content_before stringlengths 1 2.33k ⌀ | referent stringlengths 1 923 | context_after stringlengths 1 3.14k ⌀ | annotation stringlengths 9 2.98k | poet stringclasses 193 values | poem_title stringlengths 2 91 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
I shall never get you put together entirely,
Pieced, glued, and properly jointed.
Mule-bray, pig-grunt and bawdy cackles
Proceed from your great lips.
It's worse than a barnyard.
Perhaps you consider yourself an oracle,
Mouthpiece of the dead, or of some god or other.
Thirty years now I have labored
To dredge the silt from your throat.
I am none the wiser. | Scaling little ladders with glue pots and pails of Lysol | I crawl like an ant in mourning
Over the weedy acres of your brow
To mend the immense skull-plates and clear | While the speaker is gluing parts back together, it is interesting to note Plath’s use of the word
Lysol which is a modern cleaning product used to disinfect things, and standing out in this setting of ancient Greece. | Sylvia Plath | The Colossus |
null | 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. | The prequal “Meeting at Night” opens with a sea journey, as does this poem. It begins abruptly, appropriate to someone who has woken up and started a journey, aware of a purpose to his day.
The phrase “of a sudden” is an archaic construction meaning “suddenly”, no longer used today.
A “cape” is a projection of land joined to a larger land mass. | Robert Browning | Parting at Morning |
By blood's severe baptism.
Upon thy brow the cross was laid,
And labour's painful sweat-beads made
A consecrating chrism.
No other race, or white or black,
When bound as thou wert, to the rack,
So seldom stooped to grieving;
No other race, when free again,
Forgot the past and proved them men
So noble in forgiving.
Go on and up! Our souls and eyes
Shall follow thy continuous rise; | Our ears shall list thy story | From bards who from thy root shall spring,
And proudly tune their lyres to sing
Of Ethiopia's glory. | The ears of the Ethiopians will witness and be able to carry on their history.
| Paul Laurence Dunbar | Ode To Ethiopia |
Hurt once and for all into silence
A long pain ending without a song to prove it
Who could stand beside you so close to Eden
When you glinted in every eye the held-high razor
Shivering every ram and son? | Now, silent looney-bin | Where the shadows live in the rafters like day-weary bats
Until the turning mind, a radar signal
Lures them to exaggerate mountain-size on the white stone wall | A derogatory term for an insane asylum. A.M. Klein had to go to a psychiatric ward in 1954 after attempting suicide. | Leonard Cohen | To a Teacher |
Which gave to me
The high degree
Laureate to be
Of fame royal;
Whose name enrolled
With silk and gold
I dare be bold
Thus for to wear.
Of her I hold
And her household;
Though I wax old
And sometime sere, | Yet is she fain,
Void of disdain,
Me to retain
Her servitor: | With her certain
I will remain
As my sovereign | Calliope still willingly inspires Skelton and has no complaints against his poetry as long as he remains her servitor and writes poetry.
| John Skelton | Why were ye Calliope embrawdered with letters of golde ? |
All week she's cleaned
someone else's house,
stared down her own face
in the shine of copper-
bottomed pots, polished
wood, toilets she'd pull
the lid to--that look saying
Let's make a change, girl. | But Sunday mornings are hers-- | church clothes starched
and hanging, a record spinning
on the console, the whole house | The first stanza introduces the thematic tension of ownership : she cleans a house that’s not hers, but sees her own face .
That tension continues here. Sunday is, by definition, the Lord’s day . By making Sunday morning hers , she may be appropriating God’s day, or maybe making herself Lord even if just for one morning. At this point, the possibilities are open and the tension/ambiguity remains unresolved. | Natasha Trethewey | Domestic Work 1937 |
Barely daring to breathe or Achoo.
Daddy, I have had to kill you.
You died before I had time--
Marble-heavy, a bag full of God,
Ghastly statue with one gray toe
Big as a Frisco seal
And a head in the freakish Atlantic
Where it pours bean green over blue
In the waters off beautiful Nauset.
I used to pray to recover you.
Ach, du.
In the German tongue, in the Polish town | Scraped flat by the roller | Of wars, wars, wars.
But the name of the town is common.
My Polack friend | Here Plath seems to be describing the destruction of the Polish town due to war. Using “roller of wars”, it is implying that when wars roll through (battles commence) town, deconstruction is what they leave behind. May be a specific reference for WWII’s bombings and fighting.
The word ‘roller’ has multiple connotations here; the first relating to wars, but it may also allude to waves breaking on the shores of Nauset in the previous stanza. | Sylvia Plath | Daddy |
null | Your friend is your needs answered.
He is your field which you sow with love and reap with thanksgiving.
And he is your board and your fireside.
For you come to him with your hunger, and you seek him for peace. | When your friend speaks his mind you fear not the "nay" in your own mind, nor do you withhold the "ay."
And when he is silent your heart ceases not to listen to his heart;
For without words, in friendship, all thoughts, all desires, all expectations are born and shared, with joy that is unacclaimed. | In any situation, pain or sorrow, one runs to their friend to share their emotions. Although, the most important ingredient which holds the friendship together is love, friendship is also dependant upon commitment to each other. When one showers their friend with love, care, and commitment, they receive gratitude. No matter how far a friend is from you, they will always be your source of warmth and comfort.
| Kahlil Gibran | On Friendship |
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: | This reads like a death-wish. The poet seems to be welcoming the idea of oblivion, to be free of all sense and emotions. | Edward Thomas | Rain |
Now the flames they followed Joan of Arc
As she came riding through the dark
No moon to keep her armour bright
No man to get her through this very smoky night
She said, "I'm tired of the war | I want the kind of work I had before | A wedding dress or something white
To wear upon my swollen appetite"
Well, I'm glad to hear you talk this way | Joan of Arc was the daughter of peasants. She was a skilled sower and weaver. | Leonard Cohen | Joan of Arc |
I was born in the Congo
I walked to the Fertile Crescent and built
The Sphinx
I designed a pyramid so tough that a star
That only glows every one hundred years falls
Into the center giving divine perfect light
I am bad
I sat on the throne
Drinking nectar with Allah | I got hot and sent an ice age to Europe
To cool my thirst | My oldest daughter is Nefertiti
The tears from my birth pains
Created the Nile | The speaker aligns his/herself with Royalty. The idea that he/she controls people, government, as well as nature signals a Divine nature more powerful than humanity.
The speaker brings the Ice Age along simply to quench his/her thirst. The speaker demonstrates how his/her ways are beyond human comprehension | Nikki Giovanni | Ego-Tripping there may be a reason |
Who told me time would ease me of my pain!
I miss him in the weeping of the rain;
I want him at the shrinking of the tide;
The old snows melt from every mountain-side,
And last year's leaves are smoke in every lane;
But last year's bitter loving must remain
Heaped on my heart, and my old thoughts abide.
There are a hundred places where I fear
To go,—so with his memory they brim.
And entering with relief some quiet place
Where never fell his foot or shone his face
I say, "There is no memory of him here!" | And so stand stricken, so remembering him. | null | The sonnet ends with a line made up of two balanced clauses, the repetition of ‘so’ creating emphasis. The pace is slow to match her heavy heart. Note that ‘stand stricken’ is almost a tongue-twister, difficult to say, with the long vowels in ‘so’ and ‘stand’, and hard consonants in ‘stricken. The hard, alliterative 'st’s have a hissing quality that expresses deep emotion, not least anger.
And so the poem concludes fittingly with no resolution; an example of Edna St Vincent Millay’s superb craftsmanship. | Edna St. Vincent Millay | Time does not bring relief Sonnet II |
null | R-p-o-p-h-e-s-s-a-g-r | who
a)s w(e loo)k
upnowgath | cummings rearranges the letters of grasshopper the way a grasshopper might quickly rearrange its feet before jumping | E. E. Cummings | R-p-o-p-h-e-s-s-a-g-r |
Ah Sun-flower! weary of time,
Who countest the steps of the Sun:
Seeking after that sweet golden clime
Where the traveller's journey is done. | Where the Youth pined away with desire, | And the pale Virgin shrouded in snow:
Arise from their graves, and aspire,
Where my Sun-flower wishes to go. | The desire of the Youth causes him to be restless, wanting what he does not have, leading to his wasting away from lack of fulfillment.
