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 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
O beautiful for spacious skies
For amber waves of grain | For purple mountain majesties | Above the fruited plain!
America! America!
God shed his grace on thee | This line refers to the purplish glow that mountains have from afar. This is caused by atmospheric perspective . When there is dust in the air, red light (which has longer wavelengths) becomes more scattered. This visually mixes in with the blue from the sky, and creates an illusion that the mountain has a purplish tint to it
| Katharine Lee Bates | America the Beautiful |
To attain his home,
But ensorcelling powers
Have contorted space,
Odded the way:
Instead of a facile
Five-minute trot,
Far must he hirple,
Clumsied by cold,
Buffeted often
By blouts of hail
Or pirries of rain,
On stolchy paths | Over glunch clouds, | Where infrequent shepherds,
Sloomy of face,
Snudge of spirit, | Glunch is a Scots word meaning “frowning” or “sulky” or “sullen”. He is therefore personifying the clouds, seeing them as malevolent and powerful presences, hindering his homewards trek. It is interesting that he is traipsing over clouds, rather than the clouds being above him, which seems to imply either that he is wading through low-lying fog or that he is high in the hills, both of which possibilities suggest a harsh and inhospitable wilderness.
Note, more widely, how this stanza uses archaic Anglo-Saxon and earthy Northern English and Scottish dialect words to evoke a foreign land ruled by its magical landscape (whereas, upon waking from the dream in the second stanza, he slips back into the Latinate diction of literary life). | W. H. Auden | A Bad Night |
There is a pleasure in the pathless woods,
There is a rapture on the lonely shore, | There is society, where none intrudes, | By the deep sea, and music in its roar:
I love not man the less, but Nature more,
From these our interviews, in which I steal | Byron expresses his desire for simple living and self-reliance by embracing and becoming one with nature. | Lord Byron | There Is Pleasure In The Pathless Woods |
The plant of freedom upward sprung,
And spread its leaves so fresh and young-
Its blossoms now are blowing.
On every hand in this fair land,
Proud Ethiope's swarthy children stand
Beside their fairer neighbor;
The forests flee before their stroke,
Their hammers ring, their forges smoke,-
They stir in honest labour.
They tread the fields where honour calls;
Their voices sound through senate halls
In majesty and power. | To right they cling; the hymns they sing
Up to the skies in beauty ring,
And bolder grow each hour. | Be proud, my Race, in mind and soul;
Thy name is writ on Glory's scroll
In characters of fire. | Songs are an expression of how you are feeling. Most hymns were about being free, and they echoed into the skies because of others singing along. They gave people the strength to be stronger and bolder.
| Paul Laurence Dunbar | Ode To Ethiopia |
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.
Next morning I went up into the room. Snowdrops | Heaney enjambs the end of one stanza and continues in the next, smoothing out an otherwise choppy sentence to imply comfort. His mother, clearly desperate, insecure and needing to be close to her other children, clutches his hand.
‘Coughed out angry tearless sighs’ conveys a multitude of emotions — she is too tense to cry, angry at the loss of her child, her weeping emerges as dry sobs like coughs, perhaps because she is attempting to control her grief. | Seamus Heaney | Mid-Term Break |
Fly like an aeroplane, don't pull up short
Till you brake for Grand Central Station, New York.
For there in the middle of the waiting-hall
Should be standing the one that I love best of all.
If he's not there to meet me when I get to town
I'll stand on the side-walk with tears rolling down.
For he is the one that I love to look on,
The acme of kindness and perfection.
He presses my hand and he says he loves me,
Which I find an admirable peculiarity.
The woods are bright green on both sides of the line,
The trees have their loves though they're different from mine. | But the poor fat old banker in the sun-parlour car
Has no one to love him except his cigar. | If I were the Head of the Church or the State,
I'd powder my nose and just tell them to wait.
For love's more important and powerful than | It’s possible that, as Freud is reputed to have said, “sometimes a cigar is just a cigar,” but given the romantic context of the poem it seems likely this is a bit of a sexual joke.
It’s also the beginning of a serious social commentary. Like the politicians and religious leaders of the final stanzas, Auden argues that the “fat banker” has lost his sense of the fundamental human priority of love. | W. H. Auden | Calypso |
Page while musicians leap into unrestricted immensity
Right now it's just old Tchaikowsky moaning and groaning his
Way through symphony #5
But it's just as good as when I first heard it
I haven't heard one of my favorites, Eric Coates, for some time
But I know that if I keep drinking the good red and listening
That he will be along
There are others, many others
And so
This is just another poem about drinking and listening to
Music
Repeat, right? | But look at Faulkner, he not only said the same thing over and
Over but he said the same
Place | So, please, let me boost these giants of our lives
Once more: the classical composers of our time and
Of times past | Most of William Faulkner’s works were set in fictional Yoknapatawpha County.
| Charles Bukowski | Me and Faulkner |
I placed a jar in Tennessee,
And round it was, upon a hill.
It made the slovenly wilderness
Surround that hill.
The wilderness rose up to it, | And sprawled around, no longer wild. | The jar was round upon the ground
And tall and of a port in air.
It took dominion every where. | “Sprawling” –similar to the prior “slovenly” description– again highlights nature’s disorderly and muddled character. However, “sprawled around” now fits the iambic tetrameter, implying that the nature is somehow tamed by this jar.
“No longer wild” tells us that the jar tamed (and perhaps corrupted) a previously pure environment. | Wallace Stevens | Anecdote of the Jar |
Even the sun-clouds this morning cannot manage such skirts.
Nor the woman in the ambulance
Whose red heart blooms through her coat so astoundingly –
A gift, a love gift | Utterly unasked for | By a sky
Palely and flamily
Igniting its carbon monoxides, by eyes | “Utterly unasked for” both “by a sky” and, in a way, by Plath herself, is intriguing since she has attempted suicide and this poem was written when she was seperated from Ted Hughes.
Alternatively, ‘unasked for’ refers to the unexpected. The tone of the poem so far is positive and, despite the reference to the ambulance, is surprisingly joyful. | Sylvia Plath | Poppies in October |
Dear March - Come in -
How glad I am -
I hoped for you before -
Put down your Hat - | You must have walked -
How out of Breath you are - | Dear March, how are you, and the Rest -
Did you leave Nature well -
Oh March, Come right upstairs with me - | Since March is known as the windy month , one can imagine the personified version as huffing and puffing, after walking through all the eleven other months to arrive again for a visit.
| Emily Dickinson | Dear March - Come in - 1320 |
Now in Vienna there's ten pretty women
There's a shoulder where Death comes to cry | There's a lobby with nine hundred windows | There's a tree where the doves go to die
There's a piece that was torn from the morning
And it hangs in the Gallery of Frost | The original Lorca poem states that there’s a forest of ‘dried pigeons’, which is ambiguous to say the least, but given the Cohen line one could assume this has something to do with being on consistent display, in a place you can be seen and see out of endlessly (900 windows), yet are always in a place of waiting (a lobby).
This notion of being watched is absolutely CENTRAL to human development and the first step forward from the innocence of the previous line. The relevance of this is truly expressed in the next line.
However, the notion of being self-conscious is the first major event in the Judeo-Christian creation myth. Adam/Eve eat from the tree of Good and Evil and the first thing they become is conscious that they are naked.
The narrative of this piece moves very quickly as we move from innocence to its opposite (death) in the first two lines, and in the third we have awakening to the harsh reality of being as expressed through being on view.
Finally the lobby serves as a place of no clear definition. You wait in a lobby. You do not sleep, eat or live in one. In the context of being between innocence and brutal death is where we find ourselves in life, and thus enter the realm of morality.
This morality stems from our self-consciousness of ourselves in the eyes of others, and of the actions we take in life that move us away from innocence. | Leonard Cohen | Take This Waltz |
The wind on Crow Hill was her darling.
His fierce, high tide in her ear was her secret.
But his kiss was fatal.
Through her dark Paradise ran
The stream she loved too well
That bit her breast.
The shaggy sodden king of that kingdom
Followed through the wall
And lay on her love-sick bed.
The curlew trod her womb. | The stone swelled under her heart. | Her death is a baby-cry on the moor. | This is open to interpretation. Emily’s heart may have been like stone in relation to real men — there is no biographical evidence of her ever having a relationship with a man. But the stones of the moors were what she loved, and these are what, appropriately, lived closest to her heart when she died. | Ted Hughes | Emily Brontë |
Livelier liquor than the Muse,
And malt does more than Milton can
To justify God's ways to man.
