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Small as a peanut,
Big as a giant,
We're all the same size
When we turn off the light.
Rich as a sultan,
Poor as a mite,
We're all worth the same
When we turn off the light.
Red, black or orange,
Yellow or white,
We all look the same
When we turn off the light. | So maybe the way
To make everything right
Is for God to just reach out
And turn off the light! | null | Whether it be race, gender, ethnicity, or religious denomination, no one is above anyone else. Silverstein refers to sight as the commonality amongst society as the factor to demeaning others. By “turning off the light,” retrospectively, sight is taken away, therefore we cannot tell the difference between each other, making everyone equal.
| Shel Silverstein | No Difference |
List of Essentials
1. Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for yr own joy
2. Submissive to everything, open, listening | 3. Try never get drunk outside yr own house | 4. Be in love with yr life
5. Something that you feel will find its own form
6. Be crazy dumbsaint of the mind | Getting drunk in public can be dangerous because you aren’t yourself. Additionally, there’s much to observe and think about while out in the world that drunkenness may obscure.
If getting inebriated is saved for the home, you can be in comfortable peace and focus on writing. (So says Kerouac, anyway. Drinking in the house often means drinking alone, and that can be its own kind of problem…)
Kerouac was a severe alcoholic, and unfortunately wasn’t always the best follower of his own advice.
| Jack Kerouac | Belief Technique For Modern Prose |
That spring was late. We watched the sky
and studied charts for shouldering isobars.
Birds were late to pair. Crows drank from the lamb's eye.
Over Finland small birds fell: song-thrushes
steering north, smudged signatures on light,
migrating warblers, nightingales.
Wing-beats failed over fjords, each lung a sip of gall.
Children were warned of their dangerous beauty.
Milk was spilt in Poland. Each quarrel
the blowback from some old story,
a mouthful of bitter air from the Ukraine
brought by the wind out of its box of sorrows. | This spring a lamb sips caesium on a Welsh hill. | A child, lifting her head to drink the rain,
takes into her blood the poisoned arrow.
Now we are all neighbourly, each little town | This is the second reference to a spring lamb, the symbol of innocence. This time it is sipping ‘caesium’ — a toxic radioactive chemical element — in Wales. The third ‘neighbour’, Wales, the poet’s country, has been identified.
The juxtaposition of positives — the young lamb on a lovely Welsh hill — and a chemical poison reinforces, the idea of beauty devastated by man’s destructiveness. | Gillian Clarke | Neighbours |
Some thoughts traveled from distant places
Are not born within our borders
And must pass through heightened security fortified by age old tradition
The norms of societal culture
The misgivings of prejudice and misplaced judgement
In order to arrive peacefully in our minds
Our minds are high-walled fortresses | Where Security Councils gather to preserve comfort | Enforce what we have been taught to value
And discern and determine what is real
We depend on our minds to guide and aid us from one day to the next | This line evokes the U.N. Security Council, which is a tragic caricature of global diplomacy and peacekeeping. It’s only discernible function seems to be legitimizing U.S. military aggression , and protecting strategic interests of the 5 permanent members. Its harshest critics have called it the “pillar of global apartheid.” However, when pressured by the American public and international advocates, the Security Council has taken some action to end genocides just before it’s too late.
The United Nations, which was created “to prevent the scourge of war,” has become an instrument of war.
-Former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark
This metaphor is probably in reference to the 5th line regarding prejudice and misplaced judgements. Biases tend to comfort us and relieve cognitive dissonance , whether true or not. | Saul Williams | FCK THE BELIEFS |
Tell all the Truth but tell it slant --
Success in Circuit lies
Too bright for our infirm Delight
The Truth's superb surprise
As Lightning to the Children eased | With explanation kind | The Truth must dazzle gradually
Or every man be blind -- | The person telling the truth softens it, making its reception kinder to those who will otherwise find it overwhelming. | Emily Dickinson | Tell All the Truth But Tell it Slant |
‘Good-morning; good-morning!' the General said
When we met him last week on our way to the line.
Now the soldiers he smiled at are most of 'em dead,
And we're cursing his staff for incompetent swine.
‘He's a cheery old card,' grunted Harry to Jack
As they slogged up to Arras with rifle and pack. | But he did for them both by his plan of attack. | null | Here Sassoon states unequivocally that the General is responsible for the deaths of the soldiers. The dark comedy doesn’t alter the fact that the General is a buffoon, and a tragically dangerous one.
Note the rhyme fits with the last two lines of the previous stanza, stressing the satire further. | Siegfried Sassoon | The General |
492
Civilization — spurns — the Leopard!
Was the Leopard — bold?
Deserts — never rebuked her Satin
Ethiop — her Gold | Tawny — her Customs | She was Conscious
Spotted — her Dun Gown
This was the Leopard's nature — Signor | Tawny : yellowish-brown, like the leopard’s coat.
The speaker connects the lovely, luxuriant color of the animal’s coat with its “customs,” its ways of life in its former situation–which are implied to have been equally luxuriant and lovely. | Emily Dickinson | Civilization — spurns — the Leopard |
Yes, but the heat and the summer were there
And the freezing winter's cold
Now tell me,
Who'll pay reparations on my soul?
Call my brother a junkie cause he ain't got no job (no job, no job)
Told my old man to leave me when times got hard (so hard)
Told my mother she got to carry me all by herself
And now that I want to be a man (be a man) who can depend on no one else (oh yeah)
What about the red man
Who met you at the coast?
You never dig sharing,
Always had to have the most | And what about Mississippi,
The boundary of old?
Tell me,
Who'll pay reparations on my soul? | Many suggestions
And documents written
Many directions | Mississippi is probably the most racist state in Amerika, with a strong history of cruel lynchings and prominent racial injustices.
