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From the 'Skirrid Hill' collection
The water torture of your heels
emptying before me down that Paris street,
evacuated as the channels of our hearts. | That will be one memory. | The swing of the tassels on your skirt
each step filling out the curve of your hip;
your wet lashes, the loss of everything we'd learnt. | This is the first of three refrains which give the poem its structure — terse lines that deliberately interrupt the flow of free verse.
It suggests that the relationship is potentially over.
Refrains are usually grammatically identical or at least similar. Here, the phrase ‘That will be’ is repeated, using the technique of syntactic parallels to achieve rhythm and emphasis. | Owen Sheers | Valentine |
for Elizabeth Bishop | Bix to Buxtehude to Boulez. | The little white dog on the Victor label
Listens long and hard as he is able.
It's all in a day's work, whatever plays. | Leon Bismark “Bix” Beiderbecke (1903–1931), Dieterich Buxtehude (c.1637–1707), and Pierre Boulez (born 26 March 1925) are famous composers and musicians. Beiderbecke was an American jazz cornetist, pianist, and composer. Buxtehude was a German-Danish Baroque composer and organist. Boulez is a French composer of “modern classical” music as well as a conductor and pianist.
The line is quoted/borrowed as the first line of Greg Williamson’s sonnet “Music.”
Bix
Buxtehude
Boulez | James Merrill | The Victor Dog |
The room was suddenly rich and the great bay-window was
Spawning snow and pink roses against it
Soundlessly collateral and incompatible: | World is suddener than we fancy it. | World is crazier and more of it than we think,
Incorrigibly plural. I peel and portion
A tangerine and spit the pips and feel | The lack of the article “the” before “world” makes the line itself more abrupt, more “sudden.” | Louis MacNeice | Snow |
Science! true daughter of Old Time thou art!
Who alterest all things with thy peering eyes.
Why preyest thou thus upon the poet's heart,
Vulture, whose wings are dull realities? | How should he love thee? or how deem thee wise, | Who wouldst not leave him in his wandering
To seek for treasure in the jewelled skies,
Albeit he soared with an undaunted wing? | In these four lines, Poe sums up the major conflict expressed in this poem: knowledge (brought upon by scientific investigation and discovery) vs. imagination. Here, he frames these two as irreconcilable, since science denies the poet, the imaginative mind, the free pursuit of whatever fancy strikes him. Science forces him/her to stay grounded when he/she wishes to soar through the realm of imagination. | Edgar Allan Poe | Sonnet—To Science |
Let not young souls be smothered out before
They do quaint deeds and fully flaunt their pride.
It is the world's one crime its babes grow dull,
Its poor are ox-like, limp and leaden-eyed.
Not that they starve; but starve so dreamlessly, | Not that they sow, but that they seldom reap, | Not that they serve, but have no gods to serve,
Not that they die, but that they die like sheep. | It doesn’t bother the author that the ‘poor’ sow – that they’re working hard in the fields. It’s more a crime in his eyes that these people rarely reap the benefits of their work. The rewards are either going to those the ‘poor’ work for, or what they reap is merely sufficient for survival.
| Vachel Lindsay | The Leaden Eyed |
Luck's a chance, but trouble's sure,
I'd face it as a wise man would,
And train for ill and not for good.
'Tis true the stuff I bring for sale
Is not so brisk a brew as ale:
Out of a stem that scored the hand
I wrung it in a weary land.
But take it: if the smack is sour,
The better for the embittered hour;
It should do good to heart and head
When your soul is in my soul's stead;
And I will friend you, if I may, | In the dark and cloudy day. | There was a king reigned in the East:
There, when kings will sit to feast,
They get their fill before they think | See 613 from this hymnary . Has a similar ring. Housman hated church-going and the Church, but loved cathedrals. | A. E. Housman | Terence this is stupid stuff |
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. | The Downfall of Paradise
Even the Garden of Eden , an idyllic paradise, fell to corruption.
So the story goes:
As a result of a serpent’s cunning, Eve ate from the Tree of Knowledge , against God’s specific instructions.
The consequences, according to the Torah/Bible, are as follows… 1. Adam and Eve were kicked out of the Garden of Eden permanently. 2. The serpent and all of its descendants would live on their stomachs for eternity. 3. Women would have pain in childbirth. 4. Men would have to work the fields in order to attain food. Clearly, these weren’t minor consequences.
The allusion to this story (regardless of any truth or religious affiliation) indicates that even the most “perfect” place can only last for so long. By nature, everything will always fall. (Scientists call this theory entropy ). | Robert Frost | Nothing Gold Can Stay |
null | Between my finger and my thumb | The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.
Under my window a clean rasping sound
When the spade sinks into gravelly ground: | Heaney begins, characteristically, with a direct opening, without preamble, to draw the reader in. The imagery of ‘finger and thumb’ is powerful, however, bringing to mind the act of holding a pen and writing — something positive. It also refers to the action of shooting, with the thumb readying the weapon and the forefinger pressing the trigger. The latter is, of course, ironic. This is an oblique reference to The Troubles' in Northern Ireland.
| Seamus Heaney | Digging |
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
Wid choclut cangy-- I tink he's
The graygest nentis in the Ian. | With maple syrup, thick and sweet
OK…now we’re starting to see why the kid’s talking like that. | Shel Silverstein | Dentist Dan |
To perform our art
And perfect our lives.
We need great golden copulations,
When the true kings murderers
Are allowed to roam free,
A thousand magicians arise in the land
Where are the feast we are promised?
One more thing
Thank you oh lord
For the white blind light
Thank you oh lord
For the white blind light | A city rises from the sea | I had a splitting headache
From which the future's made | Apparently, a reference to Atlantis, which was kind of a big thing in the 60’s.
| Jim Morrison | The Ghost Song |
A little black thing in the snow
Crying "weep! weep!" in notes of woe!
"Where are thy father and mother? Say!"
"They are both gone up to the church to pray
"Because I was happy upon the heath
And smiled among the winter's snow
They clothed me in the clothes of death | And taught me to sing the notes of woe | "And because I am happy and dance and sing
They think they have done me no injury
And are gone to praise God and his priest and king | This line shows quite a raw display of emotion, recalling the “notes of woe” from line two. | William Blake | The Chimney Sweeper Songs of Experience |
A leaping tongue of bloom the scythe had spared
Beside a reedy brook the scythe had bared.
I left my place to know them by their name,
Finding them butterfly weed when I came.
The mower in the dew had loved them thus,
By leaving them to flourish, not for us,
Nor yet to draw one thought of ours to him.
But from sheer morning gladness at the brim.
The butterfly and I had lit upon,
Nevertheless, a message from the dawn,
That made me hear the wakening birds around,
And hear his long scythe whispering to the ground, | And feel a spirit kindred to my own;
So that henceforth I worked no more alone; | But glad with him, I worked as with his aid,
And weary, sought at noon with him the shade;
And dreaming, as it were, held brotherly speech | The persona imagines the mower and shares his appreciation of nature thus sharing a bond, alleviating his own sense of loneliness. | Robert Frost | The Tuft of Flowers |
Elysium is as far as to
The very nearest Room
If in that Room a Friend await
Felicity or Doom--
What fortitude the Soul contains
That it can so endure | The accent of a coming Foot-- | The opening of a Door-- | By characterizing the sound of a footstep as an “accent” Dickinson personifies it. An accent is “a distinct emphasis given to a syllable or word in speech by stress or pitch” (Collins Concise Dictionary): consequently, the foot step becomes a unique sound, almost taking a life of its own. In the context of this poem, one could suggest it is God or a greater force coming to claim a life. | Emily Dickinson | Elysium is as far as to |
My Wellingtons
Squelching and squelching through the beautiful red.
