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And once I marked his flight go round and round,
As where some flower lay withering on the ground.
And then he flew as far as eye could see,
And then on tremulous wing came back to me.
I thought of questions that have no reply,
And would have turned to toss the grass to dry;
But he turned first, and led my eye to look
At a tall tuft of flowers beside a brook,
A leaping tongue of bloom the scythe had spared
Beside a reedy brook the scythe had bared.
I left my place to know them by their name,
Finding them butterfly weed when I came. | The mower in the dew had loved them thus,
By leaving them to flourish, not for us, | 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, | By loving something, we discover responsibility for it, just as the narrator “finds them”. The mower may not have spared the flowers deliberately, the flowers represent beauty that is incidental to man, or perhaps accidental. They are not only “for us”, but for nature. Frost is often impressed by worlds outside the human, which he explores in After Apple Picking and Stopping By Woods On A Snowy Evening.
The narrator is comforted by the idea that the mower acted consciously; it confirms the spiritual existence of humanity, outside his limited experiences. | Robert Frost | The Tuft of Flowers |
Acacia, burnt myrrh, velvet, pricky stings
—I'm not so young but not so very old
Said screwed-up lovely 23
A final sense of being right out in the cold
Unkissed
(—My psychiatrist can lick your psychiatrist.) Women get under
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 | Czech premier Klement Gottwald | John Berryman | Dream Song 3 A Stimulant for an Old Beast |
null | A baby watched a ford, whereto | A wagtail came for drinking;
A blaring bull went wading through,
The wagtail showed no shrinking. | Hardy begins simply, starting with the baby (whom we find is an observer rather than an active participant), with the first line ending with the archaic ‘whereto’. This sets the poem in the past. | Thomas Hardy | Wagtail and Baby |
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 | The connotation invoked by “this debt” suggests that something is owed. But the sentence quickly turns out to refer to the sacrifice that must be made in order to be cunning and duplicitous.
This poem has traditionally been interpreted as an expression of black experience. Some scholars have seen it as primarily about racial relations, the dynamics of which can be extended to other systems of oppression. But in this line, the word “human” opens up exegetical possibilities in a much more universal way. | Paul Laurence Dunbar | We Wear the Mask |
You have anti-freeze in the car, yes,
But the shivering stars wade deeper.
Your scarf's tucked in under your buttons,
But a dry snow ticks through the stubble.
Your knee-boots gleam in the fashion,
But the moon must stay
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 |
Electric blankets typify the mass produced gadgets of dubious quality which rose to prominence in the 1960s. The overriding feeling of these lines is one of false, fragile comfort. | Ted Hughes | Christmas Card |
Law 36. Disdain Things You Cannot Have: Ignoring Them Is The Best Revenge
Law 37. Create Compelling Spectacles
Law 38. Disdain Things You Cannot Have: Ignoring Them Is The Best Revenge
Law 39. Stir Up Waters To Catch Fish
Law 40. Despise The Free Lunch
Law 41. Avoid Stepping Into A Great Man's Shoes
Law 42. Strike The Shepherd And The Sheep Will Scatter
Law 43. Work On The Hearts And Minds Of Others
Law 44. Disarm And Infuriate With The Mirror Effect
Law 45. Preach The Need For Change, But Never Reform Too Much At Once
Law 46. Never Appear Too Perfect
Law 47. Do Not Go Past The Mark You Aimed For; In Victory, Learn When To Stop | Law 48. Assume Formlessness | null | “By taking a shape, by having a visible plan, you open yourself to attack. Instead of taking a form for your enemy to grasp, keep yourself adaptable and on the move. Accept the fact that nothing is certain and no law is fixed. The best way to protect yourself is to be as fluid and formless as water; never bet on stability or lasting order. Everything changes.”
| Robert Greene | 48 Laws of Power |
When my mother died I was very young,
And my father sold me while yet my tongue
Could scarcely cry 'weep! 'weep! 'weep! 'weep!
So your chimneys I sweep, and in soot I sleep.
There's little Tom Dacre, who cried when his head,
That curled like a lamb's back, was shaved: so I said,
"Hush, Tom! never mind it, for when your head's bare,
You know that the soot cannot spoil your white hair." | And so he was quiet; and that very night, | As Tom was a-sleeping, he had such a sight, -
That thousands of sweepers, Dick, Joe, Ned, and Jack,
Were all of them locked up in coffins of black. | There is a rhythmic quality to the poem, particularly this line; the story-telling style emphasises the essential innocence. | William Blake | The Chimney Sweeper Songs of Innocence |
Because I could not stop for Death –
He kindly stopped for me – | The Carriage held but just Ourselves –
And Immortality | We slowly drove – He knew no haste
And I had put away
My labor and my leisure too | The ‘Carriage’ may be a hearse, which the dead speaker shares with allegorized Death, but also with ‘Immortality’. Dickinson intimates that death is a necessary part of the passage to the next life. There are also romantic overtones, i.e., the speaker is on a date with Death. Or the carriage may simply be a fantasy, the vehicle of an imagined journey that the speaker is taking into the realm of death.
The speaker and Death are about to travel to the grave, depicted in stanza five as a ‘House’. This journey might be a funeral procession or a dramatization of the “life flashing before your eyes” scenario.
Dickinson may be hinting here at poetic ‘immortality’; i.e., she is graced with the presence of immortality because her art will live on. (An old trope that’s alive and well today: see Jay Z’s “Threat.” ) Alternatively, this could simply be Dickinson’s original, highly unconventional vision of a Judeo-Christian afterlife. | Emily Dickinson | Because I Could Not Stop for Death |
That Justice is a blind goddess | Is a thing to which we black are wise: | Her bandage hides two festering sores
That once perhaps were eyes | Note Hughes’s alliteration in this line. His use of “wh” and hard “i” seems to suggest the word “white” without ever landing on it. | Langston Hughes | Justice |
I said, Johnson,
Alberta K.
But he hated to write
The K that way.
He said, What
Does K stand for?
I said, K--
And nothing more.
He said, I'm gonna put it
KÐAÐY.
I said, If you do,
You lie. | My mother christened me
Alberta K. | But he hated to write
The K that way.
He said, What | She was born with the K in her name, and she does not want that changed at the mercy of the census man.
| Langston Hughes | Madam and the Census Man |
When I go up through the mowing field,
The headless aftermath,
Smooth-laid like thatch with the heavy dew, | Half closes the garden path. | And when I come to the garden ground,
The whir of sober birds
Up from the tangle of withered weeds | The chance off getting to a better Place was starting to Close. Doesnt Close it fully, gives a sample of both Worlds and gives new perspectives. | Robert Frost | A Late Walk |
An August Bank Holiday lark;
And the shops shut, the bleached
Established names on the sunblinds,
The farthings and sovereigns,
And dark-clothed children at play
Called after kings and queens,
The tin advertisements
For cocoa and twist, and the pubs
Wide open all day;
And the countryside not caring:
The place names all hazed over
With flowering grasses and fields | Shadowing Domesday lines | Under wheat's restless silence;
The differently-dressed servants
With tiny rooms in huge houses, | Domesday Book was a record of property in England, produced in 1085 for tax purposes. This creates a sense of timelessness and continuity, the ongoing history of a country. The reader knows, however, that all this will change, as highlighted by the play on words — “Domesday” and “doom’s day”.
| Philip Larkin | MCMXIV re-transcribed |
It faces west, and round the back and sides
High beeches, bending, hang a veil of boughs
And sweep against the roof. Wild honeysucks | Climb on the walls, and seem to sprout a wish | (If we may fancy wish of trees and plants)
To overtop the apple trees hard-by
Red roses, lilacs, variegated box | When plants sprout it’s like they are aspiring to something, like they have an intuition. | Thomas Hardy | Domicilium |
Last night, while I lay thinking here, | Some Whatifs crawled inside my ear | And pranced and partied all night long
And sang their same old Whatif song:
Whatif I'm dumb in school? | Silverstein is referring to the thoughts, questions, and nagging doubts that come to your mind while you’re lying in bed–and how they seemingly just crawl into your ear. | Shel Silverstein | Whatif |
This door you might not open, and you did;
So enter now, and see for what slight thing
You are betrayed…. Here is no treasure hid,
No cauldron, no clear crystal mirroring
The sought-for truth, no heads of women slain
For greed like yours, no writhings of distress, | But only what you see…. Look yet again-- | An empty room, cobwebbed and comfortless.