Note that the Youth and the Virgin are capitalised, to represent all young people like them who will not attain fulfillment. | William Blake | Ah Sun-flower |
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
Five is a drinker with a dip-in nose
Six is a flapper with flippers on his toes | Seven is a tapper with a tripper in his beak | Eight is a nutter with a nut sack in his cheek
Nine is a hanger with a banger in his head
Ten is the stopper who stepped in and said | A woodpecker. These birds do not get headaches from their activities because of reinforced skulls which are designed to spread the forces evenly.
| John Ciardi | Guess |
Oh, give us pleasure in the flowers to-day;
And give us not to think so far away
As the uncertain harvest; keep us here
All simply in the springing of the year.
Oh, give us pleasure in the orchard white,
Like nothing else by day, like ghosts by night; | And make us happy in the happy bees,
The swarm dilating round the perfect trees. | And make us happy in the darting bird
That suddenly above the bees is heard,
The meteor that thrusts in with needle bill, | This shows how the happy bee’s are loving their home and they fly around with pleasure and not having a care.
| Robert Frost | A Prayer in Spring |
Embroider'd all with leaves of myrtle;
A gown made of the finest wool
Which from our pretty lambs we pull;
Fair linèd slippers for the cold,
With buckles of the purest gold;
A belt of straw and ivy buds,
With coral clasps and amber studs;
And if these pleasures may thee move,
Come live with me, and be my love.
Thy silver dishes for thy meat
As precious as the gods do eat,
Shall on an ivory table be | Prepared each day for thee and me. | The shepherd swains shall dance and sing
For thy delight each May-morning:
If these delights thy mind may move, | Another fully iambic line:
Pre pared each day for thee and me .
The stresses are particularly heavy on ‘thee’ and ‘me’ as the focus of the poem draws towards the two individuals it wills together. They also rhyme, creating an internal rhyme which thrusts more attention, and thereby stress, onto them.
| Christopher Marlowe | The Passionate Shepherd to His Love |
How on earth did it happen, I used to wonder
that a whole city—arches, pillars, colonnades,
not to mention vehicles and animals—had all
one fine day gone under?
I mean, I said to myself, the world was small then.
Surely a great city must have been missed? | I miss our old city— | white pepper, white pudding, you and I meeting
under fanlights and low skies to go home in it. Maybe
what really happened is | The speaker dodges between the mythical past and the present. Having thought about Atlantis, she moves to the present and her own pang of nostalgia. The dash that ends the third line of the stanza forms a caesura or break, that marks the speaker’s transition from thoughts of Atlantis to her own personal nostaglia.
The relationship between the two time-scales and the two cities will be tied together elegantly later. | Eavan Boland | Atlantis— A Lost Sonnet |
Last night your watchdog barked all night,
So once you rose and lit the light.
It wasn't someone at your locks.
No, in your rural letter box
I leave this note without a stamp | To tell you it was just a tramp | Who used your pasture for a camp.
There, pointed like the pip of spades,
The young spruce made a suite of glades | ‘Just’ implies that he does not have an important position in society. In a world where prejudice is rife, a homeless person may often seem worthless. This attitude will become more evident at the end of the poem. | Robert Frost | An Unstamped Letter on our Rural Leather Box |
CLA CLA CLA SHA KLACK KLACK
GET ME THE FUCK OFF THIS TRACK
As if the heart beat wasn't enough
They got us using drum machines now
Drums live in machines
Tryin' to make our drums humdrums
Tryin' to mute our magic
Instruments be political prisoners up inside computers
As if the heart were not enough
As if the heart were not enough
And as heart beats bring percussions
Fallen trees bring repercussions | Cities play upon our souls like broken drums | Re-drum the essence of creation from city slums
But city slums mute our drums and our drums become humdrums
Cuz city slums have never been where our drums are from | This suggests that urban life has a continual emotional impact on citizens, to the extent that we can no longer respond in an effective (harmonious) way. This relates to the general adaptation syndrome theory of stress, which proposed that prolonged exposure to psychological stressors leads to physical health decline. This is usually greater for people of low socioeconomic status, making it an element in the origin of Hip Hop. | Saul Williams | Twice the First Time |
null | My love is lyke to yse, and I to fyre; | how comes it then that this her cold so great
is not dissolv'd through my so hot desyre,
but harder growes the more I her intreat? | Ice and fire are polar opposites. He uses this simile to contrast his “burning” passion with her “cold” unresponsiveness.
Opposites attract…right? | Edmund Spenser | Amoretti: Sonnet 30 |
The publican ‘e up an' sez,
‘We serve no red-coats here.'
The girls be'ind the bar they laughed an' giggled fit to die,
I outs into the street again an' to myself sez I:
O it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an' ‘Tommy, go away';
But it's ‘Thank you, Mister Atkins,' when the band begins to
play —
The band begins to play, my boys, the band begins to play,
O it's ‘Thank you, Mister Atkins,' when the band begins to play.
I went into a theatre as sober as could be,
They gave a drunk civilian room, but ‘adn't none for mе;
They sent me to thе gallery or round the music-‘alls, | But when it comes to fightin', Lord! they'll shove me in the stalls! | For it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an' ‘Tommy, wait outside';
But it's ‘Special train for Atkins' when the trooper's on the tide —
The troopship's on the tide, my boys, the troopship's on the tide, | This gets to the essence of the injustice. The “stalls”, the front seats in a theatre, is a metaphor for the front line in the army. The ordinary soldier was the one to take the bullets and had the highest risk of injury and death. This is an astute prediction by Kipling, given the conflicts that arose in the 1890s following the poem’s publication; the Boer War, the Ashanti War, the Boxer Rebellion etc. leading of course to the First World War. | Rudyard Kipling | Tommy |
Detroit Conference of Unity and Art
(For HRB)
We went there to confer
On the possibility of
Blackness
And the inevitability of
Revolution
We talked about
Black leaders
And | Black Love | We talked about
Women
And Black men | The idea of “Black Love” is also mentioned in Giovanni’s autobiographical poem “Nikki-Rosa.” Giovanni writes, “Black Love is Black Wealth.”
View the poem “Nikki-Rosa” here. | Nikki Giovanni | Detroit Conference of Unity and Art For HRB |
My candle burns at both ends;
It will not last the night; | But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends—
It gives a lovely light! | null | What is the “it” in “it gives a lovely light”? is “it” really the candle? It may be life, or her passions- it is up to the reader to decide.
Her passion (for writing? life?) may burn itself out early, but it’ll be beautiful while it lasts.
Notice the catchy vowel cluster in “ah, my foes, and oh, my friends” - when you say only the vowels together, it sounds like “AH-OH-OH-EH” . This may be telling us that Friends and Foes are really similar after all.
“These violent delights have violent ends And in their triumph die, like fire and powder, Which as they kiss consume…” ( Romeo and Juliet , Act 2, Scene 6 )
Essentially – it isn’t going to work out long term, but things are nice in the moment. | Edna St. Vincent Millay | First Fig My candle burns at both ends... |
Our Savior, by a Hair
A second more, had dropped too deep
For Fisherman to plumb
The very profile of the Thought
Puts Recollection numb
The possibility—to pass
Without a Moment's Bell
Into Conjecture's presence
Is like a Face of Steel
That suddenly looks into ours
With a metallic grin
The Cordiality of Death | Who drills his Welcome in | null | The drilling of an epitaph on a gravestone is implied here. | Emily Dickinson | That after Horror—that twas us |
One day too sweet for beings to survive.
Many shall come away as struggle worn
And spent and dusted off of their regalia
To which at daybreak they were freshly born
As after one-of-them's proverbial failure
From having beaten all day long in vain
Against the wrong side of a window pane.
But waste was of the essence of the scheme.
And all the good they did for man or god
To all those flowers they passionately trod
Was leave as their posterity one pod
With an inheritance of restless dream. | He hangs on upside down with talon feet
In an inquisitive position odd
As any Guatemalan parakeet. | Something eludes him. Is it food to eat?
Or some dim secret of the good of waste?
