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Title divine—is mine!
The Wife—without the Sign!
Acute Degree—conferred on me—
Empress of Calvary!
Royal—all but the Crown!
Betrothed—without the swoon
God sends us Women—
When you—hold—Garnet to Garnet—
Gold—to Gold— | Born—Bridalled—Shrouded— | In a Day—
Tri Victory
"My Husband"—women say— | This line represents a nineteenth century American middle-class woman’s conventional destiny—her birth, marriage, and death, planned for her on her day of birth. Although bridal is a common word, “Bridalled” is not. Dickinson’s pun is clever wordplay that makes her point. “Bridalled” describes the headgear used to control a horse. Or, in this context, a woman.
“Shrouded” is also wordplay. A shroud is used to wrap dead bodies ready for burial. But shrouded can mean overshadowed or hidden — what happened to many women once they married and once their identity was subsumed in that of their husband. | Emily Dickinson | Title divine—is mine |
null | An Old Story | I.
It was roses, roses, all the way,
With myrtle mixed in my path like mad; | The subtitle ‘An Old Story’ implies timelessness; of recurring themes. In this case it is betrayal and trust in God. | Robert Browning | The Patriot |
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—
Deprived of liberty.
Oh, Heaven! and is there no relief
This side the silent grave—
To soothe the pain—to quell the grief
And anguish of a slave?
Come Liberty, thou cheerful sound, | Roll through my ravished ears! | Come, let my grief in joys be drowned,
And drive away my fears.
Say unto foul oppression, Cease: | The poem contains many rhetorical exclamations and questions which makes it sound festive and ceremonial. Horton addresses Liberty several times throughout the poem. He shows how highly he values it through the series of epithets. The poet associates such characteristics as “cheerful”and “golden” with Liberty. Addressing Liberty as “dear” endows the relationship between Horton and Liberty with more intimacy and warmness. He compares Freedom with a graceful Swan. What a beautiful simile! | George Moses Horton | On Liberty and Slavery |
Let no man know is my desire.
I, starting up, the light did spy,
And to my God my heart did cry
To strengthen me in my distress
And not to leave me succorless.
Then, coming out, beheld a space
The flame consume my dwelling place.
And when I could no longer look,
I blest His name that gave and took,
That laid my goods now in the dust.
Yea, so it was, and so 'twas just.
It was His own, it was not mine, | Far be it that I should repine; | He might of all justly bereft
But yet sufficient for us left.
When by the ruins oft I past | Anne Bradstreet was Puritan, which means that religion played a huge part in her life. This influence of religion, also, had a major impact on her poetry writing, which is very evident in this poem, Here Follows Some Verses upon the Burning of Our House . In this section of the poem Bradstreet is talking about how even though this fire has occurred resulting in the total destruction of her house and possessions she isn’t overly considered. This is a result of her strong religious values. The fire in a way opened her eyes; she now has a better perspective on life and the insignificant value of worldly possession.
To me it seems strange that Bradstreet is able to move past the fire so fast. Any normal person would have been devastated by the fire and most likely sad and depressed. At this point she has no house, clothes, anything really, and yet she immediately begins to see the bigger picture and thanks God that she is alive and well. It represents Bradstreet in a very positive light. However, at the time it was very unlikely that this would have been used within the community to show the dedication that one should have for religion, because she was a woman.
| Anne Bradstreet | Here follow some verses upon the burning of our house July 10 1666 |
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 strove | At Recess – in the Ring –
We passed the Fields of Gazing Grain –
We passed the Setting Sun – | This scene seems almost eerily normal. At first, we’re in a carriage with death that doesn’t seem at all normal, then we’re looking at something totally familiar. The mixing of the unreal and real makes the poem seem even stranger. It also enhances the fact that death and dying seem like just another ordinary part of life. | Emily Dickinson | Because I Could Not Stop for Death |
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 the Hour of Lead –
Remembered, if outlived,
As Freezing persons, recollect the Snow – | First – Chill – then Stupor – then the letting go – | null | This line with dashes between words, represents the transition from agony to numbness, represented by the change that people physically undergo when exposed to cold. First comes the chill, which is extreme pain. Stupor is unresponsiveness. Letting go, then, can represent two things, either death or acceptance. Ultimately, the “letting go” will occur, the final loss of the “formal feeling” and, the reader can hope, an awakening of warmth and human-ness.
The narrator is overcome by extreme pain and sadness and “dies” as one would of hypothermia. However, “letting go” can also refer to letting go of the pain, and that death is some kind of permanent relief from suffering, perhaps symbolizing acceptance or coming to terms with what happened.
The dashes in the final line slow the pace, imitating the slow, gradual process of overcoming loss, grief and numbness to reach acceptance. | Emily Dickinson | After great pain a formal feeling comes J341 F372 |
null | Spies, you are lights in state, but of base stuff | Who, when you've burn yourselves down to the snuff
Stink and are thrown away. End fair enough | Meaning well-conditioned or having a pleasing form, but also meaning serving the government nobly. Whichever meaning you take it as, the “base stuff” following the phrase provides a contrast, meaning that one has to be of low moral character to be an effective spy. | Ben Jonson | On Spies |
Nature's first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf's a flower;
But only so an hour. | Then leaf subsides to leaf. | So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay. | Cyclic Monotony
As the leaves change color, and fall, and grow again, one leaf becomes another and another, around and around in an endless cycle.
While at first beautiful, the varied hues and nuanced shades become a monotonous reminder of time and of age.
People grow older, and no longer do they marvel at the trees and leaves with the wide-eyed wonder of children. Instead, the seasons and colors become a mundane, monotonous background.
The first part of the poem focused on verbal transition—from green to gold, from leaf to flower. With this line the poem makes its careful shift: leaf to leaf, to grief. | Robert Frost | Nothing Gold Can Stay |
The soverayne beauty which I doo admyre,
witnesse the world how worthy to be prayzed:
the light whereof hath kindled heavenly fyre,
in my fraile spirit by her from basenesse raysed.
That being now with her huge brightnesse dazed,
base thing I can no more endure to view:
but looking still on her I stand amazed,
at wondrous sight of so celestiall hew.
So when my toung would speak her praises dew,
it stopped is with thoughts astonishment:
and when my pen would write her titles true,
it ravisht is with fancies wonderment: | Yet in my hart I then both speake and write | the wonder that my wit cannot endite. | Even though the poet’s eyes, mind, and inner life stand in awe of the physical and spiritual beauty of the woman, he insists that he will write – unlike some such poems that end in a kind of despair.
From Flinker’s The Song of Songs in English Renaissance Literature: Kisses of their Mouths (2000) p. 71:
Spenser’s sonnet concludes, not unlike Cavalcanti’s , with a treatment of the poet’s view of his own inability to express what he has experienced. … It is significant that Spenser’s version of Cavalcanti’s predicament includes the poet’s ability to capture both speech and writing in his ‘hart’ if not with his pen. That is, Spenser’s poem is part of the initial concern of the Amoretti with literature and poetic inspiration. The poem rephrases the despair of Cavalcanti at articulating his wonder with a determination to have ‘hart’ direct ‘wit’ which has been amazed at the lady and her light. | Edmund Spenser | Amoretti: Sonnet 3 |
[Composed, probably, in Switzerland, in the summer of 1816. Published in Hunt's "Examiner", January 19, 1817, and with "Rosalind and Helen", 1819.]
1.
The awful shadow of some unseen Power
Floats though unseen among us,—visiting
This various world with as inconstant wing
As summer winds that creep from flower to flower,—
Like moonbeams that behind some piny mountain shower,
It visits with inconstant glance
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 | Shelley begins the next four lines by repeating the word ‘like’, creating a rhythmic pattern that holds the reader’s attention — a device known as anaphora . The repetition gives emphasis to the importance of the ‘Power’ and yet demonstrates the impossibility of pinning down the description. None of the examples is adequate for Shelley. | Percy Bysshe Shelley | Hymn To Intellectual Beauty |
With a sweet emotion;
Nothing in the world is single;
All things by a law divine
In one spirit meet and mingle.
Why not I with thine?—
2.
See the mountains kiss high Heaven
And the waves clasp one another;
No sister-flower would be forgiven
If it disdained its brother;
And the sunlight clasps the earth
And the moonbeams kiss the sea: | What is all this sweet work worth | If thou kiss not me? | And now is the clinching argument. The idea of ‘sweet work’ is appealing, designed to be persuasive to the woman.
