but to err;
Alike in ignorance, his reason such,
Whether he thinks to little, or too much;
Chaos of thought and passion, all confus'd;
Still by himself, abus'd or disabus'd;
Created half to rise and half to fall;
Great lord of all things, yet a prey to all,
Sole judge of truth, in endless error hurl'd; | The glory, jest and riddle of the world. | null | Then when our time is done, we suddenly fall from glory to normality. From life, to death. | Alexander Pope | Riddle of the World |
Don't you take it awful hard
Cause I laugh like I've got gold mines
Diggin' in my own back yard.
You may shoot me with your words,
You may cut me with your eyes,
You may kill me with your hatefulness,
But still, like air, I'll rise.
Does my sexiness upset you?
Does it come as a surprise
That I dance like I've got diamonds
At the meeting of my thighs?
Out of the huts of history's shame | I rise | Up from a past that's rooted in pain
I rise
I'm a black ocean, leaping and wide, | The repitition of ‘I rise’ refers to the speaker’s increasing confidence and hope for equality. | Maya Angelou | Still I Rise |
Rain, midnight rain, nothing but the wild rain
On this bleak hut, and solitude, and me
Remembering again that I shall die
And neither hear the rain nor give it thanks
For washing me cleaner than I have been
Since I was born into this solitude. | Blessed are the dead that the rain rains upon: | But here I pray that none whom once I loved
Is dying tonight or lying still awake
Solitary, listening to the rain, | This is an echo of the Sermon on the Mount ; “Blessed are those who mourn”, but reiterates the context of rain. And it is the dead who are blessed rather than those who remain alive and mourn. | Edward Thomas | Rain |
The girl soldier Vaudevue sits
Her fingers tap the ground, she is alone
At midnight in the moonlight she is sitting alone on a round flat stone.
Graded by the Memel Conference first
Of all human exterminators
M L 5
Has left her just alive
Only her memory is dead for evermore.
She fears and cries, Ah me, why am I here?
Sitting alone on a round flat stone on a hummock there.
Rising, staggering, over the ground she goes
Over the seeming miles of rutted meadow | To the margin of a lake | The sand beneath her feet
Is cold and damp and firm to the waves' beat.
Quickly - as a child, an idiot, as one without memory - | Vaudevue may believe that the lake will cleanse her of her sorrows and pain.
There is an interesting parallel with the King Arthur legend. After the last battle of the Arthurian Knights, the wounded King Arthur was brought to a lake. Tennyson’s poem, Morte d'Arthur describes the water as beautiful and mystical, and Arthur is borne away to a special paradise, Avalon, by three goddesses. The promise is hinted that, like many dying gods or near-gods or kings (and even Elvis Presley), he hasn’t truly died and will one day return.
Vaudevue, after her own war, will also be borne away to her death on the lake. However, her end may be final and her salvation less ethereal and spiritual than King Arthur’s. | Stevie Smith | Come On Come Back |
Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses
your understanding.
Even as the stone of the fruit must break, that its
heart may stand in the sun, so must you know pain.
And could you keep your heart in wonder at the
daily miracles of your life, your pain would not seem
less wondrous than your joy; | And you would accept the seasons of your heart,
even as you have always accepted the seasons that
pass over your fields. | And you would watch with serenity through the
winters of your grief.
Much of your pain is self-chosen. | These lines are instantly evocative of the book of Kohelet (Ecclesiastes) in the Hebrew Bible. Ecclesiastes is a book of wisdom written by King Solomon in his old age (he wrote The Song of Songs in his youth, and Proverbs while middle age). In the book, we encounter this wisdom:
To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven: A time to be born, and a time to die; A time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted; A time to kill, and a time to heal; A time to break down, and a time to build up; A time to weep, and a time to laugh; A time to mourn, and a time to dance; A time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together; A time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing; A time to get, and a time to lose; A time to keep, and a time to cast away; A time to rend, and a time to sew; A time to keep silence, and a time to speak; A time to love, and a time to hate; A time of war, and a time of peace.
What Solomon was saying was that everything has a place and a purpose in life: he draws a parallel between the seasons of nature (a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted) and the seasons of the heart (a time to mourn, and a time to dance).
Kahlil extends this tradition in this line: as you accept the agricultural seasons without questions, and you accept the cycle of nature (the tides, the wax and wane of the moon, etc.), so you should consider your own fluctuations through emotion natural. | Kahlil Gibran | On Pain |
null | I knew a simple soldier boy | Who grinned at life in empty joy,
Slept soundly through the lonesome dark,
And whistled early with the lark. | This phrase indicates that the “simple soldier boy” does not exist anymore. According to Sternlicht (49), Sassoon suggests through this very first line that he is going to narrate the conditions which made the “simple soldier boy” lose his simplicity. Referencing a theme of loss, Sternlicht (50) suggests that this soldier’s simplicity has vanished to due the inhumane conditions of the trenches. | Siegfried Sassoon | Suicide in the Trenches |
Drink to me only with thine eyes,
And I will pledge with mine; | Or leave a kiss but in the cup,
And I'll not look for wine. | The thirst that from the soul doth rise
Doth ask a drink divine;
But might I of Jove's nectar sup, | He is saying that a kiss is all he wants; he will have no need for an intoxicating drink.