He almost has it in his talon clutch. |
the pods look like the parakeets! but I guess the speaker means the butterfly, not the pods. | Robert Frost | Pod of the Milkweed |
I sat all morning in the college sick bay
Counting bells knelling classes to a close.
At two o'clock our neighbours drove me home.
In the porch I met my father crying -
He had always taken funerals in his stride -
And Big Jim Evans saying it was a hard blow.
The baby cooed and laughed and rocked the pram
When I came in, and I was embarrassed
By old men standing up to shake my hand
And tell me they were "sorry for my trouble."
Whispers informed strangers I was the eldest, | Away at school, as my mother held my hand | In hers and coughed out angry tearless sighs.
At ten o'clock the ambulance arrived
With the corpse, stanched and bandaged by the nurses. | The speaker was away when he received the call that a family member had died. The phrasing “my mother held my hand” suggests that it was more for her benefit, reaching out for her son’s consolation, and also to relax her from worrying about her son’s well-being. | Seamus Heaney | Mid-Term Break |
Nature's first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf's a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day. | Nothing gold can stay. | null | Everything That Comes Must Also Go
Whether leaves, or sunrises, dreams, even material wealth, everything will fade with time. People will go through ups and downs, through life and death.
Gold – beauty, hope, miracles – can exist, but as they come, they must also go. | Robert Frost | Nothing Gold Can Stay |
Shoulders sag, | The pull of weighted needling. | Arms drag, smacking wet in soft bone
Sockets.
Knees thaw, | This can refer to two things. The pull could be physical and the needle itself can make a person’s body unclench and make their shoulders sag. The second meaning can be emotionally and it can pull you into a different mindset from your normal life, whether for the better or for the worse of it all. | Maya Angelou | Junkie Monkey Reel |
It feels so old a pain –
I wonder if it hurts to live –
And if They have to try –
And whether – could They choose between –
It would not be – to die –
I note that Some – gone patient long –
At length, renew their smile –
An imitation of a Light
That has so little Oil –
I wonder if when Years have piled –
Some Thousands – on the Harm –
That hurt them early – such a lapse | Could give them any Balm – | Or would they go on aching still
Through Centuries of Nerve –
Enlightened to a larger Pain – | Balm is used to heal wounds; Dickinson is questioning the old saying “Time heals all wounds”. | Emily Dickinson | I measure every Grief I meet 561 |
And eat well,
And grow strong.
Tomorrow,
I'll be at the table
When company comes.
Nobody'll dare
Say to me,
“Eat in the kitchen,”
Then.
Besides,
They'll see how beautiful I am
And be ashamed— | I, too, am America. | null | Unlike the first line, in which the narrator is only “singing America,” he is now establishing an identity as an American. “Too” dictates that said identity is no different than that of the white majority. | Langston Hughes | I Too |
The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending , we lay waste our powers:
Little we see in Nature that is ours; | We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon! | The Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers; | Sordid : hateful, dirty
Boon : favor
Here, Wordsworth changes his tone from inwardly sorrowful to outwardly disapproving. We have nothing because we gave our hearts to human concerns, believing that it makes us altruistic. An example is believing that it is more profitable to kill the last remaining whale and invest the money. Unlike material pleasure, nature can’t be bought or sold; it’s just there. | William Wordsworth | The world is too much with us... |
“Peace upon earth!” was said. We sing it
And pay a million priests to bring it.
After two thousand years of mass | We've got as far as poison-gas. | null | Often Hardy’s end-rhymes feel like the massive stone door to a secret temple opening, but this one undercuts ‘mass’ with wickedly dark humour.
Chemical weapons, as we now call them, were first used during the First World War. In 1914 tear gas was used, a relatively ineffective gas which could literally only induce tears. However, the technology quickly advanced, and we soon had the most famous poison gas used in World War One, Mustard Gas .The contemporary reader will probably be familiar with really evil stuff like Sarin , and in fact, Hardy’s term ‘poison-gas’ sounds kind of naïve to modern ears– which proves further the accuracy and prescience of this poem.
As a military person will tell you, chemical weapons are extremely effective at indiscriminately killing innocent civilians, and extremely ineffective at winning battles, which is why they’re banned by the UN, and why some advocated the United States striking Syria when they were deployed by the Syrian government in 2013.
Hardy frequently nails it when it comes to bleakness. | Thomas Hardy | Christmas: 1924 |
Oh Crown of Light, oh Darkened One
I never thought we'd meet
You kiss my lips, and then it's done:
I'm back on Boogie Street
A sip of wine, a cigarette
And then it's time to go
I tidied up the kitchenette;
I tuned the old banjo
I'm wanted at the traffic-jam
They're saving me a seat
I'm what I am, and what I am | Is back on Boogie Street | And oh my love, I still recall
The pleasures that we knew;
The rivers and the waterfall | Another Leonard Cohen interview clip clarifying somewhat the meaning of Boogie Street – physical and metaphorical –
It’s an image to evoke the deception, the “lost illusions boulevard”, an image of the everyday life, with its tentations, its disillusions. In fact there is actually a “Boogie Street” in Singapore. A very attractive street, where you can find illegal records. I remember having been there after a Tour in Australia. I was almost offended not to find my records. I asked the seller and he went back with a box containing the entire collection of my records – what you could never find anywhere else, furthermore at one dollar each record. By night, this same street becomes the hottest one of the area. It’s a street of working ans sex, and of all the deceptions these activities can bring, deceptions more cruel as you get older, like I do. | Leonard Cohen | Boogie Street |
In the sea, Biscayne, there prinks
The young emerald, evening star— | Good light for drunkards, poets, widows,
And ladies soon to be married. | By this light the salty fishes
Arch in the sea like tree-branches,
Going in many directions | These are the people, the well-to-do, sensuality focussed demographic, with whom Stevens contrasts the philosophic wisdom he brings in later.
| Wallace Stevens | Homunculus et La Belle Etoile |
Dear critic, who my lightness so deplores,
Would I might study to be prince of bores,
Right wisely would I rule that dull estate— | But, sir, I may not, till you abdicate. | null | The point of the poem is an insult. It is a formal insult because of the author’s use of diction. By saying sir, it seems like he may have respect for the critic, but reading between the lines, he is actually insulting him. | Paul Laurence Dunbar | To A Captious Critic |
They love you on the street
If you were here I'd kneel for you
A thousand kisses deep
The autumn moved across your skin
Got something in my eye
A light that doesn't need to live
And doesn't need to die
A riddle in the book of love
Obscure and obsolete
To witness tear and time and blood
A thousand kisses deep
And I'm still working with the wine | Still dancing cheek to cheek | The band is playing Auld Lang Syne
But the heart will not retreat
I ran with Dez, I sang with Ray | Refers to the 1935 Cole Porter song “Cheek to Cheek” , made famous by Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers in the film “Top Hat”.
| Leonard Cohen | A Thousand Kisses Deep - Recitation w/ N.L. Live in London |
LXI
The vane on Hughley steeple
Veers bright, a far-known sign,
And there lie Hughley people,
And there lie friends of mine.
Tall in their midst the tower
Divides the shade and sun, | And the clock strikes the hour
And tells the time to none. |
To south the headstones cluster,
The sunny mounds lie thick; | See also Robert Frost’s
The tower said, ‘One’ And then a steeple. They spoke to themselves And such few people As winds might rouse From sleeping warm (But not unhouse).
from his “I Will Sing You One-O” | A. E. Housman | Hughley Steeple |
They went home and told their wives,
that never once in all their lives,
had they known a girl like me, | But... They went home. | They said my house was licking clean,
no word I spoke was ever mean,
I had an air of mystery, | These men she refers to are married and think of her as nothing more than a friend–a girl to them, not a woman. Although they thinks highly of her personality, they don’t have feelings for her like she does for them.
| Maya Angelou | They Went Home |
null | In Memorium EG | We came upon him, stilled
and oblivious,
gazing into a field | Possibly a reference to Edward Gallagher, a contemporary of Heaney’s. | Seamus Heaney | Last Look |
null | I hadn't met his kind before. | His misericord face – really,
like a joke on his father – blurred
as if from years of polish; | The dry, understated opening line conveys unequivocally the speaker’s feeling of separateness and alienation from her new baby. The tone is humorous. She prefers not even to mention that he is a baby; instead “his kind” implies another type of life form altogether. | Kate Clanchy | Love |
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 | Blood in this context holds multiple meanings:
Obviously blood can literally mean blood, in that the ruler is blindly leading England towards danger and devastation as it bleeds out and slowly withers.