| Gil Scott-Heron | Wholl Pay Reparations on My Soul? |
Vallejo writing about
loneliness while starving to
death;
Van Gogh's ear rejected by a
whore;
Rimbaud running off to Africa
to look for gold and finding
an incurable case of syphilis;
Beethoven gone deaf;
Pound dragged through the streets
in a cage;
Chatterton taking rat poison; | Hemingway's brains dropping into
the orange juice; | Pascal cutting his wrists
in the bathtub;
Artaud locked up with the mad; | Refers to Ernest Hemingway’s suicide from a shotgun to the head on the morning of July 2, 1961 hence the orange juice | Charles Bukowski | What they want |
Yeah you played your part
You sang along
Under their instruction
Looking through the bars
Staring at the stars
Only love can heal the sickness of celebrity
One by one and day by day
You see the good ones, they fall away
See you standing there styling
Waiting for the day you should be soaring
I know that you said we could never be together
You're too pretty and I'm too clever | Good morning heartache | And these foolish things
Only love can bring the secrets of simplicity
Only love can bring the secrets of simplicity | Most probably a reference to the Billie Holiday song of the same name. Doherty included the song in his ‘soundtrack of his life’ with the guardian. In addition, this is not the first time he has borrowed lyrics from the song as the ‘Gunga Din’ middle 8 lyrics closely resemble lyrics in the original song with slight changes. | Pete Doherty | Bird Cage |
Or being hated, don't give way to hating,
And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise:
If you can dream - and not make dreams your master;
If you can think - and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build 'em up with worn-out tools:
If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss, | And lose, and start again at your beginnings | And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone, | Here Kipling is promoting an ideal that fits into the Victorian conception of white masculinity: stoic perseverance. If you are able to lose everything you value and still get back up, it shows true dedication. This can also relate to colonialism: being truly dedicated to an imperialist cause means being able to “keep on keeping on” regardless of how grim your situation is…
| Rudyard Kipling | If |
Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum | Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come. | Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling on the sky the message He Is Dead,
Put crêpe bows round the white necks of the public doves, | The last line of the stanza reveals the reason for the imperatives; the funeral. The dead person must be acknowledged in the appropriate, dignified way required by convention. | W. H. Auden | Funeral Blues Stop all the clocks |
335
'Tis not that Dying hurts us so
'Tis Living — hurts us more
But Dying — is a different way
A Kind behind the Door
The Southern Custom — of the Bird
That ere the Frosts are due
Accepts a better Latitude
We — are the Birds — that stay
The Shrivers round Farmers' doors
For whose reluctant Crumb
We stipulate — till pitying Snows | Persuade our Feathers Home | null | Dickinson suggests we can try to challenge our fate and run away, but in the end, we will return. It is in the birds’ nature to fly home after winter is over, as it is in ours to deal with our difficulties. | Emily Dickinson | Tis not that Dying hurts us so |
The Brain, within its Groove
Runs evenly—and true—
But let a Splinter swerve—
'Twere easier for You— | To put a Current back— | When Floods have slit the Hills—
And scooped a Turnpike for Themselves—
And trodden out the Mills— | Water, it is said, is the most destructive force on earth. With time, a simple trick of water can hollow out a cave, or create a grand canyon. Here Emily Dickinson is showing the awesome force of the mind’s discursiveness, saying that it is easier to prevent water from destroying what it does — think of a Hurricane for instance — than to keep the mind in its groove
(Source: Corsera – Modern Poetry. ) | Emily Dickinson | The Brain within its Groove |
I'd love to speak with Leonard | He's a sportsman and a shepherd | He's a lazy bastard
Living in a suit
But he does say what I tell him | Cohen played hockey at school but as an adult wasn’t known for working out. As a pop star with a community of fans he can be called a kind of shepherd of sorts. | Leonard Cohen | Going Home |
I loved you in the morning, our kisses deep and warm
Your hair upon the pillow like a sleepy golden storm
Yes, many loved before us, I know that we are not new
In city and in forest they smiled like me and you
But now it's come to distances and both of us must try
Your eyes are soft with sorrow
Hey, that's no way to say goodbye
I'm not looking for another as I wander in my time
Walk me to the corner, our steps will always rhyme
You know my love goes with you as your love stays with me
It's just the way it changes, like the shoreline and the sea | But let's not talk of love or chains and things we can't untie | Your eyes are soft with sorrow
Hey, that's no way to say goodbye
I loved you in the morning, our kisses deep and warm | They can’t plan things they have no direct influence on; you’ll never know what will happen, you can’t plan too much for the future. | Leonard Cohen | Hey Thats No Way to Say Goodbye |
His day is done.
Is done.
The news came on the wings of a wind, reluctant to carry its burden.
Nelson Mandela's day is done.
The news, expected and still unwelcome, reached us in the United States, and suddenly our world became somber.
Our skies were leadened.
His day is done. | We see you, South African people standing speechless at the slamming of that final door through which no traveler returns. | Our spirits reach out to you Bantu, Zulu, Xhosa, Boer.
We think of you and your son of Africa, your father, your one more wonder of the world.
We send our souls to you as you reflect upon your David armed with a mere stone, facing down the mighty Goliath. | The “final door” can be seen as the gates of heaven. Nelson Mandela was a weary traveler who reached the end of his road. Finally he found a place to rest, one that he will no longer be returning from. The use of the word “slamming” to describe the door shows the abruptness and harshness that we feel since Mandela has gone. His death has left us speechless. | Maya Angelou | His Day Is Done |
Tremors of your network
cause kings to disappear.
Your open mouth in anger
makes nations bow in fear. | Your bombs can change the seasons,
obliterate the spring. | What more do you long for?
Why are you suffering?
You control the human lives | Many countries have the technology to attack others with bombs, but the U.S. military is the most advanced (and perhaps the most active) in the world. Angelou here is referring to nuclear weapons, most notably the fatal U.S. bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, in 1945 during World War II.
| Maya Angelou | These Yet to be United States |
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.
Sophocles long ago
Heard it on the Aegean, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery; we
Find also in the sound a thought,
Hearing it by this distant northern sea.
The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear | Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar, | Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world. | The vowels in this line are themselves long and stretched to match the sense of sadness and depression. The repetition of the noun “roar” from stanza one reinforces its importance. | Matthew Arnold | Dover Beach |
Not in those climes where I have late been straying,
Though Beauty long hath there been matchless deem'd;
Not in those visions to the heart displaying
Forms which it sighs but to have only dream'd,
Hath aught like thee in truth or fancy seem'd:
Nor, having seen thee, shall I vainly seek
To paint those charms which varied as they beam'd --
To such as see thee not my words were weak;
To those who gaze on thee what language could they speak?
Ah! may'st thou ever be what now thou art,
Nor unbeseem the promise of thy spring,
As fair in form, as warm yet pure in heart, | Love's image upon earth without his wing, | And guileless beyond Hope's imagining!
And surely she who now so fondly rears
Thy youth, in thee, thus hourly brightening, | The reference is to the French proverb, ‘L'Aimtié est l'Amour sans Ailes’, which suggested the last line (line 412) of Childish Recollections, “And Love, without his pinion, smil’d on youth,” | Lord Byron | Childe Harolds Pilgrimage To Ianthe |
And all her ghosts that walk
And all that hide behind
Her Georgian facades -
The catcalls and the pain,
The glamour of her squalor,
The bravado of her talk.
The lights jig in the river
With a concertina movement
And the sun comes up in the morning
Like barley-sugar on the water
And the mist on the Wicklow hills
Is close, as close | As the peasantry were to the landlord, | As the Irish to the Anglo-Irish,
As the killer is close one moment
To the man he kills, | Traditionally, Irish peasants lived on the estates of their wealthy landlords ( rawn mostly from the Protestant and Anglo-Irish Ascendancy class).
Despite this proximity, the relationship was charged with conflict, which came to a head after the Great Famine (1845-1852), during which the landlord class was perceived to have looked on while their tenants starved. | Louis MacNeice | Dublin |
null | 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: | Robert Lowell was influenced by the free verse style that Beat poets like Ginsberg used. He believed a mixture of metered verse and free verse was best– a technique he utilised in his ground-breaking collection, Life Studies. | Robert Lowell | Epilogue |
null | Way Down South in Dixie | (Break the heart of me)
They hung my black young lover
To a cross roads tree. | Echoes the chorus of the song “Dixie,” part of which runs as follows:
Then I wish I was in Dixie, hooray! hooray! In Dixie Land I’ll take my stand to live and die in Dixie, Away, away, away down South in Dixie, Away, away, away down South in Dixie.
Since “Dixie” emerged from blackface mistrelsy and was a Confederate anthem during the Civil War, Hughes’s borrowing is heavily ironic. | Langston Hughes | Song for a Dark Girl |
There we were in the vaulted tunnel running, | You in your going-away coat speeding ahead | And me, me then like a fleet god gaining
Upon you before you turned to a reed
Or some new white flower japped with crimson | The woman, “you” is wearing her “going-away coat” that she would have worn at the end of her wedding, indicating that this is a newly married couple.
That she is “speeding ahead”, suggests that this is a part of the dream, a chase where the object is always out of reach. | Seamus Heaney | The Underground |
I will be the gladdest thing
Under the sun!
I will touch a hundred flowers
And not pick one.
I will look at cliffs and clouds
With quiet eyes, | Watch the wind bow down the grass,
And the grass rise. | And when lights begin to show
Up from the town,
I will mark which must be mine, | Millay’s soothing interactions and observations of nature also have a rebellious nature in them–traditionally, grass bows/sways when wind pushes them.
This may be a metaphor she is relating to–a metaphor for rising up against repression, or being brave enough to be unique. | Edna St. Vincent Millay | Afternoon on a Hill |
Calliope;
As ye may see,
Regent is she
Of poets all,
Which gave to me
The high degree
Laureate to be
Of fame royal;
Whose name enrolled
With silk and gold
I dare be bold
Thus for to wear. | Of her I hold
And her household;
Though I wax old
And sometime sere, | Yet is she fain,
Void of disdain,
Me to retain | Although Skelton writes sere, or threadbare, poetry, he is still a poet and keeps her household, the position of poet laureate.
| John Skelton | Why were ye Calliope embrawdered with letters of golde ? |
And let that page come out of you--
Then, it will be true.