This is my property.
Two times a day
I pace it, sniffing
The barbarous holly with its viridian
Scallops, pure iron,
And the wall of the old corpses.
I love them.
I love them like history.
The apples are golden,
Imagine it --- | My seventy trees | Holding their gold-ruddy balls
In a thick gray death-soup,
Their million | There are multiple symbolic meanings to seventy , but a possible application is that of an evolutionary cycle. Is Plath suggesting her life is reaching its conclusion? It also is said to symbolise universality. | Sylvia Plath | Letter in November |
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 | The center of government, located on the Potomac River. Surrounded by water, you have to cross a bridge to get to D.C.
| Gil Scott-Heron | Washington D.C. |
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 | These lines show how his entire outlook on everything has changed with his relationship with the maiden. This happens in many relationships, where people get put into an almost daze and don’t see reality for a while. Of course, this all comes crashing down when he sees her true colors in the last eight lines of the poem. | William Blake | The Crystal Cabinet |
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
Private affair?
Well, even less about your |
Madam was ranting while on the phone with her service provider, Central. Central makes Madam Johnson aware that they are not concerned with her mess. | Langston Hughes | Madam and the Phone Bill |
In far Tibet
There lives a lama.
He got no papa,
Got no mama.
He got no wife,
He got no chillun.
Got no use
For penicillun.
He got no soap,
He got no opera.
He don't know Irium | From copra. | He got no songs,
He got no banter.
He don't know Hope, |
Copra is dried coconut meat. “He don’t know Irium / From copra,” then, suggests that this lama can’t tell a newfangled teeth-cleaning product from simple food (maybe a food he eats and needs to clean from his teeth?). | Ogden Nash | I Will Arise and Go Now |
That Justice is a blind goddess
Is a thing to which we black are wise: | Her bandage hides two festering sores
That once perhaps were eyes | null | The blindfold that covers the eyes of Themis (goddess of justice) traditionally symbolizes her impartiality. Here, however, Hughes reinterprets the blindfold as a “bandage” hiding a terrible deformity, or perhaps the aftermath of a violent injury.
Hughes’s version changes the symbolism to suggest that the façade of impartiality actually hides the fact that Themis’s perception (or ability to judge in the first place) is gravely compromised, especially in matters of racial equality.
Notice how Hughes only includes three metric feet in the final line of the poem to make the poem’s ending forceful and punctuated. By coupling this with the seemingly inappropriate rhyme of “wise” with absent “eyes,” Hughes creates a harrowing ending that captures the contrast between the perceived order (of rhyme and justice) and the actual state of things (disorder, injustice).
| Langston Hughes | Justice |
I lived my days apart,
Dreaming fair songs for God;
By the glory in my heart
Covered and crowned and shod.
Now God is in the strife,
And I must seek Him there, | Where death outnumbers life,
And fury smites the air. | I walk the secret way
With anger in my brain.
O music through my clay, | Sassoon, a soldier, wrote this during the First World War. Though swept up in patriotic fervor at the beginning of the war, in 1917 he took an anti-war stance after the death of a close friend, who he later wrote about as the pseudonym Dick Tiltwwood.
Over 8 million soldiers died in the war and another 21 million were wounded making it one of the deadliest conflicts in history. The conflict was deeply ingrained in the psyche of people involved and they which led them to be known as the “Lost Generation” , popularized by Ernest Hemingway in ‘The Sun Also Rises.’ | Siegfried Sassoon | A Mystic as Soldier |
Oh yeah I'm in the fast lane snorting candy yams
That free my body and soul and send me like shazzam
Never question who I am
God knows
And I know god personally
In fact he let's me call him me
Yea I'm serious "B"
Dogon niggas plotted shit lovely
But the feds is also plotting me
They're trying to imprison my astrology
Put our stars behind bars
Our stars and stripes | Using blood splattered banners as nationalist kites | But I control the wind, that's why they call it the hawk
I am Horus, son of Isis, son of Osiris
Worshiped as Jesus resurrected | The flag we rally around and use to uplift our sense of ourselves as a nation is actually soiled from the bloody conquest our country was built on.
Also, in prisons a “kite” is a written form or piece of correspondence. | Saul Williams | Amethyst Rocks |
She came home running
back to the mothering blackness
deep in the smothering blackness
white tears icicle gold plains of her face
She came home running | She came down creeping | here to the black arms waiting
now to the warm heart waiting
rime of alien dreams befrosts her rich brown face | Maya again gives the darkness a personification saying it has arms like an actual creature. She tried to be silent in her escape while running away from home.
| Maya Angelou | The Mothering Blackness |
Why do you stand by the window
Abandoned to beauty and pride | The thorn of the night in your bosom | The spear of the age in your side
Lost in the rages of fragrance
Lost in the rags of remorse | This seems to draw inspiration from 2 Corinthians 12:7 :
I was given a thorn in my flesh, a messenger of Satan, to torment me. | Leonard Cohen | The Window |
The sea is calm to-night.
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits; on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand; | Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay. | Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!
Only, from the long line of spray
Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land, | The alliterative “gl"s beginning this and the previous line create unity. "Gimmering and vast …” have a grandeur that reinforces the tone of patriotism and pride. | Matthew Arnold | Dover Beach |
A half a dozen kissed the eaves
And made the gables laugh
A few went out to help the brook
That went to help the sea
Myself conjectured, Were they pearls
What necklaces could be!
The dust replaced in hoisted roads
The birds jocoser sung
The sunshine threw his hat away
The orchards spangles hung
The breezes brought dejected lutes
And bathed them in the glee | The East put out a single flag
And signed the fete away | null | With one gust of wind from the east, the weather is pushed away.
Dickinson’s use of the term “fete” (“a celebration or festival”) to describe the weather further emphasizes the positive attitude she has toward it.
In the brief time that it was there, the rain managed to water the trees, create musical sounds on the roof, fill up the brook and the sea, and wash away the dust. Overall, the rain brought joy, and new life that the speaker greatly appreciated it, while it lasted. | Emily Dickinson | Summer Shower |
An agitation of the air,
A perturbation of the light
Admonished me the unloved year
Would turn on its hinge that night.
I stood in the disenchanted field
Amid the stubble and the stones,
Amazed, while a small worm lisped to me
The song of my marrow-bones.
Blue poured into summer blue,
A hawk broke from his cloudless tower,
The roof of the silo blazed, and I knew | That part of my life was over. | Already the iron door of the north
Clangs open: birds, leaves, snows
Order their populations forth, | Kunitz explains that summer is over and a new season is approaching and a new stage of his life is beginning. Whether this is simply referring to a change in season, or a change in one’s life is up to the interpretation of the reader.
| Stanley Kunitz | End of Summer |
London is full of chickens on electric spits, | Cooking in windows where the public pass. | This, say the chickens, is their Auschwitz,
And all poultry eaters are psychopaths. | This suggests casualness. The public ‘pass’, not thinking of the chickens and their suffering before death. So people get on with their lives, not thinking about those who were murdered. | Peter Porter | London is full of chickens on electric spits From Annotations of Auschwitz |
apples reddening on heavy trees,
the lanes sweet with brambles
and our fingers purple,
then the child coming easy,
too soon, in the wrong place,
things seasonal and out of season
towed home a harvest moon.
My daughter's daughter
a day old under an umbrella on the beach,
Latecomer at summer's festival,
and I'm hooked again, life sentenced.