Ale, man, ale's the stuff to drink
For fellows whom it hurts to think:
Look into the pewter pot
To see the world as the world's not.
And faith, 'tis pleasant till 'tis past:
The mischief is that 'twill not last.
Oh I have been to Ludlow fair
And left my necktie God knows where,
And carried half-way home, or near, | Pints and quarts of Ludlow beer: | Then the world seemed none so bad,
And I myself a sterling lad;
And down in lovely muck I've lain, | Ludlow is still noted for its breweries:
Certain annotators I know can’t walk down the Lower East Side’s Ludlow St.
without singing Housman’s tune. | A. E. Housman | Terence this is stupid stuff |
Come and show me another city with lifted head singing so proud to be alive and coarse and strong and cunning.
Flinging magnetic curses amid the toil of piling job on job, here is a tall bold slugger set vivid against the little soft cities;
Fierce as a dog with tongue lapping for action, cunning as a savage pitted against the wilderness,
Bareheaded,
Shoveling,
Wrecking,
Planning,
Building, breaking, rebuilding,
Under the smoke, dust all over his mouth, laughing with white teeth,
Under the terrible burden of destiny laughing as a young man laughs,
Laughing even as an ignorant fighter laughs who has never lost a battle,
Bragging and laughing that under his wrist is the pulse, and under his ribs the heart of the people, | Laughing! | Laughing the stormy, husky, brawling laughter of Youth, half-naked, sweating, proud to be Hog Butcher, Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat, Player with Railroads and Freight Handler to the Nation. | The repeated laughter here isn’t the ha-ha laughter. It is kind of the in your face laughter; like a prideful laughter. It shows how even though this may be a small city it is filled with people that are hardworking and that they take pride or find enjoyment in their work.
Cue song in the background.
| Carl Sandburg | Chicago |
Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.
In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud. | Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed. | Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years | The road gets bumpy from time to time and even though these challenges can rough you up a bit, the speaker still stands with his head held high, not letting anything get in his way.
Words like clutch, winced, cried, unbowed —a semantic field of words relating to inflicted physical pain — would have had a stark personal resonance for Henley, who suffered from tuberculosis of the bone. See his biographical sketch at Victorian Web.
One commentator saw the image of ‘bludgeonings’ and ‘bloody head’ as reminiscent of a boxer raining blows.
Note the three plosive ‘b’s to give emphasis, especially if the poem is read aloud. | William Ernest Henley | Invictus |
In kitchen cups concupiscent curds.
Let the wenches dawdle in such dress
As they are used to wear, and let the boys
Bring flowers in last month's newspapers.
Let be be finale of seem.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.
Take from the dresser of deal,
Lacking the three glass knobs, that sheet
On which she embroidered fantails once,
And spread it so as to cover her face.
If her horny feet protrude, they come
To show how cold she is, and dumb. | Let the lamp affix its beam. | The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream. | Let the truth (lamp beam) be grounded (affixed) in being. This is especially appropriate at death.
By choosing the verb “affix” here Stevens makes the light that shines on the corpse an incredibly physical force, something indisputably of the world. There is no room to understand this light in the metaphysical sense that poets often give it – this sticky light cannot be mistaken for the woman’s soul as it interacts plainly with the body. | Wallace Stevens | The Emperor of Ice Cream |
The sea here used to look
As if many convicts had built it,
Standing deep in their ankle chains,
Ankle-deep in the water, to smite
The land and break it down to salt.
I was in this bog as a child
When they were all working all day
To drive the pilings down. | I thought I saw the still sun
Strike the side of a hammer in flight
And from it a sea bird be born
To take off over the marshes. | As the gray climbs the side of my head
And cuts my brain off from the world,
I walk and wish mainly for birds, | This metal vs. nature motif will be repeated later in his poem. In this particular case however, the speaker sees that despite the destruction that came with the building of this bridge, he still saw that nature would somehow persist and take back what is its own. | James Dickey | At Darien Bridge |
null | The great Overdog | That heavenly beast
With a star in one eye
Gives a leap in the east. | Canis Major is a constellation whose name means “greater dog” in Latin. Just as the word “God” is capitalized, the capitalization of “Overdog” reflects the dog’s status as a powerful, celestial being.
Not only does the constellation look like a dog, but it also contains the “Dog Star,” Sirius , which is the brightest star in the night sky. Frost also refers to this star in his poems “Bond and Free” and “One More Brevity” . | Robert Frost | Canis Major |
And like dim shadows watch by her sepulchre.
2.
The chill rain is falling, the nipped worm is crawling,
The rivers are swelling, the thunder is knelling
For the Year;
The blithe swallows are flown, and the lizards each gone
To his dwelling;
Come, Months, come away;
Put on white, black, and gray;
Let your light sisters play—
Ye, follow the bier
Of the dead cold Year, | And make her grave green with tear on tear. | null | This is another inventive idea, typical of Shelley, in which the tears of the grieving months water and nourish the grave, so that it turns green once more in Spring.
Note the monosyllables and long vowels in ‘grave’, ‘green’ and ‘tear’, suggesting slowness and sadness.
| Percy Bysshe Shelley | Autumn: A Dirge |
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.
When you part from your friend, you grieve not;
For that which you love most in him may be clearer in his absence, as the mountain to the climber is clearer from the plain.
And let there be no purpose in friendship save the deepening of the spirit.
For love that seeks aught but the disclosure of its own mystery is not love but a net cast forth: and only the unprofitable is caught. | And let your best be for your friend.
If he must know the ebb of your tide, let him know its flood also. | For what is your friend that you should seek him with hours to kill?
Seek him always with hours to live.
For it is his to fill your need, but not your emptiness. | The ebb is the movement of water back to the sea – so since your friend will comfort you in your worst moments, be sure to delight in pleasant moments with them too
This is good advice for any intimate personal relationships, really
| Kahlil Gibran | On Friendship |
To view once more the sacrifice
Of those who for some good discerned
Will gladly give up paradise.
And a white shimmering concourse rolls
Toward the throne to witness there
The speeding of devoted souls
Which God makes his especial care.
And none are taken but who will,
Having first heard the life read out
That opens earthward, good and ill,
Beyond the shadow of a doubt;
And very beautifully God limns, | And tenderly, life's little dream, | But naught extenuates or dims,
Setting the thing that is supreme.
Nor is there wanting in the press | Echoes Prospero in Shakespeare’s The Tempest (Act 4, Scene 1):
….We are such stuff As dreams are made on, and our little life Is rounded with a sleep. | Robert Frost | The Trial by Existence |
Nor am I the beauty of a garden bed
Attracting my share of Ahs and spectacularly painted,
Unknowing I must soon unpetal.
Compared with me, a tree is immortal
And a flower-head not tall, but more startling,
And I want the one's longevity and the other's daring.
Tonight, in the infinitesimal light of the stars,
The trees and the flowers have been strewing their cool odors.
I walk among them, but none of them are noticing.
Sometimes I think that when I am sleeping
I must most perfectly resemble them --
Thoughts gone dim. | It is more natural to me, lying down.
Then the sky and I are in open conversation, | And I shall be useful when I lie down finally:
Then the trees may touch me for once, and the flowers have time for me. | Being horizontal brings the speaker more in tune with the sky. | Sylvia Plath | I Am Vertical |
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth.
Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same, | And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black. | Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back. | That morning, both paths were equally empty, their leaf-cover undisturbed. The speaker has no one to follow or coerce him into choosing a path. The opening word ‘And’ is significant in that it suggests an ongoing internal personal debate. The speaker, though, is not achieving clarity as he thinks this through.
Many readers forget, or overlook, the fact that the “road less traveled” in this poem is roughly the same as the first; choosing either one makes no appreciable difference– except for the significance the speaker assigns the event years after the fact.
Choices that we think will make a huge difference in our lives, simply because we arbitrarily assign them some special weight, may turn out to be fairly inconsequential.
| Robert Frost | The Road Not Taken |
To meet thee, when thy faint perfume
Alone is in the virgin air.
Of all her train, the hands of Spring
First plant thee in the watery mould,
And I have seen thee blossoming
Beside the snow-bank's edges cold.
Thy parent sun, who bade thee view
Pale skies, and chilling moisture sip,
Has bathed thee in his own bright hue,
And streaked with jet thy glowing lip.