I wonder if it's that simple?
I am twenty-two, colored, born in Winston-Salem.
I went to school there, then Durham, then here
To this college on the hill above Harlem.
I am the only colored student in my class.
The steps from the hill lead down into Harlem
Through a park, then I cross St. Nicholas,
Eighth Avenue, Seventh, and I come to the Y,
The Harlem Branch Y, where I take the elevator
Up to my room, sit down, and write this page: | It's not easy to know what is true for you or me | At twenty-two, my age. But I guess I'm what
I feel and see and hear, Harlem, I hear you:
Hear you, hear me--we two--you, me, talk on this page. | This seems like a pivotal statement; the essence of the poem; the fact that humans have their own perceptions and understanding of the “truth”. | Langston Hughes | Theme for English B |
null | Why do you sit there on the floor so quiet and silent, tell me,
mother dear? | The rain is coming in through the open window, making you all
wet, and you don't mind it.
Do you hear the gong striking four? It is time for my brother | establishes very quickly that the speaker of the poem is a son desperately questioning his mother. | Rabindranath Tagore | The Wicked Postman |
Townsman of a stiller town.
Smart lad, to slip betimes away
From fields where glory does not stay
And early though the laurel grows
It withers quicker than the rose.
Eyes the shady night has shut
Cannot see the record cut,
And silence sounds no worse than cheers
After earth has stopped the ears:
| Now you will not swell the rout | Of lads that wore their honors out,
Runners whom renown outran
And the name died before the man. | The athlete no longer has the opportunity to walk down the road of victory. | A. E. Housman | To An Athlete Dying Young |
Ah, Douglass, we have fall'n on evil days,
Such days as thou, not even thou didst know,
When thee, the eyes of that harsh long ago
Saw, salient, at the cross of devious ways, | And all the country heard thee with amaze. | Not ended then, the passionate ebb and flow,
The awful tide that battled to and fro;
We ride amid a tempest of dispraise. | They had everyone’s attention .
| Paul Laurence Dunbar | Douglass |
Pretty women wonder where my secret lies
I'm not cute or built to suit a fashion model's size
But when I start to tell them
They think I'm telling lies | I say | It's in the reach of my arms
The span of my hips
The stride of my step |
This “I say” is repeated in every stanza of the poem, emphasizing the speaker’s voice and her outspoken attitude. She is confident and not afraid to share her opinion aloud, even when it goes against societal standards. She clearly does not follow to the misogynist expectation that women should be seen–and look a certain way–and not heard. | Maya Angelou | Phenomenal Woman |
What's this of death, from you who never will die? | Think you the wrist that fashioned you in clay, | The thumb that set the hollow just that way
In your full throat and lidded the long eye
So roundly from the forehead, will let lie | Throughout the poem, God, or maybe Nature, is portrayed as a sculptor who views the poet’s lover as his masterpiece . | Edna St. Vincent Millay | Whats this of death from you who never will die? |
The two executioners stalk along over the knolls,
Bearing two axes with heavy heads shining and wide,
And a long limp two-handled saw toothed for cutting great boles,
And so they approach the proud tree that bears the death-mark on its side.
Jackets doffed they swing axes and chop away just above ground,
And the chips fly about and lie white on the moss and fallen leaves;
Till a broad deep gash in the bark is hewn all the way round,
And one of them tries to hook upward a rope, which at last he achieves. | The saw then begins, till the top of the tall giant shivers: | The shivers are seen to grow greater with each cut than before:
They edge out the saw, tug the rope; but the tree only quivers,
And kneeling and sawing again, they step back to try pulling once more. | They start to use the saw, and the saw is so powerful, that the very top of the tall tree begins to rock back and forth slightly. | Thomas Hardy | Throwing a Tree |
[Silence]
FIRST VOICE (Very softly) | To begin at the beginning: | It is spring, moonless night in the small town
Starless and bible-black
The cobblestreets silent and the hunched | The opening of the play is also the opening of the new day with the whole play taking place over 24 hours, so this is the middle of the night– the wee hours. | Dylan Thomas | Under Milk Wood |
null | For Octavio | There's a book called
"A Dictionary of Angels."
No one has opened it in fifty years | Octavio Paz (March 31, 1914 – April 19, 1998): Mexican poet, won the [1990 Nobel Prize for (Literature] ).
| Charles Simic | In the Library |
Overnight, very
Whitely, discreetly,
Very quietly
Our toes, our noses
Take hold on the loam,
Acquire the air.
Nobody sees us,
Stops us, betrays us;
The small grains make room.
Soft fists insist on
Heaving the needles,
The leafy bedding, | Even the paving. | Our hammers, our rams,
Earless and eyeless,
Perfectly voiceless, | The cause is so strong they break metaphorically through pavements. In time, the apparently strong concrete of the paving is overcome by the constant growth of the mushrooms.
The period (full-stop) at the end of the line is affirmative. The bid by women for recognition will continue.
| Sylvia Plath | Mushrooms |
null | The flowers left thick at nightfall in the wood | This Eastertide call into mind the men,
Now far from home, who, with their sweethearts, should
Have gathered them and will do never again. | Flowers, while often linked with fertility, beauty and celebration, are also associated with death and funerals. Here, they are “left thick”, implying mulitiple deaths and consequent mourning by those left behind.
It is appropriate that the poem should be set at nightfall, the close of day and the close of life. A wood can be shady but can also be strange and frightening.
Wood is also a homophone for the conditional “would”, this being a poem about what might have been.
| Edward Thomas | In Memoriam Easter 1915 |
You are the town and we are the clock.
We are the guardians of the gate in the rock. | The Two. | On your left and on your right
In the day and in the night,
We are watching you. | Line three of each stanza is (with small variations) a spondee : a metrical foot of two stressed syllables. These stresses fall hard and ominously, like a double blow or double stroke of doom, as befits the poem’s subject and speaker: “Two” mysterious agents of fate. | W. H. Auden | The Two |
A hand is not the thick thatch of its lines
with their infinite dramas,
nor what it has written,
not on the page
not on the ecstatic body.
Nor is the hand its meadows of holding, of shaping—
not sponge of rising yeast-bread,
not rotor pin's smoothness,
not ink.
The maple's green hands do not cup
the proliferant rain.
What empties itself falls into the place that is open. | A hand turned upward holds only a single, transparent question.
Unanswerable, humming like bees, it rises, swarms, departs. | null | This brings us back to the old Zen tradition of the koan. Koans were often phrased in the form of questions that lacked an easy answer. For example “What is the sound of one hand clapping?” “If tree falls in the woods, does it make a sound?”
The hand, then, is the thing that holds the unanswerable question. A hand is a cradle of mystery. Because the question “rises, swarms, departs,” we can never know the answer. We should just enjoy the fact that our bodies are vessels of the unexplained. | Jane Hirshfield | A Hand |
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. | But sometimes everything I write
with the threadbare art of my eye
seems a snapshot, | Lowell famously separated poetry into two categories: “the cooked” and “the raw”. His attitude toward art and poetry is typical of his time period , and taken to new levels by other artists, authors, and writers of the day.
Where America was politically and economically affected their need to break classic artistic styles; a cyclical theme in their work. | Robert Lowell | Epilogue |
Was like the Stillness in the Air –
Between the Heaves of Storm –
The Eyes around – had wrung them dry –
And Breaths were gathering firm
For that last Onset – when the King
Be witnessed – in the Room –
I willed my Keepsakes – Signed away
What portions of me be
Assignable – and then it was
There interposed a Fly –
With Blue – uncertain stumbling Buzz –
Between the light – and me – | And then the Windows failed – and then
I could not see to see – | null | “Windows” may refer to the light through the capitalised “Windows” to which the soul is reaching on its journey to God. But it is also the speaker’s eyes, said to be “the windows to the soul”.
