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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;
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair! | “Mock” has a double meaning here: to create an imitation, but also to parody or critique, as the artist has done with Ozymandias. “The heart that fed [them]” refers to Ozymandias: the tyrant’s heart produced that “frown” and “sneer of cold command,” captured (“mocked”) by the anonymous sculptor.
Notice also that ‘the heart fed’. The heart is usually thought of as the seat of love. Here it doesn’t love and gives nothing, but instead takes or ‘feeds’ on whatever it needs.
Also, the heart represents emotion whereas the hand is mechanical. This idea of balance, or lack of balance, may link to how Ozymandias abused his power and was uncontrollable. | Percy Bysshe Shelley | Ozymandias |
Pretty women wonder where my secret lies
I'm not cute or built to suit a fashion model's size
But when I start to tell them
They think I'm telling lies | I say | It's in the reach of my arms
The span of my hips
The stride of my step |
This “I say” is repeated in every stanza of the poem, emphasizing the speaker’s voice and her outspoken attitude. She is confident and not afraid to share her opinion aloud, even when it goes against societal standards. She clearly does not follow to the misogynist expectation that women should be seen–and look a certain way–and not heard. | Maya Angelou | Phenomenal Woman |
Not every man knows what he shall sing at the end,
Watching the pier as the ship sails away, or what it will seem like
When he's held by the sea's roar, motionless, there at the end,
Or what he shall hope for once it is clear that he'll never go back.
When the time has passed to prune the rose or caress the cat, | When the sunset torching the lawn and the full moon icing it down
No longer appear, not every man knows what he'll discover instead. | When the weight of the past leans against nothing, and the sky
Is no more than remembered light, and the stories of cirrus
And cumulus come to a close, and all the birds are suspended in flight, | The sun setting and the moon rising are something that every human gets used to. It’s one of life’s regularities, but what happens when the very thing we have accepted (maybe more than anything else) disobeys our self appointed natural law? And what replaces it? | Mark Strand | The End |
They said, “There might
be a man or a nervous child
seeing this small piece of flesh that they
weren't quite expecting.”
So I whispered and tip-toed with nervous discretion
But after six months of her life sat sitting on lids,
sipping on milk, nostrils sniffing on piss
Trying not to bang her head on toilet roll dispensers
I wonder whether these public loo feeds offend her
‘Cause I'm getting tired of discretion and being polite
As my baby's first sips are drowned drenched in shite
I spent the first feeding months of her beautiful life | Feeling nervous and awkward and wanting everything right | Surrounded by family ‘til I stepped out the house
It took me eight weeks to get the confidence to go into town
Now, the comments around me cut like a knife | Many mothers are a bit anxious during the first few months after delivery. It is not unusal for most women to have breastfeeding difficulties. Here are some common problems and methods for dealing with them.
| Hollie McNish | Embarrassed |
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,
Its squeal was the rending of metal. | Pigs must have hot blood, they feel like ovens. | Their bite is worse than a horse's—
They chop a half-moon clean out.
They eat cinders, dead cats. | Hughes is able to attribute some life to the pig, but “they feel like ovens” is inamimate. It is notable that the previous metaphor and this simile both describe the pig in terms of metal. | Ted Hughes | View of a Pig |
My prime of youth is but a frost of cares,
My feast of joy is but a dish of pain,
My crop of corn is but a field of tares, | 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, | In sixteenth century English this means that the ‘good’ done by the speaker in his life is ‘in vain’; in effect he has failed, his efforts pointless. | Chidiock Tichborne | Tichbornes Elegy |
null | Everyone suddenly burst out singing; | And I was filled with such delight
As prisoned birds must find in freedom,
Winging wildly across the white | Sassoon wrote that this poem, rather like its opening line, burst onto the page in a strange fugue of inspiration. In his own words , from his memoir Siegfried’s Journey :
One evening in the middle of April I had an experience which seems worth describing for those who are interested in methods of poetic production. It was a sultry spring night. I was feeling dull-minded and depressed, for no explainable reason. After sitting lethargically in the ground-floor room for about three hours after dinner, I came to the conclusion that there was nothing for it but to take my useless brain to bed. On my way from the arm-chair to the door I stood by the writing-table. A few words had floated into my head as though from nowhere… I picked up a pencil and wrote the words on a sheet of note-paper. Without sitting down, I added a second line. It was as if I were remembering rather than thinking. In this mindless, recollecting manner I wrote down my poem in a few minutes. When it was finished I read it through, with no sense of elation, merely wondering how I had come to be writing a poem when feeling so stupid. I then went heavily upstairs and fell asleep without thinking about it again…
The poem was ‘Everyone Sang,’ which has since become a stock anthology piece. No one has ever said a word against it, and it is now almost as well known as Yeats’s ‘Innisfree.’ What I have been unable to understand is that there was no apparent mental process during its composition. Many of my shorter poems have been written with a sense of emotional release and then perfected by revision — often after being put away for a long time. Others have been produced by mental concentration and word seeking which lasted two or three hours. But there was usually a feeling of having said what I wanted to with directness and finality. ‘Everyone Sang’ was composed without emotion, and needed no alteration afterwards. Its rather free form was spontaneous and unlike any other poem I have written. I wasn’t aware of any technical contriving. Yet it was essentially an expression of release, and signified a thankfulness for liberation from the war years which came to the surface with the advent of spring.
| Siegfried Sassoon | Everyone Sang |
Law 30. Make Your Accomplishments Seem Effortless
Law 31. Control The Options: Get Others To Play With The Cards You Deal
Law 32. Play To People's Fantasies
Law 33. Discover Each Man's Thumbscrew
Law 34. Be Royal In Your Own Fashion: Act Like A King To Be Treated like One
Law 35. Master The Art Of Timing
Law 36. Disdain Things You Cannot Have: Ignoring Them Is The Best Revenge
Law 37. Create Compelling Spectacles
Law 38. Disdain Things You Cannot Have: Ignoring Them Is The Best Revenge
Law 39. Stir Up Waters To Catch Fish
Law 40. Despise The Free Lunch
Law 41. Avoid Stepping Into A Great Man's Shoes | Law 42. Strike The Shepherd And The Sheep Will Scatter | Law 43. Work On The Hearts And Minds Of Others
Law 44. Disarm And Infuriate With The Mirror Effect
Law 45. Preach The Need For Change, But Never Reform Too Much At Once | “Trouble can often be traced to a single strong individual – the stirrer, the arrogant underling, the poisoned of goodwill. If you allow such people room to operate, others will succumb to their influence. Do not wait for the troubles they cause to multiply, do not try to negotiate with them– they are irredeemable. Neutralize their influence by isolating or banishing them. Strike at the source of the trouble and the sheep will scatter.” | Robert Greene | 48 Laws of Power |
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,
Loved I not Honour more. | Inconstancy means unfaithfulness or inattention. But this kind of unfaithfulness is considered something she too will appreciate along with him. | Richard Lovelace | To Lucasta Going to the Wars |
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
Your vow, your holy place
O love, aren't you tired yet? | Blood and Soil is Nazi ideology based on the relationship between race and country. Many times in his career , Cohen sung against Nazism. Here, the image comes as one of those unforgettable painful moments in the history of mankind, wounding God’s own soul. | Leonard Cohen | The Faith |
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,
Thy early smile has stayed my walk;
But midst the gorgeous blooms of May,
I passed thee on thy humble stalk.
So they, who climb to wealth, forget
The friends in darker fortunes tried. | I copied them—but I regret
That I should ape the ways of pride. | And when again the genial hour
Awakes the painted tribes of light,
I'll not o'erlook the modest flower |
Bryant admits that he copied his more successful friends at one point in his life. He regrets that choice of not being original. His transcendentalist roots are reflected here. He admits that he should have relied more on himself and had more pride in his own thoughts and visions. He speaks of this mistake as a lesson learned. | William Cullen Bryant | The Yellow Violet |
Winter Afternoons –
That oppresses, like the Heft
Of Cathedral Tunes –
Heavenly Hurt, it gives us –
We can find no scar
But internal difference
Where the Meanings, are –
None may teach it – Any –
'Tis the Seal Despair –
An imperial affliction
Sent us of the Air –
When it comes, the Landscape listens – | Shadows – hold their breath – | When it goes, 'tis like the Distance
On the look of Death – | The single noun “Shadows” is for the reader to interpret. It could imply death, sin, mystery. That they “hold their breath” echoes the “Heavenly Hurt” in stanza two, with its sighing aspirate “H"s. Why they do so is also open to interpretation — perhaps the pain is too deep to bear. | Emily Dickinson | Theres a certain Slant of light |
Split the Lark—and you'll find the Music— | Bulb after Bulb, in Silver rolled— | Scantily dealt to the Summer Morning
Saved for your Ear, when Lutes be old —
Loose the Flood—you shall find it patent— | Bulb is a generic term in anatomy for various small, bulb-shaped structures or protuberances found in the body (eg the olfactory bulb, bulb of urethra).