Yet this alone out of my life I kept
Unto myself, lest any know me quite; | Edna St. Vincent Millay uses punctuation and breaks in the narrative in the this final line before the volta to increase a sense of suspense within the poem. | Edna St. Vincent Millay | Bluebeard Sonnet VI |
null | Piteous my rhyme is | What while I muse of love and pain,
Of love misspent, of love in vain,
Of love that is not loved again: | The opening line teases the reader. Is it the rhyme and the poet’s craftsmanship that is piteous? Or is it the subject matter? Or is it the poet herself? Or maybe all three? The uncertainty draws the reader in.
Note the inverted word order, starting with the adjective; a device known as anastrophe , designed to give ‘piteous’ emphasis. | Christina Rossetti | Piteous my rhyme is |
To what purpose, April, do you return again?
Beauty is not enough.
You can no longer quiet me with the redness
Of little leaves opening stickily.
I know what I know.
The sun is hot on my neck as I observe
The spikes of crocus. | The smell of the earth is good. | It is apparent that there is no death.
But what does that signify?
Not only under ground are the brains of men | Millay expresses all these great qualities of Spring—the flowers, the smell, the leaves—only to eventually diss them and say that such beauty only gives us a false sense that grotesques and death do not exist. | Edna St. Vincent Millay | Spring |
My daughter made drawings with the pens you sent,
line drawings that suggest the things they represent,
different from any drawings she — at ten — had done,
closer to real art, implying what the mind fills in. | For her mother she made a flower fragile on its stem;
for me, a lion, calm, contained, but not a handsome one. | She drew a lion for me once before, on a get-well card,
and wrote I must be brave even when it's hard.
Such love is healing — as you know, my friend, |
The flower and the lion that Ryan’s daughter drew gives away an idea of the character of both her mother and father. A flower thats fragile on its stem is a symbol that would be drawn for someone who is warm-hearted and kind. The lion means that her father (Michael Ryan) tries not to display much emotion in front of his daughter and that inevitably, Michael Ryan is not a handsome-looking gentleman.
| Michael Ryan | A Thank You Note |
Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though; | He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow. | My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake | Frost paints us a picture that is both beautiful and startling. These snowy woods are “lovely” (see final stanza), but they’re also threatening on a primal level. By the end of the poem, they’re metaphorically linked with death.
This speaker is stopping to watch –to savor the sublimity of the scene. According to Arthur Schopenhauer , a 19th-century philosopher of aesthetics, the sublime is “pleasure from perceiving objects that threaten to hurt or destroy the observer.” Think: lightning, fire, heights.
The speaker enjoys the fact that his stopping will be his own secret. His act is rebellious because he is trespassing imaginatively against the owner’s purpose for the woods, which are seemingly undeveloped, available merely as a route for villagers to pass through. By stopping, he creates a relationship with the woods in his private, subjective world of thought which re-appropriates the landscape in opposition to social and legal possession. The owner is far away and cannot share the speaker’s experience, and may have never noticed this part of the forest. He is nameless and faceless, suggesting that his ownership is irrelevant. It’s a bit like the divide between a father and a lover, if the land is a girl: the lover stirs and alters the father’s original socialisation of his daughter because his focus is more physical and spiritual. Like the speaker, he doesn’t create or raise, but rather reinterprets and ignites. Interestingly, the speaker is “possessed” by the supernatural power of the landscape, suggesting that he too is unaware of the forces seducing him. Contemplating death and the inhuman aspects of the world are certainly rebellious acts!
Here the speaker may be contemplating death as something peaceful and serene, even inviting, like a landscape whose imperfections have been smoothed out with a blanket of snow.
If we read the “he” as God, this line might also speak to the narrator’s profound sense of loneliness, despair, depression–or abandonment. “He will not see me,” either because he does not exist, or because he no longer cares what I do. | Robert Frost | Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening |
Sometimes the notes are ferocious,
Skirmishes against the author
Raging along the borders of every page
In tiny black script.
If I could just get my hands on you,
Kierkegaard, or Conor Cruise O'Brien,
They seem to say,
I would bolt the door and beat some logic into your head. | Other comments are more offhand, dismissive -
“Nonsense.” ”Please!” “HA!!” -
That kind of thing. | I remember once looking up from my reading,
My thumb as a bookmark,
Trying to imagine what the person must look like | These lighter marginalia contrast the harsher ones of the stanza above, creating a spectrum of types of such notes. | Billy Collins | Marginalia |
I LOOK into my glass,
And view my wasting skin,
And say, "Would God it came to pass
My heart had shrunk as thin!" | For then, I, undistrest
By hearts grown cold to me,
Could lonely wait my endless rest
With equanimity. | But Time, to make me grieve,
Part steals, lets part abide;
And shakes this fragile frame at eve | Skilled in concise expression, Hardy states that younger people would have greater resilience to cope with the rejection of the women— ‘hearts grown cold to me’ — with whom he had relationships. Here ‘equanimity’ means patience and calm.
Most noticable about this stanza is the word order. The conjunction ‘For’ and the subordinate clause are placed at the beginning, and the verb ‘could … wait’ doesn’t appear until line three. This gives emphasis to the iniital description ‘undistrest/By hearts grown cold’, meaning untroubled or without pain caused by his failed relationships. What the speaker wants most is freedom from the unhappiness that blights his life. | Thomas Hardy | I Look Into My Glass |
In the sun born over and over,
I ran my heedless ways,
My wishes raced through the house high hay
And nothing I cared, at my sky blue trades, that time allows
In all his tuneful turning so few and such morning songs
Before the children green and golden
Follow him out of grace,
Nothing I cared, in the lamb white days, that time would take me
Up to the swallow thronged loft by the shadow of my hand,
In the moon that is always rising,
Nor that riding to sleep
I should hear him fly with the high fields | And wake to the farm forever fled from the childless land. | Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means,
Time held me green and dying
Though I sang in my chains like the sea. | Instead of waking to a farm wandering white and beautiful like two stanzas ago, now the farm has no children. The children may have grown up and moved on; or even worse, died.
And yet another alliteration: F arm, F orever, F led. | Dylan Thomas | Fern Hill |
This strange thing must have crept
Right out of hell. | It resembles a bird's foot | Worn around the cannibal's neck.
As you hold it in your hand,
As you stab with it into a piece of meat, | A fork looks somewhat like a bird’s foot. Observe:
Fig. 1
Fig. 2 | Charles Simic | Fork |
"Of me"?
"No cordiality"—
He fathomed me—
Then to a Rhythm Slim
Secreted in his Form
As Patterns swim
Projected him.
That time I flew
Both eyes his way
Lest he pursue
Nor ever ceased to run
Till in a distant Town | Towns on from mine | I set me down
This was a dream. | This is difficult to interpret. She seems to be fleeing from the sexuality of the snake, or her own sexuality. But there are a lot of “Towns” and they seem to be far ahead. Her escape was questionable. There is a hint that, wherever she goes and whatever town she is in, the snake — her inner sexuality — will follow. | Emily Dickinson | In Winter in my Room 1670 |
[Published by Dr. Garnett, "Relics of Shelley", 1862.]
O that a chariot of cloud were mine!
Of cloud which the wild tempest weaves in air,
When the moon over the ocean's line
Is spreading the locks of her bright gray hair.
O that a chariot of cloud were mine! | I would sail on the waves of the billowy wind
To the mountain peak and the rocky lake, | And the…
*** | “Roads? Where we’re going, we don’t need roads!”
| Percy Bysshe Shelley | O That A Chariot Of Cloud Were Mine |
I was run over by the truth one day.