Blood could be referenced from the leech’s perspective, in that the leech (or ruler) feeds off of the contributions of the hardworking citizens.
The plosive ‘b’s and alliterative 'bl’s in 'blind’, ‘blood’ and ‘blow’ suggest spitting contempt. This line and the one that follows would be extremely effective if read aloud in performance.
| Percy Bysshe Shelley | England in 1819 |
There's none of these so lonely and poor of old,
But, dying, has made us rarer gifts than gold.
These laid the world away; poured out the red
Sweet wine of youth; gave up the years to be
Of work and joy, and that unhoped serene,
That men call age; and those who would have been,
Their sons, they gave, their immortality.
Blow, bugles, blow! They brought us, for our dearth,
Holiness, lacked so long, and Love, and Pain.
Honour has come back, as a king, to earth,
And paid his subjects with a royal wage;
And Nobleness walks in our ways again; | And we have come into our heritage. | null | The “we” in this line, we can assume, is the English nation. The sacrifice of the young men has engendered a new state of heroism and nobility.
And so an awkward and not quite satisfactory poem is brought to its conclusion. The smooth flow masks some illogicalities, though we should bear in mind that we have the advantage of hindsight, and Brooke was echoing the commonly held views of the time. | Rupert Brooke | III. The Dead |
null | You know, we French stormed Ratisbon: | A mile or so away
On a little mound, Napoleon
Stood on our storming-day; | This introduces the setting, pace, and tone of the poem. The speaker is a Frenchman, given by “we French”. This is iambic tetrameter, which creates a conversational tone as if the speaker were telling a story or having a conversation.
In the lines given for explanation, the poet is describing the scene of the French attack on the German city of Ratisbon. Marshal Lannes led the French aggression in the year 1783. On that occasion, the French emperor Napoleon stood on a hillock just a mile away from the scene of the onslaught. He appeared to be in a pensive mood. He had his neck sticking out and his legs were wide apart. He had his arms joined behind his bark and a cloud on his brow was quite visible. It seemed that something very important was weighing upon his mind and he was perhaps working out his future strategy and line of action. | Robert Browning | Incident of The French Camp |
Light the first light of evening, as in a room
In which we rest and, for small reason, think
The world imagined is the ultimate good. | This is, therefore, the intensest rendezvous.
It is in that thought that we collect ourselves,
Out of all the indifferences, into one thing: | Within a single thing, a single shawl
Wrapped tightly round us, since we are poor, a warmth,
A light, a power, the miraculous influence. | Here, the speaker asserts that “the world imagined” is an extremely powerful idea among all people, and also involves the highest calling to the self, and is thus “the intensest rendezvous.”
“We collect ourselves / Out of all the indifferences, into one thing"—we all pursue this idea, disregarding all "indifferences”, because it is “the intensest rendezvous.”
That the pursuit of this idea is specified as being “one thing” allows the reader to see a sort of shared interest in this pursuit. Indeed the “we” here hints at the relationship between the poet and the reader, although the title’s reference to the “interior paramour”–a kind of internal muse figure–suggests first and foremost the poet’s “rendezvous” with that side of himself he “meets” in composing poetry. | Wallace Stevens | Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour |
Could you ever understand?
We have lived a painful history,
We know the shameful past,
But I keep on marching forward,
And you keep on coming last.
Equality, and I will be free.
Equality, and I will be free.
Take the blinders from your vision,
Take the padding from your ears,
And confess you've heard me crying,
And admit you've seen my tears.
Hear the tempo so compelling, | Hear the blood throb through my veins. | Yes, my drums are beating nightly,
And the rhythms never change.
Equality, and I will be free. | The speaker want the person to know that they feel very strongly about this subject, as the feeling for justice goes through their veins, as the subject is close to their heart.
| Maya Angelou | Equality |
null | When night's black Mantle could most darkness prove, | And sleepe (deaths Image) did my senses hyre,
From Knowledge of my selfe, then thoughts did move
Swifter than those, most switnesse neede require? | Mantle (From “Mantellum” – Latin for Cloak) is a type of loose garment serving the same purpose as an overcoat.
Technically, the term describes a long, loose cape-like cloak worn from the 12th to the 16th century by both sexes, although by the 19th century, it was used to describe any loose-fitting, shaped outer garment similar to a cape. | Lady Mary Wroth | When nights black mantle could most darkness prove |
There are miners still
In the underground rivers
Of West Moor and Palmersville.
There are guttering cap-lamps bound up in the roots
Where the coal is beginning again.
They are sinking slowly further
In between the shiftless seams,
To black pools in the bed of the world. | In their long home the miners are labouring still - | Gargling dust, going down in good order,
Their black-braided banners aloft,
Into flooding and firedamp, there to inherit | This line pulls together and explains the essence of the poem; the miners are ‘labouring still’ in spirit.
Their ‘long home’ is literal and figurative. These ghostly miners inhabit a seam of coat, but ‘long’ also refers to time. | Sean O'Brien | Fantasia on a Theme of James Wright |
Oh, give us pleasure in the flowers to-day;
And give us not to think so far away
As the uncertain harvest; keep us here
All simply in the springing of the year.
Oh, give us pleasure in the orchard white,
Like nothing else by day, like ghosts by night;
And make us happy in the happy bees,
The swarm dilating round the perfect trees.
And make us happy in the darting bird | That suddenly above the bees is heard,
The meteor that thrusts in with needle bill, | And off a blossom in mid air stands still.
For this is love and nothing else is love,
The which it is reserved for God above | This fast moving bird Frost points out is the Humming bird that “thrusts in with needle bill”. That feeds of the blossom.
| Robert Frost | A Prayer in Spring |
Et sabots durs aux chevaux...
Why are not women fair,
All, as Andromache—
Having, each one, most praisable
Ears, eyes, soul, skin, hair?
Good God! That all beasts should have
The tusks of the elephant,
Or be beautiful
As large, ferocious tigers are.
It is not so with women.
I wish they were all fair,
And walked in fine clothes, | With parasols, in the afternoon air. | null | The “parasol” concordance might lead us to think that this poem is addressed to Harriet Monroe of Poetry – though this can only be conjecture.
| Wallace Stevens | Peter Parasol |
Late afternoon dreaming hotel
We just had the quarrel that sent you away
I was looking for you are you gone gone
Called you on the phone another dimension
Well you never returned oh you know what I mean
I went looking for you are you gone gone
Down by the ocean it was so dismal | Women all standing with shock on their faces | Sad description oh I was looking for you
Everyone was singing girl is washed up
On Redondo Beach and everyone is so sad | In the 1970s Redondo Beach was a popular destination for Southern California’s lesbian community. Though the song is about Smith’s sister (see opening annotation) it has often been understood as a song about a lesbian relationship “widely interpreted as the lament of a woman whose girlfriend has committed suicide and whose body washes up on a Los Angeles beach popular with lesbians and gays” according to this interview . | Patti Smith | Redondo Beach |
For Michael S. Harper | Billie Holiday's burned voice
had as many shadows as lights, | a mournful candelabra against a sleek piano,
the gardenia her signature under that ruined face.
(Now you're cooking, drummer to bass, | These lines speak to the tragic life of legendary jazz singer Billie Holiday.
Holiday had been “burned” in many ways, but her most famous song, “Strange Fruit,” speaks directly to the burning of Blacks in America.
The second line connects directly with Holiday’s life prior to fame. The shadows the poem speaks to are those of poverty, prostitution, and drugs, all of which came before she saw the light of success.
The reference to “lights” may hint at the effect of the big city on Holiday. Born in Baltimore, she moved to NYC looking for a better life. What she found in Harlem led her down the road to drugs and prostitution.
Due to her addictions and bad reputation, she was barred from performing in places that served alcohol and was ultimately restricted to Harlem, which, like Chinatown, was a place where stuff like this was swept under the rug or considered OK.