Yet slight thy form, and low thy seat,
And earthward bent thy gentle eye, | Unapt the passing view to meet
When loftier flowers are flaunting nigh. | Oft, in the sunless April day,
Thy early smile has stayed my walk;
But midst the gorgeous blooms of May, | Compares the modest yellow violet to others flowers who are able to flaunt high. Claims are made here that the flower is not suitable to the other flowers. In terms of Bryant’s style, he is known to use nature to describe the world around him which leaves room to believe he is speaking of himself and not feeling competent to the company surrounding him. | William Cullen Bryant | The Yellow Violet |
There will we sit upon the rocks,
And see the shepherds feed their flocks,
By shallow rivers to whose falls
Melodious birds sing madrigals.
There I will make thee beds of roses
And a thousand fragrant posies,
A cap of flowers, and a kirtle
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. | Let’s just pass over the faintly ridiculous imagery in this line in silence (a belt of straw?!) and focus on how it shows the relation of stress to meaning:
A belt of straw
This phrase, two perfect, clean iambs, has all its stress on the semantic words– i.e., the words which carry the meaning. The other words (‘A’ is called an article, and ‘of’ is a preposition) essentially frame these words. You can sort of tell what’s going on with ‘belt straw’, ‘A of’ means precisely nothing.
SO
A key factor in deciding stress is the weight of meaning of the word. But it’s not the only factor, by a long way. | Christopher Marlowe | The Passionate Shepherd to His Love |
I'm vex'd to see you, Dad.
You used to smile and stroke my head,
And tell me how good children did;
But now, I wot not how it be,
You take me seldom on your knee,
Yet ne'ertheless I am right glad,
To sit beside you, Dad.
How lank and thin your beard hangs down!
Scant are the white hairs on your crown:
How wan and hollow are your cheeks,
Your brow is crossed with many streaks;
But yet although his strength be fled, | I love my own old Dad. | The housewives round their potions brew,
And gossips come to ask for you;
And for your weal each neighbour cares; | At the end of the third stanza the refrain reinforces the crucial line that makes the poem so significant; the boy’s love for his grandfather. | Joanna Baillie | A Child To His Sick Grandfather |
Here come real stars to fill the upper skies,
And here on earth come emulating flies, | That though they never equal stars in size, | (And they were never really stars at heart)
Achieve at times a very star-like start.
Only, of course, they can't sustain the part. | Immeasurable Awe
Fireflies are relatively small when comparing them to stars or when considering the overall scale of the universe . Ultimately, fireflies fit within a jar.
Nonetheless, they seem infinite – as miraculous as stars – to young children, who deem size irrelevant and who explore their surroundings with boundless curiosity, wonder, and awe.
| Robert Frost | Fireflies in the Garden |
But I would rather be horizontal.
I am not a tree with my root in the soil
Sucking up minerals and motherly love
So that each March I may gleam into leaf,
Nor am I the beauty of a garden bed
Attracting my share of Ahs and spectacularly painted,
Unknowing I must soon unpetal.
Compared with me, a tree is immortal
And a flower-head not tall, but more startling,
And I want the one's longevity and the other's daring.
Tonight, in the infinitesimal light of the stars,
The trees and the flowers have been strewing their cool odors. | I walk among them, but none of them are noticing. | Sometimes I think that when I am sleeping
I must most perfectly resemble them --
Thoughts gone dim. | The goes unnoticed and uncared for by the trees and flowers– this reflects the concerns raised in the previous stanza about not “attracting Ahs”. | Sylvia Plath | I Am Vertical |
They shut me up in Prose
As when a little Girl
They put me in the Closet
Because they liked me "still"
Still! Could themself have peeped
And seen my Brain — go round
They might as wise have lodged a Bird
For Treason — in the Pound | Himself has but to will
And easy as a Star
Abolish his Captivity
And laugh — No more have I | null | If the bird (locked in the pound) just thinks to leave all it would have to do is fly. It would be so easy to do that the bird would just laugh at how easy it was and at its captors. | Emily Dickinson | They Shut Me Up in Prose |
Summer is fading:
The leaves fall in ones and twos
From trees bordering
The new recreation ground.
In the hollows of afternoons
Young mothers assemble | At swing and sandpit | Setting free their children.
Behind them, at intervals,
Stand husbands in skilled trades, | The sibilant alliterative ’s’s and the rhythmic balance of this line emphasise the idea of regimentation. | Philip Larkin | Afternoons |
To telephone me
Roscoe knows darn well
LONG DISTANCE
Ain't free
If I ever catch him
Lawd, have pity!
Calling me up
From Kansas City
Just to say he loves me!
I knowed that was so
Why didn't he tell me some'n
I don't know? | For instance, what can
Them other girls do
That Alberta K. Johnson
Can't do--and more, too? | What's that, Central?
You say you don't care
Nothing about my | Alberta K. Johnson is just as good as the next girl if not better. She also is hinting that her man is possibly unfaithful to her. | Langston Hughes | Madam and the Phone Bill |
Fancy might now her silken pinions try
To rise from earth, and sweep th' expanse on high:
From Tithon's bed now might Aurora rise,
Her cheeks all glowing with celestial dies,
While a pure stream of light o'erflows the skies.
The monarch of the day I might behold,
And all the mountains tipt with radiant gold,
But I reluctant leave the pleasing views,
Which Fancy dresses to delight the Muse;
Winter austere forbids me to aspire,
And northern tempests damp the rising fire;
They chill the tides of Fancy's flowing sea, | Cease then, my song, cease the unequal lay. | null | “Lay” = song, “unequal” = inadequate to the poet’s task of representing and reimagining the world. Wheatley “reluctant[ly]” puts down her pen, claiming that bad winter weather (possibly literal, but probably also a metaphor for her emotional state) has “damped” her powers of imagination. | Phillis Wheatley | On Imagination |
null | Ah, you should see Cynddylan on a tractor. | Gone the old look that yoked him to the soil,
He's a new man now, part of the machine,
His nerves of metal and his blood oil. | The opening sentence is conversational; the speaker’s “Ah” expressing, seemingly, his belief that he has some interesting gossip to impart. The single, declamatory end-stopped line is suitably melo-dramatic. | R. S. Thomas | Cynddylan on a Tractor |
Fair is my brow as the day.
Battle and war are my minions,
Doing my will as divine;
I am the calmer of passions,
Peace is a nursling of mine.
Speak to me gently or curse me,
Seek me or fly from my sight;
I am thy fool in the morning,
Thou art my slave in the night.
Down to the grave I will take thee,
Out from the noise of the strife,
Then shalt thou see me and know me-- | Death, then, no longer, but life. | Then shalt thou sing at my coming,
Kiss me with passionate breath,
Clasp me and smile to have thought me | This line is the volte of the poem, at which points the literary style, tone, and message shift. The key word of the volte is “then, no longer, but life” as it represents the monumental change from Death to life. The tone shifts from contrasting opposite phenomena in nature to focusing on a higher level: the ultimate contrast between Death and its opposite. Dunbar hereinafter discusses the difficulty journey to Death or its opposite. Interestingly, however, Dunbar personifies Death as a creature, but does not capitalize (or personify) life. This subtle grammatical phenomena seems to suggest that Dunbar believes Death is an animate being, whereas life is a concept, unable to be altered, harmed, or even have enemies. This is reflected in a later sentiment of Eckhart Tolle, one of the most influential spiritual authors and people in the world:
Tolle, Eckhart. Life Has No Opposite. The Opposite Of Death Is Birth. Life Is Eternal. Digital image. Quotespictures. N.p., 2013. Web. 31 Jan. 2016. | Paul Laurence Dunbar | The Paradox |
Aunt Jennifer's tigers prance across a screen,
Bright topaz denizens of a world of green.
They do not fear the men beneath the tree;
They pace in sleek chivalric certainty.
Aunt Jennifer's fingers fluttering through her wool
Find even the ivory needle hard to pull.
The massive weight of Uncle's wedding band
Sits heavily upon Aunt Jennifer's hand. | When Aunt is dead, her terrified hands will lie | Still ringed with ordeals she was mastered by.
The tigers in the panel that she made
Will go on prancing, proud and unafraid. | This line hints at something much more sinister than simply passing away from age or natural causes.
“Terrified hands” paints very intense imagery which makes the reader realize that Aunt Jennifer was not just discontent or bored; she was living in terror of her oppression.
Since Aunt Jennifer works with her hands so often, through tapestry, this line also holds more significance. | Adrienne Rich | Aunt Jennifers Tigers |
So won't you let me see"
I said "won't you let me see"
I said "won't you let me see
Your naked body?"