Ever since the accident I've walked this way
So stick my legs in plaster
Tell me lies about Vietnam.
Heard the alarm clock screaming with pain,
Couldn't find myself so I went back to sleep again
So fill my ears with silver
Stick my legs in plaster
Tell me lies about Vietnam.
Every time I shut my eyes all I see is flames.
Made a marble phone book and I carved out all the names | So coat my eyes with butter | Fill my ears with silver
Stick my legs in plaster
Tell me lies about Vietnam. | This is open to interpretation. When the poem was written Britain was beginning to emerge from post World War Two austerity — but butter was still a luxury. So this could mean that the speaker saw only his desire for luxury goods, rather than poverty and suffering across the world.
It could also be a reference to lack of clarity. Eyes need to be kept washed with nature’s clear moisture. Something greasy and foreign like butter would obscure vision. | Adrian Mitchell | To Whom It May Concern |
null | Cut to the Fleet. | The air near Ajax was so thick with arrows, that,
As they came, their shanks tickered against each other;
And under them the Trojans swarmed so thick | This cinematic ‘stage direction’ characterises Logue’s style. It brings Logue’s interpretation into the present day so that it may resonate with readers. | Christopher Logue | From War Music |
To ask the hard question is simple:
Asking at meeting
With the simple glance of acquaintance
To what these go
And how these do;
To ask the hard question is simple,
The simple act of the confused will.
But the answer
Is hard and hard to remember: | On steps or on shore | The ears listening
To words at meeting,
The eyes looking | two liminal places, moving from one area to another; we meet someone on the stairs, or on the shore—at the beach, or on “this shore,” on this side of eternity. | W. H. Auden | The Question |
Over the river, and through the wood,
To have a first-rate play.
Hear the bells ring
"Ting-a-ling-ding",
Hurrah for Thanksgiving Day!
Over the river, and through the wood
Trot fast, my dapple-gray!
Spring over the ground,
Like a hunting-hound!
For this is Thanksgiving Day.
Over the river, and through the wood,
And straight through the barn-yard gate. | We seem to go
Extremely slow,— | It is so hard to wait!
Over the river and through the wood—
Now grandmother's cap I spy! | Notice how the line break slows the phrase down for comic effect. Lydia Maria Child knows you don’t consider her a real poet, but step back: the woman’s got technique. | Lydia Maria Child | A Boys Thanksgiving Day Over the river and through the wood |
And maybe work for the Victor Jara Foundation.
I feel like a home-alone mother; all the lights
have gone out in the hall, and now I am
wearing your large black slippers, flip-flopping
into your empty bedroom, trying to imagine you
in your bed. I stare at the photos you send by messenger:
you on the top of the world, arms outstretched, eager.
Blue sky, white snow; you by Lake Tararhua, beaming.
My heart soars like the birds in your bright blue skies.
My love glows like the sunrise over the lost city.
I sing along to Ella Fitzgerald, A tisket A tasket.
I have a son out in the big wide world. | A flip and a skip ago, you were dreaming in your basket. | null | She returns once more to his childhood. His ‘dreaming’ in his Moses basket has ‘come true’ in his early adult life. For the poet the time has passed in a ‘flip and a skip’, an echo of her ‘flip-flopping’ in his slippers, the pain and joy of motherhood encapsulated in one brief line. | Jackie Kay | Gap Year |
null | 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, | With this opening line Matthew seems to suggest that other people (most likely other writers) are willing to be questioned and that they wish to be valuated by the critics and their readers. They simpy follow the traditions of convential writing.
Shakespeare, on the other hand, does no such thing; he’s ‘'free’‘. He doesn’t abide to any questioning, he doesn’t limit his way of thinking, he just follows his heart and is thus free from any criticism and scrutiny. Shakespeare is above other poets and his work will probably never be truly figured out.
| Matthew Arnold | Shakespeare |
Often beneath the wave, wide from this ledge
The dice of drowned men's bones he saw bequeath
An embassy. Their numbers as he watched,
Beat on the dusty shore and were obscured.
And wrecks passed without sound of bells,
The calyx of death's bounty giving back
A scattered chapter, livid hieroglyph,
The portent wound in corridors of shells.
Then in the circuit calm of one vast coil,
Its lashings charmed and malice reconciled, | Frosted eyes there were that lifted altars; | And silent answers crept across the stars.
Compass, quadrant and sextant contrive
No farther tides . . . High in the azure steeps |
Refers simply to a conviction that a man, not knowing perhaps a definite god yet being endowed with a reverence for deity … postulates a deity somehow, and [lifts] the altar of that deity by the very action of the eyes lifted in searching.”
-Crane in a letter to Harriet Monroe
| Hart Crane | At Melvilles Tomb |
"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? | The final two lines of the poem serve as a jarring turning point, or what would be a volta in a sonnet. The previous 12 lines of the poem are organized into simple, declarative thoughts. There is not the least bit of uncertainty by the speaker, and that is reiterated by the simple word choice and form. The speaker has made peace with his past in the first 12 lines, but as he or she begins to look ahead to the future, then the question of identity becomes very uncertain.
| Langston Hughes | Cross |
Each human heart and countenance;
Like hues and harmonies of evening,—
Like clouds in starlight widely spread,—
Like memory of music fled,—
Like aught that for its grace may be
Dear, and yet dearer for its mystery.
2.
Spirit of BEAUTY, that dost consecrate
With thine own hues all thou dost shine upon
Of human thought or form,—where art thou gone?
Why dost thou pass away and leave our state,
This dim vast vale of tears, vacant and desolate? | Ask why the sunlight not for ever | Weaves rainbows o'er yon mountain-river,
Why aught should fail and fade that once is shown,
Why fear and dream and death and birth | The sunlight is juxtaposed with the preceding tears to demonstrate how fleeting and changeable everything is. It represents human yearning for happiness. | Percy Bysshe Shelley | Hymn To Intellectual Beauty |
null | Safe upon the solid rock the ugly houses stand:
Come and see my shining palace built upon the
sand! | null | Matthew 7:24-27: “Therefore everyone who hears these words of mine and puts them into practice is like a wise man who built his house on the rock. The rain came down, the streams rose, and the winds blew and beat against that house; yet it did not fall, because it had its foundation on the rock. But everyone who hears these words of mine and does not put them into practice is like a foolish man who built his house on sand. The rain came down, the streams rose, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell with a great crash.”
Just as in First Fig , the narrator has put herself in a position she enjoys now, but without regard for the future. On the other hand, she’s also making a kind of boast: her “palace” may be temporary or even illusory–may in fact be a sandcastle–but at least it has a “shining” visionary quality. (Compare the expression “castles in the air.”) The poem lands somewhere between self-celebration and self-satire: how close it is to either side depends on the reader’s interpretation. | Edna St. Vincent Millay | Second Fig |
null | For Lincoln MacVeagh | Never tell me that not one star of all
That slip from heaven at night and softly fall
Has been picked up with stones to build a wall | Frost’s editor at Henry Holt and Company, from 1916 to 1923, when he became president of the Dial Press. According to notes provided to Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant, for her The Trial by Existence , MacVeigh visited Frost’s farm in Franconia, NH in 1919, where the two stayed up the night talking philosophy, “saying some of the best things we ever said.” Frost’s dedication turned out to be prophetic: MacVeagh would later become an amateur archaeologist while serving as U.S. ambassador to Greece. | Robert Frost | A Star in a Stone-Boat |
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 | In the tradition of Jewish mysticism dating back to the Song of Songs , Leonard Cohen often uses the metaphor and language of romantic love to describe his relationship with the divine.
Here, he is asking God whether he, too, is tired of all the suffering in the world, and is suggesting that it might be time to end it.
In Hindu tradition, a tired old world is destroyed by the god Shiva in a cosmic dance so that a new one can be created.
In both Hindu and Judeo-Christian tradition, this world is followed by another, perfect world (although in the former, the new world will also gradually corrupt). | Leonard Cohen | The Faith |
With a head of yellow cream
And Nelson on his pillar
Watching his world collapse.