But bulbs could also refer here to musical annotation, the bulbous shapes of notes on a musical score. | Emily Dickinson | Split the Lark—and youll find the Music 861 |
Feeling their notches.
For decent church-going women,
With their mean, pinched, bitter,
Evil faces.
Thanks for "Kill a Queer for
Christ" stickers.
Thanks for laboratory AIDS.
Thanks for Prohibition and the
War against drugs.
Thanks for a country where
Nobody's allowed to mind their
own business. | Thanks for a nation of finks. | Yes, thanks for all the
Memories-- all right let's see
Your arms! | Here Burroughs could mean one of two things, since fink has multiple meanings (although please note both of these meanings are sarcastic).
“Thanks for a nation of complete douchebags”
OR
“Thanks for a nation of snitches”
As Burroughs was an avid recreational drug user well into his 80s, he may be leaning towards the latter meaning (although snitches and douchebags are the same to a junkie). However, Burroughs was also a man to point out what was wrong with society, so the former is still a possibility. | William S. Burroughs | A Thanksgiving Prayer |
Huddled pavements, dark,
the lonely wail of a police-siren
moving stealthily across
grey alleys of anonymity
asking for food either
as plasma in hospital jars,
escaping fires in tenements
grown cold and bitter,
or seeking food in community garbage cans
to escape its eternal nightmare. | Harlem, the dark dirge of America | heard at evening
mean alleyways of poverty,
dispossession, early death | Awoonor here compares the poverty and suffering of Harlem to a “dirge” or funeral song. For the poet, Harlem represents the death of the nation, or more specifically the false promise of equality in American ideology.
Though African, Awoonor’s poem here shares much with African-American poetry, especially of the first half of the century. In fact, Langston Hughes ’s poem “Harlem” similarly laments the death (or “deferral”) of the dream of American equality.
Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun? Or fester like a sore— And then run? Does it stink like rotten meat? Or crust and sugar over— like a syrupy sweet?
Maybe it just sags like a heavy load.
Or does it explode?
| Kofi Awoonor | Harlem on a Winter Night |
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.
Continuous as the stars that shine
And twinkle on the milky way,
They stretched in never-ending line
Along the margin of a bay:
Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.
The waves beside them danced; but they
Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:
A poet could not but be gay, | In such a jocund company: | I gazed--and gazed--but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought:
For oft, when on my couch I lie | The poet might be trying to establish how lonely he is here. “In such a jocund company” – this refers to how the daffodils are enough companionship for him. Note that ‘jocund’ means ‘amusing’ or ‘joking’. Truly a man who is alone will feel that flowers are “jocund” company. | William Wordsworth | Daffodils |
There came a Wind like a Bugle -
It quivered through the Grass
And a Green Chill upon the Heat
So ominous did pass
We barred the Windows and the Doors
As from an Emerald Ghost -
The Doom's electric Moccasin
The very instant passed -
On a strange Mob of panting Trees | And Fences fled away | And Rivers where the Houses ran
Those looked that lived - that Day -
The Bell within the steeple wild | Dickinson personifies the fences when she writes that they “fled away”. This makes it seem as if the fences made the conscious decision to flee, when, once again, she may be describing what the wind did to the fences caught in the storm. | Emily Dickinson | There came a Wind like a Bugle |
My hope was written on sand,
O my God, O my God;
Now let Thy judgment stand,--
Yea, judge me now.
This contemned of a man,
This marred one heedless day,
This heart take Thou to scan
Both within and without:
Refine with fire its gold,
Purge Thou its dross away,--
Yea, hold it in Thy hold,
Whence none can pluck it out. | I take my heart in my hand,-- | I shall not die, but live,--
Before Thy face I stand;
I, for Thou callest such: | The speaker once more reprises the opening line and takes her heart in her hand. But she is confident, because her heart is protected by God. | Christina Rossetti | Twice |
They don't frighten me at all
Dragons breathing flame
On my counterpane
That doesn't frighten me at all.
I go boo
Make them shoo
I make fun
Way they run
I won't cry
So they fly
I just smile
They go wild | Life doesn't frighten me at all. | Tough guys fight
All alone at night
Life doesn't frighten me at all. | Angelou means that what ever life has to offer, she is not afraid. She is not afraid of anything that comes with the concept of life. | Maya Angelou | Life Doesnt Frighten Me |
null | A bunch of lonesome and very quarrelsome heroes | Were smoking out along the open road;
The night was very dark and thick between them
Each man beneath his ordinary load | Cohen starts the song with a kind of oxymoron by pairing the positive word ‘'heroes’‘ with words that contradict heroism: The ’‘heroes’‘ are a ’‘bunch’‘ (which especially contradicts military order), they are ’‘lonesome’‘ (so admiration is lacking or not having any effect) and they are ’‘very quarrelsome’‘ (a quality youdon’t expect to find in idols). | Leonard Cohen | A Bunch of Lonesome Heroes |
null | 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 |
The subtitle of this song comes from an 1867 letter from Algernon Charles Swinburne , on the subject of de Sade’s Justine .
Apparently the phrase delighted Berryman. Swinburne, a committed masochist in his sexual life, had a real respect for the original Sadist. This first line refer to some of the S&Mer’s more common tools.
Acacia , is also known as “thorntree” or “wattle.” Myrrh , also a thorny tree, can be burned for incense or oils. Velvet feels nice. Pricky stings are, in all likelihood, just what they sound like. | John Berryman | Dream Song 3 A Stimulant for an Old Beast |
There are a lot of comments about who's blacker than you are, and who's blacker than she is, blacker than thou
In other words, it's a sort of trend
And, in looking on various street corners in Harlem, I'm sure you seen it yourself
Standing on a soapbox on the corner, is an alleged brother | Dressed in blue and black dashikis or green, red and black dashikis | And spouting the news that the revolution is coming and you'd better get ready
Sorta-like the end of the world is coming
I saw recent commercials that said: | Traditional West African clothing. They had a resurgence in the United States during the civil rights movement of the 60s.
| Gil Scott-Heron | Brother |
III | Spring is like a perhaps hand | (which comes carefully
Out of Nowhere)arranging
A window,into which people look(while | Like a hand, spring can slowly, gently, gradually, or tentatively (“perhaps”) move things around or rearrange things in a landscape. | E. E. Cummings | Spring is like a perhaps hand |
Sonnet LXXV from Amoretti
One day I wrote her name upon the strand,
But came the waves and washed it away:
Again I wrote it with a second hand,
But came the tide and made my pains his prey.
Vain man (said she) that dost in vain assay
A mortal thing so to immortalize;
For I myself shall like to this decay,
And eke my name be wiped out likewise. | Not so, quoth I; let baser things devise
To die in dust, but you shall live by fame;
My verse your virtues rare shall eternize,
And in the heavens write your glorious name:
Where, when as Death shall all the world subdue,
Our love shall live, and later life renew. | null | Spenser argues that while they both will die some day, their lives will live on through his writing. Poetry will forever exceed human life. Here we are, 500 years later, still studying his work. Their love can never be erased; so long as his poetry is still read all over the world, the moments he has elucidated in his sonnets will unceasingly be relived through the reader’s mind – granting them both immortality. | Edmund Spenser | One Day I Wrote Her Name upon the Strand |
A scent of ripeness from over a wall.
And come to leave the routine road
And look for what had made me stall,
There sure enough was an apple tree
That had eased itself of its summer load,
And of all but its trivial foliage free,
Now breathed as light as a lady's fan.
For there there had been an apple fall
As complete as the apple had given man.