"Just dance me to the dark side of the gym
Chances are I will let you do most anything
I know you're hungry, I can hear it in your voice
And there are many parts of me to touch, you have your choice
Ah but no you cannot see
She said "No you cannot see"
She said "No you cannot see
My naked body" | So we're dancing close, the band is playing Stardust | The balloons and paper streamers they're floating down on us
She says, "You've got a minute left to fall in love"
In solemn moments such as this I have put my trust | A popular song written by Hoagy Carmichael. The phrase “stardust memories” from the song is a clear reference to the title of Cohen’s song. | Leonard Cohen | Memories |
Maud went to College.
Sadie stayed at home.
Sadie scraped life
With a fine-tooth comb.
She didn't leave a tangle in.
Her comb found every strand.
Sadie was one of the livingest chits
In all the land. | Sadie bore two babies
Under her maiden name. | Maud and Ma and Papa
Nearly died of shame.
Everyone but Sadie | Sadie had children out of wedlock, something that would certainly have been frowned upon. However, the fact that there are two babies recalls the two women introduced at the start of the poem, and sets up a parallel.
| Gwendolyn Brooks | Sadie and Maud |
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; | For who loves that, must first be wise and good.
But from that mark how far they rove we see,
For all this waste of wealth and loss of blood. | Milton contrasts here licence and liberty. Licence is permission to do something, while liberty is the freedom to do it. Milton suggests that the masses cry for liberty when they really mean license. In reality, people have the liberty to do most anything, but they let artificial, cultural, societal boundaries prevent them. | John Milton | Sonnet 12: I did but prompt the age to quit their clogs |
[Instrumental] | [Outro] | I wish there was a treaty we could sign
It's over now, the water and the wine
We were broken then but now we're borderline | This is the album outro and Cohen’s life’s outro too. In fact thisese are the last words on the record, which is his last, before he passed away theon 7 nNovember 2016.
| Leonard Cohen | String Reprise/Treaty |
[Saul Williams]
The fiery sun of my passions evaporates the love lakes of my soul
Clouds my thoughts and rains you into existence
As I take flight on bolts of lighting claiming chaos as my concubine and you as my me
I of the storm, you of the sea, we of the moon, land of the free
What have I done to deserve this?
Am I happy? | Happiness is a mediocre standard for a middle-class existence | I see through smiles and smell truth in the distance
Beyond one dimensional smiles and laughter lies the hereafter
Where tears echo laughter | A quote from Ellsworth M. Toohey, the primary antagonist of Ayn Rand’s classic novel The Fountainhead .
Rand’s novel was heavily influenced by the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, and Williams borrowed the title of his poem from one of Nietzsche’s works, which he discusses in Ecce Homo here. | Saul Williams | Untimely Meditations |
Loving you less than life, a little less
Than bitter-sweet upon a broken wall
Or bush-wood smoke in autumn, I confess | I cannot swear I love you not at all. | For there is that about you in this light—
A yellow darkness, sinister of rain—
Which sturdily recalls my stubborn sight | In other words, I may love you a little…
Millay returns to this cleverly dodgy syntax at the end of the poem. In her unwillingness to make straightforward statements about her feelings, she captures precisely how unstraightforward they are. Or maybe how unstraightforward she wishes they were?
| Edna St. Vincent Millay | Loving you less than life a little less |
[Published in part (lines 7-24) by Medwin (under the title, "An Ariette for Music. To a Lady singing to her Accompaniment on the Guitar"), "The Athenaeum", November 17, 1832; reprinted by Mrs. Shelley, "Poetical Works", 1839, 1st edition. Republished in full (under the title, To —.), "Poetical Works", 1839, 2nd edition. The Trelawny manuscript is headed "To Jane". Mr. C.W. Frederickson of Brooklyn possesses a transcript in an unknown hand.]
1.
The keen stars were twinkling,
And the fair moon was rising among them,
Dear Jane!
The guitar was tinkling,
But the notes were not sweet till you sung them | Again. | 2.
As the moon's soft splendour
O'er the faint cold starlight of Heaven | This wasn’t a new experience. Shelley craves the sensation of watching and hearing Jane play, over and over again.
The first stanza sets up the rhyming pattern and irregular line length that will continue in the remaining stanzas. | Percy Bysshe Shelley | To Jane: The Keen Stars Were Twinkling |
Fame is a fickle food | Upon a shifting plate | Whose table once a
Guest but not
The second time is set | This line is meant to explain that the plate in which fame is served is not fixed. It is not predictable as to who will eat the “fickle food” from one day to the next. Read more here. | Emily Dickinson | Fame is a fickle food 1659 |
But I would rather be horizontal.
I am not a tree with my root in the soil
Sucking up minerals and motherly love
So that each March I may gleam into leaf,
Nor am I the beauty of a garden bed
Attracting my share of Ahs and spectacularly painted, | Unknowing I must soon unpetal. | Compared with me, a tree is immortal
And a flower-head not tall, but more startling,
And I want the one's longevity and the other's daring. | The flowers aren’t aware of their ultimate fate– a good example of ignorance being bliss. The flowers can enjoy their moment of beauty unencumbered by the human obsession with mortality.
| Sylvia Plath | I Am Vertical |
To the water's edge. For, what expands
Before the house, but the great opaque
Blue breadth of sea without a break?
While, in the house, forever crumbles
Some fragment of the frescoed walls,
From blisters where a scorpion sprawls.
A girl bare-footed brings, and tumbles
Down on the pavement, green-flesh melons,
And says there's news to-day—the king
Was shot at, touched in the liver-wing,
Goes with his Bourbon arm in a sling:
—She hopes they have not caught the felons. | Italy, my Italy! | Queen Mary's saying serves for me—
(When fortune's malice
Lost her, Calais) | And this is perhaps the dramatic climax, the nub of the poem. It says all that is needed. The possessive determiner “my” and the exclamation mark give emphasis. The “my” is a direct contrast to the first stanza, in which Robert detaches himself from England. This further exemplifies Browning’s opinions and preferences regarding Italy. | Robert Browning | De Gustibus |
Was like the Stillness in the Air -
Between the Heaves of Storm -
The Eyes around - had wrung them dry -
And Breaths were gathering firm
For that last Onset - when the King
Be witnessed - in the Room -
I willed my Keepsakes - Signed away
What portion of me be
Assignable - and then it was
There interposed a Fly -
With Blue - uncertain - stumbling Buzz -
Between the light - and me - | And then the Windows failed - and then | I could not see to see - | The rhythm in this poem is broken up with dashes which makes it easier to read and follow along. | Emily Dickinson | I heard a Fly buzz - when I died class page |
My mother groaned, my father wept | Into the dangerous world I leapt | Helpless, naked, piping loud
Like a fiend hid in a cloud
Struggling in my father's hands | There is no compromising; disease, starvation and squalor were what made up the lives of the majority of the population. Note that the child ‘leapt’, though not for joy. It suggests awareness and agency from the moment of birth. | William Blake | Infant Sorrow |
(To JS/07 M 378
This Marble Monument
Is Erected by the State)
He was found by the Bureau of Statistics to be
One against whom there was no official complaint,
And all the reports of his conduct agree
That, in the modern sense of the old-fashioned word, he was a saint,
For in everything he did he served the Greater Community. | Except for the war till the day he retired
He worked in a factory and never got fired, | But satisfied his employers, Fudge Motors Inc.
Yet he wasn't a scab or odd in his views,
For his union reports that he paid his dues, | Notice how this is such a backhanded compliment: never got fired . Instead of saying something like he was great at his job they ‘'applaud’‘ for being able to keep the job!
Also at this part the poem unexpectedly shifts from an ABABA rhyme scheme to a rhyming couplet (retired/fired). This is such a simple and obvious rhyme that it makes the unknown citizen’s life sound even more awkward and boring. | W. H. Auden | The Unknown Citizen |
null | O thou with dewy locks, who lookest down | Through the clear windows of the morning, turn
Thine angel eyes upon our western isle,
Which in full choir hails thy approach, O Spring! | The dew of an early spring or summer morning is joined with a woman’s hair. Her angel eyes, paints ‘her’ as some sort of higher being, and personifies spring as an angel or even a goddess.
The idea of morning and “dewy locks” is a common association from Renaisance and Petrarchan poetry. Blake takes the personification further, by describing the rest of Spring’s body: “eyes”, “feet”, etc.
In convention, personifications of Spring are usually female. However, Blake does not state whether his Spring is male or female.