Harlem, the Apollo theater–famous Black performing venue:
Chinatown:
| Rita Dove | Canary |
null | Everywhere she dies. Everywhere I go she dies. | No sunrise, no city square, no lurking beautiful mountain
but has her death in it.
The silence of her dying sounds through | The poem begins abruptly, three words with multiple meanings. She ‘dies’ is in the present tense, implying that the loss is fresh in the poet’s mind. Also it is ongoing, not something that has happened and will fade; the word ‘everywhere’ suggests that he can’t escape the grief. He then goes on to repeat this, adding ‘I go’ to link with ‘she’, to emphasise their important closeness to each other.
| Norman MacCaig | Memorial |
Go to the western gate, Luke Havergal, — | There where the vines cling crimson on the wall, — | And in the twilight wait for what will come.
The wind will moan, the leaves will whisper some —
Whisper of her, and strike you as they fall; | Establishes the autumn setting of the poem and, through the verb “cling,” a mood of tension and urgency.
And now, a crimson vine interlude with light jazz:
| Edwin Arlington Robinson | Luke Havergal |
"Cross"
My old man's a white old man
And my old mother's black.
If ever I cursed my white old man
I take my curses back.
If ever I cursed my black old mother
And wished she were in hell,
I'm sorry for that evil wish
And now I wish her well.
My old man died in a fine big house.
My ma died in a shack.
I wonder where I'm going to die, | Being neither white nor black? | null | The final phrase (and forceful monosyllables) “white nor black” remind us of the current system of categorization, and how rigid it is. The speaker does not fully belong to either racial group, and his “being neither” forces him to fall into unremembered death.
The question mark at the end of the poem stands in stark contrast to the authoritative ending lines of the previous two stanzas. For no matter how confident and aware the speaker is aware of his heritage, the notion of a future identity that is acknowledged by society and uniquely his, remains uncertain. | Langston Hughes | Cross |
You say I O.K.ed
LONG DISTANCE?
O.K.ed it when?
My goodness, Central
That was then! | I'm mad and disgusted
With that Negro now
I don't pay no REVERSED
CHARGES nohow | You say, I will pay it--
Else you'll take out my phone?
You better let | Madam is upset with her lover because he refused to pay for the conversation they had and reversed the distance charge . The charging process is similar to calling someone collect.
| Langston Hughes | Madam and the Phone Bill |
First we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin
I'd really like to live beside you, baby
I love your body and your spirit and your clothes
But you see that line there moving through the station?
I told you, I told you, told you, I was one of those
And I thank you for those items that you sent me
The monkey and the plywood violin
I practiced every night, now I'm ready
First we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin
(I am guided)
Ah remember me, I used to live for music (baby)
Remember me, I brought your groceries in (ooh baby yeah) | Well it's Father's Day and everybody's wounded (baby) | First we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin | Father’s Day, a day to bond with your father or your children. But many people actually have problematic relationships with their families, and carry the emotional or physical scars that go with it. | Leonard Cohen | First We Take Manhattan |
Queer fungi sprouting; the fields and woods
Covered with spiderwebs; black vapors
Rising from the earth - all these,
And more began that fall. Ravens flew round
The hospital in pairs. Where there was water,
We could hear the sound of beating clothes
All through the night. We could not count
All the miscarriages, the quarrels, the jealousies.
And one day in a field I saw
A swarm of frogs, swollen and hideous,
Hundreds upon hundreds, sitting on each other,
Huddled together, silent, ominous, | And heard the sound of rushing wind. | null | The use of rushing wind could link back to the Bible, as it could represent a breath of life being given to the world now that it has endure the scourge that was the plague.
| Weldon Kees | The Coming of the Plague |
One thing that literature would be greatly the better for
Would be a more restricted employment by the authors of simile and
metaphor.
Authors of all races, be they Greeks, Romans, Teutons or Celts,
Can't seem just to say that anything is the thing it is but have to
go out of their way to say that it is like something else.
What does it mean when we are told | That that Assyrian came down like a wolf on the fold? | In the first place, George Gordon Byron had enough experience
To know that it probably wasn't just one Assyrian, it was a lot of
Assyrians. | Referring to the first line of The Destruction of Sennacherib by George Gordon, Lord Byron.
Here’s the first stanza:
The Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold, And his cohorts were gleaming in purple and gold; And the sheen of their spears was like stars on the sea When the blue wave rolls nightly on deep Galilee. | Ogden Nash | Very Like a Whale |
What the hand dare seize the fire?
And what shoulder, and what art
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
And when thy heart began to beat
What dread hand? & what dread feet?
What the hammer? what the chain?
In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? What dread grasp
Dare its deadly terrors clasp?
When the stars threw down their spears
And watered heaven with their tears
Did he smile his work to see? | Did he who made the Lamb make thee? | Tyger! Tyger! burning bright
In the forests of the night:
What immortal hand or eye | Blake refers his earlier poem, “The Lamb,” and, in doing so, highlights one of the major questions addressed in his companion volumes Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience , loosely expressed as “Wait…is God personally involved in suffering?
The lamb is usually associated with Jesus. Did the creator of the innocent lamb also create this fearful tiger? | William Blake | The Tyger |
Complighted in one vibrant breath made cry,—
“Make thy love sure—to weave whose song we ply!”
—From black embankments, moveless soundings hailed,
So seven oceans answer from their dream.
And on, obliquely up bright carrier bars
New octaves trestle the twin monoliths
Beyond whose frosted capes the moon bequeaths
Two worlds of sleep (O arching strands of song!)—
Onward and up the crystal-flooded aisle
White tempest nets file upward, upward ring
With silver terraces the humming spars,
The loft of vision, palladium helm of stars. | Sheerly the eyes, like seagulls stung with rime— | Slit and propelled by glistening fins of light—
Pick biting way up towering looms that press
Sidelong with flight of blade on tendon blade | “Rime” is the ice that forms when cold water droplets come into contact with a cold surface. Crane, who always plays on the multiple meanings of words, probably also means to remind us of Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” much of which takes place in the icy waters near the South Pole.
Overall this image evokes eyes staring up at something so brilliant that it almost hurts to look at, as though the eyes were stung by cold. Compare the line “Frosted eyes there were that lifted altars” from Crane’s “At Melville’s Tomb.”
| Hart Crane | Atlantis |
Unkissed
(—My psychiatrist can lick your psychiatrist.) Women get under
Things
All these old criminals sooner or later
Have had it. I've been reading old journals
Gottwald & Co., out of business now
Thick chests quit. Double agent, Joe
She holds her breath like a seal
And is whiter & smoother
Rilke was a jerk
I admit his griefs & music
& titled spelled all-disappointed ladies | A threshold worse than the circles | Where the vile settle & lurk
Rilke's. As I said,— | See Dante’s Inferno .
For Henry, on the stimulant of song, Rilke’s lettered lifelessness is a purgatory worse than hell. | John Berryman | Dream Song 3 A Stimulant for an Old Beast |
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, | Here Arnold laments the death of Shakespeare. | Matthew Arnold | Shakespeare |
The Priest sat by and heard the child;
In trembling zeal he seized his hair,
He led him by his little coat,
And all admired his priestly care.
And standing on the altar high,
‘Lo, what a fiend is here!' said he:
‘One who sets reason up for judge
Of our most holy mystery.'
The weeping child could not be heard,
The weeping parents wept in vain:
They stripped him to his little shirt,
And bound him in an iron chain, | And burned him in a holy place | Where many had been burned before;
The weeping parents wept in vain.
Are such things done on Albion's shore? | It is ironic that the burning — reference to the practice in the previous century of burning heretics alive — should take place in a ‘holy’ place. Burning humans alive could not be more alien to the love preached by Jesus. | William Blake | A Little Boy Lost |
the impossibility of being human
Maupassant going mad in a rowboat
Dostoyevsky lined up against a wall to be shot
Crane off the back of a boat into the propeller
the impossibility
Sylvia with her head in the oven like a baked potato
Harry Crosby leaping into that Black Sun
Lorca murdered in the road by Spanish troops
the impossibility
Artaud sitting on a madhouse bench
Chatterton drinking rat poison
Shakespeare a plagiarist | Beethoven with a horn stuck into his head against deafness | the impossibility the impossibility
Nietzsche gone totally mad
the impossibility of being human | German composer Ludwig van Beethoven gradually lost his hearing and eventually became completely deaf. In an attempt to combat this he used several primitive hearing aids, including an ear horn.
| Charles Bukowski | Beasts Bounding Through Time |
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.
Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling on the sky the message He Is Dead,
Put crêpe bows round the white necks of the public doves,
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.
He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last for ever: I was wrong.
The stars are not wanted now: put out every one;
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun;
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood. | For nothing now can ever come to any good. | null | After the hyperbolic statements that preceeded this line, we return to the mundane. Like giving the dog a juicy bone, the lyricism is replaced by the prosaic ‘nothing now can ever come to any good’.
So the poem ends pessimistically; the culmination of anxiety and despair, hopelessness and depression, characteristic of Auden in the 1930s, a period he termed the Age of Anxiety . The poem, as well as expressing deep grief, reflects the state of society of the time: the Great Depression, the Spanish Civil War and the rise of Hitler and Nazism.
W.H. Auden: 1907-1973.” The Poetry Foundation. Monroe Poetry Institute | W. H. Auden | Funeral Blues Stop all the clocks |
null | The world is too much with us; late and soon, | Getting and spending , we lay waste our powers:
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon! | Wordsworth starts with a complaint about consumerism, common among Romantic poets. “The world” here refers to the material as opposed to the spiritual world, or the human world as opposed to nature. Society places too much focus on the material world and inward upon itself rather than towards the outside world. Wordsworth also implies that us, humans, are a huge burden to the world and cannot coexist peacefully. Nature suffers by the hands of humans.
Late and soon imply indefiniteness; humanity’s selfishness is old news. | William Wordsworth | The world is too much with us... |
I have been one acquainted with the night.
I have walked out in rain—and back in rain.
I have outwalked the furthest city light.
I have looked down the saddest city lane.
I have passed by the watchman on his beat
And dropped my eyes, unwilling to explain.
I have stood still and stopped the sound of feet | When far away an interrupted cry
Came over houses from another street
But not to call me back or say good-bye; | And further still at an unearthly height
One luminary clock against the sky
Proclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right. | Even though there was a cry heard some distance away, indicating the presence of people near the narrator, the cry is not for the narrator as it does not “call [him] back or say good-bye.” In addition, although the people are nearby, the narrator is alone. Again, the distance between the cry and narrator represents the distance the narrator feels between himself and others. This reinforces the theme that the narrator is feeling lonely and as if there is no one there for him.
This line suggests the danger and isolation of the city. The cry could be an indication of somebody being attacked or hurt but nobody does anything about it. This has to do with the idea that many people ironically feel lonelier in a city, even though they are surrounded by people.
It’s also possibly a reference to the diffusion of responsibility that often occurs occurs in cities and which creates a reluctance for people to help others and interact with people around them. | Robert Frost | Acquainted with the Night |
(for Cyril Connolly)
The piers are pummelled by the waves;
In a lonely field the rain
Lashes an abandoned train;
Outlaws fill the mountain caves.
Fantastic grow the evening gowns;
Agents of the Fisc pursue
Absconding tax-defaulters through
The sewers of provincial towns.
Private rites of magic send | The temple prostitutes to sleep; | All the literati keep
An imaginary friend.
Cerebrotonic Cato may | In ancient Greece and Rome, people went to Asclepeions，temples dedicated to the pagan god of healing Aesculapius, to be healed. They would cleanse themselves ritually in the courtyard, offer a gift in the inner temple, and finally go to sleep in the abaton. The temple priests would act out scenes during the night in an effort to drive off the illness. If the patient was lucky, Asclepeion would come to them in their dreams and cure their sickness. More likely, the priests would divine their dreams and prescribe a cure.
This practice translated to the use of churches as hospitals after Rome adopted Christianity. However, the actual rites were largely performed well before the fall of Rome.
The ruins of the Asclepeion of Kos | W. H. Auden | The Fall of Rome |
The rent man knocked.
He said, Howdy-do?
I said, What
Can I do for you?
He said, You know
Your rent is due. | I said, Listen,
Before I'd pay
I'd go to Hades
And rot away! | The sink is broke,
The water don't run,
And you ain't done a thing | In Greek mythology, Hades is the lord of the Underworld, where the dead reside. In other words, she’s not paying her rent until she dies, which could be a pretty long time.
| Langston Hughes | Madam and The Rent Man |
[Published by Rossetti, "Complete Poetical Works of P. B. S.", 1870.]
I dreamed that Milton's spirit rose, and took
From life's green tree his Uranian lute;
And from his touch sweet thunder flowed, and shook | All human things built in contempt of man,—
And sanguine thrones and impious altars quaked, | Prisons and citadels… | Milton was known for his angry, pugnacious temperament , and devout worship of his own eccentric brand of Christianity . If he ever came back to life, he’d open a can of whup-ass on every public figure who he thought deserved it.
This rather derpy portrait of him doesn’t fully convey his willingness to beat a fool down if need be. | Percy Bysshe Shelley | Fragment: Miltons Spirit |
The toy
become the aesthetic archetype | As if
some patient peasant God
had rubbed and rubbed
the Alpha and Omega
of Form
into a lump of metal | A naked orientation
unwinged and unplumed
—the ultimate rhythm | The Bible refers to God as the potter who forms creation with his hands in the same way that a potter forms clay with his hands. This bit of the poem speaks of the creator of the sculpture and paints a picture of the sculptor as a god over his creation, working to form it into the creation is eventually becomes. Constantin Brancusi grew up as a “peasant” in an area of Romania famous for folk crafts. He later became one of the most important sculptors of the age. | Mina Loy | Brancusis Golden Bird |
joy was his song and joy so pure
a heart of star by him could steer
and pure so now and now so yes
the wrists of twilight would rejoice
keen as midsummer's keen beyond
conceiving mind of sun will stand
so strictly(over utmost him
so hugely)stood my father's dream
his flesh was flesh his blood was blood:
no hungry man but wished him food;
no cripple wouldn't creep one mile
uphill to only see him smile | Scorning the Pomp of must and shall | my father moved through dooms of feel;
his anger was as right as rain
his pity was as green as grain | His father seems to have a distaste for tradition, or the mainstream–quite strongly, as this is the first incident of two capitalized words in a single line, and the second and third capital letter of this whole poem so far (the first one is found three stanzas before ).
As a result, we may read this as “ Scorning the Pomps ”–“pomps” being a traditional and splendid ceremony; in this case, a ceremony of social norms (“must"s and "shall"s) | E. E. Cummings | My father moved through dooms of love |
I empty myself of the names of others. I empty my pockets.
I empty my shoes and leave them beside the road.
At night I turn back the clocks;
I open the family album and look at myself as a boy.
What good does it do? The hours have done their job.
I say my own name. I say goodbye.
The words follow each other downwind.
I love my wife but send her away.
My parents rise out of their thrones
into the milky rooms of clouds. How can I sing? | Time tells me what I am. I change and I am the same. | I empty myself of my life and my life remains. | Time, and how you use it, is the ultimate decider in determining how you are perceived by the world.
As time goes on we dramatically change, both physically and mentally. However, even though all of our cells replace themselves in the time span of seven years, we still remain the same human being. Whether it be because of the name the have, the way we look, or the way we think, there will always be something that remains the same. | Mark Strand | The Remains |
Dawn gilds the farmers like pigs,
Swaying slightly in their thick suits,
White towers of Smithfield ahead,
Fat haunches and blood on their minds.
There is no mercy in the glitter of cleavers,
The butcher's guillotine that whispers: 'How's this, how's this?'
In the bowl the hare is aborted,
Its baby head out of the way, embalmed in spice,
Flayed of fur and humanity.
Let us eat it like Plato's afterbirth,
Let us eat it like Christ.
These are the people that were important--- | Their round eyes, their teeth, their grimaces | On a stick that rattles and clicks, a counterfeit snake.
Shall the hood of the cobra appall me---
The loneliness of its eye, the eye of the mountains | Having referred in stanza two to the running train — signifying Plath’s entrapment — she picks up the idea again in the ‘round eyes’. So maybe Plato and Christ are not saviours but figures that imprison.