The ground was one circle of solid red. | May something go always unharvested! | May much stay out of our stated plan,
Apples or something forgotten and left,
So smelling their sweetness would be no theft. | A new take on the old law: Leviticus 23:22 :
And when ye reap the harvest of your land, thou shalt not make clean riddance of the corners of thy field when thou reapest, neither shalt thou gather any gleaning of thy harvest: thou shalt leave them unto the poor, and to the stranger: I am the LORD your God. | Robert Frost | Unharvested |
Two boys uncoached are tossing a poem together,
Overhand, underhand, backhand, sleight of hand, everyhand,
Teasing with attitudes, latitudes, interludes, altitudes,
High, make him fly off the ground for it, low, make him stoop,
Make him scoop it up, make him as-almost-as possible miss it,
Fast, let him sting from it, now, now fool him slowly,
Anything, everything tricky, risky, nonchalant,
Anything under the sun to outwit the prosy,
Over the tree and the long sweet cadence down, | Over his head, make him scramble to pick up the meaning, | And now, like a posy, a pretty one plump in his hands. | The placement of this line connects to many other poems where authors typically place the meaning of poems toward the end of the text. The analogy to throwing/catching a ball also comes into play. Just as a player scrambles to pick up the ball, a reader will scramble to find the meaning of a text to feel a sense of accomplishment and completion. | Robert Francis | Catch |
To Ridgely Torrence
On Last Looking into His 'Hesperides'
I often see flowers from a passing car
That are gone before I can tell what they are.
I want to get out of the train and go back
To see what they were beside the track.
I name all the flowers I am sure they weren't;
Not fireweed loving where woods have burnt--
Not bluebells gracing a tunnel mouth--
Not lupine living on sand and drouth.
Was something brushed across my mind
That no one on earth will ever find? | Heaven gives it glimpses only to those
Not in position to look too close. | null | In other words, heaven is just as elusive to his perceptions, as much as the flowers passing him on the train. Passing glimpses are all that the world gives us. | Robert Frost | A Passing Glimpse |
To Ridgely Torrence
On Last Looking into His 'Hesperides'
I often see flowers from a passing car
That are gone before I can tell what they are. | I want to get out of the train and go back
To see what they were beside the track. | I name all the flowers I am sure they weren't;
Not fireweed loving where woods have burnt--
Not bluebells gracing a tunnel mouth-- | He wants to get out and observe the flowers more carefully.
Since the train is moving, getting out would be extremely risky; this notion of jumping off leads to the final lines, in which he talks about Heaven (death).
There’s also a continuation the funeral metaphor: the train is leading to his final destination. | Robert Frost | A Passing Glimpse |
null | I am not a painter, I am a poet. | Why? I think I would rather be
a painter, but I am not. Well,
for instance, Mike Goldberg | The occupations of “painter” and “poet” are inherently linked in their place in haute couture and thus their desire to depict true art. O'Hara, additionally, links the two terms in a parallel structure and reinforces the doubling by highlighting their alliterative qualities. | Frank O'Hara | Why I Am Not a Painter |
Of boy scouts from Nagoya? The snow
That came when we wanted it to snow?
Beautiful images? Trying to avoid
Ideas, as in this poem? But we
Go back to them as to a wife, leaving
The mistress we desire? Now they
Will have to believe it
As we believed it. In school
All the thought got combed out:
What was left was like a field.
Shut your eyes, and you can feel it for miles around.
Now open them on a thin vertical path. | It might give us--what?--some flowers soon? | null | According to Ashbery, this line was actually a “found” line, in a sense – he overheard it, and not in the context of poetry (source: The Last Avant Garde, David Lehman). But in this context, it is a riff on the practical usefulness of poetry (see the title: “What is Poetry?”). What does it actually give us? | John Ashbery | What is Poetry? |
I've lost my wife and children
But I have many friends
And some of them are with me
An old woman gave us shelter
Kept us hidden in the garret
Then the soldiers came;
She died without a whisper
There were three of us this morning
I'm the only one this evening
But I must go on;
The frontiers are my prison
Oh, the wind, the wind is blowing | Through the graves the wind is blowing | Freedom soon will come;
Then we'll come from the shadows
Les Allemands étaient chez moi | Graves in the blowing wind are an image interestingly used in the German translation of Pete Seeger’s 1955 song “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?' by Max Colpet:
Sag wo die Soldaten sind, über Gräbern weht der Wind (Tell me where the soldiers are. Over graves the wind is blowing) | Leonard Cohen | The Partisan |
And stamp and cry
As the holly the holly
Hots its reds.
Electric blanket to comfort your bedtime
The rover no longer feels its stones.
Your windows are steamed by dumpling laughter
The snowplough's buried on the drifted moor.
Carols shake your television
And nothing moved on the road but the wind
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 | Hughes chooses two beautiful birds to symbolize the majesty of the world, and annotating with pictures is kind of a cheat, but anyway:
Robins are oft-depicted, especially on whack Christmas cards, but all-too-rarely engaged with. | Ted Hughes | Christmas Card |
Its diamonds. Having divined how drab a prison
The purest mortal tissue is,
Rarely it wakes. Unless, coaxed out by lusters
Extraordinary, like the octopus
From the gloom of its tank half-swimming half-drifting
Toward anything fair, a handkerchief
Or child's face dreaming near the glass, the writher
Advances in a godlike wreath
Of its own wrath. Chilled by such fragile reeling
A hundred blows of a boot-heel
Shall not quell, the dreamer wakes and hungers.
Percussive pulses, drum or gong, | Build in his skull their loud entrancement, | Volutions of a Hindu dance.
His hands move clumsily in the first conventional
Gestures of assent. | The repetitive, rhythmic sounds serve to entrance the dreamer, allowing the apparition to flow into his skull and build its presence in his mind. | James Merrill | The Octopus |
Both waking and both dreaming; such a doubt
Confounds and clouds our moral life about.
But whether wake or dreaming, this I know,
How dreamwise human glories come and go;
Whose momentary tenure not to break,
Walking as one who knows he soon may wake,
So fairly carry the full cup, so well
Disordered insolence and passion quell,
That there be nothing after to upbraid
Dreamer or doer in the part he played;
Whether tomorrow's dawn shall break the spell,
Or the last trumpet of the Eternal Day, | When dreaming, with the night, shall pass away. | null | I feel here the author was trying to express that maybe Life itself is the dream, and when awaken your dream “shall pass away”, along with all the other ideas or desires you had. Or maybe it’s just stating that your dreams can be about anything, but when you wake up, your back to reality and the harsh realities of life. | Edward FitzGerald | The Dream Called Life |
To Ridgely Torrence
On Last Looking into His 'Hesperides' | I often see flowers from a passing car
That are gone before I can tell what they are. | I want to get out of the train and go back
To see what they were beside the track.
I name all the flowers I am sure they weren't; | “Car” refers not an automobile, but to a train car. The narrator is riding a train.
The laws of physics provide this simple scene. He watches flowers along the track. Since the train is moving so fast, they pass by quickly.
Metaphorically, the “car” could represent a coffin. During a funeral, flowers are often presented to the deceased body. Obviously, a dead person cannot tell what the flowers literally are. | Robert Frost | A Passing Glimpse |
We've fought with many men acrost the seas,
An' some of 'em was brave an' some was not:
The Paythan an' the Zulu an' Burmese;
But the Fuzzy was the finest o' the lot. | We never got a ha'porth's change of 'im: | 'E squatted in the scrub an' 'ocked our 'orses,
'E cut our sentries up at Suakim,
An' 'e played the cat an' banjo with our forces. | “ha'porth” is a dialectical abbreviation for “halfpenny’s-worth”. The British soldiers never got a “half-penny’s worth of change” of the Fuzzy-Wuzzies–the Brits never caught them at a disadvantage, or found them making a blunder. | Rudyard Kipling | Fuzzy-Wuzzy |
null | A hippo sandwich is easy to make.
All you do is simply take
One slice of bread,
One slice of cake,
Some mayonnaise,
One onion ring,
One hippopotamus,
One piece of string, | A dash of pepper--
That ought to do it.
And now comes the problem... | rhyme scheme: A A B A C D E F E | Shel Silverstein | Recipe For A Hippopotamus Sandwich |
Mark how yond eddy steals away
From the rude stream into the bay;
There, lock'd up safe, she doth divorce
Her waters from the channel's course, | And scorns the torrent that did bring | Her headlong from her native spring.