The death of the speaker at this point isn’t straightforward. If the “Windows” failed, does this mean the soul within doesn’t reach the afterlife and God? Does the verb “failed” mean the natural process of death — a journey via the eyes and out of the body — is interrupted? Or that the yearning of the soul to see God has “failed”?
There is no answer. The speaker not only cannot see, but cannot perceive the spiritual destination she is seeking.
And so the poem ends with a dash, forming a terminal caesura , signifying an unresolved pause. We can never know what happens to the speaker’s soul. | Emily Dickinson | I heard a Fly buzz 465 |
As pines are sober
When they stand etched
Against the sky
Hating you shall be a game
Played with cool hands
And slim fingers
Your heart will yearn
For the lonely splendor
Of the pine tree
While rekindled fires
In my eyes
Shall wound you like swift arrows | Memory will lay its hands
Upon your breast | And you will understand
My hatred | It is now clear the fire/arrows the speaker is shooting as a result of her hatred represent memories explaining the history between the speaker and subject. These lines imply that the subject either does not understand the capacity of what he has done to the speaker, or simply does not remember. The personification of memory serves to remind the subject by literally seizing him.
| Gwendolyn B. Bennett | Hatred |
It was many and many a year ago,
In a kingdom by the sea,
That a maiden there lived whom you may know
By the name of Annabel Lee; —
And this maiden she lived with no other thought
Than to love and be loved by me.
I was a child and she was a child, | In this kingdom by the sea; | But we loved with a love that was more than love —
I and my Annabel Lee —
With a love that the wingéd seraphs of heaven | The location of the story is one of the gothic elements. It is non-specified and mysterious, but also romantic and secluded.
| Edgar Allan Poe | Annabel Lee |
I looked in my heart while the wild swans went over.
And what did I see I had not seen before?
Only a question less or a question more;
Nothing to match the flight of wild birds flying. | Tiresome heart, forever living and dying, | House without air, I leave you and lock your door.
Wild swans, come over the town, come over
The town again, trailing your legs and crying! | ‘Living and dying’ are binary opposites . These are huge concepts, juxtaposed against her ‘tiresome heart’; the poet — and maybe the reader — may view life and death as burdensome.
There may be biographical significance here. Edna St. Vincent Millay had many lovers and was bi-sexual in an era when this sort of lifestyle was scandalous. The vicissitudes of her personal life may inform the meaning of this line. | Edna St. Vincent Millay | Wild Swans |
I too beneath your moon, almighty Sex,
Go forth at nightfall crying like a cat,
Leaving the lofty tower I laboured at
For birds to foul and boys and girls to vex
With tittering chalk; and you, and the long necks
Of neighbours sitting where their mothers sat | Are well aware of shadowy this and that | In me, that's neither noble nor complex.
Such as I am, however, I have brought
To what it is, this tower; it is my own; | Everyone has a dark side. Yours might be more obvious to others than you think.
Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung thought all human beings have a thing called a Shadow that’s basically a confused, anxious unconscious side, “the dark side of your being”. It’s likely Millay’s making a subtle reference to her amoral, secretive sexual side.
| Edna St. Vincent Millay | I Too Beneath Your Moon Almighty Sex |
Shrouded forms that start and sigh
As they pass the wanderer by —
White —robed forms of friends long given,
In agony, to the Earth — and Heaven.
For the heart whose woes are legion
'Tis a peaceful, soothing region —
For the spirit that walks in shadow
'Tis — oh, 'tis an Eldorado!
But the traveller, travelling through it,
May not — dare not openly view it!
Never its mysteries are exposed
To the weak human eye unclosed; | So wills its King, who hath forbid | The uplifting of the fringed lid;
And thus the sad Soul that here passes
Beholds it but through darkened glasses. | We do not eventually figure out who Dream-land’s king is. Perhaps he is the Eidolon named NIGHT from the first stanza, or maybe even God himself. Either way, the King forbids for travelers to see how the true city looks like. | Edgar Allan Poe | Dream-Land |
Panoramas are not what they used to be.
Claude has been dead a long time
And apostrophes are forbidden on the funicular.
Marx has ruined Nature,
For the moment.
For myself, I live by leaves, | So that corridors of clouds,
Corridors of cloudy thoughts,
Seem pretty much one: | I don't know what.
But in Claude how near one was
(In a world that is resting on pillars, | In living by leaves, the narrator rejects the artifice and the philosophizing that tames nature and separates it from the individual’s direct experience.
Even as he is asserting this, though, the repetition of “corridors” indicates an organized and practical manmade interior. | Wallace Stevens | Botanist on Alp No. 1 |
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
Who make up a heaven of our misery." | In the previous line, the child in the poem is thought to put on a successful façade for others to believe he is truly happy with their work. Due to the fact the child “dance[s] and sing[s]”, people believe nothing is wrong. They ‘dance and sing’ — a metaphor perhaps for play — in an effort to retrieve some joy in life
“No injury” refers to the child calling out to people who think everything is well. He mentions that people think they have done him no harm, despite his misery and despair. | William Blake | The Chimney Sweeper Songs of Experience |
Of infusoria
From Pharoah's tombstones
Lead
To mercurial doomsdays
Odious oasis
In furrowed phosphorous---
The eye-white sky-light
White-light district
Of lunar lusts
---Stellectric signs
"Wing shows on Starway"
"Zodiac carrousel" | Cyclones | Of ecstatic dust
And ashes whirl
Crusaders | Could refer to a dance in which people are dancing wildly and seductively (thanks to the “ecstatic dust” of cocaine?). Having a major party like this would also kick up a lot of moon dust.
| Mina Loy | Lunar Baedeker |
I wandered lonely as a Cloud | That floats on high o'er vales and Hills, | When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host of golden Daffodils;
Along the lake, beneath the trees, | This is referring to hills and valleys, good and bad times in life. Basically hes saying hes going through life alone and experiencing both good and bad times. | William Wordsworth | I Wandered Lonely As a Cloud |
null | Helen, thy beauty is to me | Like those Nicean barks of yore
That gently, o'er a perfum'd sea,
The weary, way-worn wanderer bore | An allusion to Helen of Troy who in mythology is said to have been one of the most beautiful woman who ever lived. So beautiful, in fact, that according to many Greek writer–such as Homer, Herodotus, and Virgil–is believed to have been the cause the Trojan War.
While it is likely this poem was in response to Sarah Helen Whitman, who previously had written a poem to Poe entitled “To Edgar Allan Poe”, it is equally possible Poe was writing about Jane Stanard, the mother of one of Poe’s childhood friends, who died of brain cancer. Before dying, she became deranged, which Poe observed first hand at the age of 14. Mrs. Stanard was only one of the many tragic deaths Poe encountered in his younger years, of which likely shaped his character as a poet later in life. | Edgar Allan Poe | To Helen |
_Not a plenteous cork-crop: scarcely
Dare we hope oak-galls, I doubt:
What's the Latin name for "parsley''?_
What's the Greek name for Swine's Snout?
III.
Whew! We'll have our platter burnished,
Laid with care on our own shelf!
With a fire-new spoon we're furnished,
And a goblet for ourself,
Rinsed like something sacrificial
Ere 'tis fit to touch our chaps—
Marked with L. for our initial! | (He-he! There his lily snaps!) | IV.
Saint, forsooth! While brown Dolores
Squats outside the Convent bank | A minor mishap — the broken lily — provokes a petty, childish, vindictive response. The speaker is clearly more sinful than Brother Lawrence. | Robert Browning | Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister |
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, | Are the flowers artificial? Is this a late (springtime) snowfall? The close pairing of winter and springtime elements (snow and flowers) is made stranger, “crazier,” by the lack of context. | Louis MacNeice | Snow |
And a man said, "Speak to us of Self-Knowledge."
And he answered, saying:
Your hearts know in silence the secrets of the days and the nights.
But your ears thirst for the sound of your heart's knowledge.
You would know in words that which you have always know in thought.