Even the sea could not draw me from her. | This year I bake her a cake like our house, | and old trees blossom
with balloons and streamers.
We celebrate her with a cup | The house-shaped cake for the baby’s third birthday could represent the fact that the baby’s mother went into labour at her grandmother’s house. The cake itself is rich and sweet, a mixture of flour, sugar and eggs, significantly harvest produce, for special special life affirming occasions | Gillian Clarke | Mali |
Nothing is done, nothing is said,
But don't make the mistake of believing us dead:
I shouldn't dance.
We're afraid in that case you'll have a fall.
We've been watching you over the garden wall
For hours.
The sky is darkening like a stain,
Something is going to fall like rain
And it won't be flowers.
When the green field comes off like a lid
Revealing what was much better hid:
Unpleasant. | And look, behind you without a sound
The woods have come up and are standing round
In deadly crescent. | The bolt is sliding in its groove,
Outside the window is the black remov-
Ers' van. | Echoes the scene in Act V of Shakespeare’s Macbeth in which soldiers shielded with branches from Great Birnam Wood advance on Dunsinane Hill, fulfilling the three witches' prophecy that Macbeth will be safe until Birnam Wood has come to Dunsinane. Like most of the images of the poem, this one spells impending doom.
Much as the three witches or “Weird Sisters” in Macbeth seem to be agents of fate (modeled on the three Fates from Greek mythology), “The Two” in this poem speak as ominous, voyeuristic, possibly supernatural presences with some knowledge of and control over our destinies. | W. H. Auden | The Two |
null | MILTON! thou shouldst be living at this hour: | England hath need of thee: she is a fen
Of stagnant waters: altar, sword, and pen,
Fireside, the heroic wealth of hall and bower, | The narrator is expressing his wish for John Milton , English poet & writer of Paradise Lost , to be alive in the present time. Wordsworth had an enormous respect for Milton’s poetic achievements, and in many ways saw himself as his successor: his epic, The Prelude , begins with a reference to one of the most famous concluding lines of Paradise Lost :
| William Wordsworth | London 1802 |
null | I have desired, and I have been desired; | But now the days are over of desire,
Now dust and dying embers mock my fire;
Where is the hire for which my life was hired? | The first person voice is that of the narrator, Louise de Villiere, and she begins in emphatic mood. The abrupt statement makes clear the subject.
The reader may sense a note of pride, that though this is in the past tense, she is proud and glad of her experiences of ‘desire’. | Christina Rossetti | Soeur Louise De La Misericorde |
Rid of the world's injustice, and his pain,
He rests at last beneath God's veil of blue;
Taken from life when life and love were new
The youngest of the martyrs here is lain, | Fair as Sebastian, and as early slain. | No cypress shades his grave, no funeral yew,
But gentle violets weeping with the dew
Weave on his bones an ever-blossoming chain. | Saint Sebastian a christian and martyr killed in 288 by being tied to a tree and shot with arrows. He was executed under Roman emperor Diocletian for betrayal.
Though never recorded to have been homosexual, Saint Sebastian became a homoerotic icon; perhaps due to the fact that he was extremely handsome and young. When Wilde was in exile in France, he wrote under the pseudonym Sebastian Melmoth as a tribute to Saint Sebastian. | Oscar Wilde | The Grave of Keats |
Their noble strains your equal genius shares
In softer language, and diviner airs.
While Homer paints, lo! circumfus'd in air,
Celestial Gods in mortal forms appear;
Swift as they move hear each recess rebound,
Heav'n quakes, earth trembles, and the shores resound.
Great Sire of verse, before my mortal eyes,
The lightnings blaze across the vaulted skies,
And, as the thunder shakes the heav'nly plains,
A deep felt horror thrills through all my veins.
When gentler strains demand thy graceful song,
The length'ning line moves languishing along. | When great Patroclus courts Achilles' aid, | The grateful tribute of my tears is paid;
Prone on the shore he feels the pangs of love,
And stern Pelides tend'rest passions move. | Achilles was the great hero of the Greeks in Homer’s “Illiad” and Patroclus was his best friend.
| Phillis Wheatley | To Maecenas |
Children of the future age, | Reading this indignant page, | Know that in a former time
Love, sweet love, was thought a crime.
In the age of gold, | Indignant suggests anger and exasperation. Blake uses language concisely. It is not the page that is indignant but the speaker, a transferred epithet or hypallage . | William Blake | A Little Girl Lost |
Say this city has ten million souls,
Some are living in mansions, some are living in holes:
Yet there's no place for us, my dear, yet there's no place for us.
Once we had a country and we thought it fair,
Look in the atlas and you'll find it there:
We cannot go there now, my dear, we cannot go there now.
In the village churchyard there grows an old yew,
Every spring it blossoms anew:
Old passports can't do that, my dear, old passports can't do that. | The consul banged the table and said, | "If you've got no passport you're officially dead":
But we are still alive, my dear, but we are still alive.
Went to a committee; they offered me a chair; | Jews seeking to escape were treated with aggression by consular officials who had might have had the power to aid escape, except that the counties they represented — Britain and America for example, — barred them. | W. H. Auden | Refugee Blues |
The highway is full of big cars going nowhere fast
And folks is smoking anything that'll burn
Some people wrap their lives around a cocktail glass | And you sit wondering
what you're gonna do. | I got it.
Come. And be my baby. | The man Maya is trying to reach isn’t affected by the things in the world that can lure a man from his troubles, yet won’t help him. But, he also doesn’t know how to escape these problems or these “problem solvers”.
| Maya Angelou | Come And Be My Baby |
The little boy lost in the lonely fen, | Led by the wand'ring light, | Began to cry; but God, ever nigh,
Appear'd like his father, in white.
He kissèd the child, and by the hand led, | The ‘wandr'ing light’ is a reference to will-o-the-wisp, or marsh gas produced naturally in marshy countryside from burning sulphur fumes. It can lure travellers into danger and is usually malevolent.
In Blake’s poem, it’s probably symbolic of whatever has distracted the person from following divine will.
| William Blake | The Little Boy Found Songs of Innocence |
null | 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. | His soul was bruised and battered; it had been round for a long time.
| Patrick Kavanagh | Pegasus |
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: |
Shelley seems to be echoing Wordsworth’s own sonnet tribute to Milton in “London 1802” , in which Wordsworth said of Milton, “"Thy soul was like a Star, and dwelt apart”. As Milton was to Wordsworth, implication is, so Wordsworth was to Shelley, except that Wordsworth has lost his brightness, and has fallen, deserted. | Percy Bysshe Shelley | To Wordsworth |
for business purposes,
no loiterers or needers. Henry are
baffled. Have ev'ybody head for Maine,
utility-man take a train?
Arrive a time when all coons lose dere grip,
but is he come? Le's do a hoedown, gal,
one blue, one shuffle,
if them is all you seem to réquire. Strip,
ol banger, skip us we, sugar; so hang on
one chaste evenin.
--Sir Bones, or Galahad: astonishin
yo legal & yo good. Is you feel well? | Honey dusk do sprawl. | --Hit's hard. Kinged or thinged, though, fling & wing.
Poll-cats are coming, hurrah, hurray.
I votes in my hole. | Moments of abject poetical beauty set against the often farcical black face dialect. | John Berryman | Dream Song 2 Big Buttons Cornets: the advance |
null | Your Momma took to shouting | Your Poppa's gone to war,
Your sister's in the streets
Your brother's in the bar. | This is the black person version of the thirteens. In this version, the mother shouts and screams all day at her child, more than likely for no reason at all.
| Maya Angelou | The Thirteens Black |
Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow. | My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake | The darkest evening of the year.