Now doth she with her new love play,
Whilst he runs murmuring away. | The eddy has a clear personality. She ‘steals’ away and ‘scorns’ the stream; suggesting a woman who is trapped and wants to escape. The stream itself also has a personality. The archaic word ‘rude’ suggests it lacks consideration or subtlety. The conflict is already established. | Thomas Carew | To My Mistress Sitting by a Rivers Side: An Eddy |
Christ is a Nigger,
Beaten and black--
O, bare your back.
Mary is His Mother
Mammy of the South,
Silence your Mouth.
God's His Father--
White Master above
Grant us your love.
Most holy bastard
Of the bleeding mouth: | Nigger Christ
On the cross of the South. | null | The South has metaphorically crucified African-Americans over and over again, and the historical practice of lynching in many cases approximated a literal crucifixion. Also intended, no doubt, is a reference to the Ku Klux Klan and their notorious symbolic practice of burning crosses.
| Langston Hughes | Christ in Alabama |
Every night before I go to sleep
Find a ticket, win a lottery
Scoop the pearls up from the sea | Cash them in and buy you all the things you need | Every night before I rest my head
See those dollar bills go swirling 'round my bed
I know they're stolen, but I don't feel bad | Smith rings changes on Matthew 13:45: “Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a merchant in search of fine pearls. When he found one very precious pearl, he went away and sold all he had and bought it.” In the biblical Parable of the the Pearl, though, the pearl symbolizes the priceless luxury of heaven that the merchant goes broke to purchase; in Smith’s version, however, the dreamer sells the pearls for even greater wish-fulfillment than the promise of Christian paradise. By “need”, the rest of the song makes clear that “desire” (jet planes, lottery tickets) is meant. | Patti Smith | Free Money |
Pretty women wonder where my secret lies
I'm not cute or built to suit a fashion model's size
But when I start to tell them
They think I'm telling lies | I say | It's in the reach of my arms
The span of my hips
The stride of my step |
This “I say” is repeated in every stanza of the poem, emphasizing the speaker’s voice and her outspoken attitude. She is confident and not afraid to share her opinion aloud, even when it goes against societal standards. She clearly does not follow to the misogynist expectation that women should be seen–and look a certain way–and not heard. | Maya Angelou | Phenomenal Woman |
The wordy shapes of women, and the rows
Of the star-gestured children in the park.
Some let me make you of the vowelled beeches,
Some of the oaken voices, from the roots
Of many a thorny shire tell you notes,
Some let me make you of the water's speeches.
Behind a pot of ferns the wagging clock
Tells me the hour's word, the neural meaning
Flies on the shafted disk, declaims the morning
And tells the windy weather in the cock.
Some let me make you of the meadow's signs;
The signal grass that tells me all I know | Breaks with the wormy winter through the eye. | Some let me tell you of the raven's sins.
Especially when the October wind
(Some let me make you of autumnal spells, | The chief difficulty here is: what eye? Whose eye?
The answer may well be in the next line: the ravens we saw perched on the ‘winter sticks’ are probably there because some ready carrion feast on the ground awaits them. The grass will grow quite literally through the hollowed eye-sockets of the corpse.
A passage rather near to this one is in Foscolo’s Dei sepolcri , famous only long after his death. Yet there is as little reason to suppose Thomas read it as to assume that he didn’t, so we must leave it be. | Dylan Thomas | Especially when the October wind |
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.
They have some wonderful fun.
My mother sneers, but I say it's fine | This is her foray into “slumming it.” | Gwendolyn Brooks | A Song in the Front Yard |
null | In Memory of Colum McCartney | All round this little island, on the strand
Far down below there, where the breakers strive
Grow the tall rushes from the oozy sand. | Colum McCartney, Seamus Heaney’s cousin, was murdered in 1975 during a squirmish between Protestants and Catholics. His involvement occured by accident, an innocent man stopped at a fake road-block. | Seamus Heaney | The Strand at Lough Beg |
Return their thankfulness.
For Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love,
Is God our Father dear;
And Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love,
Is man, his child and care.
For Mercy has a human heart
Pity, a human face;
And Love, the human form divine;
And Peace, the human dress.
Then every man, of every clime,
That prays in his distress,
Prays to the human form divine: | Love, Mercy, Pity, Peace. | And all must love the human form,
In heathen, Turk, or Jew.
Where Mercy, Love, and Pity dwell, | This is repeated; another example of anaphora. The order in which they are stated has been altered to fit the rhyme, but maybe also to imply that they are interchangeable, one quality deriving from another. | William Blake | The Divine Image Songs of Innocence |
Of winds, and foaming torrents blended.
And now, with lofty tones inviting,
Thy NYMPH, her dulcimer swift smiting,
Shall wake me in ecstatic measures!
Far, far remov'd from mortal pleasures!
In cadence rich, in cadence strong,
Proving the wondrous witcheries of song!
I hear her voice! thy sunny dome,
Thy caves of ice, loud repeat,
Vibrations, madd'ning sweet,
Calling the visionary wand'rer home.
She sings of THEE, O favour'd child | Of Minstrelsy, SUBLIMELY WILD! | Of thee, whose soul can feel the tone
Which gives to airy dreams a magic ALL THY OWN! | Sublime is a great word to describe Coleridge and Robinson. They both use exaggeration and hyperbole in their poems. They both write using overwhelming emotion. Some sources say that this emotion is directly linking to both of their emotional and dramatic lifestyles that each of them live. For example, Robinson is an actor and a beautiful women involved in a marriage and is a successful author. She is the center of gossip and drama. Coleridge is an opium addict that is fascinated with the mind. These factors lead to very emotional poems. | Mary Robinson | To the Poet Coleridge |
null | To fling my arms wide | In some place of the sun,
To whirl and to dance
Till the white day is done. | The repetition follows in the tradition of blues music, a huge influence on Hughes' poetry. | Langston Hughes | Dream Variations |
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
Only, this time my shoulder bore
Her head, which droops upon it still:
The smiling rosy little head,
So glad it has its utmost will,
That all it scorned at once is fled,
And I, its love, am gained instead! | Porphyria's love: she guessed not how | Her darling one wish would be heard.
And thus we sit together now,
And all night long we have not stirred, | This reinforces the madness of the narrator. He seems proud of what he has done, that he gave Porphyria her wish in a surprising way, even though she is not alive to enjoy it. | Robert Browning | Porphyria’s Lover |
By the westway
Inside the scrubs
How long must we wait?
For they're killing us?
Killing us
[Chorus]
Oh
They are the loneliest
They are the loneliest
They are the loneliest
They are the loneliest
Still | Through my cell window | Hear the loft boys sing
Come on you R's
Carried on the wind | Doherty spent time behind bars at HMP Wormwood Scrubs in 2008
| Pete Doherty | Broken Love Song - 447705 |
A prentice whilom dwelt in our city,
And of a craft of victuallers was he:
Galliard he was, as goldfinch in the shaw,
Brown as a berry, a proper short fellaw: | With lockes black, combed full fetisly. | And dance he could so well and jollily,
That he was called Perkin Revellour.
He was as full of love and paramour, | With black locks (of hair) combed elegantly and ornately | Geoffrey Chaucer | The Canterbury Tales The Cooks Tale |
In my secret life
In my secret life
In my secret life
I saw you this morning
You were moving so fast
Can't seem to loosen my grip
Well on the past
And I miss you so much
There's no one in sight
And we're still making love
In my secret life
In my secret life | I smile when I'm angry | I cheat and I lie
I do what I have to do
To get by | The juxtaposition between interior landscape and exterior actions is underscored in this line: what is on the surface does not reflect what’s going on inside. | Leonard Cohen | In My Secret Life |
Looking up at the stars, I know quite well
That, for all they care, I can go to hell,
But on earth indifference is the least
We have to dread from man or beast.
How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.
Admirer as I think I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
I cannot, now I see them, say
I missed one terribly all day. | Were all stars to disappear or die,
I should learn to look at an empty sky
And feel its total dark sublime, | Though this might take me a little time. |
Auden concludes his star/love extended metaphor with one final (and a little desperate-seeming) rationalization. His unrequited love isn’t important to him. If this indifferent object of his adoration disappeared, he would learn to embrace his absence.
Auden was 53 when he wrote this poem, though it carries the angst and frustration of a much younger man. | W. H. Auden | The More Loving One |
Motion and Means, on land and sea at war
With old poetic feeling, not for this,
Shall ye, by Poets even, be judged amiss!