This never was my town,
I was not born or bred
Nor schooled here and she will not
Have me alive or dead
But yet she holds my mind
With her seedy elegance,
With her gentle veils of rain
And all her ghosts that walk
And all that hide behind | Her Georgian facades - | The catcalls and the pain,
The glamour of her squalor,
The bravado of her talk. | A reference to the dominant architectural style of Dublin houses: those built in the Georgian (1714 to 1830) era.
| Louis MacNeice | Dublin |
null | Because I could not stop for Death
He kindly stopped for me
The carriage held but just ourselves | And Immortality
We slowly drove, he knew no haste
And I had put away | Straight off the bat, Emily lets us know the poem is about death, personified .
This is the narrator’s last trip as they venture from the real world into the after-world.
| Emily Dickinson | The Chariot |
The light came through the window
Straight from the sun above | And so inside my little room | There plunged the rays of love
In streams of light I clearly saw
The dust you seldom see | In various songs Cohen sings of a cell-like little rooms (like in monasteries) where the speaker and sometimes other characters live in:
“I’ve lain by this window long enough To get used to an empty room” (Master Song)
“I choose the rooms that I live in with care The windows are small and the walls almost bare There’s only one bed and there’s only one prayer” (Tonight Will Be Fine)
“And the last time that I saw her she was living with some boy Who gives her soul an empty room and gives her body joy” (Death of a Ladies' Man)
“I told my mother "Mother I must leave you Preserve my room but do not shed a tear” (The Traitor)
Cohen himself lived several years in a Buddhist retreat, becoming a monk, and this song seems like a mystical experience he reached in loneliness and meditation. | Leonard Cohen | Love Itself |
Democracy will not come
Today, this year
Nor ever | Through compromise and fear. | I have as much right
As the other fellow has
To stand | Here Hughes adds a justification to his prior lines. No longer is the tone depressed and pessimistic, it is empowering. Democracy emerges as achievable, but not “through compromise or fear”. This is Hughes implying the route to equality and democracy for blacks is through direct action. As a member of the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s, Hughes lays an egg that hatches into the Civil Rights Movement of the 50s and 60s with this line. The direct action Hughes dreamed of materialized during this Movement with sit-ins, bus boycotts, and voter registrations.
This picture is of a bus boycott march in the 1950s. It is one of many examples of the direct actions carried out by the leaders of the Civil Rights Movement and captures exactly what Hughes desires. These people are not sitting back and lobbying/compromising for their rights or fearful of the consequences and choosing to accept their back-of-the-bus treatment. They are taking real action. | Langston Hughes | Democracy |
Breaking things
I can't repair
Making objects
Out of thoughts
Making more than
By thinking not
Eating food
And drinking wine
A body that
I thought was mine
Dressed as Arab
Dressed as Jew | O mask of iron | I was there for you
Moods of glory
Moods so foul | The Man in the Iron Mask was an unidentified prisoner in the Bastille. Arab and Jew being masquerades, the mask of iron seems to be the most honest way of not showing oneself and thus escaping classification. | Leonard Cohen | There for You |
Blues and greys and greens across the river
We went into winter London parks, my darling
Monuments for blood spilt in foreign lands
It's on our hands, it's all across our faces
Photographs in paper bags
And she is far
She's getting so much further every day
Well, youth was no excuse I will excuse you still
For every single dirty magazine, my darling | Monuments on Margate Sands staples across your hands | And all across your face
Photographs in paper bags
And she is far | There is imagery in this song that appears to reference T S Eliot’s The Waste Land. This line could refer to the shelter at Margate in which Eliot wrote his draft of the poem:
On Margate Sands. I can connect Nothing with nothing.
The shelter has recently been designated a heritage site — a monument of a sort.
Focusing on the idea of nothing coming to nothing, which also appears in lyrics of another song on this album, the specific phrase has also been used in the Babyshamble’s song “Nothing Comes to Nothing.” | Pete Doherty | She Is Far |
And home we brought you shoulder-high.
To-day, the road all runners come,
Shoulder-high we bring you home,
And set you at your threshold down,
Townsman of a stiller town.
Smart lad, to slip betimes away
From fields where glory does not stay
And early though the laurel grows
It withers quicker than the rose.
| Eyes the shady night has shut | Cannot see the record cut,
And silence sounds no worse than cheers
After earth has stopped the ears: | The shady night is death. | A. E. Housman | To An Athlete Dying Young |
I laugh sometimes when I think about
Say
Céline at a typewriter
Or Dostoevsky... | Or Hamsun... | Ordinary men with feet, ears, eyes
Ordinary men with hair on their heads
Sitting there typing words | Refers to Norwegian author Knut Hamsun who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1920.
| Charles Bukowski | One thirty-six a.m. |
I started Early - Took my Dog
And visited the Sea
The Mermaids in the Basement
Came out to look at me
And Frigates - in the Upper Floor
Extended Hempen Hands
Presuming Me to be a Mouse | Aground - upon the Sands | But no Man moved Me - till the Tide
Went past my simple Shoe
And past my Apron - and my Belt | The ‘Sands’ could be interpreted in many ways. Sand is constantly shifting, like the poet’s imagination. There is a time progression in this poem; Dickinson starts ‘Early’, so the sands could represent time, as she travels through her imaginative journey. The friendliness of the mermaids is already over taken, Shifting sands represent uncertainty and insecurity. | Emily Dickinson | I Started Early - Took my Dog |
Man I love
but won't let you devour
even tho'
I'm all watermelon
and starapple and plum
when you touch me
even tho
I'm all seamoss and jellyfish
and tongue | Come | leh we go to the carnival
You be banana
I be avocado | There are complex messages in this poem. This seems like an invitation to the man, but we can already see that it is more sexual than a deep relationship. | Grace Nichols | Even Tho |
A Christmas Circular Letter
The city had withdrawn into itself
And left at last the country to the country;
When between whirls of snow not come to lie
And whirls of foliage not yet laid, there drove
A stranger to our yard, who looked the city,
Yet did in country fashion in that there
He sat and waited till he drew us out | A-buttoning coats to ask him who he was. | He proved to be the city come again
To look for something it had left behind
And could not do without and keep its Christmas. | People have to button their coats so they can go outside and ask of his identity. This further indicates that he is a city folk. | Robert Frost | Christmas Trees |
Tune me, O Lord, into one harmony
With Thee, one full responsive vibrant chord;
Unto Thy praise all love and melody,
Tune me, O Lord.
Thus need I flee nor death, nor fire, nor sword:
A little while these be, then cease to be,
And sent by Thee not these should be abhorred.
Devil and world, gird me with strength to flee,
To flee the flesh, and arm me with Thy word:
As Thy Heart is to my heart, unto Thee | Tune me, O Lord. | null | The last line repeats the opening, creating emphasis and an appropriate circularity in an address to an eternal God. | Christina Rossetti | Tune me O Lord into one harmony |
Look down now, Cotton Mather, from the blank.
Was heaven where you thought? It must be there.
It must be where you think it is, in the light
On bed-clothes, in an apple on a plate.
It is the honey-comb of the seeing man.
It is the leaf the bird brings back to the boat.
V
Go, mouse, go nibble at Lenin in his tomb.
Are you not le plus pur, you ancient one?
Cut summer down to find the honey-comb.
You are one . . . Go hunt for honey in his hair.
You are one of the not-numberable mice | Searching all day, all night, for the honey-comb. | null | We look for beauty at all times, but it is not to be found among the dead in the past; it is among us, thriving and flourishing in the natural, year in and year out. | Wallace Stevens | The Blue Buildings in the Summer Air |
Your skin like dawn
Mine like musk
One paints the beginning
Of a certain end. | The other, the end of a
Sure beginning. | null | Parallel
This line almost exactly mirrors the line before it, reversing the “beginning” and “end.”
If unaware of time, one can’t really tell the difference between sunrise and sunset.
Similarly, African Americans and whites are intrinsically the same.