Note that the pace changes from the rapid movement of the two previous lines to the slow, long vowels in ‘sweet, work worth’, the last two being assonant . The three words are quite difficult to say if spoken aloud, creating a feeling of heavy sadness. | Percy Bysshe Shelley | Loves Philosophy |
Birth-soils,
The sea-salts, scoured me, cortex and intestine,
To receive these remains.
As the incinerator, as the sun,
As the spider, I had a whole world in my hands.
Flowerlike, I loved nothing.
Dead and unborn are in God comfortable.
What a length of gut is growing and breathing –
This mute eater, biting through the mind's
Nursery floor, with eel and hyena and vulture,
With creepy-crawly and the root,
With the sea-worm. entering its birthright. | The stars make pietas. The owl announces its sanity. | The crow sleeps glutted and the stoat begins.
There are eye-guarded eggs in these hedgerows,
Hot haynests under the roots-in burrows. | This one line stanza is also open to interpretation. A pieta is a sculpture of a virgin and child. The owl, in popular imagination, is thought of as “wise” because of its wide-eyed beautiful appearance.
Hughes posits in this poem that nature should not be romanticised but rather accepted as brutally unsentimental. The owl is a nocturnal hunter and announces its sanity through hunting to survive. Night brings an unforgiving natural world, not just awe-inspiring starlight. | Ted Hughes | Mayday on Holderness |
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, | With all of the events listed above, this has pushed the brother into the bar and off to kill the pain of his life in a bottle of alcohol, as he feels this is his only option for relief.
| Maya Angelou | The Thirteens Black |
What would I give for a heart of flesh to warm me through,
Instead of this heart of stone ice-cold whatever I do; | Hard and cold and small, of all hearts the worst of all. | What would I give for words, if only words would come;
But now in its misery my spirit has fallen dumb:
O, merry friends, go your way, I have never a word to say. | The third line is internally rhymed, a neat, concise summary of an emotional state that is far from simple. Why has her heart grown ‘hard and cold’? And why should it be the worst of all hearts? This is a clear statement of self-hatred that is difficult to fathom. | Christina Rossetti | What would I give? |
'Dah now,' says de weasel, 'dah,
I done cotched you, Mistah Bah!'
O, dat bah did sno't and spout,
Try'n' his bestes' to git out,
But de weasel say, 'Goo'-bye!
Weasel small, but weasel sly.'
Den he tu'ned his back an' run
Tol' de fa'mer whut he done.
So de fa'mer come down dah,
Wif a axe and killed de bah.
Dah now, ain't dat sto'y fine?
Run erlong now, nevah min'. | Want some mo', you rascal, you?
No, suh! no, suh! dat 'll do. | null | The speaker is denying the child’s request for another story. He calls the kid a rascal for pestering him for more and then tells him that one story will do for the day.
| Paul Laurence Dunbar | A Cabin Tale |
null | She is neither pink nor pale, | And she never will be all mine;
She learned her hands in a fairy-tale,
And her mouth on a valentine. | “Pink” and “pale” are generally adjectives for beauty; therefore already confusing us readers, as this line clearly contradicts the title Witch-Wife .
This line can also be interpreted as “She is neither Alive or Dead”, which is what Witches are. as pink and pale can be associated with skin hue. | Edna St. Vincent Millay | Witch-Wife |
My soul was an old horse | Offered for sale in twenty fairs. | I offered him to the Church--the buyers
Were little men who feared his unusual airs.
One said: 'Let him remain unbid |
Tried to sell his soul time and time again. | Patrick Kavanagh | Pegasus |
My prime of youth is but a frost of cares,
My feast of joy is but a dish of pain,
My crop of corn is but a field of tares,
And all my good is but vain hope of gain.
The day is gone and I yet I saw no sun, | And now I live, and now my life is done. | The spring is past, and yet it hath not sprung,
The fruit is dead, and yet the leaves are green,
My youth is gone, and yet I am but young, | The final dramatic statement, the refrain that ends all three stanzas, brings the poem to an end. Martyrdom, triumph, life and death are conflated. The final word ‘done’ has an appropriate downward pitch when spoken aloud. The dramatic climax is resolved and seems to end with resignation. | Chidiock Tichborne | Tichbornes Elegy |
And even now after decades of listening I still am able to hear
A new work never heard before that is totally
Bright, a fresh-blazing sun
There are countless sub-stratas of rising surprise from the
Human firmament
Music has an expansive and endless flow of ungodly
Exploration
Writers are confined to the limit of sight and feeling upon the
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 | Eric Coates was an English composer and viola player. Many of his compositions were used as theme music for television and radio programs.
| Charles Bukowski | Me and Faulkner |
Rain patters on a sea that tilts and sighs
Fast-running floors, collapsing into hollows
Tower suddenly, spray-haired. Contrariwise
A wave drops like a wall: another follows
Wilting and scrambling, tirelessly at play
Where there are no ships and no shallows
Above the sea, the yet more shoreless day
Riddled by wind, trails lit-up galleries:
They shift to giant ribbing, sift away | Such attics cleared of me! Such absences! | null | The last line forms the denouement. The poet intrudes and yet is absent; another oxymoron . The wild, overwhelming forces of nature are condensed into an ‘attic’; the site of dusty unwanted possessions, an odd contradiction considering the blustery scene would normally clear the mind.
The poet isn’t part of the larger universe. His purpose seems to be to describe and interpret. Cosmic forces exist despite him. Individuals — the poet and the readers — are transcended. | Philip Larkin | Absences |
A heavy weight of hours has chained and bowed
One too like thee: tameless, and swift, and proud.
V.
Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is:
What if my leaves are falling like its own!
The tumult of thy mighty harmonies
Will take from both a deep, autumnal tone,
Sweet though in sadness. Be thou, Spirit fierce,
My spirit! Be thou me, impetuous one!
Drive my dead thoughts over the universe
Like withered leaves to quicken a new birth!
And, by the incantation of this verse, | Scatter, as from an unextinguished hearth | Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind!
Be through my lips to unawakened Earth
The trumpet of a prophecy! O Wind, | An unextinguished hearth may burn uncontrollably; the flames are free, scattered, thus containing their own freedom. Shelley wants to be like the flames so that he can gain similar freedom. | Percy Bysshe Shelley | Ode to the West Wind |
There came a Wind like a Bugle -
It quivered through the Grass
And a Green Chill upon the Heat
So ominous did pass
We barred the Windows and the Doors
As from an Emerald Ghost -
The Doom's electric Moccasin
The very instant passed -
On a strange Mob of panting Trees
And Fences fled away | And Rivers where the Houses ran | Those looked that lived - that Day -
The Bell within the steeple wild
The flying tidings told - | Normally “rivers” are described as running, so it is curious to use “ran” to describe the house and not the river. Perhaps “ran” in this line is a way of describing the impact the storm’s strong winds on the houses nearby. | Emily Dickinson | There came a Wind like a Bugle |
Trav'ling lady, stay awhile
Until the night is over
I'm just a station on your way
I know I am not your lover
Well I lived with a child of snow
When I was a soldier
And I fought every man for her
Until the nights grew colder
She used to wear her hair like you
Except when she was sleeping | And then she'd weave it on a loom | Of smoke and gold and breathing
And why are you so quiet now
Standing there in the doorway? | This obviously mystical character reminds one of the very many mythological characters who are associated with knitting or spinning. Some examples include the Norns in Nordic mythology, the Moirai in Greek mythology, and the Parcae in Roman mythology, who spin the thread of life for every human being.
| Leonard Cohen | Winter Lady |
But I am black as if bereav'd of light.
My mother taught me underneath a tree
And sitting down before the heat of day,
She took me on her lap and kissed me,
And pointing to the east began to say.
Look on the rising sun: there God does live
And gives his light, and gives his heat away.
And flowers and trees and beasts and men receive
Comfort in morning joy in the noonday.
And we are put on earth a little space,
That we may learn to bear the beams of love,
And these black bodies and this sun-burnt face | Is but a cloud, and like a shady grove. | For when our souls have learn'd the heat to bear
The cloud will vanish we shall hear his voice.