The goddess imagery continues in the last part of the stanza when Blake writes that the western isle is in full choir as Spring approaches, like nature itself is ecstatic she had blessed them with her power. | William Blake | To Spring |
Ah, Douglass, we have fall'n on evil days,
Such days as thou, not even thou didst know,
When thee, the eyes of that harsh long ago
Saw, salient, at the cross of devious ways,
And all the country heard thee with amaze.
Not ended then, the passionate ebb and flow,
The awful tide that battled to and fro;
We ride amid a tempest of dispraise. | Now, when the waves of swift dissension swarm, | And Honour, the strong pilot, lieth stark,
Oh, for thy voice high-sounding o'er the storm,
For thy strong arm to guide the shivering bark, | During a period where oppression and discrimination was at its highest. | Paul Laurence Dunbar | Douglass |
null | Cream of Wheat | sometimes at night
we stroll the market aisles
ben and jemima and me they | The poet is mentioning a type of soup.
| Lucille Clifton | Cream of Wheat |
Remember Thee! Remember Thee!
1.
Remember thee! remember thee!
Till Lethe quench life's burning stream
Remorse and Shame shall cling to thee,
And haunt thee like a feverish dream!
2.
Remember thee! Aye, doubt it not.
Thy husband too shall think of thee:
By neither shalt thou be forgot, | Thou false to him, thou fiend to me! | [First published, Conversations of Lord Byron, 1824.] | [49] {60} [“To Bd., Feb. 22, 1813. ”‘Remember thee,’ nay—doubt it not—
Thy Husband too may ‘think’ of thee! By neither canst thou be forgot, Thou false to him—thou fiend to me! “‘Remember thee’? Yes—yes—till Fate In Lethe quench the guilty dream. Yet then—e'en then—Remorse and Hate Shall vainly quaff the vanquished stream.” From a MS. (in the possession of Mr. Hallam Murray) not in Byron’s handwriting.] | Lord Byron | Remember Thee Remember Thee |
The ponies run, the girls are young
The odds are there to beat
You win a while, and then it's done
Your little winning streak
And summoned now to deal
With your invincible defeat
You live your life as if it's real
A thousand kisses deep
I'm turning tricks, I'm getting fixed | I'm back on Boogie Street | You lose your grip, and then you slip
Into the masterpiece
And maybe I had miles to drive | That mythical place, evoked in this song and the eponymous track off the same album
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 and sex, and of all the deceptions these activities can bring, deceptions more cruel as you get older, like I do.
| Leonard Cohen | A Thousand Kisses Deep |
"Nature" is what we see
The Hill—the Afternoon
Squirrel—Eclipse—the Bumble bee | Nay—Nature is Heaven | Nature is what we hear
The Bobolink—the Sea
Thunder—the Cricket | Just like poetry, Nature is indefinable . Note Dickinson’s definition of poetry, in which the words have meaning only in terms of the impact on the reader.
The negative “Nay” is an archaism which adds emphasis in the way “No” cannot. She ends the four lines by equating “Nature” and “Heaven”. So though she expresses the concept in concrete visual terms, ultimately it is as indefinable as the idea of “Heaven”.
This line is echoed by line eight. | Emily Dickinson | Nature is what we see— |
Pipe the Sweet Birds in gorant cadence—
Ah, what sagacity perished here!
Version of 1862
*****
Safe in their Alabaster Chambers—
Untouched by Morning
And untouched by Noon—
Lie the meek members of the Resurrection—
Rafter of Satin—and Roof of Stone!
Grand go the Years—in the Crescent—above them—
Worlds scoop their Arcs—
And Firmaments—row— | Diadems—drop—and Doges—surrender— | Soundless as dots—on a Disc of Snow— | The rise and fall of royalty and powerful clergy (diadems and Doges)–and by extension, the coming and going of historical eras–pales in comparison to the long timescale of death. | Emily Dickinson | Safe in their Alabaster Chambers 216 |
Evenings during the week he took her to see plays in which the brain-clutching heroine was rescued from the palatial home of her guardian, who is cruelly after her bonds, by the hero with the beautiful sentiments. The latter spent most of his time out at soak in pale-green snow storms, busy with a nickel-plated revolver, rescuing aged strangers from villains
Maggie lost herself in sympathy with the wanderers swooning in snow storms beneath happy-hued church windows. And a choir within singing "Joy to the World." To Maggie and the rest of the audience this was transcendental realism. Joy always within, and they, like the actor, inevitably without. Viewing it, they hugged themselves in ecstatic pity of their imagined or real condition
The girl thought the arrogance and granite-heartedness of the magnate of the play was very accurately drawn. She echoed the maledictions that the occupants of the gallery showered on this individual when his lines compelled him to expose his extreme selfishness | Shady persons in the audience revolted from the pictured villainy of the drama. With untiring zeal they hissed vice and applauded virtue. Unmistakably bad men evinced an apparently sincere admiration for virtue | The loud gallery was overwhelmingly with the unfortunate and the oppressed. They encouraged the struggling hero with cries, and jeered the villain, hooting and calling attention to his whiskers. When anybody died in the pale-green snow storms, the gallery mourned. They sought out the painted misery and hugged it as akin
In the hero's erratic march from poverty in the first act, to wealth and triumph in the final one, in which he forgives all the enemies that he has left, he was assisted by the gallery, which applauded his generous and noble sentiments and confounded the speeches of his opponents by making irrelevant but very sharp remarks. Those actors who were cursed with villainy parts were confronted at every turn by the gallery. If one of them rendered lines containing the most subtile distinctions between right and wrong, the gallery was immediately aware if the actor meant wickedness, and denounced him accordingly
The last act was a triumph for the hero, poor and of the masses, the representative of the audience, over the villain and the rich man, his pockets stuffed with bonds, his heart packed with tyrannical purposes, imperturbable amid suffering | Crane depicts the hypocrisy of the people sitting in the audience. They are condoning the bad character on the stage even when they are not good themselves. They can’t even see the hypocrisy. Crane says they are “unmistakably bad men,” but they see nothing wrong with hissing at the characters on the stage. The people who live in the city are affected the Crane’s descriptions of a dark city. | Stephen Crane | The Theater VIII |
Alas! and am I born for this,
To wear this slavish chain?
Deprived of all created bliss, | Through hardship, toil and pain! | How long have I in bondage lain,
And languished to be free!
Alas! and must I still complain— | Horton recognizes the pain that is naturally brought along with slavery. This is where Horton states his stance on slavery in “On liberty and Slavery”. Not that it is anything eye opening, but it is none the less the stance that Horton has on being enslaved. | George Moses Horton | On Liberty and Slavery |
And reached for a pen if only to show
We did not just laze in an armchair turning pages;
We pressed a thought into the wayside,
Planted an impression along the verge.
Even Irish monks in their cold scriptoria
Jotted along the borders of the Gospels
Brief asides about the pains of copying,
A bird singing near their window,
Or the sunlight that illuminated their page-
Anonymous men catching a ride into the future
On a vessel more lasting than themselves.
And you have not read Joshua Reynolds, | They say, until you have read him
Enwreathed with Blake's furious scribbling. | Yet the one I think of most often,
The one that dangles from me like a locket,
Was written in the copy of Catcher in the Rye | William Blake had beef with Reynolds, taking particular offense at the latter’s Discourses on Art . The two had radically different views on the role of art, Blake believing that men were born with artistic knowledge while Reynolds arguing that such knowledge was only gained from experience. Blake also disagreed with Reynold’s emphasis on portraiture.
Collins alludes to Blake’s famously harsh annotations of Reynolds (see this article from the Andrew Graham-Dixon archive for more). On the title page of Discourses on Art, Blake wrote, “This Man was Hired to Depress Art.” Later he went further:
Having spent the vigour my Youth & Genius under the Oppression of Sr Joshua & his Gang of Cunning Hired Knaves Without Employment & as much as could possibly be Without Bread, The Reader must Expect to Read in all my Remarks on these Books Nothing but Indignation & Resentment. While Sr Joshua was rolling in Riches, Barry was Poor & Unemploy’d except by his own Energy; Mortimer was call’d a Madman, & only Portrait Painting applauded by the Rich & Great … Fuseli, Indignant, almost hid himself. I am hid. | Billy Collins | Marginalia |
invent an island on which he abandons
the woman who saved his life
with no loss of sleep over his betrayal.