He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake. | After the practical description of the opening stanza Frost moves into a more spiritual state of mind. “Between the woods and frozen lake” may allude to Dante’s Inferno : specifically the “selva oscura” (dark wood) in which Dante’s pilgrim finds himself in middle age. Characteristic of Dante’s way of working, this “dark wood” is a product of the poet’s imagination.
See also the forest at the entrance to the classical underworld as described by Virgil in Aeneid : 6.179 . Augustine’s association of sin with a “region of unlikeness” ( Confessions : 7.10) and the dangerous forests from which the wandering knights of medieval romances must extricate themselves may also come into play here.
These allusions place the speaker in the disconcerting, liminal space between the dark forest, which begins the descent into the infernal regions, and the frozen lake, which serves as Inferno’s Telos. (XXXII-IV)
Horses are often said to have a sixth sense that pick up their riders' anxieties . The speaker antropomorphizes the horse, suggesting that it ‘sees’ this act of stopping as ‘queer’. The horse, in this context, appears to retain its ‘sensibilities’ and ‘work ethic’ in the face of the haunting beauty of the wood, yet can’t comprehend why the narrator has forced it to stop because it can’t comprehend the sublime.
In reaility, as far as humans can judge, animals react rather than ‘think’. There is, however, a sense of communion between the speaker and the horse. Note that the adjective ‘little’ conveys a sense of care and affection by the speaker. The idea that the ‘little’ horse and the narrator conduct this silent conversation suggests the speaker has moved into a world of imagination, spirituality and symbolism.
One interpretation is that these lines may suggest that the rider is not only contemplating death but suicide. This, however, was challenged and dismissed with scorn by Robert Frost, as the next annotation explains.
| Robert Frost | Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening |
I, too, sing America.
I am the darker brother.
They send me to eat in the kitchen
When company comes,
But I laugh,
And eat well, | And grow strong. | Tomorrow,
I'll be at the table
When company comes. | When the time comes, the narrator will have garnered the strength to respond to the racial oppression. | Langston Hughes | I Too |
—A sick man sees
Truer, when his hot eyes roll on her!
Thus the craftsman thinks to grace the rose,—
Plucks a mould-flower
For his gold flower,
Uses fine things that efface the rose.
Rosy rubies make its cup more rose.
Precious metals
Ape the petals,—
Last, some old king locks it up, morose!
Then how grace a rose? I know a way!
Leave it, rather. | Must you gather? | Smell, kiss, wear it—at last, throw away. | See Upon Some Women | Robert Browning | A Pretty Woman |
I could never be a barber
Once I was not sure about de future,
Got a sentence an I done it
Still me angry feelings groweth
Now I am jus a different fighter,
I sight de struggle up more clearly
I get younger yearly
An me black heart don't get no lighter.
I will not join de army
I would work wid malt an barley
But here I am checking me roots,
I could work de ital kitchen | But I won't cook dead chicken | An I won't lick nobody's boots,
Yes I could be a beggar
Maybe not a tax collector | The Rastafarian Ital diet prohibits meat-eating. | Benjamin Zephaniah | Its Work |
CLXXVIII.
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
From all I may be, or have been before,
To mingle with the Universe, and feel
What I can ne'er express, yet cannot all conceal.
CLXXIX. | Roll on, thou deep and dark blue Ocean — roll! | Ten thousand fleets sweep over thee in vain;
Man marks the earth with ruin — his control
Stops with the shore; — upon the watery plain | Byron loves the ocean because it is enduring and does not let the power of mankind control/ affect it. He is able to draw meaning from it unlike many others. | Lord Byron | Childe Harolds Pilgrimage Canto 4 Stanzas 178-186 |
"Maude Clare":--and hid his face.
She turned to Nell: "My Lady Nell,
I have a gift for you;
Though, were it fruit, the bloom were gone,
Or, were it flowers, the dew.
"Take my share of a fickle heart,
Mine of a paltry love:
Take it or leave it as you will,
I wash my hands thereof."
"And what you leave," said Nell, "I'll take,
And what you spurn, I'll wear;
For he's my lord for better and worse, | And him I love, Maude Clare. | "Yea, though you're taller by the head,
More wise, and much more fair;
I'll love him till he loves me best, | Nell is the only character to say these words. She appears to have her own quiet brand of strength. Or it may be defiance. It suggests that Rossetti was presenting a situation in which all the protagonists suffer; there is no hero/heroine and no villain. | Christina Rossetti | Maude Clare |
Everyone suddenly burst out singing;
And I was filled with such delight
As prisoned birds must find in freedom,
Winging wildly across the white
Orchards and dark-green fields; on—on—and out of sight.
Everyone's voice was suddenly lifted; | And beauty came like the setting sun: | My heart was shaken with tears; and horror
Drifted away ... O, but Everyone
Was a bird; and the song was wordless; the singing will never be done. | Not the rising sun of a new day and a fresh start, but the setting sun—an ending. Sometimes the most beautiful moment of catharsis comes at the end of an ordeal, when hindsight starts to set in and you can finally see what’s passed for the whole what it was, and what it now is: the past.
This flash of the “light at the end of the tunnel” can be as universal as the release of death, as communal as the conclusion of a war, or as individual as finding relief from depression. That exact flexibility of meaning is why this poem has found its way into so many anthologies covering so many different subjects. | Siegfried Sassoon | Everyone Sang |
Any of them using their finger.
And this you can see is the bolt. The purpose of this
Is to open the breech, as you see. We can slide it
Rapidly backwards and forwards; we call this
Easing the spring. And rapidly backwards and forwards
The early bees are assaulting and fumbling the flowers:
They call it easing the Spring.
They call it easing the Spring. It is perfectly easy
If you have any strength in your thumb; like the bolt,
And the breech, and the cocking piece, and the point of balance,
Which in our case we have not got; and the almond-blossom
Silent in all of the gardens and the bees going backwards and forwards, | For today we have naming of parts. | null | The way Reed is writing, with the repeated directions, could be symptomatic of a sensibility dulled by the prevalence of violence. | Henry Reed | Lessons of the War |
I.
I've watched you now a full half-hour;
Self-poised upon that yellow flower
And, little Butterfly! indeed
I know not if you sleep or feed.
How motionless!--not frozen seas | More motionless! and then
What joy awaits you, when the breeze
Hath found you out among the trees,
And calls you forth again! | This plot of orchard-ground is ours;
My trees they are, my Sister's flowers;
Here rest your wings when they are weary; | The butterfly is joyful when the breeze passes by because it releases the creature from its motionless state and carries it through nature. | William Wordsworth | To a Butterfly |
I am packing the babies,
I am packing the sick cats.
O vase of acid,
It is love you are full of. You know who you hate.
He is hugging his ball and chain down by the gate
That opens to the sea
Where it drives in, white and black,
Then spews it back.
Every day you fill him with soul-stuff, like a pitcher.
You are so exhausted.
Your voice my ear-ring,
Flapping and sucking, blood-loving bat. | That is that. That is that. | You peer from the door,
Sad hag. "Every woman's a whore.
I can't communicate." | The reader feels a sense of relief that Plath is packed up ready to leave! She can’t even manage a polite ‘goodbye’, but only two dismissive sentences; ‘That is that’. | Sylvia Plath | Lesbos |
There is no Frigate like a Book
To take us Lands away,
Nor any Coursers like a Page
Of prancing Poetry –
This Traverse may the poorest take | Without oppress of Toll – | How frugal is the Chariot
That bears a Human soul. | Since the previous line says that even the poorest individual can find a journey in literature, the ‘toll’ here could also refer to a fee – it doesn’t cost anything to read a poem. | Emily Dickinson | There is no frigate like a book 1263 |
O Rose, thou art sick!