Nor shall your presence, howsoe'er it mar
The loveliness of nature, prove a bar
To the Mind's gaining that prophetic sense
Of future change, that point of vision, whence
May be discovered what in soul ye are.
In spite of all that beauty may disown
In your harsh features, Nature doth embrace
Her lawful offspring in Man's art; and Time,
Pleased with your triumphs o'er his brother Space, | Accepts from your bold hands the proffered crown
Of hope, and smiles on you with cheer sublime. | null | No matter how much mankind is able to progress during its lifetime, Time itself will always win when matched against a human life. During their short period on Earth, humans dominate their realm and are able to produce wonderful creations. Unfortunately, as time passes, man and his creations will eventually wear away. Time remains king because it does not wear down or stop. | William Wordsworth | Steamboats Viaducts and Railways |
Itself - an asterisk on the map. This hyphenated line, a burst
of rapid fire ...
I was trying to complete a sentence in my head, but it kept
stuttering
All the alleyways and side streets blocked with stops and
colons.
I know this labyrinth so well - Balaklava, Raglan, Inkerman,
Odessa Street -
Why can't I escape? Every move is punctuated. Crimea Street.
Dead end again.
A Saracen, Kremlin-2 mesh. Makrolon face -shields. Walkie-
talkies. What is | My name? Where am I coming from? Where am I going? | A fusillade of question-marks. | Carson’s rhetorical questions are enormously significant; a dramatic climax and the nub of the poem, which is about seeking the meaning of a terrible civil struggle.
The fundamental basis of the conflict was and still is ‘identity’; the essential ‘being’ of those involved. Being Catholic or Protestant remains deep within the psyche of the population of Belfast and Northern Ireland, though there is now peace. They are questions Carson asks but he, like those involved in the Troubles, has no answers. | Ciaran Carson | Belfast Confetti |
To the wild woods and the plains,
And the pools where winter rains .
Image all their roof of leaves,
Where the pine its garland weaves
Of sapless green and ivy dun
Round stems that never kiss the sun;
Where the lawns and pastures be,
And the sandhills of the sea;—
Where the melting hoar-frost wets
The daisy-star that never sets,
And wind-flowers, and violets,
Which yet join not scent to hue, | Crown the pale year weak and new; | When the night is left behind
In the deep east, dun and blind,
And the blue noon is over us, | The frailty of the ‘pale year’ may be significant in that their love is tenuous, illicit. They can only enjoy temporarily this ‘new year’ that Jane brings. | Percy Bysshe Shelley | To Jane: The Invitation |
null | Nothing nastier than a white person! | She mutters as she irons alterations
in the backroom of Charlotte's Dress Shoppe.
The steam rising from a cranberry wool | The introductory line, in italics and therefore the words of the speaker, convey the main theme; racism. It is declarative and assertive and needs no explanation. The reader may assume that the speaker is black and bluntly spoken. | Rita Dove | The Great Palaces of Versailles |
[Published by Mrs. Shelley, "Posthumous Poems", 1824.]
1.
The warm sun is failing, the bleak wind is wailing,
The bare boughs are sighing, the pale flowers are dying,
And the Year
On the earth her death-bed, in a shroud of leaves dead,
Is lying.
Come, Months, come away,
From November to May,
In your saddest array;
Follow the bier
Of the dead cold Year, | And like dim shadows watch by her sepulchre. | 2.
The chill rain is falling, the nipped worm is crawling,
The rivers are swelling, the thunder is knelling | Another long, slow line, suggesting that the months are like shadows of friends and relatives, grieving for the dying summer.
| Percy Bysshe Shelley | Autumn: A Dirge |
null | She must have been kicked unseen or brushed by a car. | Too young to know much, she was beginning to learn
To use the newspapers spread on the kitchen floor
And to win, wetting there, the words, "Good dog! Good dog!" | The dog seems to be young due to the fact that this line says, “She must have been kicked unseen or bruised by a car” which can tell the reader that the dog was not old. If the dog was old, John Updike would have just said something that implicated that she was old and not that is looks like something or someone hurt the dog and that is why the dog is dying. The line is then backed up with the next line that states, “Too young to know much,” which means the dog was young. The first line is giving the reader some what of a relief so they don’t read the whole poem wondering the whole time what happened to the dog and why it is dying. | John Updike | Dogs Death |
Policies taken out in his name prove that he was fully insured,
And his Health-card shows that he was once in hospital but left it cured.
Both Producers Research and High--Grade Living declare
He was fully sensible to the advantages of the Installment Plan
And had everything necessary to the Modern Man,
A phonograph, a radio, a car and a Frigidaire.
Our researchers into Public Opinion are content
That he held the proper opinions for the time of the year;
When there was peace he was for peace; when there was war he went.
He was married and added five children to the population,
which our Eugenist says was the right number for a parent of his generation,
And our teachers report he never interfered with their education. | Was he free? Was he happy? The question is absurd:
Had anything been wrong, we should certainly have heard. | null | The poet ends the poem by asking two rhetorical questions: ‘'Was he free? Was he happy?’‘. It’s amusing that these two questions are referred to in the singular, as “the question,” as if being free and being happy were the same thing.
The question is absurd to the government seeing as if something had gone badly they’d know about it. Although the government like to believe that they know everything, in reality, they don’t really know anything. They know each and every statistic and fact, but they don’t possess any noteworthy knowledge such as the feelings and the meaning of one’s life. | W. H. Auden | The Unknown Citizen |
Carry him off the way I might have gone,
Without so much as wishing him good-night.
He went behind it to make his last stand.
It was a cord of maple, cut and split
And piled—and measured, four by four by eight.
And not another like it could I see.
No runner tracks in this year's snow looped near it.
And it was older sure than this year's cutting,
Or even last year's or the year's before.
The wood was gray and the bark warping off it
And the pile somewhat sunken. Clematis
Had wound strings round and round it like a bundle. | What held it though on one side was a tree
Still growing, and on one a stake and prop,
These latter about to fall. I thought that only
Someone who lived in turning to fresh tasks
Could so forget his handiwork on which
He spent himself, the labor of his ax,
And leave it there far from a useful fireplace
To warm the frozen swamp as best it could | With the slow smokeless burning of decay. | Now, although the speaker is completely at home in this place, his meditation does not lead to any reassuring consolation or benevolent resolution that would cancel these tensions and contrarieties; instead, it reaffirms and heightens them. For if the speaker’s turning inward to the mind is a turning outward to the imagined identity of the woodcutter, and thus implies a consoling movement from solitude to human relationship, it also leads simultaneously to the speaker’s recognition of his still distant separation from that imagined home with the “useful fireplace.” The very process by which the speaker, along with the frozen swamp, has been warmed by the woodcutter’s selfless and forgetful act of love issues in no comfortable, Emersonian notion of transcendent compensation. The condition of distance, of being “far from home,” still attaches, as does the implied need to continually “turn to fresh tasks.” Space and time have indeed been redeemed within the process of the speaker’s vision to the extent that the woodpile as fact and process—as seemingly senseless material waste—is now endowed with a poignant significance and spiritual usefulness. But the implications of that redemption presuppose the necessity of continual other ones at different times, in different places. Seeing the woodpile in all its magnificence, the speaker sees also that its heat warms “only as best it could.” And while there are duration, clarity, and beauty in the “slow, smokeless burning,” they are apprehended in a vision that focuses on the inexorable fact of decay. The woodpile and the loving vision it induces only momentarily stay the confusion of a universe moving toward nothingness. | Robert Frost | The Wood-pile |
Let not young souls be smothered out before | They do quaint deeds and fully flaunt their pride. | It is the world's one crime its babes grow dull,
Its poor are ox-like, limp and leaden-eyed.
Not that they starve; but starve so dreamlessly, | Even though life isn’t always filled with epic triumphs and drama, a child growing in this world needs to accomplish and experience the many little adventures and experiences that come with the territory, and which should always been seen as amazing things. For each person the world is new, and should seem that way forever. | Vachel Lindsay | The Leaden Eyed |
An old, mad, blind, despised, and dying king,—
Princes, the dregs of their dull race, who flow
Through public scorn,—mud from a muddy spring,—
Rulers who neither see, nor feel, nor know,
But leech-like to their fainting country cling,
Till they drop, blind in blood, without a blow,—
A people starved and stabbed in the untilled field,—
An army, which liberticide and prey
Makes as a two-edged sword to all who wield
Golden and sanguine laws which tempt and slay;
Religion Christless, Godless—a book sealed; | A Senate,—Time's worst statute unrepealed,— | Are graves, from which a glorious Phantom may
Burst, to illumine our tempestous day. | Shelley is saying that Parliament provides a corrupt form of leadership. Their immense power prohibits challenge; hence the ‘statute un-repealed’. In other words, the laws passed by Parliament were immutable.