In more general terms, the mirroring of these two lines suggests that everything is a matter of perspective. It’s up to the reader to decide if the glass is half empty or half full, if we are referring to the beginning of the end or to the end of the beginning.
| Maya Angelou | Passing Time |
Frankie Laine, he was singing Jezebel
I pinned an Iron Cross to my lapel | I walked up to the tallest and the blondest girl | I said, "Look, you don't know me now but very soon you will
So won't you let me see"
I said "won't you let me see" | Possibly a reference to the German rock singer Nico, who spurned Cohen’s advances but was apparently the muse for several of his songs including “Take This Longing” . | Leonard Cohen | Memories |
Fame is a fickle food
Upon a shifting plate
Whose table once a
Guest but not
The second time is set | Whose crumbs the crows inspect
And with ironic caw | Flap past it to the Farmer's Corn
Men eat of it and die | Perhaps “ironic” here is meant to imply that the crows are tainted in some way; maybe they are fickle themselves. | Emily Dickinson | Fame is a fickle food 1659 |
Is a stringed lute on which all winds can play
Is it for this that I have given away
Mine ancient wisdom, and austere control?
Methinks my life is a twice-written scroll
Scrawled over on some boyish holiday
With idle songs for pipe and virelay,
Which do but mar the secret of the whole.
Surely there was a time I might have trod
The sunlit heights, and from life's dissonance
Struck one clear chord to reach the ears of God:
Is that time dead? Lo, with a little rod
I did but touch the honey of romance— | And must I lose a soul's inheritance? | null | “What will be lost when in love?”
To end this work with this line shows skepticism till the end. | Oscar Wilde | Hélas |
You will do the same to a German
Soon, no doubt, if it be your pleasure
To cross the sleeping green between.
It seems you inwardly grin as you pass
Strong eyes, fine limbs, haughty athletes,
Less chanced than you for life,
Bonds to the whims of murder,
Sprawled in the bowels of the earth,
The torn fields of France.
What do you see in our eyes
At the shrieking iron and flame
Hurled through still heavens? | What quaver—what heart aghast? | Poppies whose roots are in man's veins
Drop, and are ever dropping;
But mine in my ear is safe— | The second rhetorical question relates to the terrible fears of the young men. Here, ‘quaver’ refers to trembling and terror, rather than the short musical note.
The ‘heart aghast’ brings this section to a climax. The two words are assonant with elongated vowels. It also picks up the alliterative ‘h’s of the previous line, as if mimicking gasps of fear. | Isaac Rosenberg | Break of Day in the Trenches |
And two of us at Conway dwell,
And two are gone to sea.
“Two of us in the church-yard lie,
My sister and my brother;
And, in the church-yard cottage, I
Dwell near them with my mother.”
“You say that two at Conway dwell,
And two are gone to sea,
Yet ye are seven! I pray you tell,
Sweet Maid, how this may be.”
Then did the little Maid reply,
“Seven boys and girls are we; | Two of us in the church-yard lie, | Beneath the church-yard tree.”
“You run about, my little Maid,
Your limbs they are alive; | The little girl includes her dead brother and sister in her account of her siblings. Her use of “us” shows that she is still considering the two dead siblings to be part of the group. The frustration and disagreement of the adult shows the disconnect between adult and children. While an adult would say “there are five children and two have passed,” the child continues to assert that there are still seven of them. She claims that because she spends time with her brother and sister, and eats with them, and plays with them that they are still with her and can be considered seven children instead of five. | William Wordsworth | We Are Seven |
I will be the gladdest thing
Under the sun!
I will touch a hundred flowers
And not pick one.
I will look at cliffs and clouds
With quiet eyes,
Watch the wind bow down the grass,
And the grass rise. | And when lights begin to show
Up from the town,
I will mark which must be mine,
And then start down! | null | We are enchanted by Millay’s words, only to finally be cut off by the presence of townspeople. This may be a metaphor for humans destroying the beauty that surrounds them–a topic also found in Eliot’s work | Edna St. Vincent Millay | Afternoon on a Hill |
null | 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 infinite, but amoral universe, representing the beginning in this verse.
In Hindu cosmology, the god Vishnu rests in an infinite sea of milk as he dreams up new worlds.
In Jewish mysticism, God in his true form is referred to as Ein Sof , Infinity, and created the universe by shrinking itself. | Leonard Cohen | The Faith |
Had I not been awake I would have missed it,
A wind that rose and whirled until the roof
Pattered with quick leaves off the sycamore | And got me up, the whole of me a-patter, | Alive and ticking like an electric fence:
Had I not been awake I would have missed it
It came and went too unexpectedly | This is a perfect iambic line, with an additional unstressed syllable at the end. There is a palpable sense of movement and progression as the speaker jumps up, brimming with motion.
There is no “I awoke” or “I got out of bed”– the speaker is forced up by the wind, in the simplest of terms: “And got me up”. | Seamus Heaney | Had I not been awake I would have missed it |
Should I kill you like you asked me to
If you're still alive
When you're twenty five
Would I kill you I know you told me to
But I really don't want to
I remember every single thing you said to me
You played the man and I was Calvary
And you said, ah you said
New love grows on trees
New love grows on trees
New love grows
New love grows on trees | If you please and if you don't please | That makes perfect nonsense to me
The price of being free these days
It's ridiculous | This line possibly references the first two lines of the song sung by Siamese cats in an orientalist scene from The Lady and the Tramp :
| Pete Doherty | New Love Grows On Trees |
After great pain, a formal feeling comes –
The Nerves sit ceremonious, like Tombs –
The stiff Heart questions ‘was it He, that bore,'
And ‘Yesterday, or Centuries before'?
The Feet, mechanical, go round – | A Wooden way | Of Ground, or Air, or Ought –
Regardless grown,
A Quartz contentment, like a stone – | This is perhaps just another reference to the last line, where the “Feet” can be seen to belong to some spiritless toy. “Wooden” conveys a sense of numbness. | Emily Dickinson | After great pain a formal feeling comes J341 F372 |
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. | The writer is explaining that he would have to devote a lot of personal time to studying how to be boring in order to usurp the critic’s throne at the matter. | Paul Laurence Dunbar | To A Captious Critic |
Love set you going like a fat gold watch.
The midwife slapped your footsoles, and your bald cry
Took its place among the elements.
Our voices echo, magnifying your arrival. New statue.
In a drafty museum, your nakedness
Shadows our safety. We stand round blankly as walls.
I'm no more your mother
Than the cloud that distills a mirror to reflect its own slow
Effacement at the wind's hand.
All night your moth-breath
Flickers among the flat pink roses. I wake to listen:
A far sea moves in my ear. | One cry, and I stumble from bed, cow-heavy and floral
In my Victorian nightgown. | Your mouth opens clean as a cat's. The window square
Whitens and swallows its dull stars. And now you try
Your handful of notes; | Despite being exhausted, heavy with post-pregnancy weight, and probably overwhelmed, Plath follows her maternal instincts in going to take care of the baby.
The Victorian nightgown is a style that covers her from neck to the ground, modesty being the aim. Motherhood has taken away her sexuality. | Sylvia Plath | Morning Song |
King of the perennial holly-groves, the riven sand-
stone: overlord of the M5: architect of the his-
toric rampart and ditch, the citadel at Tamsworth,
the summer hermitage in Holy Cross: guardian of
the Welsh Bridge and the Iron Bridge: contractor
to the desirable new estates: saltmaster: money-
changer: commissioner for oaths: martyrologist:
the friend of Charlemagne. | ‘I liked that,' said Offa, ‘sing it again.' | null | This line frames the previous verset, establishing it as a panegyric delivered to Offa, about whom the rest of Mercian Hymns will return to many times. | Geoffrey Hill | Mercian Hymns: I |
For tryin' to change the system from within
I'm coming now, I'm coming to reward them
First we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin
I'm guided by a signal in the heavens
I'm guided by this birthmark on my skin
I'm guided by the beauty of our weapons
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
Ah you loved me as a loser, but now you're worried that I just might win | You know the way to stop me, but you don't have the discipline | How many nights I prayed for this, to let my work begin
First we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin
I don't like your fashion business, mister | In his heart, he still has feelings for the man he once was, and for the people important to him back them. They hold the key to “stopping” him, making him want to go back to just being another common man, but he also knows well that the men untouched by his own passions lack the drive to do such a thing.
| Leonard Cohen | First We Take Manhattan |
null | There we were in the vaulted tunnel running, | You in your going-away coat speeding ahead
And me, me then like a fleet god gaining
Upon you before you turned to a reed | The “we” is Heaney and his new wife. The atmosphere is that of a dream or fantasy.