The invisible worm
That flies in the night | In the howling storm | Has found out thy bed
Of crimson joy
And his dark secret love | The throes of passion. Or a storm. A howling one. So the throes of passion. Blake did hold some fairly libertarian views about sex.
Those with sharp eyes– or well attuned ears– can pull out “worm” from ho w ling st orm . | William Blake | The Sick Rose |
In search of space, light,
Empty air.
The bed is lifting out of
Its nightmares
From dark corners, chairs
Are rising up to crash through clouds.
This is the time and place
To be alive:
When the daily furniture of our lives
Stirs, when the improbable arrives.
Pots and pans bang together
In celebration, clang | Past the crowd of garlic, onions, spices, | Fly by the ceiling fan.
No one is looking for the door.
In all this excitement | Another triplet of objects, this time a lexical field of cooking ingredients with strong flavours, representing the feelings of joy that are giving meaning to her life, like a strongly-spiced meal.
| Imtiaz Dharker | This Room |
The howling cry through door posts
carrying boiling pots
ready for the feasters. | Kutsiami the benevolent boatman; | when I come to the river shore
please ferry me across
I do not have tied in my cloth the | Ku-tsiami literally means “death-translator” in Ewe, or someone who facilitates the transition to death. It is common in Ewe to say that someone how has died has “crossed the river,” a metaphor for the journey from life to death. In Ewe mythology, Kutsiami is the ferryman who transports the souls of the dead from life. | Kofi Awoonor | The Journey Beyond |
That fawn-skin-dappled hair of hers,
And the blue eye
Dear and dewy,
And that infantine fresh air of hers!
To think men cannot take you, Sweet,
And infold you,
Ay, and hold you,
And so keep you what they make you, Sweet!
You like us for a glance, you know—
For a word's sake
Or a sword's sake:
All's the same, whate'er the chance, you know. | And in turn we make you ours, we say— | You and youth too,
Eyes and mouth too,
All the face composed of flowers, we say. | That is, in exchange for certain pleasures, men marry. | Robert Browning | A Pretty Woman |
I cannot follow you, my love
You cannot follow me
I am the distance you put between
All of the moments that we will be
You know who I am
You've stared at the sun
Well I am the one who loves
Changing from nothing to one
Sometimes I need you naked
Sometimes I need you wild
I need you to carry my children in | And I need you to kill a child | You know who I am
You've stared at the sun
Well I am the one who loves | He may be asking her to do something seemingly impossible so that she’d refuse and leave. Perhaps abortion.
Another meaning may be that he says he is like a child and needs someone to kill his innocence, so he can grow up to become a man. | Leonard Cohen | You Know Who I Am |
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?
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! | As a child created by God, the speaker and the lamb are no different. Both exemplify the qualities of Christ on earth. | William Blake | The Lamb |
Does my sexiness upset you?
Does it come as a surprise
That I dance like I've got diamonds
At the meeting of my thighs?
Out of the huts of history's shame
I rise
Up from a past that's rooted in pain
I rise
I'm a black ocean, leaping and wide,
Welling and swelling I bear in the tide.
Leaving behind nights of terror and fear
I rise | Into a daybreak that's wondrously clear | I rise
Bringing the gifts that my ancestors gave,
I am the dream and the hope of the slave. | The sun rises and Angelou sees a future of beauty and clarity for her people. Maya is saying that now she is breaking free from slavery and the dark days racist people have put her through.
The word ‘wondrously’ adds a spiritual element.
| Maya Angelou | Still I Rise |
It lieth, gazing on the midnight sky,
Upon the cloudy mountain peak supine;
Below, far lands are seen tremblingly; | Its horror and its beauty are divine. | Upon its lips and eyelids seems to lie
Loveliness like a shadow, from which shrine,
Fiery and lurid, struggling underneath, | The picture actually is quite terrifying, what with the thrashing snakes, and strange creatures crawling about around it, but has a striking beauty that only Da Vinci can evoke. | Percy Bysshe Shelley | On the Medusa of Leonardo Da Vinci in the Florentine Gallery - 114386 |
But the Fuzzy was the finest o' the lot.
We never got a ha'porth's change of 'im:
'E squatted in the scrub an' 'ocked our 'orses,
'E cut our sentries up at Suakim,
An' 'e played the cat an' banjo with our forces.
So 'ere's to you, Fuzzy-Wuzzy, at your 'ome in the Soudan;
You're a pore benighted 'eathen but a first-class fightin' man;
We gives you your certificate, an' if you want it signed
We'll come an' 'ave a romp with you whenever you're inclined.
We took our chanst among the Khyber 'ills,
The Boers knocked us silly at a mile,
The Burman give us Irriwaddy chills, | An' a Zulu impi dished us up in style: | But all we ever got from such as they
Was pop to what the Fuzzy made us swaller;
We 'eld our bloomin' own, the papers say, | The British repeatedly clashed with the Zulu over the last decades of the 19th century. (“ Impi ” is a Zulu word for a body of armed men; the British used it to refer to a Zulu regiment.)
| Rudyard Kipling | Fuzzy-Wuzzy |
A poem should be wordless
As the flight of birds.
*
A poem should be motionless in time
As the moon climbs,
Leaving, as the moon releases
Twig by twig the night-entangled trees,
Leaving, as the moon behind the winter leaves,
Memory by memory the mind --
A poem should be motionless in time
As the moon climbs.
* | A poem should be equal to
Not true. | For all the history of grief
An empty doorway and a maple leaf.
For love | Notice that this is not the same thing as “false.” | Archibald MacLeish | Ars Poetica |
Often beneath the wave, wide from this ledge
The dice of drowned men's bones he saw bequeath
An embassy. Their numbers as he watched,
Beat on the dusty shore and were obscured.
And wrecks passed without sound of bells,
The calyx of death's bounty giving back | A scattered chapter, livid hieroglyph, | The portent wound in corridors of shells.
Then in the circuit calm of one vast coil,
Its lashings charmed and malice reconciled, | In these lines, one feels the severity of the Sublime (painted as the sea), especially to those who dare to flirt with it. Like Melville’s Moby-Dick , the Sublime devours, dehumanizes, and denounces one’s being. Alas, one is left a part of the nameless numbers that beat on the dusty shore, forever to be obscured. | Hart Crane | At Melvilles Tomb |
null | (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 | The epigraph to the poem is a parody of symbolic Tombs of the Unknown Soldier, which are located all around the world.
It seems that “JS/07 M 378” is how the Unknown Citizen is identified: initials and numbers are cold and impersonal, but can be quite convenient for bureaucrats. (“JS” may hint that the citizen had the ultimate anonymous English name, John Smith.) Also, the title is the only mention of the unknown citizen and serves as an allegory or extended comparison to something outside of the poem.
The number represents a theme that runs throughout the poem: the loss of individuality. The mystery man was never mentioned by name, but only by a mere number. This portrays a certain insignificance. The poem describes his life as something so conventional that he didn’t separate himself from the crowd in any way thus having no specific personal identity. This is also a fact that pleases the government because this way he wouldn’t get in the way of anyone. He is just another man lost in the crowd whose life bears no meaning to the bigger picture. Perhaps the unknown citizen isn’t only one individual, but someone who represents unknown people in general about whom little can be said. | W. H. Auden | The Unknown Citizen |
I like it so less I don't understood—
He couldn't hear or see well—all we sift—
But this is a bad story.