The word “Senate” has its origins from “old man” so the line may be a pun on the etymology in relation to ‘Time’. | Percy Bysshe Shelley | England in 1819 |
In time of silver rain
The earth puts forth new life again, | Green grasses grow | And flowers lift their heads,
And over all the plain
The wonder spreads | Notice the use of alliteration in the GR sound (“ GR een GR asses GR ow”)–as though Hughes wants to express the strength of grass’s growth. | Langston Hughes | In Time Of Silver Rain |
“When I was just as far as I could walk
From here to-day,
There was an hour
All still
When leaning with my head against a flower | I heard you talk. | Don't say I didn't, for I heard you say––
You spoke from that flower on the window sill––
Do you remember what it was you said?” | Who is the “you” that Frost is referring to? Perhaps he is attempting to converse with God, seeing that he is using a flower as a form of communication.
Throughout this poem, Frost is absolutely certain that God has spoken to him, but he does not recall the exact words. | Robert Frost | The Telephone |
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 | It is best to let Cohen “annotate” it himself ( here ) –
I never thought I’d have the experience of this reconciliation of what seemed to be apparent and irreducible conflicts. You kiss my lips; and then, it’s done: I’m back on Boogie Street…So, when you hug your children, you dissolve; when you kiss your Beloved, you dissolve; when you have some kind of experience of the totality of this life, you dissolve; but, immediately, you return to Boogie Street. As my teacher says, You can’t live in Paradise because there are no toilets nor restaurants. | Leonard Cohen | Boogie Street |
Think what you are marching to.
Little live, great pass.
Jesus Christ and Barabbas
Were found the same day.
This died, that went his way.
So sing with joyful breath,
For why, you are going to death.
Teeming earth will surely store
All the gladness that you pour.
Earth that never doubts nor fears,
Earth that knows of death, not tears,
Earth that bore with joyful ease | Hemlock for Socrates, | Earth that blossomed and was glad
‘Neath the cross that Christ had,
Shall rejoice and blossom too | Socrates , an ancient Greek philosopher, was executed by the powers in Athens for the subversiveness of his views. The form of execution was to drink the poison, hemlock. He, like Jesus in the previous stanza, is an example of a great person who is absorbed by the earth, along with ordinary people long forgotten.
| Charles Sorley | All the hills and vales along |
Nor yet to draw one thought of ours to him.
But from sheer morning gladness at the brim.
The butterfly and I had lit upon,
Nevertheless, a message from the dawn,
That made me hear the wakening birds around,
And hear his long scythe whispering to the ground,
And feel a spirit kindred to my own;
So that henceforth I worked no more alone;
But glad with him, I worked as with his aid,
And weary, sought at noon with him the shade;
And dreaming, as it were, held brotherly speech
With one whose thought I had not hoped to reach. | Men work together,' I told him from the heart,
Whether they work together or apart.' | But as I said it, swift there passed me by
On noiseless wing a bewildered butterfly,
Seeking with memories grown dim o'er night | Despite working at different times and apart – they are joined in purpose and spirit of completing the job.
The quote, ‘I told him from the heart’ shows a reversal of understanding throughout the poem as through the poem the persona’s attitude and feelings change from something negative to a positive feeling and attitude. | Robert Frost | The Tuft of Flowers |
null | The Grass so little has to do
I wish I were a Hay | null | The speaker has spent the poem cataloging the idle, privileged lifestyle of a woman who is so beautiful and wealthy she makes a duchess look common. In these final lines, the speaker unequivocally rejects that life, choosing hay over grass. In addition to being a food source for beasts of burden, hay is also used as to insulate buildings. It may not be pretty, the speaker implies, but at least it’s useful.
Like Stanza 2 with the pearls/duchess, Dickinson introduces an object first (a barn) and waits a few lines to mention something that puts it in context (hay). | Emily Dickinson | The Grass |
Give me crack and anal sex
Take the only tree that's left
And stuff it up the hole
In your culture
Give me back the Berlin wall
Give me Stalin and St. Paul
I've seen the future, brother
It is murder
Things are going to slide (slide) in all directions
Won't be nothing (won't be)
Nothing you can measure anymore
The blizzard, the blizzard of the world | Has crossed the threshold | And it's overturned
The order of the soul
When they said (they said) repent (repent), repent (repent) | The idea that the world has crossed a critical threshold is powerful. Western modern world is reluctant to accept that in any system (human or natural) critical points exist beyond which what one does generates the opposite of what was supposed to be produced. We, as modern societies, entered this paradoxical and tragic world and the artist describes it powerfully. | Leonard Cohen | The Future |
Others abide our question. Thou art free.
We ask and ask: Thou smilest and art still,
Out-topping knowledge. For the loftiest hill
That to the stars uncrowns his majesty,
Planting his stedfast footsteps in the sea,
Making the Heaven of Heavens his dwelling-place,
Spares but the cloudy border of his base
To the foil'd searching of mortality:
And thou, who didst the stars and sunbeams know,
Self-school'd, self-scann'd, self-honour'd, self-secure,
Didst walk on Earth unguess'd at. Better so! | All pains the immortal spirit must endure,
All weakness that impairs, all griefs that bow,
Find their sole voice in that victorious brow. | null | Whatever problems he is going through, he can turn to Shakespeare’s writings for comfort. | Matthew Arnold | Shakespeare |
It must decide, for men and birds alike,
As pick-pick-pick it goes with its sharp beak,
If so much trust is possible in Nature;
And back it darts to that safe banksia tree
Then swoops on my own head, the brave wild creature.
It thinks it must have hair to line its nest
And hair will have, and it will chance the rest;
And up and down my neck and then my daughter's
Those prickly black feet run, that tugging beak,
And loud like wind it whirrs its green wing-feathers.
Then take your choice from me or those fair tresses
You darting bird too shy for our caresses; | There's just this gap in Nature and in man | Where birds may perch on heads and pull out hair
And if you want to chance it, well, you can. | Stewart comments on the similarities between the bird’s behaviour and human behaviour when protecting their homes | Douglas Stewart | Nesting Time |
Go mark them with your living,
And mark them with your dead.
Take up the White Man's burden--
And reap his old reward:
The blame of those ye better,
The hate of those ye guard--
The cry of hosts ye humour
(Ah, slowly!) toward the light:--
"Why brought he us from bondage,
Our loved Egyptian night?"
Take up the White Man's burden--
Ye dare not stoop to less-- | Nor call too loud on Freedom | To cloke your weariness;
By all ye cry or whisper,
By all ye leave or do, | This line (and following ones) is a reminder that advocating “Freedom” while denying colonized people their freedom to be uncivilized is not only hypocritical, but blatantly hypocritical. “Freedom” is not something you will achieve for anyone by taking up the White Man’s Burden, so when you do, don’t let it be your stated reason for doing it. | Rudyard Kipling | The White Mans Burden |
The boundaries of old?
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.
Tell me,
Who'll pay reparations on my soul?
Who'll pay reparations? | ‘Cause I don't dig segregation,
But I can't get integration
I got to take it to the United Nations
Someone to help me away from this nation
Tell me,
Who'll pay reparations on my soul? | Many suggestions
And documents written
Many directions | Separate but equal? Yeah right.
| Gil Scott-Heron | Wholl Pay Reparations on My Soul? |
And to allay his freezing age,
The poor man takes her in his arms;
The cottage fades before his sight,
The garden and its lovely charms.