Using the same methodology, Plath may have cited ‘teeth’ as a continuation of the theme of devouring. Grimacing is what one does when in pain.
Therefore, what may be thought of as positives in society in Plath’s world become negatives; the familiar totems are destructive and have no value. | Sylvia Plath | Totem |
All things that pass
Are woman's looking-glass;
They show her how her bloom must fade,
And she herself be laid
With withered roses in the shade;
With withered roses and the fallen peach,
Unlovely, out of reach | Of summer joy that was. | All things that pass
Are woman's tiring-glass;
The faded lavender is sweet, | The summer is a metaphor for pleasure and beauty, but also for time passing. Once the summer is over the flowers fade. A woman’s ‘summer’ means the end of her beauty and the beginning of her ‘decline’.
The use of the seasons as a metaphor for time passing is common in poetry and song.
| Christina Rossetti | Passing And Glassing |
I shall hate you
Like a dart of singing steel
Shot through still air
At even-tide.
Or solemnly
As pines are sober
When they stand etched
Against the sky
Hating you shall be a game
Played with cool hands
And slim fingers | Your heart will yearn
For the lonely splendor
Of the pine tree | While rekindled fires
In my eyes
Shall wound you like swift arrows | Once the speaker has graduated to playing her hatred like a game, the subject will wish the speaker were still hating him (I’m assuming a male subject here) in silence like a solemn pine tree. | Gwendolyn B. Bennett | Hatred |
Saying something very soppy such as ‘Who Loves Ya, Poo?
I'll tell you, I do, Fozzy bear, that's who!'
You'd entirely fail to charm me, in fact I'd detest it
I wouldn't be eighteen again for anything, I'm glad I'm past it.
I wouldn't thank you for a Valentine.
If you sent me a single orchid, or a pair of Janet Reger's
In a heart-shaped box and declared your Love Eternal
I'd say I'd rather not be caught dead in them they were
Politically suspect and I'd rather something thermal.
If you hired a plane and blazed our love in a banner across the skies;
If you bought me something flimsy in a flatteringly wrong size;
If you sent me a postcard with three Xs and told me how you felt | I wouldn't thank you, I'd melt. | null | The last line is open to interpretation. One possibility is that the gifts in the last stanza would strike a chord and the speaker would find these acceptable, although this is unlikely; they don’t differ that much in uselessness from the preceding gifts.
Another suggestion is that the speaker would “melt” with embarrassment, though there is insufficient evidence in the poem for this.
More likely is that she is receptive to the love that prompted the gifts, though not the gifts themselves. It is this underlying love that she appreciates, so they cause her to “melt”. The poem concludes with the idea that it is love that is important, not the commercialisation and material gifts. | Liz Lochhead | I Wouldnt Thank You For A Valentine |
The hills step off into whiteness.
People or stars
Regard me sadly, I disappoint them.
The train leaves a line of breath. | O slow | Horse the color of rust,
Hooves, dolorous bells--
All morning the | This short, two word line is full of complex meaning. Firstly, there are the long, rhyming ‘O’ sounds. Although this is the shortest line in the poem the sounds are the slowest. There is a contrast between the train with its smoke, signifying speed, and the reference to slowness. It would seem to be an oxymoron . It is difficult to define why this train should be slow, unless Plath sees it as akin to the sluggish, dragging feeling of depression.
Although the sentence continues to the next line, the enjambment is hesitant. There is a pause after ‘slow’ - a caesura which separates it from the ‘horse’ in the following line.
We can speculate why Plath does this. Perhaps she is reluctant to think of horses. She once used to love horse-riding, as she describes in the poem Ariel , but abandoned riding during her depressive episodes. | Sylvia Plath | Sheep in Fog |
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
Of easy wind and downy flake.
The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep, | And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep. | null | The final couplet is one of the most famous instances of repetition in American poetry.
The speaker is exhausted and wishes he could fall asleep. His repetition thus has a weary quality. On the literal level he still has a long ways to go before he’s home. Metaphorically, “miles to go” suggests life; “sleep,” death. The metaphorical linkage between sleep and death is as old as the most ancient mythology, and echoes through some of the most famous passages in English literature; see e.g. Hamlet’s “To die, to sleep.”
If we read the previous line (“promises to keep”) as the speaker yielding to his societal obligations, this couplet may indicate how difficult fulfilling those obligations will be–how hard the road ahead is. Tensions like these are part of why critic Lionel Trilling famously called Frost (against the opinion of most critics at the time) “a terrifying poet.”
| Robert Frost | Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening |
943
A Coffin — is a small Domain
Yet able to contain
A Citizen of Paradise
In it diminished Plane
A Grave — is a restricted Breadth
Yet ampler than the Sun | And all the Seas He populates | And Lands He looks upon
To Him who on its small Repose
Bestows a single Friend | Bodies decompose and deteriorate into the soil of the land. Other options for burrial is creamating the body and burying an empty casket. The remains are then most times let go to see or to any desired location. The ashen body spreads out and much of it may be present in multiple bodies of water.
| Emily Dickinson | A Coffin — is a small Domain |
And put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,
Then with cracked hands that ached
From labor in the weekday weather made
Banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.
I'd wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he'd call,
And slowly I would rise and dress,
Fearing the chronic angers of that house,
Speaking indifferently to him,
Who had driven out the cold
And polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know | Of love's austere and lonely offices? | null | This line implies that love motivates the father to do so much for his unappreciative family. As a result, the man is lonely. The adjectives ‘austere and lonely’ emphasise the speaker’s awareness as an adult and his feelings of guilt.
The long vowels in ‘love’, ‘austere’ and ‘lonely’ add to the heaviness and sadness. This again benefits from being read aloud.
This final line also implies that love is often unrequited. The love of a parent for a child can be a one-way street and a lonely place to inhabit. | Robert Hayden | Those Winter Sundays |
null | London is full of chickens on electric spits, | Cooking in windows where the public pass.
This, say the chickens, is their Auschwitz,
And all poultry eaters are psychopaths. | A statement that suggests huge but imprecise numbers, too many to mentally grasp, just as the six million murdered Jews are too many for the mind to accept. | Peter Porter | London is full of chickens on electric spits From Annotations of Auschwitz |
White and black,
Who make surveys and write books
Will live on weaving words to smother the kids who die,
And the sleazy courts,
And the bribe-reaching police,
And the blood-loving generals,
And the money-loving preachers
Will all raise their hands against the kids who die,
Beating them with laws and clubs and bayonets and bullets
To frighten the people—
For the kids who die are like iron in the blood of the people—
And the old and rich don't want the people | To taste the iron of the kids who die, | Don't want the people to get wise to their own power,
To believe an Angelo Herndon, or even get together
Listen, kids who die— | Human blood has a certain amount of iron in it, and tastes a little like iron (as you know if you’ve ever had a cut in your mouth). | Langston Hughes | Kids Who Die |
But she had a twelve-room
House to clean.
Had to get breakfast,
Dinner, and supper, too--
Then take care of her children
When I got through.
Wash, iron, and scrub,
Walk the dog around--
It was too much,
Nearly broke me down.
I said, Madam,
Can it be | You trying to make a
Pack-horse out of me? | She opened her mouth.
She cried, Oh, no!
You know, Alberta, | Madam is trying to over work the life out of her. A pack-horse is a horse used to transport goods, equipment, etc but is most often used as a metaphor to describe over working someone or something.
| Langston Hughes | Madam and Her Madam |
These pools that, though in forests, still reflect
The total sky almost without defect,
And like the flowers beside them, chill and shiver,
Will like the flowers beside them soon be gone,
And yet not out by any brook or river,
But up by roots to bring dark foliage on.
The trees that have it in their pent-up buds
To darken nature and be summer woods --
Let them think twice before they use their powers | To blot out and drink up and sweep away | These flowery waters and these watery flowers
From snow that melted only yesterday. |
Despite the fact that the flowers will soon be gone, there is room for hope here.
Wallace says that “Death is the mother of beauty”; as the leaves blossom, they push out the flowers. Even if we think imagine the flowers as dead, there is new life/beauty that comes with the death. Eventually, the tree will wither and the cycle will begin again.