You would touch with your fingers the naked body of your dreams.
And it is well you should.
The hidden well-spring of your soul must needs rise and run murmuring to the sea;
And the treasure of your infinite depths would be revealed to your eyes. | But let there be no scales to weigh your unknown treasure; | And seek not the depths of your knowledge with staff or sounding line.
For self is a sea boundless and measureless.
Say not, "I have found the truth," but rather, "I have found a truth." | The type of wisdom that Gibran is referring to, is of unmeasurable quality. Most individuals who are experiencing self-knowledge and the inner peace that can be found with that realization, have truly found a treasure which is so deeply personal, it is a treasure to behold, not weighed. No earthly scales exist because self-knowledge is so deeply personal and relevant, the value comes only from the individual who sees it within.
| Kahlil Gibran | On Self-Knowledge |
There is a charge
For the eyeing of my scars, there is a charge
For the hearing of my heart--
It really goes.
And there is a charge, a very large charge
For a word or a touch
Or a bit of blood
Or a piece of my hair or my clothes.
So, so, Herr Doktor.
So, Herr Enemy.
I am your opus,
I am your valuable, | The pure gold baby | That melts to a shriek.
I turn and burn.
Do not think I underestimate your great concern. | Fairy gold in ancient superstitious lore was unstable and often melted to nothing.
The ‘gold baby’ may be a reference to the income that is derived from a successful artistic composition, in other words, herself. Note that artists often refer to successful work as their ‘baby.’
This is reminiscent of a simile in Morning Song, where the baby is compared to a ‘fat gold watch’. | Sylvia Plath | Lady Lazarus |
Round the cape of a sudden came the sea, | And the sun looked over the mountain's rim: | And straight was a path of gold for him,
And the need of a world of men for me. |
The personified sun emerges over the mountain, much as a human might awaken and peer out from sleep. There is a sense of romance and mystery.
Note that three lines begin with “And”, a device known as anaphora , creating pace and a sense of eagerness. | Robert Browning | Parting at Morning |
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 | For the ladies: don’t get any wrong ideas, you know what kind of man I am. Also reminds of Exodus 3:14, in which God speaks through a burning bush and says: ‘I am that I am.’, which might not be coincidence, for Cohen often uses Biblical allusions. | Leonard Cohen | You Know Who I Am |
All summer long she touched me
She gathered in my soul
From many a thorn, from many thickets
Her fingers like a weaver's
Quick and cool | And the light came from her body | And the night went through her grace
All summer long she touched me
And I knew her, I knew her | One of the many devotional titles of the Virgin Mary is Our Lady of Light. | Leonard Cohen | Our Lady of Solitude |
your father's pain as he sells his stock
and another dream goes
And though you're poor it isn't poverty that
concerns you
and though they fought a lot
it isn't your father's drinking that makes any difference
but only that everybody is together and you
and your sister have happy birthdays and very good
Christmases
and I really hope no white person ever has cause
to write about me
because they never understand | Black love is Black wealth and they'll
probably talk about my hard childhood | and never understand that
all the while I was quite happy | Metaphor.The narrator’s racial love is wealth. They were very rich, fortunate and pure. No love compares to black love. The main thing people would focus on is the rough times the narrator went through.
In many Black communities, community and unity and love are all important cultural values. In the preceding line, the narrator speaks of how “they” never understand and it seems that the “they” that he/she is referring to are Whites. She emphasizes that love does not seem to carry the same weight in the White community as it does in that of African Americans. | Nikki Giovanni | Nikki-Rosa |
Not at the centre, the centre of the world
When I am on a pedestal
You did not raise me there
Your laws do not compel me
To kneel grotesque and bare
I myself am the pedestal
For this ugly hump at which you stare
You who wish to conquer pain
You must learn what makes me kind;
The crumbs of love that you offer me
They're the crumbs I've left behind
Your pain is no credential here | It's just the shadow, shadow of my wound | I have begun to long for you
I who have no greed
I have begun to ask for you | In the medieval epic poem Perceval the wound of the grail or fisher king can only heal when a son-like figure (here Perceval) asks for his pain . The whole song can be read as an attempt to convince a reluctant part of one soul to get interested in the pain and wound that has been ignored for par too long. | Leonard Cohen | Avalanche |
Tell all the Truth but tell it slant -- | Success in Circuit lies | Too bright for our infirm Delight
The Truth's superb surprise
As Lightning to the Children eased | “Success in circuit lies” suggests circumlocution in relation to the truth rather than telling it directly.
This could be positive or negative. A politician may tell a version of the truth that is to his political advantage. A mother, however, may simplify an issue for a small child, appropriate for their age. | Emily Dickinson | Tell All the Truth But Tell it Slant |
Cancel things; pretend all's well,
Admit it's not. Learn to conjugate all the genres of misery:
Tears, torpor, boredom, lassitude, yearnings
For a simpler illness, like a broken leg.
Enduring ceremonial delays. Being referred
Somewhere else. Consultant's holiday. Saying Thank you,
For anything to everyone
Not the star part.
And who would want it? I jettison the spear,
The servant's try, the terrible drone of Chorus:
Yet to my thinking this act was ill advised
It would have been better to die*. No it wouldn't! | I am here to make you believe in life. | *Chorus: from Oedipus Rex, trans. EF Watling | The final line seems inevitable. ‘I am here to make you believe in life’ is a powerful statement of human desire to live. The terse imperative, after all the other imperatives, especially in stanza four, provides a moving and dramatic, ironic conclusion. This command is not to herself, but by the speaker to the reader. | U. A. Fanthorpe | A Minor Role |
To produce my foot, my each feather:
Now I hold Creation in my foot
Or fly up, and revolve it all slowly -
I kill where I please because it is all mine.
There is no sophistry in my body:
My manners are tearing off heads -
The allotment of death.
For the one path of my flight is direct
Through the bones of the living.
No arguments assert my right:
The sun is behind me.
Nothing has changed since I began. | My eye has permitted no change. | I am going to keep things like this. | The hawk thinks that its eye (or I) is only thing that could authorize change. But: “I am going to keep things like this” is convenient for its delusions about itself. Nothing changes, which is what it intends. Note that hawks have exceptional eyesight.
It refers to its ‘eye’ and not its ‘mind’, as if its control relates to what it sees, presumably prey, rather than logical thought processes. This brings to mind a dictator who sees and commands, and is so accustomed to power that he doesn’t have to think through the consequences. | Ted Hughes | Hawk Roosting |
Over the eastern steeps,
And the rustling birds of dawn
The earth do scorn.
Lo! to the vault
Of paved heaven,
With sorrow fraught
My notes are driven:
They strike the ear of night,
Make weep the eyes of day;
They make mad the roaring winds,
And with tempests play.
Like a fiend in a cloud | With howling woe, | After night I do croud,
And with night will go;
I turn my back to the east, | With howling voice,
He invokes images of a mad man screaming in a completely benign environment.
| William Blake | Mad Song |
All mixed with dimes and
Dollars and clean spittoons
And house rent to pay.
Hey, boy!
A bright bowl of brass is beautiful to the Lord.
Bright polished brass like the cymbals
Of King David's dancers,
Like the wine cups of Solomon.
Hey, boy!
A clean spittoon on the altar of the Lord.
A clean bright spittoon all newly polished—
At least I can offer that. | Com'mere, boy! | null | By this point, the boy has been run ragged, being called here and there to do different tasks. | Langston Hughes | Brass Spittoons |
Counting bells knelling classes to a close.
At two o'clock our neighbours drove me home.
In the porch I met my father crying -
He had always taken funerals in his stride -
And Big Jim Evans saying it was a hard blow.
The baby cooed and laughed and rocked the pram
When I came in, and I was embarrassed
By old men standing up to shake my hand
And tell me they were "sorry for my trouble."
Whispers informed strangers I was the eldest,
Away at school, as my mother held my hand
In hers and coughed out angry tearless sighs. | At ten o'clock the ambulance arrived | With the corpse, stanched and bandaged by the nurses.