The “vaulted tunnel” refers to the underground, traffic-free linking pedestrian underpass from South Kensington tube station, along the length of Exhibition Road and emerging close to the Royal Albert Hall where the Proms are held.
The “tube” is the underground train system in London.
The idea of a “vaulted tunnel” is dream-like or nightmarish even, somewhere mysterious and without end.
| Seamus Heaney | The Underground |
I did but prompt the age to quit their clogs
By the known rules of ancient liberty,
When straight a barbarous noise environs me
Of owls and cuckoos, asses, apes and dogs:
As when those hinds that were transform'd to frogs
Rail'd at Latona's twin-born progeny
Which after held the sun and moon in fee. | But this is got by casting pearl to hogs, | That bawl for freedom in their senseless mood,
And still revolt when truth would set them free.
Licence they mean when they cry liberty; | This line alludes to Jesus' Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 7:6:
Do not give what is holy to the dogs; nor cast your pearls before swine, lest they trample them under their feet, and turn and tear you in pieces | John Milton | Sonnet 12: I did but prompt the age to quit their clogs |
Driven out, and compelled to the chaste
I went to the Garden of Love
And saw what I never had seen
A Chapel was built in the midst
Where I used to play on the green
And the gates of this Chapel were shut
And "Thou shalt not," writ over the door
So I turned to the Garden of Love
That so many sweet flowers bore
And I saw it was filled with graves
And tombstones where flowers should be
And priests in black gowns were walking their rounds | And binding with briars my joys and desires | null | Blake applies this negative and repressive teaching to himself. Believing as he did in free love, he feels his natural, loving ‘joys and desires’ — in other words his sexual drives — are restricted and suppressed. The ‘binding with briars’ is a metaphor for the distorted teaching of the Church, which generates pain rather than a sense of God’s love. It is also an obvious reference to Jesus’s crown of thorns, and therefore symbolises pain and humiliation.
Note that, like the previous line, Blake uses internal assonant rhyme in ‘briars’ and ‘desires’. To conclude the poem he abandons the rhyming structure to introduce a different and inventive construction that draws the attention of the reader.
| William Blake | The Garden of Love |
You know you are tasting together
The winter, or light spring weather.
His hand to take your hand is overmuch.
Too much to bear.
You cannot look in his eyes
Because your pulse must not say
What must not be said.
When he
shuts a door-
Is not there-
Your arms are water.
And you are free | With a ghastly freedom. | You are the beautiful half
Of a golden hurt
You remember and covet his mouth, | This is an oxymoron. It refers to the freedom from the confinement of a failing relationship, but it’s also frightening. It’s nearly a punishment for this girl to be without this guy.
| Gwendolyn Brooks | To be in love |
Rid of the world's injustice, and his pain,
He rests at last beneath God's veil of blue;
Taken from life when life and love were new
The youngest of the martyrs here is lain,
Fair as Sebastian, and as early slain.
No cypress shades his grave, no funeral yew,
But gentle violets weeping with the dew
Weave on his bones an ever-blossoming chain.
O proudest heart that broke for misery!
O sweetest lips since those of Mitylene!
O poet-painter of our English Land! | Thy name was writ in water—it shall stand; | And tears like mine will keep thy memory green,
As Isabella did her Basil-tree. | Keats’s grave is famous for the simple phrase engraved on it, which he himself requested:
Here lies one whose name was writ in water.
Robert Ross, fellow famous writer as well as best friend of Wilde, once joked of wanting his own grave to read “Here lies one whose name was writ in hot water”–which ultimately did not happen. | Oscar Wilde | The Grave of Keats |
Yesterday I knew no lullaby
But you have taught me overnight to order
This song, which takes from your final cry
Its tune, from your unreasoned end its reason;
Its rhythm from the discord of your murder,
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 | If the child had lived to grow older he would have learned idioms , that is figurative language to express more complex ideas. In this child’s case it will be a tragic idiom relating to death as a result of the conflict. | Eavan Boland | Child of Our Time |
null | I do not wish that anyone were here. | This place is not a holiday resort
with karaoke nights and pints of beer
for drunken tourist types – perish the thought. | Postcards sent from holidays often used to include the line ‘wish you were here’. Instead, the snobbish speaker makes quite clear that she is glad to be alone. | Sophie Hannah | Postcard from a Travel Snob |
At Harlan, Richmond, Gastonia, Atlanta, New Orleans;
That the plants and the roads and the tools of power
Be ours:
Let us forget what Booker T. said,
"Separate as the fingers."
Let us become instead, you and I,
One single hand
That can united rise
To smash the old dead dogmas of the past--
To kill the lies of color
That keep the rich enthroned
And drive us to the time-clock and the plow | Helpless, stupid, scattered, and alone--as now-- | Race against race,
Because one is black,
Another white of face. | This refers to the position of former slaves and blacks as a whole after the end of slavery. Many had been separated from their families through the slave trade, and even those who were together still struggled to find jobs and survive.
Yes, post Civil War African Americans were free, but with their freedom came many uncertainties. Many died from illnesses and famine, and had no income to sustain living or buy land. They had no where to turn, and no one to look to for help. | Langston Hughes | Open Letter to the South |
When I was young my teachers were the old.
I gave up fire for form till I was cold. | I suffered like a metal being cast. | I went to school to age to learn the past.
Now when I am old my teachers are the young.
What can't be molded must be cracked and sprung. | An odd simile, given that one doesn’t usually bemoan much the suffering of cold, inanimate surfaces. But then it would be well to remember the plight of The Grindstone . | Robert Frost | What Fifty Said |
When I go up through the mowing field,
The headless aftermath,
Smooth-laid like thatch with the heavy dew,
Half closes the garden path. | And when I come to the garden ground, | The whir of sober birds
Up from the tangle of withered weeds
Is sadder than any words | This is Robert showing his anticipation of getting to a better side of the World. Getting a better Life where the grass is greener .
| Robert Frost | A Late Walk |
For thirty years, poor and white,
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. | This could be a reference to the renaming of towns by the marauding Germans in WWII. For example the town, Oświęcim was renamed Auschwitz. | Sylvia Plath | Daddy |
Was I supposed to praise my Lord
Make some kind of joyful sound?
He said, "Listen, listen to me now
I go round and round
And you, you are my only child."
Do not leave me now
Do not leave me now
I'm broken down
From a recent fall
Blood upon my body
And ice upon my soul
Lead on, my son, is your world | {Instrumental} | null | Acoustic guitar ending – very much Bob Dylan’s style, as is the whole song. | Leonard Cohen | The Butcher |
Here is the girl's head like an exhumed gourd. | Oval-faced, prune-skinned, prune-stones for teeth. | They unswaddled the wet fern of her hair
And made an exhibition of its coil,
Let the air at her leathery beauty. | The concise, asyndetic list creates a vivid image, with compound adjectives and a compound noun to describe the preserved head. The wrinkled, prune-like characteristic is gruesome. The fruit metaphor relating the find to the Billie Holliday song and the execution of slaves in America begin to make sense. | Seamus Heaney | Strange Fruit |
null | I travell'd thro' a land of men, | A land of men and women too;
And heard and saw such dreadful things
As cold earth-wanderers never knew. | According to Harold Bloom, the Traveller seems to be “a wandering Eternal, who has visited the fallen world and is able so to stand back from it as to see its horrific cycle” ( The Visionary Company , 1961, 58-59). The land through which he wanders is fantastical, allegorical, almost an alien planet, but it’s also our own world of alternating grief and joy, suffering and redemption. | William Blake | The Mental Traveller |
But no, you needs must part,
Fling him his release--
On whose ungenerous heart
Alone you are at peace.