Saying: come out from the grove my love & care, | The black body is a cloud, and the sun-burnt face is a grove, both of which provide shade (shelter) from the brightness of the sun. | William Blake | The Little Black Boy Songs of Innocence |
Sniff them and think and sniff again and try
Once more to think what it is I am remembering,
Always in vain. I cannot like the scent,
Yet I would rather give up others more sweet,
With no meaning, than this bitter one.
I have mislaid the key. I sniff the spray
And think of nothing; I see and I hear nothing;
Yet seem, too, to be listening, lying in wait
For what I should, yet never can, remember:
No garden appears, no path, no hoar-green bush
Of Lad's-love, or Old Man, no child beside,
Neither father nor mother, nor any playmate; | Only an avenue, dark, nameless, without end. | null | The gloomy final sentence provides a sad conclusion that fails to resolve the problem. The last two words “without end” may call to mind the biblical Christian reference;
Thou art God from everlasting, and world without end (1662 Prayer Book).
It is significant that a poem which deals with names ends with the “avenue” which is “nameless”.
But the speaker, and therefore the reader, is left with the metaphorical dark endless avenue, which represents his past and his future. He can’t look as the memories of the past elude him, but there is no future either; no meaning, no identity and no light.
| Edward Thomas | Old Man |
The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending , we lay waste our powers:
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
The Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not.—Great God! I'd rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn; | Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea; | Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn. |
Proteus was an early sea god referenced by Homer as “The Old Man of the Sea.”
He can be forced to read the future by anyone who is able to hold him whilst he takes on many frightening forms, as seen in The Odyssey .
The line points to a strange tension between poetry and imagination. Does Wordsworth really believe that if he were a pagan he would actually be able to see Proteus rising from the see? More realistically, mythology provides imaginative resources, ideas and images for reckoning with inhuman powers–resources that Wordsworth, in a large sense, still has: the poetry enacts mythologized vision.
So maybe Wordsworth can “have sight of Proteus rising from the sea” in his imagination. What he regrets, then, is that he can’t endorse his imagination as truth. Thanks to intellectual developments since the time of the Greeks, imagination is severed from the “world,” and Wordsworth is upset about that. | William Wordsworth | The world is too much with us... |
null | There, Robert, you have kill'd that fly — ,
And should you thousand ages try
The life you've taken to supply,
You could not do it. | You surely must have been devoid
Of thought and sense, to have destroy'd
A thing which no way you annoy'd — | Lamb is angrily ranting towards Robert because he has killed an innocent fly. When he states, “The life you’ve taken to supply, you could not do it,” he means he has taken that poor fly’s life and will never get it back no matter how hard he tries.
| Charles Lamb | Thoughtless Cruelty |
In the dawn-dirty light, in the biggest snow of the year
Two blue-dark deer stood in the road, alerted.
They had happened into my dimension
The moment I was arriving just there.
They planted their two or three years of secret deerhood
Clear on my snow-screen vision of the abnormal
And hesitated in the all-way disintegration
And stared at me. And for some lasting seconds
I could think the deer were waiting for me
To remember the password and sign
That the curtain had blown aside for a moment
And there where the trees were no longer trees, nor the road a road | The deer had come for me. | Then they ducked through the hedge, and upright they rode their legs
Away downhill over a snow-lonely field
Towards tree dark - finally | This line is a pivot, a dramatic climax, also open to interpretation. The poet may feel a threat, as if he has intruded into the world of ‘deerhood’ and must be punished. Or else, the deer are welcoming him to their sphere. It is ambiguous.
The sentence is notably sharp, emphatic and monosyllabic, coming between two long sentences. It is also colloquial, contrasting with the lyrical lines that precede it.
An added significance may be seen in this line, that fate played a part in this encounter. As in his other work, Hughes attributes symbolic significance to such experiences, believing they foreshadow future events in his life. | Ted Hughes | Roe-Deer |
[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. | An exclamatory statement of love that needs no explanation. Shelley, who is capable of highly complex writing, for example in Sonnet to Byron seems capable also of the most straightforward, easy-to-understand love poetry, falling back as he does on traditional language and imagery.
| Percy Bysshe Shelley | To Jane: The Keen Stars Were Twinkling |
And Allen Ginsberg's hosed down in a barn
Neal Cassady drops dead
And Allen Ginsberg's "Howl" becomes a growl
Everyone has babies
Babies full of rabies
Rabies full of scabies
Scarlett has a fever
Ringlets full of ringworm
Angel of distemper
The little fella has got Rubella
Nipper full of fungus
Junior full of gangrene | Minor's melanoma | Tyke full of grippe
Whipper snapper's scurvy
Urchin made of acne | Morrissey recently said in an interview that he is being treated for cancer. In this song he tells us that he has melanoma. | Morrissey | Neal Cassady Drops Dead |
XLII
Once in the wind of morning
I ranged the thymy wold;
The world-wide air was azure
And all the brooks ran gold.
There through the dews beside me
Behold a youth that trod, | With feathered cap on forehead,
And poised a golden rod. |
With mien to match the morning
And gay delightful guise | This is a variation on Hermes (Mercury), with his winged cap (and sandals) and the caduceus rod. Hermes leads the soul into the underworld.
Hermes is more than the messenger of the gods. The Oxford Classical Dictionary explains under the entry “Hermes”:
He is generally well-disposed, and negotiates the ransom of Hector with pleasantness and good humour. His titles stress speed and beneficence. He is also the god who guides: he shows transhumant shepherds the way and leads teams of animals; he guides people, especially travellers, for whom he marks out the route in the form of a pillar or herm. He takes divine children to safety (thus he gives Dionysus to the Hymphs of Nysa, as depicted in the famous statue by Praxiteles , and Arcas to Maia), and is generally a patron of children (Heracles, Achilles); he also helps heroes such as Perseus, for whom he obtains the bronze sickle used by the hero to decapitate Medusa, and Heracles. He leads Hera, Aphrodite, and Athena to Paris, the judge in their beauty contest. As god of movement, he is leader of the Nymphs and the Charites. Finally, as psychopompos (one who escorts souls), he leads the dead to Hades, summoning them to the journey beyond, taking them by the hand and accompanying them on to Charon’s boat.
| A. E. Housman | The Merry Guide |
You know, we French stormed Ratisbon: | A mile or so away
On a little mound, Napoleon
Stood on our storming-day;
With neck out-thrust, you fancy how,
Legs wide, arms locked behind,
As if to balance the prone brow
Oppressive with its mind. | Just as perhaps he mused "My plans
That soar, to earth may fall,
Let once my army-leader Lannes | Imagery used in this stanza depicts the leader of the French military, Napoleon Bonaparte, as a strong leader. The alliteration of the “st” in the third line represents Napoleon’s power and aggressive leadership. The “st” sound is hard and it compliments Napoleon’s stance that is depicted by the speaker. | Robert Browning | Incident of The French Camp |
A common thing, yet oh, inevitable.
How soon, my Dear, death may my steps attend,
How soon't may be thy lot to lose thy friend,
We both are ignorant, yet love bids me
These farewell lines to recommend to thee,
That when the knot's untied that made us one,
I may seem thine, who in effect am none.
And if I see not half my days that's due,
What nature would, God grant to yours and you;
The many faults that well you know I have
Let be interred in my oblivious grave;
If any worth or virtue were in me, | Let that live freshly in thy memory | And when thou feel'st no grief, as I no harmes,
Yet love thy dead, who long lay in thine arms,
And when thy loss shall be repaid with gains | Anne is saying that when she dies, she wants people to remember her for the good things she did and her best qualities. Similar to what J. Cole said in his song “Farewell” about how people will remember him when he’s gone. | Anne Bradstreet | Before the Birth of One of Her Children |
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 cousin of this person is talking a lot of smack, or trying to start a fight with people. The cousin could get beat up or killed or end up in a terrible situation if he continues. It further enhances the tone of this poem. | Maya Angelou | The Thirteens Black |
Redwings from Norway rattle at the clouds
But comfortless sneezers puddle in pubs.
The robin looks in at the kitchen window
But all care huddles to hearths and kettles.
The sun lobs one wet snowball feebly
Grim and blue
The dusk of the coombe
And the swamp woodland
Sinks with the wren.
See old lips go purple and old brows go paler.
The stiff crow drops in the midnight silence.