The guests are scatter'd thro' the land,
For the eye altering alters all;
The senses roll themselves in fear,
And the flat earth becomes a ball;
The stars, sun, moon, all shrink away,
A desert vast without a bound,
And nothing left to eat or drink,
And a dark desert all around. | The honey of her infant lips,
The bread and wine of her sweet smile,
The wild game of her roving eye,
Does him to infancy beguile; | For as he eats and drinks he grows
Younger and younger every day;
And on the desert wild they both | The Woman’s “beguiling” charms seem to cast a spell over him, but rather than seducing him they cause him, bizarrely, to regress toward infancy. | William Blake | The Mental Traveller |
Mad Song
by William Blake
The wild winds weep,
And the night is a-cold;
Come hither, Sleep,
And my griefs infold:
But lo! the morning peeps
Over the eastern steeps,
And the rustling birds of dawn | The earth do scorn. | Lo! to the vault
Of paved heaven,
With sorrow fraught | The birds of dawn are taking flight away from the Earth. It is interesting that he uses the word scorn to portray this. Scorn is a very negative word and goes well with the mood of the poem.
| William Blake | Mad Song |
And that infantine fresh air of hers!
To think men cannot take you, Sweet,
And infold you,
Ay, and hold you,
And so keep you what they make you, Sweet!
You like us for a glance, you know—
For a word's sake
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, | True: not an uncommon way for fellows to woo. See John Clare’s First Love and so many others. | Robert Browning | A Pretty Woman |
Heere folwen the wordes bitwene the Hoost and the Millere | Whan that the Knyght had thus his tale ytoold, | In al the route ne was ther yong ne oold
That he ne seyde it was a noble storie,
And worthy for to drawen to memorie; | It is important to remember that this tale comes directly after the Knight’s Tale. A high-class tale with classical descriptions of beauty and love is sharply contrasted with the crude and sexual descriptions in the upcoming fabliau. This highlights the huge difference in class between the Knight and the Miller, and the effect that it has on each of the characters. | Geoffrey Chaucer | The Canterbury Tales: The Millers Prologue in Middle English |
I looked in my heart while the wild swans went over.
And what did I see I had not seen before?
Only a question less or a question more;
Nothing to match the flight of wild birds flying.
Tiresome heart, forever living and dying, | House without air, I leave you and lock your door. | Wild swans, come over the town, come over
The town again, trailing your legs and crying! | The poet, significantly, refers to a ‘house’ rather than a ‘home’. Usually, associated with safety and comfort, for the speaker the house is metaphorically ‘without air’, therefore mentally constricting. Also, we lock doors for security and protection, but she is doing so to keep herself out, to liberate herself. | Edna St. Vincent Millay | Wild Swans |
Gather quickly
Out of darkness
All the songs you know | And throw them at the sun
Before they melt
Like snow | null | By “throwing” your knowledge and art out into the light, you make them visible and unforgettable to the world. If they were in the dark they would only be forgotten and would disappear like the melting snow. | Langston Hughes | Bouquet |
The planets douse
Their flames with tears,
The world’s Divine Poet
Constructs its history,
From wild cosmic song
Its epic is formed.
Stars in their orbits,
Moon sun and planets –
He binds with his mace
All things to Law,
Imposes the discipline
Of metre and rhyme. | In the Manasa depths | Vishnu watches -
Beauties arise
From the light of lotuses. | The literal translation of Manasa would mean mind or soul.Here the poet says “In the manas depths.” This could be a reference to Yoga nidra (“yogi sleep” is a sleep-like state which yogis report to experience during their meditations) of vishnu.Vishnu is said to be in the state of perpetual Yoga nidra, in which he engages his mind in the preservation of the universe. In short manasa depth here means “from the depth of his divine mind”.
A golden sculpture idol of vishnu in his yoga nidra.Vishnu’s this posture is also called padmanabha | Rabindranath Tagore | Brahmā Vişņu Śiva |
They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.
But they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another's throats.
Man hands on misery to man. | It deepens like a coastal shelf. | Get out as early as you can,
And don't have any kids yourself. | Here, Larkin switched into something close to Romanticism, introducing a simile that underlines how dramatic the misery of life is, at every new birth. He throws us into the depths of futility, unable to escape the depths of misery.
At this point, we are learning much about his grim mindset. Moreover by likening the erosion of the human happiness, to something made unstoppable by forces of nature (the metaphor of a coast being eroded by the sea) he suggests that although the process is detrimental, it is also natural and inevitable. | Philip Larkin | This Be The Verse x |
Here, she said, put this on your head.
She handed me a hat. | You 'bout as white as your dad,
and you gone stay like that. | Aunt Sugar rolled her nylons down
around each bony ankle,
and I rolled down my white knee socks | This first line hints that the small girl in the poem is of a mixed race, but has fair skin like her father. The fact that her Aunt Sugar says, “And you gone stay like that” shows the importance of being white or even “light-skinned” during this time. | Natasha Trethewey | Flounder |
We wear the mask that grins and lies,
It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes,—
This debt we pay to human guile;
With torn and bleeding hearts we smile, | And mouth with myriad subtleties. | Why should the world be over-wise
In counting all our tears and sighs?
Nay, let them only see us, while | Deception has become so ingrained, it is part of the ways humans interact with the world of others.
Mouth here is a verb meaning speak or talk, almost silently or muttered under one’s breath. It extends the image of the smile but subverts its positive connotation with a disgruntled or repressed “mouthing off.”
Myriad subtleties refers to the deft wordplay and behavior blacks resorted to in order to avoid offending whites and provoking retaliation. Under oppression, people create a language of their own, a medium through which they can communicate without interference from mainstream white culture. In a way, the linguistic subtleties mentioned here are their own kind of mask. | Paul Laurence Dunbar | We Wear the Mask |
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! | Instead of focusing on polluted air, Wordsworth seems to embrace the beauty of the London sky. He is so immersed in nature, he longs to enjoy what he can see before the working day starts. It suggests that he is viewing the sky early in the morning before the workers start at the factories.
The plosive ‘b’, gutteral ‘g’ and percussive ’t’s unexpectedly suggest sharpness, rather than misty morning. | William Wordsworth | Composed upon Westminster Bridge September 3 1802 |
Hold fast to dreams,
For if dreams die
Life is a broken-winged bird | That cannot fly. | Hold fast to dreams,
For when dreams go
Life is a barren field | If you don’t continue to chase your dreams they will never take shape or manifest.
This holds true for many Black Americans who kept the dream of equality alive despite the constant adversity they faced.
| Langston Hughes | Dreams |
The camels crossed the miles of sand
That stretched around the cups and plates;
The desert was their own, they planned
To portion out the stars and dates:
The camels crossed the miles of sand.
Time was away and somewhere else.
The waiter did not come, the clock
Forgot them and the radio waltz
Came out like water from a rock:
Time was away and somewhere else.
Her fingers flicked away the ash
That bloomed again in tropic trees: | Not caring if the markets crash | When they had forests such as these,
Her fingers flicked away the ash.
God or whatever means the Good | The great Depression that followed the stock market crash in 1929 would have been in the poet’s mind. Major world events — the Second World War had begun when this was published yet isn’t referred to — but they would have diminished in the minds of the lovers at times like these. | Louis MacNeice | Meeting Point |
Huffy Henryhid the day,
unappeasable Henry sulked. | I see his point,—a trying to put things over. | It was the thought that they thought
they could do it made Henry wicked & away.
But he should have come out and talked. | for “put over,” the OED gives “ colloq. (orig. U.S.) to inflict a defeat or gain an advantage on a person; to get the better of someone,” as well as “ trans. To present convincingly or effectively; to communicate, convey”—under which is noted a felicitous example from a 2006 issue of the Halifax Courier : “Even though he is not the best singer in the business at least he puts over the songs with feeling.” | John Berryman | Dream Song 1 |
That drives these two to excess
And into the arms of sin?
They are the children of Eros.
They move, but not too fast.
They want to extend their pleasure,
They want the moment to last.
Too bad they cannot hear us.
too bad we can't advise.
Fate that brought them together
Has yet another surprise.
Just as they reach the utmost
Peak of their endeavor, | An empty downtown local | Separates them forever.
An empty downtown local
Screams through the grimy air | The description Strand uses for the oncoming train. | Mark Strand | The Couple |
Your beauty lost to you yourself
Just as it was lost to them
Oh take this longing from my tongue
Whatever useless things these hands have done
Let me see your beauty broken down
Like you would do for one you love
Your body like a searchlight
My poverty revealed
I would like to try your charity
Until you cry, "Now you must try my greed."