Next morning I went up into the room. Snowdrops
And candles soothed the bedside; I saw him | Eight hours have passed. Heaney doesn’t say this, other than to state the time. The bare minimum of factual information given maximises the emotional impact. | Seamus Heaney | Mid-Term Break |
I felt a Funeral, in my Brain,
And Mourners to and fro
Kept treading − treading − till it seemed
That Sense was breaking through −
And when they all were seated,
A Service, like a Drum −
Kept beating − beating − till I thought
My Mind was going numb −
And then I heard them lift a Box
And creak across my Soul
With those same Boots of Lead, again,
Then Space − began to toll, | As all the Heavens were a Bell,
And Being, but an Ear,
And I, and Silence, some strange Race
Wrecked, solitary, here − | And then a Plank in Reason, broke,
And I dropped down, and down −
And hit a World, at every plunge, | The speaker of the poem perceives the “Heavens” as a “Bell”, making it worthy of melodic tunes and expression. Here, Dickinson condenses the vastness and ultimate spiritual power of “Heaven” into a single instrument, subtly venerating its importance and holiness.
At the same time, the speaker becomes an “Ear,” emphasizing its passivity. Dickinson employs a metaphor in which the speaker listens in on the almighty wisdom and judgment of the Heavens and God. When mourning and grieving, many individuals find themselves looking towards their faith, and other non-religious people suddenly turn towards God, hoping to justify death.
By claiming the position of an “ear,” the speaker does not show any signs of refusal, ultimately revealing the desperation and overpowering urge to find closure.
| Emily Dickinson | 280 |
Students are more modest
Needing to leave only their splayed footprints
Along the shore of the page.
One scrawls "Metaphor" next to a stanza of Eliot's.
Another notes the presence of "Irony"
Fifty times outside the paragraphs of A Modest Proposal.
Or they are fans who cheer from the empty bleachers,
Hands cupped around their mouths.
"Absolutely," they shout
To Duns Scotus and James Baldwin.
"Yes." "Bull's-eye." "My man!"
Check marks, asterisks, and exclamation points | Rain down along the sidelines. | And if you have managed to graduate from college
Without ever having written "Man vs. Nature"
In a margin, perhaps now | The sidelines here a metaphor for the margin of the page and continue the sports analogy begun in the opening lines of the stanza. | Billy Collins | Marginalia |
Come with soft rounded cheeks and eyes as bright
As sunlight on a stream;
Come back in tears,
O memory, hope, love of finished years.
O dream how sweet, too sweet, too bitter sweet,
Whose wakening should have been in Paradise,
Where souls brimful of love abide and meet;
Where thirsting longing eyes
Watch the slow door
That opening, letting in, lets out no more.
Yet come to me in dreams, that I may live
My very life again though cold in death: | Come back to me in dreams, that I may give | Pulse for pulse, breath for breath:
Speak low, lean low,
As long ago, my love, how long ago! | The refrain ‘Come back’ is repeated once more, as is the reference to dreams. It is the final plea for his return before the dramatic climax. | Christina Rossetti | Echo |
Of wars, wars, wars.
But the name of the town is common.
My Polack friend
Says there are a dozen or two.
So I never could tell where you
Put your foot, your root.
I never could talk to you.
The tongue stuck in my jaw.
It stuck in a barb wire snare.
Ich, ich, ich, ich.
I could hardly speak.
I thought every German was you. | And the language obscene, | An engine, an engine
Chuffing me off like a Jew,
A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen. | Possibly a self-critique of Plath’s own use of pretentious words prior to learning to control her poetry better. Possibly Plath’s father has tainted the German language for her. | Sylvia Plath | Daddy |
Over the river, and through the wood,
To grandfather's house we go;
The horse knows the way
To carry the sleigh
Through the white and drifted snow.
Over the river, and through the wood—
Oh, how the wind does blow!
It stings the toes
And bites the nose
As over the ground we go.
Over the river, and through the wood, | To have a first-rate play. | Hear the bells ring
"Ting-a-ling-ding",
Hurrah for Thanksgiving Day! | An amateur play, staged by family and/or neighbors, will be part of the evening’s entertainment. | Lydia Maria Child | A Boys Thanksgiving Day Over the river and through the wood |
Call the roller of big cigars,
The muscular one, and bid him whip
In kitchen cups concupiscent curds.
Let the wenches dawdle in such dress
As they are used to wear, and let the boys
Bring flowers in last month's newspapers.
Let be be finale of seem. | The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream. | Take from the dresser of deal,
Lacking the three glass knobs, that sheet
On which she embroidered fantails once, | Suggests that there’s no God per se, certainly none awaiting us after death: that the only governing spirit in the world is the spirit of hedonism and sensual pleasure that pervades life. Or, as critic Helen Vendler put it :
What remains after death, in the cold light of reality, is life – all of that life, with its coarse muscularity and crude hunger and greedy concupiscence, that is going on in the kitchen. The only god of this world is the cold god of persistent life and appetite.
Another possible reading: The only constant is the constant of change. Ice cream represents impermanence, the transformation from one state to the another through death. It’s also a physical reminder of the funeral that has stopped the woman’s life and the daily routines of all these people. Today, they’ve become mourners and partakers of the concupiscent eucharist of ice cream.
Yet another possible reading: “ice-cream” as a concept unites the two stanzas and is a way to draw a compass around the experiences both of life (i.e. “cream” and its reflection in the first stanza) and of death (i.e. “ice” and its reflection in this one). | Wallace Stevens | The Emperor of Ice Cream |
What does Webster's say about soul?
I say you silly chipe motherfucker, your great grandfather
Tied a ball and chain to my balls
And bounced me through a cotton field
While I lived in an unflushable toilet bowl
And now you want me to help you overthrow what?
The only Truth that can be delivered to a four year
Revolutionary with a whole card i.e. skin is this:
Fuck up what you can in the name of
Piggy Wallace, Dickless Nixon, and Spiro Agnew
Leave brother Cleaver and Brother Malcolm alone please
After all is said and done build a new route to China if they'll have you | Who will survive in America? | null | Qui survivra en Amérique? Qui survivra en Amérique? Qui survivra en Amérique? Qui survivra en Amérique?
Cette dernière ligne répétée comme le présage apocalyptique d'un prêcheur de rue, est une référence à un poème d' Amiri Baraka , Who Will Survive America , un intellectuel écrivain afro-américain.
GSH annonce peut-être une grande émeute nationale des noirs à laquelle peu réchapperont, telle celle décrite par James Baldwin dans son livre Fire Next Time . | Gil Scott-Heron | Comment 1 Version Française |
I looked in my heart while the wild swans went over. | And what did I see I had not seen before? | Only a question less or a question more;
Nothing to match the flight of wild birds flying.
Tiresome heart, forever living and dying, | A rhetorical question for which there is no answer, and will encapsulate what will follow. She is seeking something beyond the mundane, everyday routine.
The speaker repeats the idea of scrutiny — in two lines she uses ‘looked’, ‘see’ and ‘seen’. | Edna St. Vincent Millay | Wild Swans |
Knew its destination.
In the quarter of the negroes
Ornette and consternation
Claim attention from the papers
That have no news that day of Moscow.
In the pot behind the
Paper doors what's cooking?
What's smelling, Leontyne?
Lieder, lovely Lieder
And a leaf of collard green,
Lovely Lieder Leontyne.
In the shadow of the negroes | Nkrumah | In the shadow of the negroes
Nasser Nasser
In the shadow of the negroes | Kwame Nkrumah was a independence activist from Ghana and became the countries first president in 1960.
| Langston Hughes | Cultural Exchange |
One face looks out from all his canvasses,
One selfsame figure sits or walks or leans;
We found her hidden just behind those screens,
That mirror gave back all her loveliness.
A queen in opal or in ruby dress,
A nameless girl in freshest summer greens,
A saint, an angel;— every canvass means
The same one meaning, neither more nor less.