Sneezes grow coughs and coughs grow painful. | The vixen yells in the midnight garden. | You wake with the shakes and watch your breathing
Smoke in the moonlight – silent, silent.
Your anklebone | An almost cinematic image in the way it taps into primordial power of nature.
A vixen is a female fox– it seems that Hughes is playing on what is now the first thing we’d think of when we hear ‘vixen’, i.e., a ‘foxy lady’, starring, no doubt, in a Hollywood film. He tries to reclaim the word from cookie-cutter culture.
| Ted Hughes | Christmas Card |
You thought that it could never happen
To all the people that you became
Your body lost in legend, the beast so very tame
But here, right here
Between the birthmark and the stain
Between the ocean and your open vein
Between the snowman and the rain
Once again, once again | Love calls you by your name | The women in your scrapbook
Whom you still praise and blame
You say they chained you to your fingernails | Isaiah 43:1 : “But now, thus says the Lord, who created you, O Jacob, And He who formed you, O Israel: “Fear not, for I have redeemed you; I have called you by your name; You are Mine.” | Leonard Cohen | Love Calls You by Your Name |
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. | null | The tigers are still represent freedom, something that Aunt Jennifer never had. Once Aunt Jennifer dies, she will become free like the tigers she made. | Adrienne Rich | Aunt Jennifers Tigers |
coiling from sunk-in mattresses where dew
and rain have rosetted the stitching with mildew.
Inland seagulls hector with their wings
a strew of rinds and punctured bags. Beyond
the reeking mounds, bulldozers have smoothed the soil
over the sodden diapers and glittering foil
so that, as though some conjurer waved his wand
above a flat expanse of dust, you see
a little island looming at the edge
of vision: hairline of seedling grass, a ridge
with here and there a haggard maple tree,
the burlapped roots buried in beds of peat. | That place where Yeats thought all the ladders start? | At the heaps, a man steers a wobbly shopping cart
and throws in a pair of wing-tipped shoes, a sheet
of Visqueen, and what might be a megaphone | Creech references W.B Yeats' poem “The Circus Animals' Desertion.”
I must lie down where all the ladders start, In the foul rag-and-bone shop of my heart.
The poem is about Yeats' struggle to find contentment so I think that Creech questions the “happiness” that buying nice things brings.
So essentially no, the ladders don’t start there. | Morri Creech | Landfill |
So foreign to my own.
I wished the grass would hurry,
So when 't was time to see,
He'd be too tall, the tallest one
Could stretch to look at me.
I could not bear the bees should come,
I wished they'd stay away
In those dim countries where they go:
What word had they for me?
They're here, though; not a creature failed,
No blossom stayed away
In gentle deference to me, | The Queen of Calvary. | Each one salutes me as he goes,
And I my childish plumes
Lift, in bereaved acknowledgment | A religious reference/imagery. Refers to ‘Mount Calvary’, also known in Aramaic as ‘Gagluta’ and in Greek as ‘Golgotha’. Meaning ‘place of (the) skull’. It is mentioned in several books of the Bible in the Newt Testament, and is generally accepted as the place where Jesus Christ was crucified and died.
“And when they were come unto a place called Golgotha, that is to say, a place of a skull,” Matthew 27:33 | Emily Dickinson | First Robin |
In the underground rivers
Of West Moor and Palmersville.
There are guttering cap-lamps bound up in the roots
Where the coal is beginning again.
They are sinking slowly further
In between the shiftless seams,
To black pools in the bed of the world.
In their long home the miners are labouring still -
Gargling dust, going down in good order,
Their black-braided banners aloft,
Into flooding and firedamp, there to inherit
Once more the tiny corridors of the immense estate | They line with prints of Hedley's Coming Home. | We hardly hear of them.
There are the faint reports of spent economies,
Explosions in the ocean floor, | This is a reference to the painting entitled ‘Going Home’. Hedley painted scenes of everyday life in the North East of England. There is a subtle distinction between ‘coming’ and ‘going’. O'Brien may have wanted to create the sense of the miners coming towards the reader, seeking our attention.
| Sean O'Brien | Fantasia on a Theme of James Wright |
A fool I was to sleep at noon,
And wake when night is chilly
Beneath the comfortless cold moon;
A fool to pluck my rose too soon,
A fool to snap my lily.
My garden-plot I have not kept;
Faded and all-forsaken, | I weep as I have never wept: | Oh it was summer when I slept,
It's winter now I waken.
Talk what you please of future spring | Rossetti repeats the technique of the previous line, with the alliterative “weep” and “wept”. Note that the use of a root word in different forms is a device known as polyptoton . | Christina Rossetti | A Daughter of Eve |
Than work and plow a field
Worshiping a daily yield of cash green crops
STEALING US WAS THE SMARTEST THING THEY EVER DID!
Too bad they don't teach the truth to their kids
Our influence on them is the reflection they see
When they look into their minstrel mirror and talk about
"Their" culture
Their existence is that of a schizophrenic vulture
Yea there's no repentance
They are bound to live an infinite consecutive executive life sentence
So what are you bound to live nigga
So while you're out there serving the time | I'll be in sync with the sun while you run from the moon | Life of the womb reflected by guns
Worshiper of moons, I am the the sun
And WE are public enemy's number 1 | The moon appears to be a source of light at night, but it only actually reflects it from the sun. The speaker is living life in accordance with the truth, while the one he is addressing is fearfully reacting to illusions, much like the inmates of Plato’s Allegory of the Cave .
Following Williams' earlier historical analysis, the line also suggests that the speaker is in tune with the origins of civilization that Eurocentrism has suppressed now that white people have appropriated it. | Saul Williams | Amethyst Rocks |
What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore—
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over—
like a syrupy sweet?
Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load. | Or does it explode? | null | While the other images in this poem imply that a “dream deferred” languishes along with the dreamer, this one-line reevaluation provides a new perspective. Explosions cause great destruction: likewise, if people feel thwarted in their dreams, their frustration and despair could compel them to cause others pain and kill more dreams, as in a domino effect. Or, people might decide suddenly to fight on behalf of their dreams.
The speaker of this poem seems to question his prior perspective on lost dreams, which he had viewed as just sitting in limbo. He seems almost afraid that, if deferring dreams is like a disease, it could spread across groups of people and destroy wishes on a mass scale.
The “explosion” could also be one that, while violent and disruptive, produces positive changes of some kind (e.g. a revolution).
Finally, though the most of the poem projects a negative tone, the shift at the end of the poem—signaled by the new stanza and the introduction of italics–might suggest a different and possibly positive change. Hughes was a major figure in Harlem during the Harlem Renaissance; Harlem was the epicenter for America’s first embraced black arts movement. It was an explosion, so to speak, of dreams. | Langston Hughes | Harlem What happens to a dream deferred? |
I have been one acquainted with the night. | I have walked out in rain—and back in rain. | I have outwalked the furthest city light.
I have looked down the saddest city lane.
I have passed by the watchman on his beat | The “rain” could be a metaphor for his constant feelings of depression and loneliness. He starts out his walks feeling the same way he ends his walks, hence he has “walked out in rain-and back in rain.” Nothing changes for the narrator on the walks; his depression stays constant. | Robert Frost | Acquainted with the Night |
So, we'll go no more a-roving
So late into the night,
Though the heart be still as loving,
And the moon be still as bright. | For the sword outwears its sheath, | And the soul wears out the breast,
And the heart must pause to breathe,
And Love itself have rest. | This metaphor is saying that the “sword” is still sharp, but the sheath in which it is kept is worn out — an erotic reference. It can be interpreted that the desire (the sword) is still keen, but the speaker’s body has grown tired. This idea is reinforced by the following line.
The poem was originally included in a letter Byron wrote to Thomas Moore, in which he also noted the following:
…yet I find ‘the sword wearing out the scabbard,’ though I have but just turned the corner of twenty-nine. Source: Byron’s “Letter CCLXIII. To Mr. Moore.” | Lord Byron | So well go no more a-roving |
Or come a cold blast in the night,
There's no breath in it.
The bird but seeks his proper food —
And Providence, whose power endu'd
That fly with life, when it thinks good,
May justly take it.
But you have no excuses for't —
A life by Nature made so short,
Less reason is that you for sport
Should shorter make it.
