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[Published by Garnett, "Relics of Shelley", 1862.]
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Dear home, thou scene of earliest hopes and joys,
The least of which wronged Memory ever makes
Bitterer than all thine unremembered tears.
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***
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As Thomas Wolfe said, “you can’t go back home”, and seems to apply to Shelley in this poem. He’s been hurt so bad everywhere else besides his childhood home, that it seems tragic to him to remember the good times he had there.
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Percy Bysshe Shelley
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Fragment: Home
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You love us when we're heroes, home on leave,
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Or wounded in a mentionable place.
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You worship decorations; you believe
That chivalry redeems the war's disgrace.
You make us shells. You listen with delight,
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Women love the idea of an injured soldier, he has been through a trauma protecting them. This line also seems to be a dig at women who may have been horrified or unbecoming to men who were injured in especially undesirable ways. The line suggests those with traumatic injuries were stigmatized for their image- perhaps an important part of the image of the glorified soldier necessitates one remains handsome.
|
Siegfried Sassoon
|
Glory of Women
|
null |
When the green woods laugh with the voice of joy
|
And the dimpling stream runs laughing by
When the air does laugh with our merry wit
And the green hill laughs with the noise of it
|
William Blake opens the poem with words that echo teh Old Testament book Jeremiah 33:11 :
“ the voice of joy and the voice of gladness, the voice of the bridegroom and the voice of the bride, the voice of those who say, "Give thanks to the LORD of hosts, For the LORD is good, For His lovingkindness is everlasting ”
This establishes the theme of the poem, in which Blake or the speaker and the anthropomorphised environment revel in joy that closeness to nature can bring.
|
William Blake
|
Laughing Song
|
My goodness, Central
That was then!
I'm mad and disgusted
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
|
She is saying that Roscoe (the man who called her collect) should have known better than to do that. He knew it would cost her, yet he did it anyway.
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Langston Hughes
|
Madam and the Phone Bill
|
I heard two sisters reason on
Things that are past and things to come.
One Flesh was call'd, who had her eye
On worldly wealth and vanity;
The other Spirit, who did rear
Her thoughts unto a higher sphere.
"Sister," quoth Flesh, "what liv'st thou on
Nothing but Meditation?
Doth Contemplation feed thee so
Regardlessly to let earth go?
Can Speculation satisfy
Notion without Reality?
|
Dost dream of things beyond the Moon
And dost thou hope to dwell there soon?
|
Hast treasures there laid up in store
That all in th' world thou count'st but poor?
Art fancy-sick or turn'd a Sot
|
The questioning nature of the Flesh represents the struggle of puritan Christianity between worldly and spiritual satisfaction. In many ways this is an internal struggle for Bradstreet as well. Poetry as a genre is concerned romantically with worldly ideas such as dreaming, love, and aesthetic beauty which the Puritans would deem irrelevant compared to their hope for an afterlife. But ironically throughout this poem the spiritual world can only be explained through physical poetic metaphor. For example “dream of things beyond the moon” or daydreaming is a secular idea of letting one’s mind wander creatively which would be problematic for the Puritan faith. This struggle between Bradstreet’s life as a daydreaming poet and a spiritualist represents a potential debate about fitting into the history of poetry before her while remaining true to her own faith.
I believe that “Dost dream of things beyond the moon,” may also represent (also keeping the scientific knowledge of the time period) where one would literally believe heaven to be. A belief that heaven was “up” beyond the physical plane. I think this is corroborated by the following line, “And dost thou hope to dwell there soon?” I believe the Puritan concept of heaven to be literal, rather than to reach an enlightened place of creativity.
Here is a theatrical portrayal of Anne Bradstreet, I found on YouTube:
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Anne Bradstreet
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Flesh and the Spirit The
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For John Callahan
|
Those four black girls blown up
in that Alabama church
|
remind me of five hundred
middle passage blacks,
in a net, under water
|
The poem starts with an actual event where a church was blown up and four young black girls were killed. The event was covered but then forgotten. Harper uses it as a trigger to allow him to “remember” other incidents in American History.