He had fine stories and was another man
In private; difficult, always. Courteous,
On the whole, in private.
He apologize to Henry, off & on,
For two blue slanders; which was good of him.
I don't know how he made it.
Quickly, off stage with all but kindness, now.
I can't say what I have in mind. Bless Frost,
Any odd god around. | Gentle his shift, I decussate & command, | Stoic deity. For a while here we possessed
An unusual man. | OED gives for ‘decussate’: “To cross or intersect each other; to form a figure like the letter X.” | John Berryman | Dream Song 37 |
This Consciousness that is aware
Of Neighbors and the Sun
Will be the one aware of Death | And that itself alone | Is traversing the interval
Experience between
And most profound experiment | The solitude Dickinson conveys through her usage of “itself” and “alone” in conjunction with one another indicates that all of life’s actions are truly individual endeavors.
Consciousness, death, adventure; all of these great events that she names in the poem are but autonomous at their core. | Emily Dickinson | This Consciousness that is aware 822 |
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.
It is more natural to me, lying down.
Then the sky and I are in open conversation, | To sleep, perchance to dream…
In sleep, the speaker can relate most closely to the natural objects that have been described. They are similar by existing passively. | Sylvia Plath | I Am Vertical |
Then saith the Lord to his own:—
"See ye the battle below?
Turmoil of death and of birth!
Too long let we them groan.
Haste, arise ye, and go;
Carry my peace upon earth."
Gladly they rise at his call;
Gladly they take his command;
Gladly descend to the plain.
Alas! How few of them all—
Those willing servants—shall stand
In their Master's presence again! | Some in the tumult are lost:
Baffled, bewilder'd, they stray.
Some as prisoners draw breath.
Others—the bravest—are cross'd,
On the height of their bold-follow'd way,
By the swift-rushing missile of Death. | Hardly, hardly shall one
Come, with countenance bright,
O'er the cloud-wrapt, perilous plain: | The “willing servants” appear to be nearly impotent in these lines, victimized by humanity’s cruelty. Even the bravest are “cross’d,” shot down, in an ironic allusion to Christ’s crucifixion.
Hugo Simberg, The Wounded Angel (1903). Ateneum, Helsinki. | Matthew Arnold | Men of Genius |
Sanctus which was and is and is to come.
The sleeper watched the people at the waterless wilderness' edge;
The wilderness was made of granite, of thorn, of death,
It was the goat which lightened the people praying.
The goat went out with sin on its sunken head.
On the sleeper's midnight and the smaller after hours
From above below elsewhere there shone the animals
Through the circular dark; the cock appeared in light
Crying three times, for tears for tears for tears.
High in the frozen tree the sparrow sat. At three o'clock
The luminous thunder of its fall fractured the earth.
The somber serpent looped its coils to write | In scales the slow snake-music of the red ripe globe. | To the sleeper, alone, the animals came and shone,
The darkness whirled but silent shone the animals.
Just before dawn the dove flew out of the dark | Genesis 3:1 Now the serpent was more crafty than any of the wild animals the LORD God had made. He said to the woman, “Did God really say, ‘You must not eat from any tree in the garden’?” | Josephine Jacobsen | The Animals |
Those blessèd structures, plot and rhyme--
why are they no help to me now | I want to make
something imagined, not recalled? | I hear the noise of my own voice:
The painter's vision is not a lens,
it trembles to caress the light. | Robert Lowell’s most famous poems (e.g. “Skunk Hour” and others from Life Studies ) tend to be reflections of his real, tumultuous life.
He says he wants to create work from the imagination, but the question mark (even though it comes at the end of a larger question) seems to cast some doubt on that desire. | Robert Lowell | Epilogue |
I built my house beside the wood
So I could hear you singing
And it was sweet and it was good
And love was all beginning
Fare thee well, my nightingale
'Twas long ago I found you
Now all your songs of beauty fail
The forest closes 'round you
The sun goes down behind a veil
‘Tis now that you would call me
So rest in peace my nightingale | Beneath your branch of holly | Fare thee well, my nightingale
I lived but to be near you
Tho' you are singing somewhere still | The red berries of the holly symbolize the blood of Jesus on the cross The holly’s pointed leaves symbolize the crown of thorns placed on Jesus' head. ( Source ]
| Leonard Cohen | Nightingale |
The stag loped through his favourite valley.
While the blue horseman down in the boggy meadow
Sodden nearly black, on sodden horses,
Spaced as at a military parade,
Moved a few paces to the right and a few to the left and felt rather foolish
Looking at the brown impassable river,
The stag came over the last hill of Exmoor.
While everybody high-kneed it to the bank top all along the road
Where steady men in oilskins were stationed with binocular,
And the horsemen by the river galloping anxiously this way and that
And the cry of hounds came tumbling invisibly with their echoes down through the draggle of trees,
Swinging across the wall of dark woodland, | The stag dropped in to strange country. | And turned at the river
Hearing the hound-pack smash the undergrowth, hearing the bell-note
Of the voice carried all others, | This is the first suggestion that the stag may be in trouble. The verb ‘dropped’ suggests insecurity, as does ‘strange country’. | Ted Hughes | The Stag |
Through the bound cable strands, the arching path
Upward, veering with light, the flight of strings,—
Taut miles of shuttling moonlight syncopate
The whispered rush, telepathy of wires.
Up the index of night, granite and steel—
Transparent meshes—fleckless the gleaming staves—
Sibylline voices flicker, waveringly stream
As though a god were issue of the strings. . . .
And through that cordage, threading with its call | One arc synoptic of all tides below— | Their labyrinthine mouths of history
Pouring reply as though all ships at sea
Complighted in one vibrant breath made cry,— | The bridge and its arc comprise the most layered and essential symbol for Crane – a metaphor for the span of consciousness through all of time and space. The tides below, the mysterious aquamarine deep, comprise the immensity of experience over which that consciousness rises and falls. | Hart Crane | Atlantis |
Putting the decorations back into their cardboard boxes -
Some have got broken - and carrying them up to the attic.
The holly and the mistletoe must be taken down and burnt,
And the children got ready for school. There are enough
Leftovers to do, warmed up, for the rest of the week -
Not that we have much appetite, having drunk such a lot,
Stayed up so late, attempted - quite unsuccessfully -
To love all of our relatives, and in general
Grossly overestimated our powers. Once again
As in previous years we have seen the actual Vision and failed
To do more than entertain it as an agreeable
Possibility, once again we have sent Him away, | Begging though to remain His disobedient servant,
The promising child who cannot keep His word for long. | null | Auden posits that we want to stay locked into a kind of half-committed Christianity; it’s heavily implied, though not directly stated, that our listless Christmas celebrations are symptomatic of this.
Without full committal, we keep Jesus as a kind of child prodigy, and we all know how they can turn out…
| W. H. Auden | Well So That Is That |
Saboteur,
Kamikaze man ---
The stain on your
Gauze Ku Klux Klan
Babushka
Darkens and tarnishes and when
The balled
Pulp of your heart
Confronts its small
Mill of silence
How you jump ---
Trepanned veteran, | Dirty girl, | Thumb stump. | This is a statement of the conflict between the body and the self. The “thrill” reignites her self and anxiety (the thin papery feeling) suppressed by the “pill” she has taken.
The blood and the excitement and pain of the cut revive her and this new consciousness looks at the “thumb stump” “trepanned veteran” bleeding and sees only a muted “dirty girl”. | Sylvia Plath | Cut |
And while they fought, if they remembered to fight:
So earnest were they to pack into that hour
Their unwilling hoard of song before the moon
Grew brighter than the clouds. Then 'twas no time
For singing merely. So they could keep off silence
And night, they cared not what they sang or screamed;
Whether 'twas hoarse or sweet or fierce or soft;
And to me all was sweet: they could do no wrong.