IV
Not dead of wounds, not borne
Home to the village on a litter of branches, torn
By splendid claws and the talk all night of the villagers,
But stung to death by gnats
Lies Love.
What swamp I sweated through for all these years
Is at length plain to me. | V | Poor passionate thing,
Even with this clipped wing how well you flew!--though not so far as the forest.
Unwounded and unspent, serene but for the eye's bright trouble, | This part illustrates a bird being domesticated, and having its wings clipped, bringing us back to the theme of Loss of Hope. | Edna St. Vincent Millay | Not So Far as the Forest |
Sonnet XIX
When I consider how my light is spent,
E're half my days, in this dark world and wide,
And that one Talent which is death to hide,
Lodg'd with me useless, though my Soul more bent
To serve there with my Maker, and present
My true account, lest he returning chide, | Doth God exact day-labor, light deny'd, | I fondly ask; But patience to prevent
That murmur, soon replies, God doth not need
Either man's work or his own gifts, who best | This line is very important because this is the only time in this sonnet that Milton questions god, this questioning of god shows that while Milton is fine working and trying to do what god wants him to do he falters when faced with him losing his sight questioning his non responsive god and asking does he still need to do day work if he can’t even see when it’s day, but none the less he questions god not ruefully or angrily he simply states the irony of the situation. | John Milton | Sonnet 19: When I Consider How My Light Is Spent |
Slowly I smoke and hug my knee,
The while a witless masquerade
Of things that only children see
Floats in a mist of light and shade:
They pass, a flimsy cavalcade,
And with a weak, remindful glow,
The falling embers break and fade,
As one by one the phantoms go.
Then, with a melancholy glee
To think where once my fancy strayed,
I muse on what the years may be
Whose coming tales are all unsaid, | Till tongs and shovel, snugly laid | Within their shadowed niches, grow
By grim degrees to pick and spade,
As one by one the phantoms go. | Tongs and shovel is a reference to tools that are used to help keep a fire burning. The following words, “snugly laid” suggest that the tools aren’t being used anymore. Fire is often symbolic for inner light and can reference “Divine Fire” or passion within. If the tools are laid down, no one is trying to preserve the fire and it will likely die out.
| Edwin Arlington Robinson | Ballade by the Fire |
And torn from Black Africa's strand I came
To build a "homeland of the free."
The free?
Who said the free? Not me?
Surely not me? The millions on relief today?
The millions shot down when we strike?
The millions who have nothing for our pay?
For all the dreams we've dreamed
And all the songs we've sung
And all the hopes we've held
And all the flags we've hung
The millions who have nothing for our pay-- | Except the dream that's almost dead today | O, let America be America again--
The land that never has been yet--
And yet must be--the land where every man is free | The things that were promised by our founding fathers have not been given to us. America is supposed to be the land of opportunity, but has failed miserably. The dreams that people have when they come here do not always come true.
| Langston Hughes | Let America Be America Again |
Threshed corn lay piled like grit of ivory
Or solid as cement in two-lugged sacks.
The musky dark hoarded an armoury
Of farmyard implements, harness, plough-socks.
The floor was mouse-grey, smooth, chilly concrete.
There were no windows, just two narrow shafts
Of gilded motes, crossing, from air-holes slit
High in each gable. The one door meant no draughts
All summer when the zinc burned like an oven.
A scythe's edge, a clean spade, a pitchfork's prongs:
Slowly bright objects formed when you went in.
Then you felt cobwebs clogging up your lungs | And scuttled fast into the sunlit yard- | And into nights when bats were on the wing
Over the rafters of sleep, where bright eyes stared
From piles of grain in corners, fierce, unblinking. | The end of stanza three is enjambed with stanza four, expressing the speed and fear of the child. The verb ‘scuttled’ is vivid, suggesting nerves and a rapid, scrambling movement.
The dash after ‘yard’ forms a caesura , a pause, to change the mood again. | Seamus Heaney | The Barn |
I used to know so long ago;
Summer has followed after Spring;
Now Autumn is so shrunk and sere,
I scarcely think a sadder thing
Can be the Winter of my year.
Yet Robin sings through Winter's rest,
When bushes put their berries on;
While they their ruddy jewels don,
He sings out of a ruddy breast;
The hips and haws and ruddy breast
Make one spot warm where snowflakes lie
They break and cheer the unlovely rest | Of Winter's pause--and why not I? | null | The poem ends with an unanswerable rhetorical question . The poet asks “why not I?” — an ambiguous question. Does she think that she will be cheered, or is she saying that she doubts if she will — as if she senses happiness will be denied her. So the poem ends without resolution.
On a biographical note, this poem can be viewed as encapsulating two elements of Rossetti’s life — her positivity in her younger years and the depression and illness that blighted her later life. | Christina Rossetti | The Key-Note |
SILENT, the Lord of the world
Eyes from the heavenly height,
Girt by his far-shining train, | Us, who with banners unfurl'd
Fight life's many-chanc'd fight
Madly below, in the plain. | Then saith the Lord to his own:—
"See ye the battle below?
Turmoil of death and of birth! | “Us” is the object of the Lord’s “eyeing;” in other words, it refers to the people being watched by God.
These people are far from elevated: not only is their manner vicious, but they additionally clash with “banners unfurl’d,“ that is to say, flags on display, representing invented nations headed by people instead of the will and rule of God.
To fight “in the plain,” besides assigning an open space to the conflict where no shelter from massacre can be found and opposing parties engage each other head-on, seems to allude to another meaning of the word “plain:” common, lacking distinction–vulgar, even, and therefore strongly opposed to the sphere of Heaven.
These lines raise the question of who the “Men of Genius” actually are. As the OED clarifies, “ man was considered until the 20th cent[ury] to include women by implication, though referring primarily to males,” and could only point to human beings (not the Lord’s servants introduced below). Yet these men embody anything but “Genius” in their violent madness–that the fight is “many-chanc’d” also means it is not theirs to control.
Henry Arthur McArdle, The Battle of San Jacinto (1895). | Matthew Arnold | Men of Genius |
The houses are haunted
By white night-gowns.
None are green,
Or purple with green rings,
Or green with yellow rings,
or yellow with blue rings.
None of them are strange,
With socks of lace
And beaded ceintures.
People are not going
To dream of baboons and periwinkles.
Only, here and there, an old sailor, | Drunk and asleep in his boots, | Catches tigers
In red weather. | The drink is a form of escape, and the drunk dreaming provides an imaginative outlet that the other figures in the poem don’t have. The drunk sailor may not be a full-fledged artist, but he’s at least got a spark of life in him. | Wallace Stevens | Disillusionment of Ten O Clock |
I sit in the top of the wood, my eyes closed.
Inaction, no falsifying dream
Between my hooked head and hooked feet:
Or in sleep rehearse perfect kills and eat.
The convenience of the high trees!
The air's buoyancy and the sun's ray
Are of advantage to me; | And the earth's face upward for my inspection. | My feet are locked upon the rough bark.
It took the whole of Creation
To produce my foot, my each feather: | The hawk is in control, and the earth is personified as looking up to the bird, awaiting its metaphorical ‘inspection’ or approval. The hawk is clearly superior, able to analyse the way the world is seen as a whole, symbolising power and even fascistic control. The world, for its part, may fail to realise its own subservience. | Ted Hughes | Hawk Roosting |
There, in the corner, staring at his drink.
The cap juts like a gantry's crossbeam,
Cowling plated forehead and sledgehead jaw.
Speech is clamped in the lips' vice.
That fist would drop a hammer on a Catholic-
Oh yes, that kind of thing could start again;
The only Roman collar he tolerates
Smiles all round his sleek pint of porter.
Mosaic imperatives bang home like rivets;
God is a foreman with certain definite views
Who orders life in shifts of work and leisure.