And everything depends upon
How near you sleep to me | Just take this longing from my tongue | All the lonely things my hands have done
Let me see your beauty broken down
Like you would do for one you love | The tone then shifts as the chorus repeats: he doesn’t care whether it is love or not, just take away the longing. | Leonard Cohen | Take This Longing |
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 | A comment Berryman put down in his journal in 1955, apparently said by a girl called Susan. See also Britney Spears' take on the subject. | John Berryman | Dream Song 3 A Stimulant for an Old Beast |
null | Christ is a Nigger, | Beaten and black--
O, bare your back.
Mary is His Mother |
“Christ is a nigger” in two senses: in the historical sense as a brown-skinned Jew like other Jews of his day, with a brown-skinned mother—both later adopted into the white West and given a lily-white heavenly father; and in the symbolic sense of Jesus as an alien presence, preaching an exacting spirituality, a foreign religion as it were, much as the black man, with his different color and culture, is an alien presence in the South. Each is a scapegoat sacrificed for the society’s sins.
- Onwuchekwa Jemie
| Langston Hughes | Christ in Alabama |
'Twas mercy brought me from my Pagan land, | Taught my benighted soul to understand | That there's a God, that there's a Saviour too:
Once I redemption neither sought nor knew.
Some view our sable race with scornful eye, | Phillis Wheatley refers to her life before she was brought to America as benighted. Benighted means being overtaken by darkness, which in this context refers to sin.
It can also mean a life without the knowledge of God (ignorance), or as Christians would put it, a life of sin. She has come to embrace Christianity more than her previous religion back in Africa.
This imagery of darkness invoked here by the word “benighted” isn’t accidental. Wheatley is well aware that the darkness of her skin is an excuse, a pretext, or otherwise a reason for white people to pre-judge her moral character. To slave-owners, black people were dark and dumb inside and out. Through the poem, she seeks to dissociate the moral darkness for the physical appearance.
In “The Difficult Miracle of Black Poetry in America,” poet June Jordan points out how Phillis Wheatley “clearly reverses what had happened to that African child, surrounded by and captured by the greed of white men.” While Jordan doesn’t cut Phillis Wheatley any slack for “her bizarre interpretation of slavery’s theft of Black life as a merciful rescue,” Jordan suggests that these facts “should not bewilder anyone”: “These are regular kinds of iniquitous nonsense found in white literature, the literature that Phillis Wheatley assimilated, with no choice in the matter.” | Phillis Wheatley | On Being Brought from Africa to America |
I've known rivers:
I've known rivers ancient as the world and older than the
Flow of human blood in human veins. | My soul has grown deep like the rivers. | I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young.
I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep.
I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it. | His soul has flown the same path as these rivers and through these paths he has acquired knowledge of history, of himself and has grown deep, maybe becoming part of the river himself | Langston Hughes | The Negro Speaks of Rivers |
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 | She only asks for him to come and be her’s for the rest of time since the world is such a cruel and unforgiving place. They can spend their time together, their way.
| Maya Angelou | Come And Be My Baby |
Ay, thou art for the grave; thy glances shine
Too brightly to shine long; another Spring
Shall deck her for men's eyes---but not for thine ---
Sealed in a sleep which knows no wakening.
The fields for thee have no medicinal leaf,
And the vexed ore no mineral of power;
And they who love thee wait in anxious grief | Till the slow plague shall bring the final hour. | Glide softly to thy rest then; Death should come
Gently, to one of gentle mould like thee,
As light winds wandering through groves of bloom | This is How I Really Feel – Poetry as an Outlet
While going through Bryant’s biography, I stumbled upon a small note that covered the sickness of his beloved sibling Sarah and his response to her illness. While the biography says next to nothing about how he really felt and failed to expand anything else in regards to her sickness and eventual death, the biography states that Bryant wrote this short sonnet in response.
While sonnets are normally recognized for love (mutual, unrequited, or otherwise), death was a common theme in Shakespearean and later sonnets. Shakespeare himself wrote his first 17 sonnets on growing older and dying, Edgar Allan Poe wrote To My Mother as a eulogy to the deceased Aunt that raised him, John Donne’s Death, to not proud was about the inevitability of death, and Heath Bailey’s Sonnet to Death described death the way an angsty preteen would do so.
In short, death was a common theme in sonnet-writing and Bryant was using sonnets as an outlet grief, akin to Poe’s To My Mother .
Links to the mentioned Sonnets:
Note – Shakespeare’s sonnets being specifically about death might be a bit of a reach: he wrote those 17 successive sonnets as more a response to a youth so beautiful that he must procreate so that while he may die eventually, his image will live on in his children. It’s more pushing towards “make beautiful babies because you are a beautiful person” instead of “woe is me, death takes all eventually”. | William Cullen Bryant | Consumption |
There is a bitter river
Flowing through the South.
Too long has the taste of its water
Been in my mouth.
There is a bitter river
Dark with filth and mud.
Too long has its evil poison
Poisoned my blood.
I've drunk of the bitter river
And its gall coats the red of my tongue,
Mixed with the blood of the lynched boys | From its iron bridge hung, | Mixed with the hopes that are drowned there
In the snake-like hiss of its stream
Where I drank of the bitter river | Hughes goes into deeper detail of the young boys' wrongful deaths–Charlie Lang and Ernest Green died beneath the Shubuta Bridge in Mississippi. This bridge became famously known as the “Hanging Bridge”.
| Langston Hughes | The Bitter River |
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.
It is the bitter potion by which the physician within
you heals your sick self. | Your opinion of winter might change dramatically based on your mood; we might choose to focus on the cold and the dark of the winter, or we might just as well focus on the tranquil bursting of snow falling on snow. And as the peoples of the Arctic circle know, snow is, in fact, insulating.
There are odd parallels between grief and serenity, and it’s often in our moments of mourning, when our soul feels tormented, that our life is at its most static, its most quiet. They say that once you resign yourself to the water in your lungs, that drowning is a peaceful death. Whether or not this is true, it is useful as a metaphor: when we resign ourselves to grief, and allow ourselves to “drown” in it, that’s how we’re able to pass through it.
Henry Miller put it another way:
Once you have given up the ghost, everything follows with dead certainty, even in the midst of chaos.
Note that winter is the agricultural season in which no fruit is borne or harvested. | Kahlil Gibran | On Pain |
Its motive from the fact you cannot listen.
We who should have known how to instruct
With rhymes for your waking, rhymes for your sleep
Names for the animals you took to bed,
Tales to distract, legends to protect,
Later an idiom for you to keep
And living, learn, must learn from you, dead.
To make our broken images rebuild
Themselves around your limbs, your broken
Image, find for your sake whose life our idle
Talk has cost, a new language. Child
Of our time, our times have robbed your cradle. | Sleep in a world your final sleep has woken. | null | This is the poet’s final wish, her yearning that the child — or future children — will sleep peacefully in a new world engendered by the “final sleep” of the baby that was killed; the death, that, ironically, “has woken” a new society; a peaceful world.
The last line is suitably rhythmic, like the opening stanza. In a complex manipulation of contradictions, the poet says that the peaceful, living “sleep” of new life can only be “woken” by the “final sleep” that was the child’s death. This line reflects the complexity of the terrible events of the Troubles. | Eavan Boland | Child of Our Time |
An agitation of the air,
A perturbation of the light
Admonished me the unloved year
Would turn on its hinge that night.
I stood in the disenchanted field
Amid the stubble and the stones,
Amazed, while a small worm lisped to me
The song of my marrow-bones.
Blue poured into summer blue,
A hawk broke from his cloudless tower,
The roof of the silo blazed, and I knew
That part of my life was over. | Already the iron door of the north | Clangs open: birds, leaves, snows
Order their populations forth,
And a cruel wind blows. | Referring to the cold climate opening like a door and making its way further down south. | Stanley Kunitz | End of Summer |
And much it grieved my heart to think
What man has made of man.
Through primrose tufts, in that green bower,
The periwinkle trailed its wreaths;
And 'tis my faith that every flower
Enjoys the air it breathes.
The birds around me hopped and played,
Their thoughts I cannot measure:—
But the least motion which they made
It seemed a thrill of pleasure.
The budding twigs spread out their fan,
To catch the breezy air; | And I must think, do all I can, | That there was pleasure there.
If this belief from heaven be sent,
If such be Nature's holy plan, | The author reflects that seeing the budding power of nature, even in the smallest twigs, spurs him to do all that he can. Nature is his source of inspiration and drive. | William Wordsworth | Lines Written in Early Spring |
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