Something they knew- I also, while they sang
And after. Not till night had half its stars
And never a cloud, was I aware of silence
Stained with all that hour's songs, a silence | Saying that Spring returns, perhaps to-morrow. | null | The manic thrush song was a song of life, which is now “silence”. So, the fluctuating certainty and uncertainty of the first line is repeated. The poet knows that Spring will return. However, time is in question. It is “perhaps” tomorrow, as he says in the opening sentence. | Edward Thomas | March |
All praises All praises
I am the one who would save
I sowed diamonds in my back yard
My bowels deliver uranium
The filings from my fingernails are
Semi-precious jewels
On a trip north
I caught a cold and blew
My nose giving oil to the Arab world
I am so hip even my errors are correct
I sailed west to reach east and had to round off
The earth as I went | The hair from my head thinned and gold was laid
Across three continents | I am so perfect so divine so ethereal so surreal
I cannot be comprehended except by my permission
I mean...I...can fly | The speaker has furnished the world with precious jewels, metals, and other resources from her body parts.
| Nikki Giovanni | Ego-Tripping there may be a reason |
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. | Because war causes death of fathers, this leaves mothers in charge of the house. The mother is struggling to be in charge and the house is “toppling” or falling over and collapsing. The holy spring sounds like a metaphor for home . | Dylan Thomas | Holy Spring |
And who by fire, who by water
Who in the sunshine, who in the night time
Who by high ordeal, who by common trial | Who in your merry merry month of May | Who by very slow decay
And who shall I say is calling?
And who in her lonely slip, who by barbiturate | The line “merry month of May” is famous; the first recorded usage is a poem of that title from a play written in 1599, though its use in the play indicates that it was a common phrase well before then. Its most famous usage may be in the folk song “ Barbara Allen ,” where it denotes a far more bitter event: “the merry month of May” is the month where Barbara’s suitor dies after she cruelly rejects him. In that context the line may be said to evoke one who dies of a broken heart. | Leonard Cohen | Who by Fire |
null | It's Hell for the poet arriving for the gig | Off the five thirty three to meet the organiser
Who claps her in a car that reeks enough of dog to make her gag,
Tells her he's looked at her work but he was none the wiser. | Something like this…ain’t it?
| Liz Lochhead | Hell For Poets |
XXVII
“IS my team ploughing,
That I was used to drive
And hear the harness jingle
When I was man alive?”
Ay, the horses trample,
The harness jingles now;
No change though you lie under
The land you used to plough.
“Is football playing
Along the river shore, | With lads to chase the leather, | Now I stand up no more?”
Ay, the ball is flying,
The lads play heart and soul; |
Many footballs (soccer balls) are still covered in waterproofed leather; others, in waterproofed plastic. See Wikipedia’s entry on Football (ball) if you’re someone who’s secretly more interested in sports than poetry. | A. E. Housman | Is My Team Ploughing |
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 | See Frost’s January 1, 1937 letter to Louis Untermeyer: “I should like to be so subtle at this game [i.e. poetry] as to seem to the casual person altogether obvious. The casual person would assume that I meant nothing or else I came near enough meaning some thing he was familiar with to mean it for all practical purposes.”
“Mark” is presumably Mark van Doren—poet, noted Shakespeare scholar, Berryman’s mentor at Columbia and a friend of Frost’s. | John Berryman | Dream Song 39 |
There sat down, once, a thing on Henry's heart
só heavy, if he had a hundred years
& more, & weeping, sleepless, in all them time
Henry could not make good. | Starts again always in Henry's ears | the little cough somewhere, an odour, a chime.
And there is another thing he has in mind
like a grave Sienese face a thousand years | This refers to some type of memory triggers that make Henry remember the oppression that is the “thing on Henry’s heart.” The next line then goes into a more vivid description of how Henry remembers this oppression. | John Berryman | Dream Song 29 |
I
Swiftly walk o'er the western wave,
Spirit of the Night!
Out of the misty eastern cave,
Where, all the long and lone daylight,
Thou wovest dreams of joy and fear,
Which make thee terrible and dear,—
Swift be thy flight!
II
Wrap thy form in a mantle gray,
Star-inwrought!
Blind with thine hair the eyes of Day; | Kiss her until she be wearied out, | Then wander o'er city, and sea, and land,
Touching all with thine opiate wand—
Come, long-sought! | Kissing, usually an expression of love, is negative here, a joyless act designed only to ‘wear out’ the recipient of the kisses.
Again Shelley subverts our expectations. | Percy Bysshe Shelley | To Night |
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, | An estateful of washing, | And the albums, lettered
Our Wedding, lying
Near the television: | The women were responsible for the housework and for child-raising. The lack of labour-saving devices in those days meant that housekeeing and motherhood was a full-time job.
| Philip Larkin | Afternoons |
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Old age should burn and rave at close of day; | Rage, rage against the dying of the light. | Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night. | Note that these ‘good men’ wish they had done more in life — “their frail deeds might have danced” … so are said by the poet to ‘rage’. This implies anger. The normal expectation is for the ‘good men’ to accept death peacefully, but not for the poet. This is echoed by the “grave men” in stanza five. Again, the metaphor for death (“the dying of the light”) is written at the end of the line.
| Dylan Thomas | Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night |
And he dances, and he yells;
Keeping time, time, time
In a sort of Runic rhyme
To the pæan of the bells —
Of the bells:
Keeping time, time, time
In a sort of Runic rhyme
To the throbbing of the bells —
Of the bells, bells, bells —
To the sobbing of the bells;
Keeping time, time, time
As he knells, knells, knells | In a happy Runic rhyme | To the rolling of the bells —
Of the bells, bells, bells —
To the tolling of the bells | The phrase Runic rhyme was also used in the first stanza , as well as earlier in this one. Poe is implying that the way we celebrate holidays (in stanza I) is no different than the way the Ghouls celebrate misery and death. | Edgar Allan Poe | The Bells |
With that Negro now
I don't pay no REVERSED
CHARGES nohow
You say, I will pay it--
Else you'll take out my phone?
You better let
My phone alone
I didn't ask him
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 | Madam Johnson is upset because Roscoe is calling long distance from Kansas City , which costs more than a local phone call. Apparently KC is far away from where she lives.
| Langston Hughes | Madam and the Phone Bill |
I knew a simple soldier boy
Who grinned at life in empty joy,
Slept soundly through the lonesome dark,
And whistled early with the lark.
In winter trenches, cowed and glum,
With crumps and lice and lack of rum,
He put a bullet through his brain. | No one spoke of him again. | You smug-faced crowds with kindling eye
Who cheer when soldier lads march by,
Sneak home and pray you'll never know | This line might allude to a denial of those who couldn’t handle the pressure of a combat situation.
It could also relate to the idea of pain in that remembering those who took their lives too young would be a difficult reminder of the situation that soldiers like Sassoon found themselves in. | Siegfried Sassoon | Suicide in the Trenches |
null | Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though; | He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.
My little horse must think it queer | The opening lines set the psychological tone of the poem. Whose woods are these? The speaker THINKS he knows, but he is uncertain. Uncertainty is pervasive through this poem. The speaker seems at first to be referring to a local landowner on whose property the woods lie, but as the poem ultimately suggests, the woods “belong” also to the darker, more impersonal forces of nature.