A fly a little thing you rate —
But, Robert do not estimate | A creature's pain by small or great;
The greatest being | Can have but fibres, nerves, and flesh,
And these the smallest ones possess,
Although their frame and structure less | Everyone experiences pain. Pain exists in every being and whether the being is small or great they still experience it. Is a fly’s pain as important as Lamb describes it to be?
| Charles Lamb | Thoughtless Cruelty |
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! | Hurrah for the fun!
Is the pudding done? | Hurrah for the pumpkin-pie! | They’re so excited about Thanksgiving, especially for the food. | Lydia Maria Child | A Boys Thanksgiving Day Over the river and through the wood |
Little Lamb, who made thee?
Dost thou know who made thee?
Gave thee life, and bid thee feed
By the stream and o'er the mead;
Gave thee clothing of delight | Softest clothing, woolly, bright; | Gave thee such a tender voice
Making all the vales rejoice?
Little Lamb, who made thee? | The theme is continued in this line, where the lamb’s wool is further described as “softest clothing, woolly, bright.” Very few things sound more pure than a soft, fluffy (“woolly”), clean (“bright”) “little lamb”!
Note the soft, consonants in ‘softest clothing’ – ’s', ‘th’ and ‘l’s. | William Blake | The Lamb |
For there the Babe is born in joy
That was begotten in dire woe;
Just as we reap in joy the fruit
Which we in bitter tears did sow.
And if the Babe is born a boy
He's given to a Woman Old,
Who nails him down upon a rock,
Catches his shrieks in cups of gold.
She binds iron thorns around his head,
She pierces both his hands and feet,
She cuts his heart out at his side,
To make it feel both cold and heat. | Her fingers number every nerve,
Just as a miser counts his gold;
She lives upon his shrieks and cries,
And she grows young as he grows old. | Till he becomes a bleeding Youth,
And she becomes a Virgin bright;
Then he rends up his manacles, | The scenery is meant to be creepy, almost as if the female is patiently taking away bits of his youth and not caring about the pain inflicting upon him and causing him to suffer. As this happens, his suffering transfers into her youth, comparing the suffering of the old going away and the innocence of the young | William Blake | The Mental Traveller |
1545
The Bible is an antique Volume
Written by faded men
At the suggestion of Holy Spectres
Subjects—Bethlehem
Eden—the ancient Homestead
Satan—the Brigadier
Judas—the Great Defaulter | David—the Troubadour | Sin—a distinguished Precipice
Others must resist
Boys that "believe" are very lonesome | In this line, and the ones before and after, Dickinson wittily condenses famous Biblical stories into 4 words or less–a kind of Dickinsonian haiku! Here she alludes to the fact that King David was a poet and a lover of music as well as a strong leader. The reference to David hints at the final turn of the poem, when she evokes another famous ancient poet, Orpheus, who also stressed wonder, beauty, and mystery, not the Word as a force for self-righteousness and hate. | Emily Dickinson | The Bible Is An Antique Volume |
null | 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, | Referring to how Satan who lives in hell is often depicted with a pitchfork which is pretty much is a giant fork.
| Charles Simic | Fork |
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. | Red suggests the flesh of the baby. Ivory suggests the bones, and the fine timbers suggest the growing limbs. Compare also the expression “fruit of her loins.”
Don’t read too much into ‘O’. It simply emphasizes the sense of exhibition referring to the baby. | Sylvia Plath | Metaphors |
Peace, melody, my sight,
My ears and heart did fill and freely move.
All that I saw did me delight.
The Universe was then a world of treasure,
To me an universal world of pleasure.
Unwelcome penitence was then unknown,
Vain costly toys,
Swearing and roaring boys,
Shops, markets, taverns, coaches, were unshown;
So all things were that drown'd my joys:
No thorns chok'd up my path, nor hid the face
Of bliss and beauty, nor eclips'd the place. | Only what Adam in his first estate, | Did I behold;
Hard silver and dry gold
As yet lay under ground; my blessed fate | Adam’s “first estate” is the Garden of Eden . | Thomas Traherne | Eden |
The Maiden caught me in the wild
Where I was dancing merrily
She put me into her Cabinet
And lock'd me up with a golden key
This cabinet is form'd of gold
And pearl and crystal shining bright
And within it opens into a world
And a little lovely moony night
Another England there I saw
Another London with its Tower
Another Thames and other hills
And another pleasant Surrey bower | Another Maiden like herself,
Translucent, lovely, shining clear | Threefold each in the other clos'd
O, what a pleasant trembling fear!
O, what a smile! a threefold smile | The maiden possesses cabinet-like properties: the crystalline translucence, etc. | William Blake | The Crystal Cabinet |
Apparently with no surprise, | To any happy Flower, | The Frost beheads it at its play,
In accidental power.
The blond assassin passes on. | The capitalization of “Flower” shows the significance of it, and its symbolism in this poem. This Flower is also being personified as “happy”. | Emily Dickinson | Apparently with no Surprise |
A stranger has come
To share my room in the house not right in the head,
A girl mad as birds
Bolting the night of the door with her arm her plume.
Strait in the mazed bed | She deludes the heaven-proof house with entering clouds | Yet she deludes with walking the nightmarish room,
At large as the dead,
Or rides the imagined oceans of the male wards. | The girl’s entrance into the “heaven-proof” house goes against the house’s regularities. The house is “heaven-proof,” since good people go to heaven and therefore the girl is good because if she wasn’t, she wouldn’t have to “delude” the house in the first place. It’s a beautiful way of saying the girl isn’t where she belongs: She’s good. | Dylan Thomas | Love in the Asylum |
What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why,
I have forgotten, and what arms have lain
Under my head till morning; but the rain
Is full of ghosts tonight, that tap and sigh
Upon the glass and listen for reply,
And in my heart there stirs a quiet pain
For unremembered lads that not again
Will turn to me at midnight with a cry.
Thus in winter stands the lonely tree,
Nor knows what birds have vanished one by one,
Yet knows its boughs more silent than before:
I cannot say what loves have come and gone, | I only know that summer sang in me
A little while, that in me sings no more. | null | The brightness of the summer used to be part of the character for a little while, but summer has vanished and the cold winter is now here eternally.
| Edna St. Vincent Millay | What lips my lips have kissed and where and why Sonnet XLIII |
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 | Everywhere | Gwendolyn Brooks | Sadie and Maud |
They eat beans mostly, this old yellow pair.
Dinner is a casual affair.
Plain chipware on a plain and creaking wood,
Tin flatware. | Two who are Mostly Good. | Two who have lived their day.
But keep on putting on their clothes
And putting things away. | People are mostly good. They do good, and they do bad, but as long as they are around they are mostly good. Those who have lives that aren’t exciting are mostly good themselves. | Gwendolyn Brooks | The Bean Eaters |
Even sunlight dares
and trembles through
my bars
to shimmer
dances on
the floor. | A clang og
lock and
keys and heels | and blood-dried
guns.
Even sunshine dares | Maya uses an onomatopoeia to display the sounds of the guard’s keys and footsteps down the cell block, adding to the depressed feeling the prisoner must have.
| Maya Angelou | Prisoner |
Law 28. Enter Action With Boldness
Law 29. Plan All The Way To The End
Law 30. Make Your Accomplishments Seem Effortless
Law 31. Control The Options: Get Others To Play With The Cards You Deal
Law 32. Play To People's Fantasies
Law 33. Discover Each Man's Thumbscrew
Law 34. Be Royal In Your Own Fashion: Act Like A King To Be Treated like One
Law 35. Master The Art Of Timing
Law 36. Disdain Things You Cannot Have: Ignoring Them Is The Best Revenge
Law 37. Create Compelling Spectacles
Law 38. Disdain Things You Cannot Have: Ignoring Them Is The Best Revenge
Law 39. Stir Up Waters To Catch Fish | Law 40. Despise The Free Lunch | Law 41. Avoid Stepping Into A Great Man's Shoes
Law 42. Strike The Shepherd And The Sheep Will Scatter
Law 43. Work On The Hearts And Minds Of Others | “What is offered for free is dangerous – it usually involves either a trick or a hidden obligation. What has worth is worth paying for. By paying your own way you stay clear of gratitude, guilt, and deceit. It is also often wise to pay the full price – there is no cutting corners with excellence. Be lavish with your money and keep it circulating, for generosity is a sign and a magnet for power.” | Robert Greene | 48 Laws of Power |
Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses
your understanding. | Even as the stone of the fruit must break, that its
heart may stand in the sun, so must you know pain. | And could you keep your heart in wonder at the
daily miracles of your life, your pain would not seem
less wondrous than your joy; | Continuing his lines about the necessity of pain for growth, Kahlil draws another comparison: that of a fruit stone, such as that of a peach, avocado, or plum, must first break, so that the seedling (its “heart”) can breach the soil and reach the sun, which sustains it. This is no doubt a difficult process, but it’s also a miraculous one.
| Kahlil Gibran | On Pain |
And while the face lies quiet there,
Who shall wonder
That I ponder
A conclusion? I will try it there.