He feeds upon her face by day and night,
And she with true kind eyes looks back on him
Fair as the moon and joyfull as the light;
Not wan with waiting, not with sorrow dim; | Not as she is, but was when hope shone bright; | Not as she is, but as she fills his dream. | That the canvass doesn’t represent what a normal girl looks like, but what a man hopes his ideal girl looks like. | Christina Rossetti | In An Artists Studio |
I'm guided by the beauty of our weapons
First we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin
I'd really like to live beside you, baby
I love your body and your spirit and your clothes
But you see that line there moving through the station?
I told you, I told you, told you, I was one of those
Ah you loved me as a loser, but now you're worried that I just might win
You know the way to stop me, but you don't have the discipline
How many nights I prayed for this, to let my work begin
First we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin
I don't like your fashion business, mister
And I don't like these drugs that keep you thin | I don't like what happened to my sister | First we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin
I'd really like to live beside you, baby
I love your body and your spirit and your clothes | This line might refer to the objectification of women by the fashion industry and more generally by unrealistic standards of beauty. Cohen did have an older sister, Esther, but rather than a literal sister, he might be referring the woman he was dating at the time, fashion photographer Dominique Isermann . | Leonard Cohen | First We Take Manhattan |
skunks in a subtle manner
or by drowning himself in the watertank
but somebody who'd given my Uncle Sol a Victor
Victrola and records while he lived presented to
him upon the auspicious occasion of his decease a
scruptious not to mention splendiferous funeral with
tall boys in black gloves and flowers and everything and
i remember we all cried like the Missouri
when my Uncle Sol's coffin lurched because
somebody pressed a button
(and down went
my Uncle | Sol | and started a worm farm) | What is unique about this poem is that almost every stanza,except for the last one starts with the uncle’s name “Sol”. This suggests that the speaker wanted to add emphasis on Sol’s failures.
If a stanza does not start with Sol’s name it is in lower case. This attribute is quite unusual to the poem since with the exception of lacking punctuation, all the other words seem to be used and written in a grammatically accurate manner. | E. E. Cummings | Nobody Looses All The Time |
Sonnet LXXV from Amoretti | One day I wrote her name upon the strand,
But came the waves and washed it away:
Again I wrote it with a second hand,
But came the tide and made my pains his prey. | Vain man (said she) that dost in vain assay
A mortal thing so to immortalize;
For I myself shall like to this decay, | He’s writing the name of his love in the sand but the ocean keeps washing it away. His second attempt, as futile as it may be, shows how relentless he is in trying to create something that’ll live forever. That’s what he’s doing with his poetry. | Edmund Spenser | One Day I Wrote Her Name upon the Strand |
MAECENAS, you, beneath the myrtle shade,
Read o'er what poets sung, and shepherds play'd.
What felt those poets but you feel the same?
Does not your soul possess the sacred flame?
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. | Homer, the epic poet of ancient Greece, was blind and most likely unable to paint, however this could mean that Homer was so skilled with his words that he could “paint” an image with his vernacular.
| Phillis Wheatley | To Maecenas |
One by one they appear in
the darkness: a few friends, and
a few with historical
names. How late they start to shine!
but before they fade they stand
perfectly embodied, all
the past lapping them like a
cloak of chaos. They were men
who, I thought, lived only to
renew the wasteful force they
spent with each hot convulsion. | They remind me, distant now. | True, they are not at rest yet,
but now that they are indeed
apart, winnowed from failures, | His friends lives and ideas are remembered, yet they are distant because Gunn is trying to show how you need to eventually let go and forget eventually. A good allusion is the story of Kip. Our class is going to be the last class that was in direct interaction with him. Therefor after we graduate he won’t be forgotten yet there will be a period of letting go and acceptance of moving forward.
| Thom Gunn | My Sad Captains |
XXX
Others, I am not the first, | Have willed more mischief than they durst: | If in the breathless night I too
Shiver now, 'tis nothing new.
| That is: have spent more time desiring crimes than committing them | A. E. Housman | Others I am not the first |
And did those feet in ancient time
Walk upon England's mountains green?
And was the holy Lamb of God | On England's pleasant pastures seen? | And did the Countenance Divine
Shine forth upon our clouded hills?
And was Jerusalem builded here | This is an idealised view of England. It is a line repeated at the end of the poem with a variation, a device known as anaphora . | William Blake | And Did Those Feet In Ancient Time |
And in Alabama in '85
A Negro was lucky
To be alive.
But Booker T.
Was nobody's fool:
You may carve a dream
With an humble tool.
The tallest tower
Can tumble down
If it be not rooted
In solid ground.
So, being a far-seeing | Practical man, | He said, Train your head,
Your heart, and your hand.
Your fate is here | Repetition.
By reiterating that Booker T. is a “practical” man Hughes is trying to make the point that Booker T. is “realistic and sensible” . Thus, he paints Booker T Washington with a more generous brush and sees him as not a sellout, but rather a clever man planning ahead. | Langston Hughes | Ballad of Booker T. |
I wander thro' each charter'd street,
Near where the chartered Thames does flow.
And mark in every face I meet
Marks of weakness, marks of woe.
In every cry of every man,
In every Infant's cry of fear,
In every voice: in every ban,
The mind-forged manacles I hear.
How the Chimney-sweeper's cry
Every blackning church appalls; | And the hapless Soldier's sigh | Runs in blood down Palace walls.
But most thro' midnight streets I hear
How the youthful Harlot's curse | This line, along with the one immediately after it, refers to the way events are controlled by outside forces. The “hapless” soldier’s sigh “run[ning] in blood” down the enclosures of power–metaphorically staining the palace’s pristine walls–could speak to Blake’s understanding of the futility of existence, the destructive stupidity of war, or the fact that soldiers who die while following orders have literally given control of their life to their country, and thus lack agency over their fates.
Note the alliterative repetition of ‘a’s and 'p’s in 'appalls’ and ‘hapless’, which give unity to the stanza. Also the plosive ‘b’s and 'p’s in 'blackening’ and ‘blood’, and ‘Palace’, ‘appalls’ and again ‘hapless’ express the anger and despair of the speaker. The sibilant ’s’s imitate the sound of sighing.
To reinforce the speaker’s synaesthesia — whose ‘mind-forged manacles’ sees the worst in everything around him (an unfortunate condition of Experience) and causes him to have his aural experience manifest itself in horrible sights (literally seeing sounds) — Blake has made an acrostic of this stanza with the first letter of each line spelling ‘H E A R’. The speaker is overwhelmed by the suffering that marks his perception as much as it marks the hapless victims of an Industrial Empire.
Although Blake had an encounter with a drunken soldier invading his property in 1803, who is named in Blake’s later prophetic works (and a reversed image from this plate of the old man and child appear in Plate 84 of ‘Jerusalem’), our sympathy here in London is with the soldier as a victim of the state.
There is also irony in the returned Soldier who sheds blood to protect a system that keeps him in such terrible conditions, so he is indeed ‘hapless’. Simon Armitage arguably provides a contemporary echo of this soldier’s sigh in the poem Remains . | William Blake | London |
"I'd like to tell my story,"
Said one of them so young and bold
"I'd like to tell my story
Before I turn into gold."
But no one really could hear him
The night so dark and thick and green;
Well I guess that these heroes must always live there
Where you and I have only been
Put out your cigarette, my love
You've been alone too long;
And some of us are so very hungry now
To hear what it is you've done that was so wrong | I sing this for the crickets | I sing this for the army
I sing this for your children
And for all who do not need me | Crickets live in Vietnam where they were eaten by the famished Viet Cong soldiers but they also live in Greece where Cohen lived and which was the stage to a military coup in 1967 although this was not followed by widespread military action. | Leonard Cohen | A Bunch of Lonesome Heroes |
The wind on Crow Hill was her darling.
His fierce, high tide in her ear was her secret.
But his kiss was fatal.
Through her dark Paradise ran
The stream she loved too well
That bit her breast.