Some have speculated that “Whose” might even refer to God. The impersonal forces of nature have no house in the village. God does, though. He’s got the biggest house: in the context of the poem it would be the church. For readers of different religious persuasions it could be the spiritual presence to which they relate.
“The woods” and “the village” create a nature vs. society juxtaposition that highlights the speaker’s isolation. This dichotomy also establishes one of the poem’s major themes: choosing between a looming irrational world (the wild woods) and sensibility and responsibility. Sounds like the summer after senior year of high school.
| Robert Frost | Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening |
So enter now, and see for what slight thing
You are betrayed…. Here is no treasure hid,
No cauldron, no clear crystal mirroring
The sought-for truth, no heads of women slain
For greed like yours, no writhings of distress,
But only what you see…. Look yet again--
An empty room, cobwebbed and comfortless.
Yet this alone out of my life I kept
Unto myself, lest any know me quite;
And you did so profane me when you crept
Unto the threshold of this room to-night
That I must never more behold your face. | This now is yours. I seek another place. | null | The end here is much different from the original tale. Both have the wife possessing the home, but in this retelling, it’s Bluebeard’s decision to give her the home after having his secret room discovered. | Edna St. Vincent Millay | Bluebeard Sonnet VI |
Does the road wind up-hill all the way?
Yes, to the very end.
Will the day's journey take the whole long day?
From morn to night, my friend.
But is there for the night a resting-place?
A roof for when the slow dark hours begin.
May not the darkness hide it from my face?
You cannot miss that inn. | Shall I meet other wayfarers at night? | Those who have gone before.
Then must I knock, or call when just in sight?
They will not keep you standing at that door. | ‘Wayfarers’ refers to travellers on the road of life. The nervous speaker wonders if he is alone in his doubts and troubles. It suggests that sharing the journey with others is in itself a comfort. The reassuring answer comes as always. | Christina Rossetti | Up-hill |
I
The Owl and the Pussy-cat went to sea
In a beautiful pea-green boat,
They took some honey, and plenty of money,
Wrapped up in a five-pound note. | The Owl looked up to the stars above, | And sang to a small guitar,
"O lovely Pussy! O Pussy, my love,
What a beautiful Pussy you are, | The nightly stars and setting provide a sentimental theme for the poem, related to an owl’s appearance in reality at nightfall .
| Edward Lear | The Owl and the Pussycat |
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,
For the one bird no one has looked for
To spring again from a flash | As he grows older, he cares less and less about the artificial world humans have created. | James Dickey | At Darien Bridge |
'Jack fell as he'd have wished,' the mother said,
And folded up the letter that she'd read.
'The Colonel writes so nicely.' Something broke
In the tired voice that quivered to a choke.
She half looked up. 'We mothers are so proud
Of our dead soldiers.' Then her face was bowed.
Quietly the Brother Officer went out.
He'd told the poor old dear some gallant lies
That she would nourish all her days, no doubt
For while he coughed and mumbled, her weak eyes
Had shone with gentle triumph, brimmed with joy, | Because he'd been so brave, her glorious boy. | He thought how 'Jack', cold-footed, useless swine,
Had panicked down the trench that night the mine
Went up at Wicked Corner; how he'd tried | The woman has already embroided the reality; he is her “brave” and “glorious boy” — these are far more likely to be what she has inferred incorrectly from the information she has been given.
| Siegfried Sassoon | The Hero |
Unapt the passing view to meet
When loftier flowers are flaunting nigh.
Oft, in the sunless April day,
Thy early smile has stayed my walk;
But midst the gorgeous blooms of May,
I passed thee on thy humble stalk.
So they, who climb to wealth, forget
The friends in darker fortunes tried.
I copied them—but I regret
That I should ape the ways of pride.
And when again the genial hour
Awakes the painted tribes of light, | I'll not o'erlook the modest flower
That made the woods of April bright. | null | This humble and modest flower should not be overlooked for it brought happiness and brightness to the once dark woods in April. | William Cullen Bryant | The Yellow Violet |
Art fancy-sick or turn'd a Sot
To catch at shadows which are not?
Come, come. I'll show unto thy sense,
Industry hath its recompence.
What canst desire, but thou maist see
True substance in variety?
Dost honour like? Acquire the same,
As some to their immortal fame;
And trophies to thy name erect
Which wearing time shall ne'er deject.
For riches dost thou long full sore?
Behold enough of precious store. | Earth hath more silver, pearls, and gold
Than eyes can see or hands can hold.
Affects thou pleasure? Take thy fill.
Earth hath enough of what you will. | Then let not go what thou maist find
For things unknown only in mind." | Having questioned the Spirit’s devotion, the Flesh tempts the Spirit with earthly wealth: “Earth hath more silver, pearls and gold…Take they fill/Earth hath enough of what you will.” This temptation of the spirit is reminiscent of the serpent tempting Eve in the garden. In both cases, the subject (Eve and the Spirit) are tempted away from their spiritual devotion/faith with earthly reward (the apple of knowledge and wealth). Here, Bradstreet confronts the continuation of temptation of the spirit on earth after the temptation of Eve gave rise to original sin.
| Anne Bradstreet | Flesh and the Spirit The |
[Saul Williams] | I'm falling up flights of stairs, scraping myself from the sidewalk | Jumping from rivers to bridges, drowning in pure air
Hip hop is lying on the side of the road, half dead to itself
Blood scrawled over its mangled flesh, like jazz | This might be a reference to the works of another famous american poet Shel Silverstein – who wrote on outside of the box thinking.
In this context it seems Saul is describing how he writes poetry while hip hop is dying. Two of Shel’s popular children’s poetry books include Falling up and Where the Sidewalk Ends .
As a ‘preachers son from Haiti’ (lyric from “ Black Stacy ”), it would make sense that he was aware of Shel’s works during his childhood . One popular piece that often circulated among Christian groups was The Giving Tree – published 8 years before Saul was born.
Shel’s works are notable for a semi-absurdist take on conventional constructs we tend to over look as adults. Reading through the poetry helps children take on a different perspective and ask questions on the nature of our reality – and better understand the way the world works as a result. | Saul Williams | Telegram |
Sundays too my father got up early
And put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,
Then with cracked hands that ached
From labor in the weekday weather made
Banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him. | I'd wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he'd call, | And slowly I would rise and dress,
Fearing the chronic angers of that house,
Speaking indifferently to him, | The phrase ‘hear the cold’ is synaesthetic , a mix of senses, a reflection perhaps of the harshness of the life of the father who received few thanks, implying he felt the neglect in every aspect of his being, through every sense. Note the hard, percussive consonants in ‘cold’, ‘splintering’ and ‘breaking’. The warm rooms provide marked contrast. | Robert Hayden | Those Winter Sundays |
O SINGER of Persephone!
In the dim meadows desolate
Dost thou remember Sicily? | Still through the ivy flits the bee | Where Amaryllis lies in state
O Singer of Persephone!
Simætha calls on Hecate | To “flit” means to move swiftly, in this case, through an entanglement of ivy, a symbol for inmortality in Greek Mythology. Like the amaryllis [in the next line] , ivy has the property of remaining fresh and green all year round, hence why this symbol is suiting.
A bee is known to symbolize great fruits of hard labor, seeing that bees work year-round and produce sweet honey. For the bee to zoom through ivy gives one an image of eternal happiness that strongly contrasts the dark imagery of the following line. Happy notes drowned by sadder lines is consistent throughout this poem to further emphasize the surprise element of despair Wilde expresses.
(Interestingly, there does exist the Ivy Bee ( Colletes hederae ), though it wasn’t truly discovered until far after Wilde’s time.) | Oscar Wilde | Theocritus |
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