As,—why must one, for the love foregone
Scout mere liking?
Thunder-striking
Earth,—the heaven, we looked above for, gone!
Why, with beauty, needs there money be,
Love with liking?
Crush the fly-king
In his gauze, because no honey-bee? | May not liking be so simple-sweet,
If love grew there
'Twould undo there
All that breaks the cheek to dimples sweet? | Is the creature too imperfect, say?
Would you mend it
And so end it? | That is, might not love take the passion out of dimply simple lust?
| Robert Browning | A Pretty Woman |
Slips upward, creases down, forms
The gentle buttocks of a young
Giant. In the nestle,
Old adobe bricks, washed of
Whiteness, paled to umber,
Await another century.
Star Jasmine and old vines
Lay claim upon the ghosted land,
Then quiet pools whisper
Private childhood secrets.
Flush on inner cottage walls
Antiquitous faces, | Used to the gelid breath | Of old manors, glare disdainfully
Over breached time.
Around and through these | “Gelid” means extremely cold, so it could show that the house is used to it’s forgotten times and memories, even more personification. Also, the use of cold could show that the house is either way up in the mountains or in northern California.
| Maya Angelou | California Prodigal |
So sweet the hour, so calm the time,
I feel it more than half a crime,
When Nature sleeps and stars are mute,
To mar the silence ev'n with lute.
At rest on ocean's brilliant dyes
An image of Elysium lies:
Seven Pleiades entranced in Heaven,
Form in the deep another seven: | Endymion nodding from above | Sees in the sea a second love.
Within the valleys dim and brown,
And on the spectral mountain's crown, | Endymion was variously a handsome shepherd, hunter, or king who was said to rule and live at Olympia in Elis. He was supposedly the mortal son of Zeus whom Selene (Goddess of the Moon) fell in love with.
There is a bit of confusion on why he was put into an everlasting slumber. Some say it was a wish granted by Zeus so that he would stay eternally youthful. Other sources claim it was punishment to Selene for leaving her moon duties to visit him (or because poor Endymion was trying to lie with Zeus’s wife, Hera). Some say it was a wish granted by Zeus to Selene because she so loved to watch Endymion sleep and wanted him to stay young and alive forever. | Edgar Allan Poe | Serenade |
My prime of youth is but a frost of cares,
My feast of joy is but a dish of pain,
My crop of corn is but a field of tares,
And all my good is but vain hope of gain.
The day is gone and I yet I saw no sun,
And now I live, and now my life is done.
The spring is past, and yet it hath not sprung,
The fruit is dead, and yet the leaves are green,
My youth is gone, and yet I am but young, | I saw the world, and yet I was not seen, | My thread is cut, and yet it was not spun,
And now I live, and now my life is done.
I sought my death and found it in my womb, | This is more mystifying. In autobiographical terms Tichbourne was awaiting execution for plotting to murder Queen Elizabeth 1 or else, depending on one’s interpretation, he was a freedom-fighter. His place in the Babngton Plot is a matter of historical fact. But could this line suggest that he felt his cause was misunderstood? Or that he was regarded as a minor player, but felt he should be seen as a martyr. We can only speculate. | Chidiock Tichborne | Tichbornes Elegy |
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 |
So close to the speaker’s ear, the baby’s breathing sounds like the distant roar of the sea.
The ‘far sea’ is something massive, a great uncontrollable natural phenomenon. To a mother, so is her baby. | Sylvia Plath | Morning Song |
So fares it by a riotous servant;
It is well lesse harm to let him pace*,
Than he shend* all the servants in the place.
Therefore his master gave him a quittance,
And bade him go, with sorrow and mischance.
And thus this jolly prentice had his leve*:
Now let him riot all the night, or leave*.
And, for there is no thief without a louke,
That helpeth him to wasten and to souk
Of that he bribe* can, or borrow may,
Anon he sent his bed and his array
Unto a compere* of his owen sort, | That loved dice, and riot, and disport; | And had a wife, that held *for countenance
A shop, and swived* for her sustenance. | Although many argue that this tale has been left unfinished, it is possible to find evidence to the contrary. For example, the master sending the apprentice to a group of companions that are similar to him can be seen as a type of ending. Theoretically, there would be no more plot in this story. He merely went off with people equally motivated by vice and lived out his life as such. Additionally, the rhyming couplet that concludes this tale seems to suggest some type of deliberate conclusion. | Geoffrey Chaucer | The Canterbury Tales The Cooks Tale |
null | Blow out, you bugles, over the rich Dead! | There's none of these so lonely and poor of old,
But, dying, has made us rarer gifts than gold.
These laid the world away; poured out the red | The poet begins with an exclamatory command to personified bugles. As the reader will learn, he is demanding that they honour the sacrifice of the soldiers. The tone is militaristic; bugles, like drums, are part of the panoply of soldiering. The idea is archaic, implying timelessness; men have died in battle for centuries.
The “rich Dead”, with its capitalised noun, implies an abstract idea of dead soldiers representing all courageous fighters who die bravely in battle. They are spiritually “rich” because of the nobility of their sacrifice. | Rupert Brooke | III. The Dead |
Call for confessor and wiser mirror but there is none
To glow after the god stoning night
And I am struck as lonely as a holy marker by the sun
No
Praise that the spring time is all
Gabriel and radiant shrubbery as the morning grows joyful
Out of the woebegone pyre
And the multitude's sultry tear turns cool on the weeping wall,
My arising prodgidal
Sun the father his quiver full of the infants of pure fire,
But blessed be hail and upheaval
That uncalm still it is sure alone to stand and sing | Alone in the husk of man's home | And the mother and toppling house of the holy spring,
If only for a last time. | Could symbolize loneliness in families that the war causes, because the male figure dies in the war. The husk or shell of a home because there is no content inside without the man.
Also could symbolize the soldier at the beginning of the poem who dies, saying his home is empty and his family is lonely. | Dylan Thomas | Holy Spring |
About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters; how well they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course | Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree. | In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry, | After the dramatic climax of the ‘dreadful martyrdom’, the tone changes to conversational, with the words ‘Anyhow’, ‘doggy’ and ‘behind’, a characteristic of the poem.
The ‘innocent behind’ may be a reference to another of Breughel’s paintings, ‘The Slaughter of the Innocents.’ The animals are oblivious to the brutality of those in power, a reflection of human capacity to become inured to suffering of others.
| W. H. Auden | Musée des Beaux Arts |
null | Musidorus | Will you unto one single sense
Confine a starry Influence?
Or when you do the raies combine, | The fictional name of an imagined or real woman, in the speaker’s circle of friends. | Katherine Philips | Dialogue of Friendship Multiplyed |
null | All I know is a door into the dark. | Outside, old axles and iron hoops rusting;
Inside, the hammered anvil's short-pitched ring,
The unpredictable fantail of sparks | The first quatrain introduces the themes. “Dark” suggests that the area into which the door leads is mysterious or forbidden to the speaker.
The line presents a contrast between the dark, the older time period or the blacksmith’s profession, and the outside, modern world, in which his work is needed less and is almost invisible.
It is also a metaphor , an oblique reference to more mysterious depths. The blacksmith’s workshop is also a place of alchemical significance for refining the soul. | Seamus Heaney | The Forge |
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.
Now here, now there, the roving Fancy flies,
Till some lov'd object strikes her wand'ring eyes,
Whose silken fetters all the senses bind,
And soft captivity involves the mind. | Imagination! who can sing thy force? | Or who describe the swiftness of thy course?
Soaring through air to find the bright abode,
Th' empyreal palace of the thund'ring God, | Nothing is stronger or more powerful than the human imagination | Phillis Wheatley | On Imagination |
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.