|
Michael S. Harper
|
American History
|
Law 32. Play To People's Fantasies
Law 33. Discover Each Man's Thumbscrew
Law 34. Be Royal In Your Own Fashion: Act Like A King To Be Treated like One
Law 35. Master The Art Of Timing
Law 36. Disdain Things You Cannot Have: Ignoring Them Is The Best Revenge
Law 37. Create Compelling Spectacles
Law 38. Disdain Things You Cannot Have: Ignoring Them Is The Best Revenge
Law 39. Stir Up Waters To Catch Fish
Law 40. Despise The Free Lunch
Law 41. Avoid Stepping Into A Great Man's Shoes
Law 42. Strike The Shepherd And The Sheep Will Scatter
Law 43. Work On The Hearts And Minds Of Others
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Law 44. Disarm And Infuriate With The Mirror Effect
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Law 45. Preach The Need For Change, But Never Reform Too Much At Once
Law 46. Never Appear Too Perfect
Law 47. Do Not Go Past The Mark You Aimed For; In Victory, Learn When To Stop
|
“The mirror reflects reality, but it is also the perfect tool for deception: When you mirror your enemies, doing exactly as they do, they cannot figure out your strategy. The Mirror Effect mocks and humiliates them, making them overreact. By holding up a mirror to their psyches, you seduce them with the illusion that you share their values; by holding up a mirror to their actions, you teach them a lesson. Few can resist the power of Mirror Effect.” - Robert Greene
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Robert Greene
|
48 Laws of Power
|
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
Some of us see our minds like muscles
|
Along with the theme of cultural bias, this line underscores the fact that ethical/moral, doctrinal/ideological, social, and aesthetic values are all social constructs. As the Trilateral Commission briefly discussed in their 1975 report Crisis of Democracy (pg. 34):
And they [teachers] are, even more than other intellectuals, directly confronted with the revolution of human relations that perturbs their traditional mode of social control
This was in regards to modern day “education”. It’s goal is not to foster inquiry and creation nor to internalize those significant treasures of the past, but rather, social control. This was said regarding the rise of mass media (pg. 35):
It has made it impossible to maintain the cultural fragmentation and hierarchy that was necessary to enforce traditional forms of social control…the main impact of these changes, of course, is visibility. The only real event is the event that is reported and seen.
The idea that government control & authority in a democratic state requires some conspiracy is unfounded. This document was readily released to the public; it’s something they rationalize, not something they hide.
|
Saul Williams
|
FCK THE BELIEFS
|
Besides the Autumn poets sing
A few prosaic days
A little this side of the snow
And that side of the Haze -
|
A few incisive mornings -
|
A few Ascetic eves -
Gone - Mr Bryant's "Golden Rod" -
And Mr Thomson's "sheaves."
|
Like the line which follows, this is a adjective which gives the reader pause for thought inserted craftily into a throwaway phrase– “A few mornings”.
Cold mornings = frosted dew
We often here of the cold being “cutting”, but Dickinson heightens the register and deploys the Latinate “incisive”, which derives from “cutting” but has come to mean mental cutting– it’s used to describe particularly intelligent observations. The word deepens this line’s symmetry with the following one.
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Emily Dickinson
|
Besides the Autumn poets sing 131
|
Dust bags in and out
Will not
Let
Me relapse
While the day outside glides by like ticker tape
The night brings violets
Tapestries of eyes
Lights
The soft anonymous
Talkers: 'You all right?'
The starched, inaccessible breast
Dead egg, I lie
|
Whole
|
On a whole world I cannot touch
At the white, tight
Drum of my sleeping couch
|
The contents of an egg that remains whole will necessarily die and shrivel up.
|
Sylvia Plath
|
Paralytic
|
I remember the night
And the Tennessee Waltz
'Cause I know just how much I have lost
Yes, I lost my little darling
The night they were playing
That beautiful Tennessee Waltz
I remember the night
And the Tennessee Waltz
'Cause I know just how much I have lost
Yes, I lost my little darling
The night they were playin'
That beautiful Tennessee Waltz
|
She goes dancin' through the darkness
|
To the Tennessee Waltz
And I feel like I'm falling apart
And it's stronger than drink
|
Cohen played this song many times during his 1985 tour. On the 2nd of February, in Birmingham, he introduced it saying:
Friends, I’d like to sing a song that I didn’t write. It’s an old song, it’s a beautiful song. I wrote a couple extra words to it. And it’s a song that I loved all the time I was growing up, and I hope you’ll like it too. It’s called “The Tennessee Waltz.”
These here are the extra verses added by Cohen, much darker than the rest of the song.
|
Leonard Cohen
|
Tennessee Waltz Live
|
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
Need — a keeper — frown?
Pity — the Pard — that left her Asia
|
Memories — of Palm
Cannot be stifled — with Narcotic
Nor suppressed — with Balm
| null |
Narcotic : a durg, mood or behavior-altering agent.
Balm : a fragrant ointment or preparation used to heal skin.