With a deeper understanding of the ecological process underway in this poem, the flowers do not generally die, but live underground through a root system and rebloom the next spring. Just because we can’t see the flowers doesn’t mean that they are gone; visibility is not necessary for existence. | Robert Frost | Spring Pools |
Traffic holding its breath,
Sky a tense diaphragm:
Dusk hung like a backcloth
That shook where a swan swam,
Tremulous as a hawk
Hanging deadly, calm.
A vacuum of need
Collapsed each hunting heart
But tremulously we held
As hawk and prey apart,
Preserved classic decorum,
Deployed our talk with art. | Our Juvenilia | Had taught us both to wait,
Not to publish feeling
And regret it all too late - | Juvenilia refers to an artist’s early artwork, usually not their best. In this case Heaney compares the couple’s juvenilia to their early relationships with others that scared them and how those relationships have made them “Twice Shy” and reluctant to open up to each other. | Seamus Heaney | Twice Shy |
null | 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. | “The front yard” is a metaphor for a sheltered or protected life, in contrast with “the back”: a rougher, more dangerous, but (for the speaker) more thrilling and authentic-seeming life.
Brooks tended to worry a lot about “the kids these days” – see also “We Real Cool” – but wrote from inside their heads to try to understand their motivations. | Gwendolyn Brooks | A Song in the Front Yard |
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
Five is a drinker with a dip-in nose
Six is a flapper with flippers on his toes
Seven is a tapper with a tripper in his beak
Eight is a nutter with a nut sack in his cheek | Nine is a hanger with a banger in his head | Ten is the stopper who stepped in and said
It's time for the guessing; here in a line
Are all the numbers from one to nine | A bell. Bells originated in China and have often been used for religious purposes. The world’s largest swinging bell is the World Peace Bell in the Millennium Monument of Newport, Kentucky, USA; it weighs 66,000 pounds and is 12 feet across.
| John Ciardi | Guess |
She is neither pink nor pale,
And she never will be all mine;
She learned her hands in a fairy-tale,
And her mouth on a valentine.
She has more hair than she needs;
In the sun 'tis a woe to me! | And her voice is a string of colored beads,
Or steps leading into the sea. | She loves me all that she can,
And her ways to my ways resign;
But she was not made for any man, | This line’s metaphor greatly contrasts the first line , wherein the woman was neither dead or alive, but either way, lacking colorful features.
This line is synonymous the fourth line , where her mouth is described as sweet and made of fantasy and love.
But the next part takes an unexpected turn–apparently her words are not only lovely, but also has the ability to lead you into the sea, and drown. | Edna St. Vincent Millay | Witch-Wife |
null | Somewhere or other there must surely be | The face not seen, the voice not heard,
The heart that not yet--never yet--ah me!
Made answer to my word. | The opening line of each stanza is repeated with slight variations, a device known as anaphora . This emphasises the message of the poem; the speaker’s yearning for love. Note that the second and third stanzas are almost identical apart from the reversal of ‘near or far’ to ‘far or near’.
If spoken aloud this line has a rhythmic sonority that draws the reader in. | Christina Rossetti | Somewhere or Other |
In some place of the sun,
To whirl and to dance
Till the white day is done.
Then rest at cool evening
Beneath a tall tree
While night comes on gently,
Dark like me--
That is my dream!
To fling my arms wide
In the face of the sun,
Dance! Whirl! Whirl!
Till the quick day is done. | Rest at pale evening . . .
A tall, slim tree . . . | Night coming tenderly
Black like me. | When the day is over, the speaker would like to lay against a tall, slim tree and rest while watching the sunset. Once the sunset turns into a dark night, it’s like he is watching himself. | Langston Hughes | Dream Variations |
null | It is true, as someone has said, that in
A world without heaven all is farewell.
Whether you wave your hand or not, | It is farewell, and if no tears come to your eyes
It is still farewell, and if you pretend not to notice,
Hating what passes, it is still farewell. | Strand often writes about the inevitability of death.
We see this idea recur in his poem “The Remains”: “What good does it do? The hours have done their job.” | Mark Strand | XVI |
null | There is a deep brooding
In Arkansas. | Old crimes like moss pend
From poplar trees.
The sullen earth | “Brooding”: Engaged in or showing deep thought about something that makes one sad, angry, worried.
The word quite possibly refers to the period of brutality and racism going on in Arkansas at the time.
| Maya Angelou | My Arkansas |
If we should stumble when musicians play,
Time will say nothing but I told you so.
There are no fortunes to be told, although,
Because I love you more than I can say,
If I could tell you I would let you know.
The winds must come from somewhere when they blow,
There must be reasons why the leaves decay;
Time will say nothing but I told you so.
Perhaps the roses really want to grow,
The vision seriously intends to stay;
If I could tell you I would let you know.
Suppose the lions all get up and go, | And all the brooks and soldiers run away; | Will Time say nothing but I told you so?
If I could tell you I would let you know. | For soldiers to run away from battle is what is viewed as cowardice. There also seems to be a bit of word-play going on here: soldiers run, and so do brooks. Running water is a classic symbol for Time, and this would not be the first time Auden used it like that . This means that cowardice runs as does Time. | W. H. Auden | If I Could Tell You |
I cannot follow you, my love
You cannot follow me
I am the distance you put between
All of the moments that we will be
You know who I am
You've stared at the sun
Well I am the one who loves | Changing from nothing to one | Sometimes I need you naked
Sometimes I need you wild
I need you to carry my children in | Likely referring to the creation of something out of nothing or, in Genesis, order out of chaos. | Leonard Cohen | You Know Who I Am |
null | A Route of Evanescence | With a revolving Wheel--
A Resonance of Emerald--
A Rush of Cochineal-- | “Evanescence” is used to describe things that fade or disappear quickly. Hummingbirds can flap their wings over 1200 times a minute and can fly up to 60 miles per hour, thus their path is so evanescent, and they themselves disappear quickly too.
| Emily Dickinson | A Route of Evanescence |
943
A Coffin — is a small Domain
Yet able to contain
A Citizen of Paradise
In it diminished Plane
A Grave — is a restricted Breadth
Yet ampler than the Sun
And all the Seas He populates | And Lands He looks upon | To Him who on its small Repose
Bestows a single Friend
Circumference without Relief | The soul of the deceased looks upon earth from his vantage point. His body has disintegrated into the ground and is now one with the land and soil.
| Emily Dickinson | A Coffin — is a small Domain |
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand dare seize the fire?
And what shoulder, and what art
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
And when thy heart began to beat
What dread hand? & what dread feet?
What the hammer? what the chain?
In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? What dread grasp
Dare its deadly terrors clasp?
When the stars threw down their spears
And watered heaven with their tears | Did he smile his work to see? | Did he who made the Lamb make thee?
Tyger! Tyger! burning bright
In the forests of the night: | Is this creation something of which God was proud? Blake is again struggling with the concept of evil being deliberately created by his God, a supposedly compassionate and good entity. Is he asking the question, “Does God just allow evil to exist, or does he create it for his own amusement?”
There is no clear answer given the biblical passage
And God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good. (Genesis 1:31, KJV).
It may, however, refer to the gift of free will that God gave to his ‘children’, who then allowed evil into their world, though this isn’t posited in poem. | William Blake | The Tyger |
Ten years from now I'll be payin' still
While whitey's on the moon
The man just upped my rent last night
Cause whitey's on the moon
No hot water, no toilets, no lights
But whitey's on the moon
I wonder why he's upping me?
Cause whitey's on the moon?
Well I was already giving him fifty a week
With whitey on the moon
Taxes taking my whole damn check
Junkies making me a nervous wreck | The price of food is going up | And as if all that shit wasn't enough:
A rat done bit my sister Nell
With whitey on the moon | In low income and impoverished neighborhoods, access to nutritional and affordable food is not as available as areas where income is high. This situation creates what is known as food deserts, where residents have to resort to buying heavily processed boxed and can goods, old produce, and high calorie-low nutrition food. There is also the abundance and proliferation of fast-food Restaurants that provide fast, cheap, and low nutrition food which residents primarily rely on to avoid going hungry.
| Gil Scott-Heron | Whitey on the Moon |
Subsets and Splits
No community queries yet
The top public SQL queries from the community will appear here once available.