Invent us as we were
before our bodies glittered
and we stopped bleeding:
invent a shepherd who kills a giant,
a girl who grows into a tree,
a woman who refuses to turn
her back on the past and is changed to salt,
a boy who steals his brother's birthright
and becomes the head of a nation. | Invent real tears, hard love,
slow-spoken, ancient words, | difficult as a child's
first steps across a room. | Telling the reader to create something that makes people feel, bringing back their humanity. | Lisel Mueller | The End of Science Fiction |
Ha there! old pig, old bear, old bristly and gingery
Wombat out of the red earth peering gingerly
Was there some thud of foot in the mist and the silence
That stiffens whisker and ear in sound's fierce absence,
Some smell means man?
I see the dewdrop trembling upon the rushes,
All else is the mist's now, river and rocks and ridges. | Poor lump of movable clay, snuffling and blinking, | Too thick in the head to know what thumps in your thinking,
Rears in the rain –
Be easy, old tree-root's companion; down there where your burrow | Personification: used to describe the wombat as created by nature, this highlights the deep relationship between the wombat and the environment | Douglas Stewart | Wombat |
It tires him out if he tries to speak.]
Some die quietly. Some abound
In loud self-pity. Others spread
Bad morale through the cots around . . .
This is a type that is better dead.
"The war was forced on me by my foes.
All that I sought was the right to live."
[Don't be afraid of a triple dose;
The pain will neutralize half we give.
Here are the needles. See that he dies
While the effects of the drug endure . . .
What is the question he asks with his eyes?— | Yes, All-Highest, to God, be sure.] | null | In this final throw-away line the Physician uses the formal title for the Kaiser, “All-Highest,” and assures him that he will go to heaven. This infers from the previous line that the character of the Kaiser has finally begun to plead, even if only with his eyes. This pleading represents the final fall of the Kaiser. | Rudyard Kipling | A Death-Bed |
Douglass was someone who,
Had he walked with wary foot
And frightened tread,
From very indecision
Might be dead,
Might have lost his soul,
But instead decided to be bold
And capture every street,
On which he set his feet,
To route each path | Toward freedom's goal, | To make each highway
Choose his compass' choice
To all the world cried, | The goal of being equal and self governed
| Langston Hughes | Frederick Douglass: 1817-1895 |
Declamatory bronze
On somber pedestals -
O'Connell, Grattan, Moore -
And the brewery tugs and the swans
On the balustraded stream
And the bare bones of a fanlight
Over a hungry door
And the air soft on the cheek
And porter running from the taps
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 | MacNeice was born and raised in Belfast, and thus can admire Dublin only from the perspective of a relative outsider. | Louis MacNeice | Dublin |
And this is what I see:
This fenced-off narrow space
Assigned to me.
I look then at the silly walls
Through dark eyes in a dark face—
And this is what I know:
That all these walls oppression builds
Will have to go!
I look at my own body
With eyes no longer blind—
And I see that my own hands can make
The world that's in my mind. | Then let us hurry, comrades,
The road to find. | null | Hughes ends this poem by creating a sense of unity for this change. Together with “comrades” the road to change can be made/found. With haste the speaker implores that the hunt is started and equality is sought. | Langston Hughes | I Look At The World |
null | 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, | Heaney wrote this poem about his first poetic inspiration after a stroke, a spark of genius that led to this poem. This feeling was dependent on his being conscious and alert; his recovery brought a new wave of creativity. | Seamus Heaney | Had I not been awake I would have missed it |
And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise:
If you can dream - and not make dreams your master;
If you can think - and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build 'em up with worn-out tools:
If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings | And never breathe a word about your loss; | If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you | An example of the shortcomings of the philosophy of the age, exemplified in this poem by Kipling, which was, by and large, work hard without any thought or guile and everything will be okay.
Why risk all of your winnings on a game of pitch-and-toss? That’s a really stupid move, by the standards of economics and those of common sense– it’s a fast way to lose all of your money and slip down the social ladder.
What’s more, not saying anything compounds the situation– you don’t admit that you’ve made a stupid move so you, and others, can’t learn from it, and will probably end up making the same mistake again.
Gambling remains a powerful influence in the UK, especially among the least well off– a report recently found that the poorest quarter of England’s population spent £13 billion (about 22 billion USD) on high stakes, high speed gambling machines like the one below in 2013.
Kipling toed the Victorian line so firmly that his poems made perfect tools of social control– encouraging people to throw their money away is a timeless means of doing just that. | Rudyard Kipling | If |
Only a man harrowing clods
In a slow silent walk
With an old horse that stumbles and nods
Half asleep as they stalk. | Only thin smoke without flame
From the heaps of couch-grass; | Yet this will go onward the same
Though Dynasties pass.
Yonder a maid and her wight | The object of contemplation is a pile of grass-like weeds smouldering.
This stanza, like the first, begins with the word “Only.” There are no verbs in these two lines; in face, the only words here are modifiers of the noun “smoke.” All these modifiers are absolutely necessary to make the point (or produce the impression) that man’s involvement here is not evil, destructive, or intrusive. “Couch-grass” is also known as quack grass , a creeping, invasive weed that strangles out other plant life.
The humans who make this smoldering pile are acting constructively, and the “thin smoke” contrasts with battle scenes from the Great War, where the smoke is usually thick and poisonous.
These lines anticipate lines in a later poem by T.S. Eliot, The Hollow Men:
Shape without form, shade without colour, Paralysed force, gesture without motion | Thomas Hardy | In Time of The Breaking of Nations |
Under the low clay roof.'
And I think of one gone to him,
A little stillness dancer -
Haunter-son, lost brother -
Cavorting through the yard,
So glad to see me home,
My homesick first term over.
And think of a neighbour's words
Long after the accident;
'Yon bird on the shed roof,
Up on the ridge for weeks -
I said nothing at the time | But I never liked yon bird' | The automatic lock
Clunks shut, the blackbird's panic
Is shortlived, for a second | In this one line stanza Heaney sums up the negative superstitious view of the bird. The neighbour didn’t like it and this may be justified, given the association of blackbirds with death. It contrasts with the first one-line stanza, where Heaney declares his love for the bird. | Seamus Heaney | The Blackbird of Glanmore |
RAPT in the visionary theme!
SPIRIT DIVINE! with THEE I'll wander,
Where the blue, wavy, lucid stream,
'Mid forest glooms, shall slow meander!
With THEE I'll trace the circling bounds
Of thy NEW PARADISE extended;
And listen to the varying sounds
Of winds, and foamy torrents blended.
Now by the source which lab'ring heaves
The mystic fountain, bubbling, panting,
While Gossamer its net-work weaves, | Adown the blue lawn slanting! | I'll mark thy sunny dome, and view
Thy Caves of Ice, thy fields of dew!
Thy ever-blooming mead, whose flow'r | Coleridge loved Mary Robinson’s work and reviewed it with great detail. He actually wrote a letter to her daughter after Robinson died, saying, “Your dear Mother is more present to my eyes, than the paper on which I am writing–which indeed swims before my sight–for I can not think of your Mother without Tears” This was written two years after Robinson had passed away. Connecting Mary Robinson with Coleridge is essential because of the influence they both had in each other’s work. She had lived her entire life in the shadow of gossip and verbal abuse. Coleridge was portraying himself to the grieving daughter as a protector of her mother’s reputation. | Mary Robinson | To the Poet Coleridge |
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
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,— | From the same letter: “I liked [Rilke] when he was writing out of his active grief and awe, not these damned letters , these lay sermons he sprayed around Europe instead of sleeping with people like a wicked but actual man. Love affairs on paper, ugh.” | John Berryman | Dream Song 3 A Stimulant for an Old Beast |
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
For his civility
We passed the school where children played | Their lessons scarcely done | We passed the fields of gazing grain
We passed the setting sun
We paused before a house that seemed | In this version a rhyme has also been put in place. Otherwise, in version ‘712’ the appearance of a non-rhyme disrupts the flow of the poem and creates a negative change of tone which is then continued into the alternative fourth stanza. | Emily Dickinson | The Chariot |
And everything but sleep.
Here life has death for neighbour,
And far from eye or ear
Wan waves and wet winds labour,
Weak ships and spirits steer;
They drive adrift, and whither
They wot not who make thither;
But no such winds blow hither,
And no such things grow here.
No growth of moor or coppice,
No heather-flower or vine,
But bloomless buds of poppies, | Green grapes of Proserpine, | Pale beds of blowing rushes
Where no leaf blooms or blushes
Save this whereout she crushes | Proserpine (Greek equivalent: Persephone) is an ancient Roman goddess, the daughter of Ceres, the Roman agricultural goddess. Her legend says that she was abducted by Hades, and tricked into remaining in the Underworld for six months out of the year. She is associated with the cycles of life and death, growth and decay. | Algernon Charles Swinburne | The Garden Of Proserpine |
I'm a riddle in nine syllables,
An elephant, a ponderous house,
A melon strolling on two tendrils.