The shaggy sodden king of that kingdom
Followed through the wall
And lay on her love-sick bed. | The curlew trod her womb. | The stone swelled under her heart.
Her death is a baby-cry on the moor. | The curlew is a bird of northern climate with a distinctive cry. One myth is that it represents souls waiting to be born. Cathy dies in childbirth. Emily had no children but “gave birth” to one of the greatest novels in the English language.
The idea that the bird “trod” her womb is violent and disturbing.
| Ted Hughes | Emily Brontë |
Many men have loved the bells
You fastened to the rein
And everyone who wanted you
They found what they will always want again
Your beauty lost to you yourself
Just as it was lost to them
Oh take this longing from my tongue
Whatever useless things these hands have done
Let me see your beauty broken down | Like you would do for one you love | Your body like a searchlight
My poverty revealed
I would like to try your charity | He asks to imitate a gesture for an object of love, to show him her beauty in a way only a beloved might see it, clarifying that he knows the one he addresses is not in love with him, and he wants her anyways. | Leonard Cohen | Take This Longing |
To welcome the spring
The skylark and thrush
The birds of the bush
Sing louder around
To the bell's cheerful sound
While our sports shall be seen
On the Ecchoing Green
Old John with white hair
Does laugh away care
Sitting under the oak
Among the old folk
They laugh at our play | And soon they all say | "Such, such were the joys
When we all, girls and boys
In our youth time were seen | This might be a reference to garrulous old age; but here they comment positively, not with envy or disapproval. | William Blake | The Echoing Green |
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 | Who in these realms of love, who by something blunt
And who by avalanche, who by powder
Who for his greed, who for his hunger | The barbiturate refers to suicide by a sleeping pill overdose. The dead woman in her lonely slip maybe refers to female suicides like Nancy in “Seems So Long Ago, Nancy” . | Leonard Cohen | Who by Fire |
I have come to the borders of sleep,
The unfathomable deep
Forest where all must lose
Their way, however straight,
Or winding, soon or late; | They cannot choose. | Many a road and track
That, since the dawn's first crack,
Up to the forest brink, | They “cannot choose” is a statement of inevitability. At this stage the speaker, initially using the pronoun “I” doesn’t seem to identify with the third person plural “They”. | Edward Thomas | Lights Out |
If yu give I a chance
I can teach yu of Timbuktu
I can do more dan dance
I am not de problem
I greet yu wid a smile
Yu put me in a pigeon hole
But i am versatile
These conditions may affect me
As I get older,
An I am positively sure
I have no chips on my shoulders,
Black is not de problem | Mother country get it right | An juss fe de record,
Sum of me best friends are white. | There is a long tradition in former colonies that Britain was the ‘mother country’. This attitude has long been consigned to history. the poet is using the expression with wry humour. | Benjamin Zephaniah | No problem |
"Nature" is what we see
The Hill—the Afternoon
Squirrel—Eclipse—the Bumble bee
Nay—Nature is Heaven | Nature is what we hear | The Bobolink—the Sea
Thunder—the Cricket
Nay—Nature is Harmony | Dickinson moves on to an aural definition of Nature. Note this echoes the opening line and is echoed by the closing line. This is an example of anaphora and also syntactic parallelism . | Emily Dickinson | Nature is what we see— |
Out of the tomb, we bring Badroulbadour,
Within our bellies, we her chariot. | Here is an eye. And here are, one by one,
The lashes of that eye and its white lid.
Here is the cheek on which that lid declined,
And, finger after finger, here, the hand,
The genius of that cheek. Here are the lips,
The bundle of the body and the feet. | Out of the tomb we bring Badroulbadour. | The worms' procession is described in great detail, worm by worm, body part by body part, to better convey the gruesomeness of the image.
At the same time, however, the slowness forces us to contemplate the scene on a more “literary” level: the tragedy of such beauty in life eroding by such terrific means in death.
That so much time is spent describing their proceedings better conveys the horror, as well as the indignity, of death, as contrasted with Badroulbadour’s exalted position in life.
| Wallace Stevens | The Worms at Heavens Gate |
Fantastic grow the evening gowns;
Agents of the Fisc pursue
Absconding tax-defaulters through
The sewers of provincial towns.
Private rites of magic send
The temple prostitutes to sleep;
All the literati keep
An imaginary friend.
Cerebrotonic Cato may
Extol the Ancient Disciplines,
But the muscle-bound Marines
Mutiny for food and pay. | Caesar's double-bed is warm | As an unimportant clerk
Writes I DO NOT LIKE MY WORK
On a pink official form. | This has the obvious connotation that Caesar is more concerned with sex than governing. More than that, it suggests a general air of laziness. Even if he’s alone, this Caesar would probably rather stay snoozing than get out and do his job. | W. H. Auden | The Fall of Rome |
it will not be simple, it will not be long
it will take little time, it will take all your thought
it will take all your heart, it will take all your breath
it will be short, it will not be simple
it will touch through your ribs, it will take all your heart
it will not be long, it will occupy your thought
as a city is occupied, as a bed is occupied
it will take all your flesh, it will not be simple | You are coming into us who cannot withstand you
you are coming into us who never wanted to withstand you | you are taking parts of us into places never planned
you are going far away with pieces of our lives
it will be short, it will take all your breath | Psychic distance between the speaker and the addressee becomes closest in these four lines, where the speaker is suddenly shifted from the original narrator to the one being spoken to. The relationship between them is especially confusing at this point – showing a heavy power discrepancy. | Adrienne Rich | Final Notations |
(Prologue to "The Two Poets of Croisic.")
Such a starved bank of moss
Till, that May-morn,
Blue ran the flash across:
Violets were born! | Sky—what a scowl of cloud | Till, near and far,
Ray on ray split the shroud:
Splendid, a star! | This is personification because it is saying that the cloud has a scowl. | Robert Browning | Apparitions |
null | He sang of life, serenely sweet,
With, now and then, a deeper note. | From some high peak, nigh yet remote,
He voiced the world's absorbing beat.
He sang of love when earth was young, | He often spoke about the sweet and beautiful points of life, yet he occasionally threw in some truth–a deep note of reality. That could signify the mix of joy and suffering people will encounter in their lifetime.
| Paul Laurence Dunbar | The Poet |
In a car I'd suspect low tyre pressure.
A sudden swiftness, earth slithers
Off at an angle. The experienced solidly
This is rather a short hop for me
Read Guardians, discuss secretaries,
Business lunches. I crane for the last of dear
I'm doing it just to say I've done it
Familiar England, motorways, reservoir,
Building sites. Nimble tiny-disc, a sun
Tell us when we get to water
Runs up the porthole and vanishes.
Under us the broad meringue kingdom | The next lot of water'll be the Med | Of cumulus, bearing the crinkled tangerine stain
That light spreads on an evening sea at home.
You don't need an overcoat, but | Once more the prosaic statements of the fellow passenger intervenes and the smooth flow of the first speaker’s comment is broken up, juxtaposing the practical with the narrator’s sense of awe. | U. A. Fanthorpe | First Flight |
II
Say even that this complete simplicity
Stripped one of all one's torments, concealed
The evilly compounded, vital I
And made it fresh in a world of white,
A world of clear water, brilliant-edged,
Still one would want more, one would need more,
More than a world of white and snowy scents.
III
There would still remain the never-resting mind,
So that one would want to escape, come back
To what had been so long composed. | The imperfect is our paradise. | Note that, in this bitterness, delight,
Since the imperfect is so hot in us,
Lies in flawed words and stubborn sounds. | This is a central theme of Stevens' post-Nietzschean radical humanism; see also “Sunday Morning” where the poet insists:
Death is the mother of beauty, mystical, Within whose burning bosom we devise Our earthly mothers waiting, sleeplessly.
For Stevens the “perfect” (embodied for him by sculptures) is that which is static, staid, and dead. Without the pressures of change (“death”), life is as frozen and cold as the bowl described in the poem. | Wallace Stevens | The Poems of Our Climate |
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