I smell something burning, hope it's just my brains.
They're only dropping peppermints and daisy-chains
So stuff my nose with garlic
Coat my eyes with butter
Fill my ears with silver
Stick my legs in plaster
Tell me lies about Vietnam. | Where were you at the time of the crime? | Down by the Cenotaph drinking slime
So chain my tongue with whisky
Stuff my nose with garlic | There is no question. The speaker regards the miltary intervention in Vietnam as a crime. ‘Where were you?’ is a challenge to the reader, to speak out. | Adrian Mitchell | To Whom It May Concern |
Last night, ah, yesternight, betwixt her lips and mine
There fell thy shadow, Cynara! thy breath was shed
Upon my soul between the kisses and the wine;
And I was desolate and sick of an old passion, | Yea, I was desolate and bowed my head: | I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion.
All night upon mine heart I felt her warm heart beat,
Night-long within mine arms in love and sleep she lay; | The archaic ‘yea’ sounds biblical, and the image of the poet bowing his head has religious connotations. This is ironic, as it is followed in the next stanza by the description of the poet in bed with a prostitute. | Ernest Dowson | Non sum qualis eram bonae sub regno Cynarae |
Those in the deeper vitals rage:
Lo, Poverty, to fill the band,
That numbs the soul with icy hand,
And slow-consuming Age.
To each his suff'rings: all are men,
Condemn'd alike to groan,
The tender for another's pain;
Th' unfeeling for his own.
Yet ah! why should they know their fate?
Since sorrow never comes too late,
And happiness too swiftly flies.
Thought would destroy their paradise. | No more; where ignorance is bliss,
'Tis folly to be wise. | null | Gray’s closing lines spawned the extremely well-known phrase “Ignorance is bliss”. He means something quite different to the carefree, hedonistic philosophy it has acquired, though. The lines represent the speaker (who is pretty well Thomas Gray) pining for his youth when ignorance wasn’t so frowned upon, and wisdom wasn’t so revered, or even important. | Thomas Gray | Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College |
So, we'll go no more a-roving
So late into the night,
Though the heart be still as loving,
And the moon be still as bright.
For the sword outwears its sheath,
And the soul wears out the breast,
And the heart must pause to breathe,
And Love itself have rest.
Though the night was made for loving, | And the day returns too soon, | Yet we'll go no more a-roving
By the light of the moon. | The two lines together form the antithetical night and day, mystery and clarity, passion and sobriety — juxtaposed appropriately for impact | Lord Byron | So well go no more a-roving |
Wait while the skylarks pipe,
Till the corn grows brown.
As you set it down it broke,--
Broke, but I did not wince;
I smiled at the speech you spoke,
At your judgment that I heard:
But I have not often smiled
Since then, nor questioned since,
Nor cared for corn-flowers wild,
Nor sung with the singing bird.
I take my heart in my hand,
O my God, O my God, | My broken heart in my hand: | Thou hast seen, judge Thou.
My hope was written on sand,
O my God, O my God; | Again another rephrasing of an idea in the previous stanza. She is able to pick up and repair her own broken heart. | Christina Rossetti | Twice |
Food will become a diminishing return
Nuclear power will be taken over by the many
Explosions will continually shake the earth
Radiated robot men will stalk each other
The rich and the chosen will watch from space platforms
Dante's Inferno will be made to look like a children's playground
The sun will not be seen and it will always be night
Trees will die
All vegetation will die
Radiated men will eat the flesh of radiated men
The sea will be poisoned
The lakes and rivers will vanish | Rain will be the new gold | The rotting bodies of men and animals will stink in the dark wind
The last few survivors will be overtaken by new and hideous diseases
And the space platforms will be destroyed by attrition | Rain will be extremely rare, and the only time it rains will be the only time people are able to drink or grow food. | Charles Bukowski | Dinosauria We |
I nursed it in my bosom while it lived,
I hid it in my heart when it was dead;
In joy I sat alone, even so I grieved
Alone and nothing said.
I shut the door to face the naked truth,
I stood alone,--I faced the truth alone,
Stripped bare of self-regard or forms or ruth
Till first and last were shown.
I took the perfect balances and weighed;
No shaking of my hand disturbed the poise;
Weighed, found it wanting: not a word I said,
But silent made my choice. | None know the choice I made; I make it still. | None know the choice I made and broke my heart,
Breaking mine idol: I have braced my will
Once, chosen for once my part. | The two phrases are syntactically reversed, a device known as chiasmus . The construction creates sonority, to add to the sense of rightness of her choice. | Christina Rossetti | Memory |
It was probably the wisest thing to do
Cause heavenly moulds lead to heavenly forms
And heavenly forms lead to devilish woes
And this is hell nor we are out of it
Oh, those devilish woes
I don't want to end up like Kolly Kibber
From a ghost train into the
Beautiful briny
Beautiful briny sea
One way, the only way
Oh Liebling
Liebling, die Form zerbrach | Noch in der ersten Nacht | Die Nacht des ersten Lichts
Danach kommt nichts, oder?
Heavenly moulds to the heavenly forms | He says “Noch in der ersten Nacht” which is german for “in the first night” | Pete Doherty | Kolly Kibber |
Awake! arise! and come away!
To the wild woods and the plains,
And the pools where winter rains .
Image all their roof of leaves,
Where the pine its garland weaves
Of sapless green and ivy dun
Round stems that never kiss the sun;
Where the lawns and pastures be,
And the sandhills of the sea;—
Where the melting hoar-frost wets
The daisy-star that never sets,
And wind-flowers, and violets, | Which yet join not scent to hue, | Crown the pale year weak and new;
When the night is left behind
In the deep east, dun and blind, | Scent and hue and linked, an example of synesthesia . | Percy Bysshe Shelley | To Jane: The Invitation |
Goodbye, sir, & fare well. You're in the clear
“Nobody” (Mark says you said) “is ever found out.”
I figure you were right
Having as Henry got away with murder
For long. Some jarred clock tells us it's late
Not for you who went straight
But for the lorn. Our roof is lefted off
Lately: the shooter, and the bourbon man
And then you got tired
I'm afraid that's it. I figure you with love | Lifey, deathy, but I have a little sense | The rest of us are fired
Or fired: be with us, and we'll blow our best
Our sad wild riffs come easy in that case | The earlier NYRB-published version has “in life, in death…” to begin this line. A fine example of Berryman’s disorienting baby talk edging out, for whatever reason, a much clearer phrase. | John Berryman | Dream Song 39 |
"Why William, on that old grey stone
Thus for the length of half a day | Why William, sit you thus alone
And dream your time away? | "Where are your books? that light bequeath'd
To beings else forlorn and blind!
Up! Up! and drink the spirit breath'd | We might envision William in pose of Rodin’s “The Thinker”:
This opening is the “expostulation” (remonstrance, kindly protest) that sets the poem in motion. The poem will be Wordsworth’s “reply” to the objection that he is too solitary and absorbed in thought. | William Wordsworth | Expostulation and Reply |
Poet of Nature, thou hast wept to know
That things depart which never may return:
Childhood and youth, friendship and love's first glow,
Have fled like sweet dreams, leaving thee to mourn.
These common woes I feel. One loss is mine
Which thou too feel'st, yet I alone deplore.
Thou wert as a lone star, whose light did shine
On some frail bark in winter's midnight roar:
Thou hast like to a rock-built refuge stood
Above the blind and battling multitude:
In honored poverty thy voice did weave
Songs consecrate to truth and liberty,-- | Deserting these, thou leavest me to grieve,
Thus having been, that thou shouldst cease to be. | London, 1802
William Wordsworth
Milton! thou should'st be living at this hour: | In these final two lines, Shelley transforms Wordsworth himself into one of the fleeting “things” that Wordsworth had earlier lamented–this kind of recapitulation is typical of Shelley’s poetics. See for instance, To Edward Williams :
Of hatred I am proud,—with scorn content; Indifference, that once hurt me, now is grown Itself indifferent; | Percy Bysshe Shelley | To Wordsworth |
There is a place where the sidewalk ends
And before the street begins,
And there the grass grows soft and white,
And there the sun burns crimson bright,
And there the moon-bird rests from his flight
To cool in the peppermint wind.