O red fruit, ivory, fine timbers! | This loaf's big with its yeasty rising. | Money's new-minted in this fat purse.
I'm a means, a stage, a cow in calf.
I've eaten a bag of green apples, | Plath is comparing her big belly to the baking of bread. Yeast is used in bread to help it rise and have a nice, soft and fluffy texture…which happens when it is almost finished baking. Plath’s babies have grown even bigger and she is almost ready to go into labor.
| Sylvia Plath | Metaphors |
null | Art thou abroad on this stormy night | on thy journey of love, my friend?
The sky groans like one in despair.
I have no sleep tonight. | The poem starts off with strong visual imagery of pouring rain, loud thunder, flashing lightning, with dark grey clouds on the horizon.
| Rabindranath Tagore | My Friend |
For Faun and nymph are old and grey,
Ah, leave the hills of Arcady!
This is the land where liberty
Lit grave-browed Milton on his way,
This modern world hath need of thee!
A land of ancient chivalry
Where gentle Sidney saw the day,
Ah, leave the hills of Arcady!
This fierce sea-lion of the sea,
This England lacks some stronger lay,
This modern world hath need of thee!
Then blow some trumpet loud and free, | And give thine oaten pipe away, | Ah, leave the hills of Arcady!
This modern world hath need of thee! | According to myth, Pan invented the pan flute, which was made from lengths of hollow reed. He created the pipe after a woman he chased turned into a reed to escape him. Because he could not tell which of the reeds nearby was the object of his affection, he took the seven reeds nearby and formed them into the instrument.
| Oscar Wilde | Pan: A Double Villanelle |
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,
The dust behind limousines; | The wheat harvest will continue. The oxymoron , “restless silence” suggests unease, as if nature is more aware than humans of the disaster to come. The wheat is personified as if predicting impending events, which of course the reader is aware of. But for the moment, for those who lived at the time, the sound of it blowing in the wind would be melodic, natural and calming. | Philip Larkin | MCMXIV re-transcribed |
As if reminded--or as if perhaps
Within a million years of an idea
He got his purple little knuckles stung
The already known had once more been confirmed
By psychological experiment
And that were all the finding to announce
Had the boy not presumed too close and long
There was a sudden flash of arm, a snatch
And the glass was the monkey's, not the boy's
Precipitately they retired back-cage
And instituted an investigation
On their part, though without the needed insight | They bit the glass and listened for the flavor | They broke the handle and the binding off it
Then none the wiser, frankly gave it up
And having hid it in their bedding straw | Poet and critic Clive James gives this line as an example of a “poetic moment,” which can, for better or for worse, overwhelm the unity of a poem: “The moment is so good that the way it serves the poem to perfection is only part of its appeal: once we know about the monkeys and the burning-glass, the line becomes memorable on its own.” Poetry Notebook | Robert Frost | At Woodwards Gardens |
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 | This is interesting–a concrete person to complement the concrete object of the pearls. This Duchess, a noblewoman of wealth and standing, is described as “common”–too common for what? It seems as though even a Duchess pales against the beauty of nature.
Or perhaps the Duchess, despite her social standing and wealth, is no match for the woman that the grass represents. | Emily Dickinson | The Grass |
Now as I was young and easy under the apple boughs
About the lilting house and happy as the grass was green,
The night above the dingle starry,
Time let me hail and climb
Golden in the heydays of his eyes, | And honoured among wagons I was prince of the apple towns | And once below a time I lordly had the trees and leaves
Trail with daisies and barley
Down the rivers of the windfall light. | With merry solemnity Frost proclaims that his younger self was “Prince of the Apple Towns” – alluding to childhood games among nature (and thus linking nostalgia for childhood with nature) | Robert Frost | Fern Hill |
If but some vengeful god would call to me
From up the sky, and laugh: "Thou suffering thing,
Know that thy sorrow is my ecstasy,
That thy love's loss is my hate's profiting!"
Then would I bear it, clench myself, and die,
Steeled by the sense of ire unmerited;
Half-eased in that a Powerfuller than I
Had willed and meted me the tears I shed.
But not so. How arrives it joy lies slain,
And why unblooms the best hope ever sown? | —Crass Casualty obstructs the sun and rain, | And dicing Time for gladness casts a moan. . . .
These purblind Doomsters had as readily strown
Blisses about my pilgrimage as pain. | “Crass Casualty” – a surname for Fate – blackens the skies, obstructing both the literal and metaphorical light and rain humans need to survive.
The alliteration found in this designation reinforces the cold, callous nature of Destiny. | Thomas Hardy | Hap |
I'll tell you a plan for gaining wealth,
Better than banking, trade or leases—
Take a bank note and fold it up, | And then you will find your money in creases! | This wonderful plan, without danger or loss,
Keeps your cash in your hands, where nothing can trouble it;
And every time that you fold it across, | #OH POE
| Edgar Allan Poe | Epigram For Wall Street |
We wear the mask that grins and lies,
It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes,—
This debt we pay to human guile; | With torn and bleeding hearts we smile, | And mouth with myriad subtleties.
Why should the world be over-wise
In counting all our tears and sighs? | The juxtaposition of the “bleeding heart” and “smile” presents the juggle between the external and internal and poses many questions. Why is the heart bleeding? Is it wounded? Why is the smile not bleeding like the heart when both the external and internal have been slashed? How are these wounds mended? Are these wounds necessary for us to realize the mask?
“We smile”, may also let us believe that even through the pain and suffering, fake smile is worn to let your abuser know that they haven’t yet broken you. That as long as you smile, they can’t touch you. | Paul Laurence Dunbar | We Wear the Mask |
null | 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 | An allusion to Corona Borealis – the Northern Crown constellation?
The myth of the Labyrinth originated in the mythological story of the Corona Borealis, the complicated, full of contradictions story of the love of Theseus and Ariadne. | Leonard Cohen | Boogie Street |
Gave thee such a tender voice
Making all the vales rejoice?
Little Lamb, who made thee?
Dost thou know who made thee?
Little Lamb, I'll tell thee
Little Lamb, I'll tell thee:
He is called by thy name
For he calls himself a Lamb
He is meek, and he is mild;
He became a little child
I a child, and thou a lamb
We are called by his name | Little Lamb, God bless thee!
Little Lamb, God bless thee! | Little Lamb, God bless thee! | This embodiment of Christian ideals deserves to be praised, and has been blessed by God. Therefore, the repetition of the line is justified since it conveys both meanings. The colloquial expression “God bless you” indicates reverence (which the lamb deserves on account of its perfection). The speaker is saying that the lamb is literally blessed by God. | William Blake | The Lamb |
Let's sing another song, boys, this one has grown old and bitter | Ah his fingernails, I see they're broken | His ships they're all on fire
The moneylender's lovely little daughter
Ah, she's eaten, she's eaten with desire | Calls back to the song Love Calls You By Your Name :
You say they chained you to your fingernails And you climb the halls of fame
Practice, practice, practice! Just don’t be like Robert Schumann, the pianist who devised a finger stretching device to make himself better and ended up crippling a few fingers. | Leonard Cohen | Sing Another Song Boys |
null | Calliope;
As ye may see,
Regent is she
Of poets all, | Which gave to me
The high degree
Laureate to be |
Calliope is the muse of epic poetry in Greek mythology and was often depicted holding copies of The Iliad or The Odyssey by Renaissance painters and sculptors. Skelton’s praise of Calliope in this poem, one of Skelton’s shortest, can be seen as ironic or self-deprecating. | John Skelton | Why were ye Calliope embrawdered with letters of golde ? |
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
Through which the sky eternally threads itself? | The world is blood-hot and personal | Dawn says, with its blood-flush.
There is no terminus, only suitcases
Out of which the same self unfolds like a suit | Plath seems to be full of anger. The idea of blood, last mentioned in stanza four, is resumed and it belongs, one supposes to the ‘world’ — the ‘us’ of the stanza seven, but also to herself; — it is ‘personal’.
This line evokes Hamlet in Act 3 scene 2 who says;
now could I drink hot blood, And do such bitter business as the day Would quake to look on.
Hamlet is consumed with anger at his mother and step-father and burning with the need to avenge is dead father.
The idea of blood accentuates the imagery of pain and injury. The mention of blood is repeated once more in stanza twelve “blood-flush” — reprising the theme. | Sylvia Plath | Totem |
Doctor, you say there are no haloes
around the streetlights in Paris
and what I see is an aberration
caused by old age, an affliction.