A factory horn will blare the Resurrection. | He sits, strong and blunt as a Celtic cross, | Clearly used to silence and an armchair:
Tonight the wife and children will be quiet
At slammed door and smoker's cough in the hall. | Celtic crosses are more stumpy than later representations, and give a sense of this man’s history and ancestors dating back over centuries. The appearance clearly reflects his nature.
Note also the hard consonants in this line, each word monosyllabic with elongated vowels in ‘strong’ and ‘blunt’, and a heavy, slow pace..
| Seamus Heaney | Docker |
IF the muse were mine to tempt it
And my feeble voice were strong,
If my tongue were trained to measures,
I would sing a stirring song.
I would sing a song heroic
Of those noble sons of Ham,
Of the gallant colored soldiers
Who fought for Uncle Sam!
In the early days you scorned them, | And with many a flip and flout | Said 'These battles are the white man's,
And the whites will fight them out.'
Up the hills you fought and faltered, | The term “A white man’s war” represented several public feelings and beliefs about black people in war stating that they were inferior and not suited to fight alongside white men.
The “flip and flout” refers to the opinions of naysayers concerning whether black people could participate. | Paul Laurence Dunbar | The Colored Soldiers |
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
As I rush into toilet cubicles
feeling nothing like nice
Because I'm giving her milk that's not in a bottle
Which in the cocaine generation white powder would topple | I see pyramids, sales pitches, across our green globe | And female breasts--banned--unless they're out just for show
And the more I go out, the more I can't stand it
I walk into town, feel I'm surrounded by bandits | This is possibly a reference to the incessant advertising to which we are inundated with each day.
| Hollie McNish | Embarrassed |
Who was so foolish as to think what he thought.
He thought that I was after him for a feather—
The white one in his tail; like one who takes
Everything said as personal to himself.
One flight out sideways would have undeceived him.
And then there was a pile of wood for which
I forgot him and let his little fear
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 | The moment is a perfect illustration of Frost’s distinction between what it means to believe in things and what it means.The latter is the special task of him who would be poet and person. In this symbolic re-enactment, the speaker believes into existence an entity which was potentially there in the emerging but partial lines of the earlier stages of his journey inward. The woodpile, according to Frost’s poetic theory, had its beginnings.While in one sense, then, the speaker only “reveals” and “discovers” the woodpile, in another he can be said to have “made” it. | Robert Frost | The Wood-pile |
Good morning, daddy!
Ain't you heard
The boogie-woogie rumble | Of a dream deferred? | Listen closely:
You'll hear their feet
Beating out and beating out a— | Refers to Hughes’s poem Harlem | Langston Hughes | Dream Boogie |
To use the newspapers spread on the kitchen floor
And to win, wetting there, the words, "Good dog! Good dog!"
We thought her shy malaise was a shot reaction.
The autopsy disclosed a rupture in her liver.
As we teased her with play, blood was filling her skin
And her heart was learning to lie down forever.
Monday morning, as the children were noisily fed
And sent to school, she crawled beneath the youngest's bed.
We found her twisted and limp but still alive.
In the car to the vet's, on my lap, she tried
To bite my hand and died. I stroked her warm fur
And my wife called in a voice imperious with tears. | Though surrounded by love that would have upheld her,
Nevertheless she sank and, stiffening, disappeared. | Back home, we found that in the night her frame,
Drawing near to dissolution, had endured the shame
Of diarrhoea and had dragged across the floor | The dog had so much love from it’s family and that type of love would’ve made the dog stronger than where it was at. Even though it clearly wasn’t going to help the stage the dog was in, it still makes an impact on the reader reading to see how much it’s family did love and care for it. | John Updike | Dogs Death |
There's a certain Slant of light,
Winter Afternoons − | That oppresses, like the Heft
Of Cathedral Tunes − | Heavenly Hurt, it gives us −
We can find no scar,
But internal difference, | After Dickinson’s reference to winter, she immediately continues with a religious reference to church, or the “Cathedral” mentioned. The “Cathedral” generally is a symbol of God and Christianity; however, these “oppress[ing] Cathedral Tunes” bring about the atmosphere of something as cold as the “Winter Afternoons”.
Here, it seems as if Dickinson is trying to express the heaviness of church bells on a cold afternoon when someone is mourning. The “Cathedral Tunes” that “oppress” the speaker, create the sense that the world is forcing something upon the individuals in the poem. Death, being an inevitable characteristic of nature, is in a sense “oppress[ing]” the people it affects. Dickinson’s atmosphere can be taken in as something of mourning and something in relation to the death of a loved one, being forced upon by nature as the dreadful church bells force reality onto the speaker.
| Emily Dickinson | 258 |
Never seraph spread a pinion
Over fabric half so fair!
Banners yellow, glorious, golden
On its roof did float and flow
(This — all this — was in the olden
Time long ago,)
And every gentle air that dallied
In that sweet day
Along the ramparts plumed and pallid
A winged odor went away
Wanderers in that happy valley
Through two luminous windows, saw | Spirits moving musically | To a lute's well-tuned law
Round about a throne where, sitting
(Porphyrogene!) | The spirits were moving with a lot of fluidity. The movement was perfectly uniform like music. | Edgar Allan Poe | The Haunted Palace |
Two virtues ride, by stallion, by nag,
To grind our knives and scissors:
Lantern-jawed Reason, squat Common Sense, | One courting doctors of all sorts,
One, housewives and shopkeepers. | The trees are lopped, the poodles trim,
The laborer's nails pared level
Since those two civil servants set | Plath lists a couple commonplace occupations. This first stanza discuss the normalcy of life. Plath suffered from battles with depression her whole life so she had a hard time living with dismal reality sometimes. This poem is a bit of intellectual dribble about how it may seem nice to escape to myth but in the end it always dies and you go back to being a doctor, housewife or shopkeeper. | Sylvia Plath | The Death of Myth-Making |
The Grass so little has to do
A Sphere of simple Green
With only Butterflies to brood
And Bees to entertain
And stir all day to pretty Tunes
The Breezes fetch along
And hold the Sunshine in its lap
And bow to everything
And thread the Dews, all night, like Pearls
And make itself so fine
A Duchess were too common
For such a noticing | And even when it dies – to pass
In Odors so divine | Like Lowly spices, lain to sleep
Or Spikenards, perishing
And then, in Sovereign Barns to dwell | This mid-line break is interesting because it forces us to think about the implications of ‘dies’. This metaphorical woman is so lovely that even when she dies she smells amazing–another way to reinforce her wealth–and she’s so important that her death causes the death of the plants used to perfume her body. | Emily Dickinson | The Grass |
Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.
Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead | 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, | The poet deifies his lover by referring to him with capitals; ‘He’ and ‘Dead’. To him, this was no mere mortal. ‘Scribbling’ on the sky is something of a contradiction; ‘scribbling’ implies carelessness, but the sky suggests heaven. As with the reference to the dog’s juicy bone, there is a note of wry humour and flippancy. | W. H. Auden | Funeral Blues Stop all the clocks |
i'm going to look at madison, wisconsin through a telescope then move there
five-million-dollar poems are going to come from my head if i move from new york to wisconsin
each word i type further alienates me from other human beings
i am willing to interpret an alien crash-landing a UFO in wisconsin as a ‘desperate cry for help'
i just feel alienated from the noises that are coming out of your head
i'm going to look at other human beings through a telescope then make a desperate noise
five million dollars wouldn't really further alienate me from my poetry
i'm going to stare at my poetry then move my desperate noise there | ‘good idea,' i just typed | i feel that i just further alienated myself from my own desperate poem
human beings who interpret my poetry as a ‘cry for help' further alienate me generally
i feel alienated from the noises that just came out of my cell phone | This poem is made up of two poems. The Poem we are reading and the poem Tao Lin is writing. The two poems converge at this line in the poem.
In other words, the author is aware that someone is going to read his poem with an awareness of his writing of the poem. | Tao Lin | I’ll write another poem instead of looking for a job |
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