It is worth noting the succinct language that Ben Jonson uses, mostly monosyllables, but full of meaning.
| Ben Jonson | Song To Celia |
Empty, I echo to the least footfall,
Museum without statues, grand with pillars, porticoes, rotundas.
In my courtyard a fountain leaps and sinks back into itself,
Nun-hearted and blind to the world. Marble lilies
Exhale their pallor like scent. | I imagine myself with a great public, | Mother of a white Nike and several bald-eyed Apollos.
Instead, the dead injure me attentions, and nothing can happen.
Blank-faced and mum as a nurse. | Plath, the empty museum (barren woman), imagines herself full of statues (children) in order to gain the view of the public, or recognition from society. In order to be viewed as “something” by society, Plath would have to have children and the museum would have to contain statues. | Sylvia Plath | Barren Woman |
Your Momma kissed the chauffer,
Your Poppa balled the cook, | Your sister did the dirty, | in the middle of the book,
The thirteens. Right On.
Your daughter wears a jock strap, | “Did the dirty” in this particular context refers to his sister having sex, presumably at to young of an age for it to be legal and perceived as morally right by people. | Maya Angelou | The Thirteens White |
When I was young my teachers were the old.
I gave up fire for form till I was cold.
I suffered like a metal being cast.
I went to school to age to learn the past.
Now when I am old my teachers are the young. | What can't be molded must be cracked and sprung. | I strain at lessons fit to start a suture.
I got to school to youth to learn the future. | Although never so cracked as to experiment in the free verse preferred by many younger poets, Frost continued to experiment in verse into his eighties, writing witty epigraphs, one “Political Pastoral,” and two dramatic masques: A Masque of Reason and A Masque of Mercy.
Also, a possible allusion to Gerald Manley Hopkins' theory of “sprung verse,” a predecessor to what would become free verse. | Robert Frost | What Fifty Said |
Who'll pay reparations on my soul?
Many suggestions
And documents written
Many directions
For the end that was given
They gave us
Pieces of silver and pieces of gold
Tell me,
Who'll pay reparations on my soul? | Many fine speeches (oh yeah)
From the White House desk (uh huh)
Written on the cue cards
That were never really there | Yes, but the heat and the summer were there
And the freezing winter's cold
Now tell me, | Empty words coming from the White House, illustrating the hypocrisy in the way Amerika operates.
Ronald Reagan, for example began the official “Drug War” in 1982, supposedly to make Amerika better and keep it safe. However, the “Drug War” has become nothing more than a war on Black and Third World people in Amerika. | Gil Scott-Heron | Wholl Pay Reparations on My Soul? |
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 | Diminished Plane refers to the level at which paradise refers to. Emily Dickinson intended it to mean a dimished level of existence.
| Emily Dickinson | A Coffin — is a small Domain |
Hither and thither
The wind and three
Starving sheep.
Redwings from Norway rattle at the clouds
But comfortless sneezers puddle in pubs.
The robin looks in at the kitchen window
But all care huddles to hearths and kettles.
The sun lobs one wet snowball feebly
Grim and blue
The dusk of the coombe
And the swamp woodland
Sinks with the wren. | See old lips go purple and old brows go paler.
The stiff crow drops in the midnight silence.
Sneezes grow coughs and coughs grow painful. | The vixen yells in the midnight garden.
You wake with the shakes and watch your breathing
Smoke in the moonlight – silent, silent. | In the final stanza, Hughes seems to merge the two worlds– the power of nature and the fleetingness of human concerns.
Note Hughes’s deliberately vague address– ‘See old lips’ is an imperative to the reader, but the old lips could be the speaker’s, the reader’s, or, most likely, everyone’s, human and animal alike– they are a general inevitability.
‘The stiff crow’ is redolent with symbolism. Traditionally a portent of death, in this stanza it blends in nicely with the overarching blackness of the scene.
| Ted Hughes | Christmas Card |
On the day of Sicilian July, with Etna smoking.
The voice of my education said to me
He must be killed,
For in Sicily the black, black snakes are innocent, the gold are venomous.
And voices in me said, If you were a man
You would take a stick and break him now, and finish him off.
But must I confess how I liked him,
How glad I was he had come like a guest in quiet, to drink at my water-trough
And depart peaceful, pacified, and thankless,
Into the burning bowels of this earth?
Was it cowardice, that I dared not kill him? Was it perversity, that I longed to talk to him? Was it humility, to feel so honoured?
I felt so honoured. | And yet those voices: | If you were not afraid, you would kill him!
And truly I was afraid, I was most afraid, But even so, honoured still more
That he should seek my hospitality | The two impulses vie with each other; to kill the snake or to leave it be. The conjunction “And” gives emphasis to the struggle. It is clearly more than just the snake at issue here, but the alternating forces of “education” and “common sense” on the one hand, and humanity and caring on the other. | D. H. Lawrence | Snake |
I built my house beside the wood
So I could hear you singing
And it was sweet and it was good
And love was all beginning | Fare thee well, my nightingale | 'Twas long ago I found you
Now all your songs of beauty fail
The forest closes 'round you | Since Cohen called himself a “broken-down nightingale” ( Source ), he could refer to himself and the end of his singing career. | Leonard Cohen | Nightingale |
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