I tell you it has taken me all my life
to arrive at the vision of gas lamps as angels,
to soften and blur and finally banish
the edges you regret I don't see,
to learn that the line I called the horizon
does not exist and sky and water,
so long apart, are the same state of being. | Fifty-four years before I could see | Rouen cathedral is built
of parallel shafts of sun,
and now you want to restore | The poem switches focus. The subtopic (although the main topic remains light and perception) switches briefly to the topic of age, which was also briefly mentioned in the beginning of this poem.
The word “see” makes an appearance at the end of the sentence, which in the past has proven a hint at the importance of the following line. | Lisel Mueller | Monet Refuses the Operation |
I've stayed in the front yard all my life. | I want a peek at the back
Where it's rough and untended and hungry weed grows. | A girl gets sick of a rose.
I want to go in the back yard now
And maybe down the alley, | The “back” is where the area isn’t manicured. She isn’t necessarily talking about a backyard, as much as she is alluding to engaging in a life that is less sheltered than the one she lives in the “front yard”. | Gwendolyn Brooks | A Song in the Front Yard |
He sang of life, serenely sweet,
With, now and then, a deeper note.
From some high peak, nigh yet remote,
He voiced the world's absorbing beat.
He sang of love when earth was young, | And Love, itself, was in his lays. | But, ah, the world, it turned to praise
A jingle in a broken tongue. | He is saying love is in his lay , or song. The song was made with love.
| Paul Laurence Dunbar | The Poet |
And flap their useless wings; the wildest brutes
Came tame and tremulous; and vipers crawled
And twined themselves among the multitude,
Hissing, but stingless—they were slain for food:
And War, which for a moment was no more,
Did glut himself again:—a meal was bought
With blood, and each sate sullenly apart
Gorging himself in gloom: no Love was left;
All earth was but one thought—and that was Death,
Immediate and inglorious; and the pang
Of famine fed upon all entrails—men
Died, and their bones were tombless as their flesh; | The meagre by the meagre were devoured, | Even dogs assailed their masters, all save one,
And he was faithful to a corse, and kept
The birds and beasts and famished men at bay, | Meagre meaning thin or lacking in quantity The only thing left that existed in great quantity was death. | Lord Byron | Darkness |
Dame Kindness, she is so nice!
The blue and red jewels of her rings smoke
In the windows, the mirrors
Are filling with smiles.
What is so real as the cry of a child?
A rabbit's cry may be wilder
But it has no soul.
Sugar can cure everything, so Kindness says.
Sugar is a necessary fluid,
Its crystals a little poultice.
O kindness, kindness
Sweetly picking up pieces! | My Japanese silks, desperate butterflies, | May be pinned any minute, anesthetized.
And here you come, with a cup of tea
Wreathed in steam. | These could be metaphors for her poetic mind, uniquely beautiful and desperate, “anesthetized” by kindness. Alternatively, the Japanese silks and trapped ‘desperate’ butterflies may be flimsy, foreign representations of Plath’s delicate psyche. She was at a stage of her life when she was close to suicide.
The line endings in the third stanza are clever and interesting. ‘Butterflies’ and ‘anesthetized’ are closely if imperfectly rhymed, to give a neat, concise ending to the two related ideas. But Plath also subtly rhymes the first three lines as well, with the consonant ‘poultice’ and ‘kindness’, and ‘pieces’. There are also sibilant ’s' sounds throughout. These effectively unify the stanza. | Sylvia Plath | Kindness |
This is a song for the genius child. | Sing it softly, for the song is wild. | Sing it softly as ever you can -
Lest the song get out of hand.
Nobody loves a genius child. | The first hint of the poem’s dominant theme, which is the power of genius–to upset, transform, revolutionize, run “wild.” This kind of power is unsettling to many, as Hughes well knew. | Langston Hughes | Genius Child |
I know I am but summer to your heart,
And not the full four seasons of the year;
And you must welcome from another part
Such noble moods as are not mine, my dear. | No gracious weight of golden fruits to sell | Have I, nor any wise and wintry thing;
And I have loved you all too long and well
To carry still the high sweet breast of Spring. | Saying she is not Autumn–when the fall harvest brings about plump “golden fruits”–and so has none “to sell” (i.e., give to her lover)
| Edna St. Vincent Millay | I know I am but summer to your heart Sonnet XXVII |
On a cloud I saw a child.
And he laughing said to me.
Pipe a song about a Lamb;
So I piped with merry chear,
Piper pipe that song again—
So I piped, he wept to hear.
Drop thy pipe thy happy pipe
Sing thy songs of happy chear,
So I sung the same again
While he wept with joy to hear
Piper sit thee down and write
In a book that all may read— | So he vanish'd from my sight. | And I pluck'd a hollow reed.
And I made a rural pen,
And I stain'd the water clear, | After another caesura the fantasy child disappears and the poet is left in another consciousness to write his songs. What he produces in the Songs of Innocence are still not part of the real world, but idealised scenarios that contrast with the grim reality of the Songs of Experience — Blake’s social protest. | William Blake | Introduction to the Songs of Innocence |
Thy various works, imperial queen, we see,
How bright their forms! how deck'd with pomp by thee!
Thy wond'rous acts in beauteous order stand,
And all attest how potent is thine hand. | From Helicon's refulgent heights attend, | Ye sacred choir, and my attempts befriend:
To tell her glories with a faithful tongue,
Ye blooming graces, triumph in my song. | “Helicon” refers to Mount Helicon, “celebrated in classical literature as the favourite haunt of the Muses” ( Encyclopedia Britannica ) and the site of two sacred rivers. The river Hippocrene, in particular, was thought to be the wellspring of poetic inspiration. Wheatley calls on the “sacred choir” of the Muses to descend from this mountain and inspire her. | Phillis Wheatley | On Imagination |
of silver-bellied eels, and sea-snails
cooked in a rusty can.
Allow me to mend the broken ends
of shared days:
but I wanted to say
that the tree we climbed
that gave food and drink
to youthful dreams, is no more.
Pursed to the lips her fine-edged
leaves made whistle - now stamp
no silken tracery on the cracked
clay floor. | Friend, | in this drear
dreamless time I clasp
your hand if only to reassure | This one word is repeated and brings the poem to an emotional, dramatic climax. It is a direct invocation to the invisible friend, a pivot, in which the past memories are left behind and the present is addressed. | Hone Tuwhare | Friend |
Neal Cassady drops dead | And Allen Ginsberg's tears shampoo his beard | Neal Cassady drops dead
And Allen Ginsberg's lips tighten and thin
Neal Cassady drops dead | Allen Ginsberg (1926–1997) was an American poet and one of the leading figures of both the Beat Generation of the 1950s and the counterculture that soon would follow.
Allen Ginsberg and Neal Cassady were said to have had a sexual relationship on and off for over 20 years, despite Cassady’s marriages to women. Cassady is immortalized as the “Adonis of Denver” in Ginsberg’s famous poem “Howl”. Also, “Please Master” is one of the most graphically written works by Ginsberg about his relationship with Cassady.
| Morrissey | Neal Cassady Drops Dead |
Tread lightly, she is near
Under the snow,
Speak gently, she can hear
The daisies grow.
All her bright golden hair
Tarnished with rust,
She that was young and fair
Fallen to dust. | Lily-like, white as snow, | She hardly knew
She was a woman, so
Sweetly she grew. | In the first stanza , snow was already referenced once. Now it is mentioned again, though in the context of her pale complexion due to her death rather than the gloomy scenery.
Isola was compared to a daisy in line 4 to express her innocence and purity, which lilies also famously express. The lily was a symbol for Hera in Greek Mythology. However, they also symbolized death, seeing that many believed that when one dies, their lost innocence is regained.
Lillies are generally dormant in winter, making it a possible allusion to Wilde’s belief that Isola “is at rest” in this snow rather than dead. | Oscar Wilde | Requiescat |
Your Momma took to shouting
Your Poppa's gone to war,
Your sister's in the streets
Your brother's in the bar.
The thirteens. Right On.
Your cousin's taking smack | Your Uncle's in the joint, | Your buddy's in the gutter
Shooting for his point
The thirteens. Right on. | “Joint” is a slang term for being locked up in a jail cell. His Uncle has had the same problems as other members of the family, but has been caught by the law unlike the rest. | Maya Angelou | The Thirteens Black |
Subsets and Splits
No community queries yet
The top public SQL queries from the community will appear here once available.