The speaker implies that nothing can soothe or substitute for a lost happiness, even a lost paradise.
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Emily Dickinson
|
Civilization — spurns — the Leopard
|
By sorrow:
She pursues me
Everywhere,
I can't lose her
Anywhere.
Fold me in your black
Abyss,
She will never look
In this,--
Shadows, shadows,
Hug me round
In your solitude
|
Profound.
| null |
Not only are the shadows in solitude, but it is a “profound,” or deep and intense solitude. This reiterates the contradiction in which “shadows” is always expressed as plural. Could the shadows (plural) be representative of the black nation (singular)? This would make sense given the profound solitude that the black nation finds itself in within the greater context of America, isolated from all other citizens.
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Georgia Douglas Johnson
|
Escape
|
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?
Oh vanity of vanities, desire!
|
The second line gives rhythmic balance. She is looking back. At this stage we aren’t sure of whether this is with regret or relief.
|
Christina Rossetti
|
Soeur Louise De La Misericorde
|
Out of the church she followed them
With a lofty step and mien:
His bride was like a village maid,
Maude Clare was like a queen.
"Son Thomas," his lady mother said,
With smiles, almost with tears:
"May Nell and you but live as true
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As we have done for years;
|
"Your father thirty years ago
Had just your tale to tell;
But he was not so pale as you,
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This may indicate hope — or false hope — for the young couple. Does this mean that marriage survives despite a shaky foundation? Or is this long marriage an unhappy one. We don’t know at this stage, but the older woman can see an impending explosion of emotion.
|
Christina Rossetti
|
Maude Clare
|
Oh the sisters of mercy, they are not departed or gone
They were waitin' for me when I thought that I just can't go on
And they brought me their comfort and later they brought me this song
Oh I hope you run into them, you who've been travelling so long
Yes you who must leave everything that you cannot control
It begins with your family, but soon it comes round to your soul
Well I've been where you're hanging, I think I can see how you're pinned:
When you're not feeling holy, your loneliness says that you've sinned
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Well they lay down beside me, I made my confession to them
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They touched both my eyes and I touched the dew on their hem
If your life is a leaf that the seasons tear off and condemn
They will bind you with love that is graceful and green as a stem
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This is the physical stanza. Here he took some poetic freedom, since in his account of that night Leonard Cohen does not describe any sexual activity.
“Confession” continues the theme of the women as nuns, casting them in a chaste and holy rather than lustful light. They are connecting him to the spiritual in a moment when he feels lonely and lost.
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Leonard Cohen
|
Sisters of Mercy
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Say, for what were hop-yards meant,
Or why was Burton built on Trent?
Oh many a peer of England brews
Livelier liquor than the Muse,
And malt does more than Milton can
To justify God's ways to man.
Ale, man, ale's the stuff to drink
For fellows whom it hurts to think:
Look into the pewter pot
To see the world as the world's not.
And faith, 'tis pleasant till 'tis past:
The mischief is that 'twill not last.
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Oh I have been to Ludlow fair
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And left my necktie God knows where,
And carried half-way home, or near,
Pints and quarts of Ludlow beer:
|
See “ The lads in their hundreds to Ludlow come in for the fair .” Ludlow is a Shropshire town near the Welsh border. Houseman here is likely cribbing from the border ballad Weyhill Fair .
|
A. E. Housman
|
Terence this is stupid stuff
|
Had I not been awake I would have missed it,
A wind that rose and whirled until the roof
Pattered with quick leaves off the sycamore
And got me up, the whole of me a-patter,
|
Alive and ticking like an electric fence:
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Had I not been awake I would have missed it
It came and went too unexpectedly
And almost it seemed dangerously,
|
The choice of words adds to the vitality of the poem, with percussive, plosive “t"s in "ticking” and “electric”.
The speaker feels alive with electric charge, and reinforces this with unpredictable spurts of meaning, such as conveyed in stanza two.
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Seamus Heaney
|
Had I not been awake I would have missed it
|
Not every man knows what he shall sing at the end,
Watching the pier as the ship sails away, or what it will seem like
When he's held by the sea's roar, motionless, there at the end,
Or what he shall hope for once it is clear that he'll never go back.
|
When the time has passed to prune the rose or caress the cat,
|
When the sunset torching the lawn and the full moon icing it down
No longer appear, not every man knows what he'll discover instead.
When the weight of the past leans against nothing, and the sky
|
The speaker touches on how death allows no more time to take part in life’s simple actions. There is no more time for “I’ll get around to it.”