Let us leave this place where the smoke blows black
And the dark street winds and bends,
Past the pits where the asphalt flowers grow
We shall walk with a walk that is measured and slow, | And watch where the chalk-white arrows go | To the place where the sidewalk ends.
Yes we'll walk with a walk that is measured and slow,
And we'll go where the chalk-white arrows go, | The chalk is reminiscent of childhood nostalgia…Think drawing hopscotch in chalk on the sidewalk….The chalk symbolizes our innoncence as children and the arrows is the prescribed path we take to the street.
| Shel Silverstein | Where the Sidewalk Ends |
null | Hold fast to dreams,
For when dreams go
Life is a barren field
Frozen with snow. | null | A continuation of the previous stanza. If one does not “hold fast” to one’s dreams, then life will never reach its full potential to blossom, become fruitful, and transform into something beautiful.
| Langston Hughes | Dreams |
Withouten oother compaignye in youthe,—
But ther-of nedeth nat to speke as nowthe,—
And thries hadde she been at Jerusalem;
She hadde passed many a straunge strem;
At Rome she hadde been and at Boloigne,
In Galice at Seint Jame, and at Coloigne,
She koude muchel of wandrynge by the weye.
Gat-tothed was she, soothly for to seye.
Upon an amblere esily she sat,
Ywympled wel, and on hir heed an hat
As brood as is a bokeler or a targe;
A foot mantel aboute hir hipes large, | And on hir feet a paire of spores sharpe. | In felaweshipe wel koude she laughe and carpe;
Of remedies of love she knew per chaunce,
For she koude of that art the olde daunce. | And on her feet a pair of sharp spurs
This presents a contradiction in that foot mantel suggests she is riding side-saddle but wearing a pair of spurs suggests she is riding astride the horse.
In the Ellesmere manuscript she is shown riding astride:
Shows she doesn’t conform to the norms and is a strong woman. | Geoffrey Chaucer | The Wife of Baths Portrait |
null | Tremors of your network
cause kings to disappear. | Your open mouth in anger
makes nations bow in fear.
Your bombs can change the seasons, | Tremors means a quivering movement. The network is a metaphor for the interconnected people living under a government system. Colonial Americans revolted against their king and established a constitutional republic in which “we the people” (ideally) reign supreme. However, these lines could also refer to the contemporary U.S. government flexing its might abroad and deposing rulers, etc.
| Maya Angelou | These Yet to be United States |
The time will come
when, with elation
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror
and each will smile at the other's welcome,
and say, sit here. Eat. | You will love again the stranger who was your self. | Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you
all your life, whom you ignored | This implies that within the split person, the confident, self-respecting one has been forgotten, overtaken by the part that has been damaged. The strong person has become the ‘stranger’ within. | Derek Walcott | Love After Love |
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
Nearly died of shame. | Everyone but Sadie
Nearly died of shame.
When Sadie said her last so-long | The end of this stanza separates Sadie from “everyone” which is odd, since the person who would logically feel the most shame in this situation should be Sadie. The reason why she does not feel shame is not entirely clear, but we can assume it has to do with her being more occupied with simply living life fully. | Gwendolyn Brooks | Sadie and Maud |
Seem pretty much one:
I don't know what.
But in Claude how near one was
(In a world that is resting on pillars,
That was seen through arches)
To the central composition,
The essential theme.
What composition is there in all this:
Stockholm slender in a slender light,
And Adriatic riva rising,
Statues and stars,
Without a theme? | The pillars are prostrate, the arches are haggard,
The hotel is boarded and bare. | Yet the panorama of despair
Cannot be the speciality
Of this ecstatic air. | The Romantic painters had very different ideas about what signs of human inhabitation belonged in landscape paintings. While Claude alluded to the classical world, the Romantic painters developed the picturesque which included scenes of ruined buildings, lightening struck tree stumps, gypsy encampments and other similarly “rugged” things.
In these lines, Stevens implies that there are many different ways that the “panorama” of his first stanza can be framed. | Wallace Stevens | Botanist on Alp No. 1 |
Nentis Nan, he's my man, | I go do im each chanz I gan. | He sicks me down an creans my teed
Wid mabel syrub, tick an' sweed,
An ten he filks my cavakies | I go to him each chance I can
Twice a year isn’t enough… | Shel Silverstein | Dentist Dan |
Symbols of democracy, pinned up against the coast
Outhouse of bureaucracy, surrounded by a moat
Citizens of poverty are barely out of sight
Overlords escape in the evening with people of the night
Morning brings the tourists, peering eyes and rubber necks
To catch a glimpse of the cowboy making the world a nervous wreck
It's a mass of irony for all the world to see
It's the nation's capital, it's Washington D.C
It's the nation's capital
It's the nation's capital
It's the nation's capital, it's Washington D.C
(mmmm-hmmm) | May not have the glitter or the glamour of L.A | May not have the history or the intrigue of Bombay
But when it comes to making music, and sure enough making news
People who just don't make sense and people making do | Might not be as tall and beautiful as the city of the Angels. Maybe because no building in D.C. is allowed to be taller than the Washington Monument?
| Gil Scott-Heron | Washington D.C. |
Yet faced unbroken wires; stepped over, and went,
A noble fool, faithful to his stripes – and ended.
But I weak, hungry, and willing only for the chance
Of line – to fight in the line, lay down under unbroken
Wires, and saw the flashes, and kept unshaken.
Till the politest voice – a finicking accent, said:
‘Do you think you might crawl through, there; there's a hole;'
In the afraid
Darkness, shot at; I smiled, as politely replied –
‘I'm afraid not, Sir.' There was no hole, no way to be seen.
Nothing but chance of death, after tearing of clothes
Kept flat, and watched the darkness, hearing bullets whizzing – | - | And thought of music – and swore deep heart's deep oaths.
(Polite to God -) and retreated and came on again.
Again retreated – and a second time faced the screen. | Some versions of the poem have a break between lines fifteen and sixteen, forming a caesira , a pause in which the soldier retreats into his imagination, hearing music instead of bullets, | Ivor Gurney | The Silent One |
leaving this chamber
—size of a demitasse—
open to reveal
a shocking, Giotto blue.
Though it smells
of seaweed and ruin,
this little traveling case
comes with such lavish lining!
Imagine breathing
surrounded by
the brilliant rinse
of summer's firmament. | What color is
the underside of skin? | Not so bad, to die,
if we could be opened
into this— | This can be seen as a question that has a meaning outside of the green crab. The speaker here asks the reader to look beyond someone’s skin and view them based on who they are as a person. | Mark Doty | A Green Crab’s Shell |
The apes yawn and adore their fleas in the sun.
The parrots shriek as if they were on fire, or strut
Like cheap tarts to attract the stroller with the nut.
Fatigued with indolence, tiger and lion
Lie still as the sun. The boa-constrictor's coil
Is a fossil. Cage after cage seems empty, or
Stinks of sleepers from the breathing straw. | It might be painted on a nursery wall. | But who runs like the rest past these arrives
At a cage where the crowd stands, stares, mesmerized,
As a child at a dream, at a jaguar hurrying enraged | The zoo seem static like a painting. Ironically, the animals' suffering is denied by the presentation of the place as fit to be a design for a child’s nursery. The ferocity and violence of the natural world has been sanitised, its animals are subdued by their lives in the zoo.
| Ted Hughes | The Jaguar |
Ah
Let us consider your application form.
Your qualifications, though impressive, are
Not, we must admit, precisely what
We had in mind. Would you care
To defend their relevance?
Indeed
Now your age. Perhaps you feel able
To make your own comment about that,
Too? We are conscious ourselves
Of the need for a candidate with precisely
The right degree of immaturity. | So glad we agree | And now a delicate matter: your looks.
You do appreciate this work involves
Contact with the actual public? Might they, | It is highly unlikely that they do agree. | U. A. Fanthorpe | You will be hearing from us shortly |
null | Looking up at the stars, I know quite well
That, for all they care, I can go to hell, | But on earth indifference is the least
We have to dread from man or beast.
How should we like it were stars to burn | The speaker believes the personified stars to be indifferent to the human condition–aloft and aloof.
The unfeeling stars are securely settled up in Heaven which is quite far away from Hell. They don’t even long to have him at their side; they’ll be unperturbed if he ends up in a completely different world. | W. H. Auden | The More Loving One |
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