In this way, the speaker encourages readers to appreciate small things like gardening or pets. It’s one of the optimistic things about this poem.
|
Mark Strand
|
The End
|
Little Lamb, who made thee?
Dost thou know who made thee?
|
Gave thee life, and bid thee feed
By the stream and o'er the mead;
|
Gave thee clothing of delight
Softest clothing, woolly, bright;
Gave thee such a tender voice
|
Lambs are traditionally seen as followers in need of a shepherd. The specificities within the speaker’s question (which has now been asked three times) imply that the lamb is wholly dependent on some greater power.
The ‘stream’ is a reference to the Christian tradition, in which water symbolises purity and baptism — a commitment to God. Consequently, bidding the lamb to feed by water reflects its purity and innocence.
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William Blake
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The Lamb
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But do not imagine we do not know
Nor that what you hide with such care won't show
At a glance.
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.
|
This line, continuing down to, “…and the scissor man,” was used in the novel “ Watership Down ” by Richard Adams as an epigram to a chapter wherein a horrible truth about a seemingly innocent and peaceful warren is revealed to the primary characters.
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W. H. Auden
|
The Two
|
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,
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So dawn goes down to day.
|
Nothing gold can stay.
|
Sunrise, Sunset
The most spectacular sights can line the horizon, inspiring awe for any and all spectators.
But two things follow:
For the sun to rise, the sun most also set.
People can only appreciate sunrises because of their infrequency. If the sky were always as gorgeous as above, such an image would become ordinary and unspectacular. “Average” and “ordinary” must exist for there to be marvels “above average” and “extraordinary.”
It is because of skies like this…
…that we can so greatly appreciate skies like this:
|
Robert Frost
|
Nothing Gold Can Stay
|
To talk to yourself in—
Just swerving memories
Of hope and fear
So lethally ephemeral—
A girl playing guitar
And horses in the yard.
You wait for the horse
That comes to your gate
With a bullet hole in his forehead.
He doesn't want anything.
He stares at you,
Then wheels and gallops away,
|
Leaving you
|
In the heavy house
You made from life.
A heavy wet snow.
|
It is important throughout this poem that Galvin is talking directly to the reader. This is important because he is emphasizing that this poem is not a story about himself, but something shared in humanity.
|
James Galvin
|
Heaven Is A Heavy House: Axe Drawknife Auger Crosscut Saw
|
When I am out of funds and sorts
And life is all in snarls,
I quit New York and travel east
|
To Boston on the Charles.
|
In Boston, life is smoother far,
It's easier and freer,
Where every boy's a Harvard man
|
The Charles River flows through Boston.
|
E. B. White
|
Boston Is Like No Other Place in the World Only More So
|
null |
If your Nerve, deny you—
Go above your Nerve—
He can lean against the Grave,
If he fear to swerve—
|
That's a steady posture—
Never any bend
Held of those Brass arms—
|
Nerve can be seen to represent the physical human form. Nerves themselves key to the physical sensory experience, Dickinson implores us to be courageous and go beyond our limitations in thought, action, and spirituality.
Dickinson conveys a sarcastic tone when she suggests the man afraid to ‘swerve’ can ‘lean against the Grave’. The grave– a symbol for mortality– makes us questions the purpose of life without the pursuit of a higher experience. The grave is a crutch, the ever present knowledge of death gives man an excuse to be docile.
This poem is a calling to rebel outdated animal instincts for survival alone and achieve a richer human experience.
|
Emily Dickinson
|
If your Nerve deny you 292
|
Huffy Henryhid the day,
unappeasable Henry sulked.
I see his point,—a trying to put things over.
It was the thought that they thought
they could do it made Henry wicked & away.
But he should have come out and talked.
All the world like a woolen lover
once did seem on Henry's side.
Then came a departure.
Thereafter nothing fell out as it might or ought.
I don't see how Henry, pried
open for all the world to see, survived.
|
What he has now to say is a long
wonder the world can bear & be.
|
Once in a sycamore I was glad
all at the top, and I sang.
Hard on the land wears the strong sea
|
These two lines talk in an objective voice. Throught this voice, Berryman introduces a character and sums up the theme.
|
John Berryman
|
Dream Song 1
|
Oh, give us pleasure in the flowers to-day;
And give us not to think so far away
As the uncertain harvest; keep us here
All simply in the springing of the year.
|
Oh, give us pleasure in the orchard white,
Like nothing else by day, like ghosts by night;
|
And make us happy in the happy bees,
The swarm dilating round the perfect trees.
And make us happy in the darting bird
|
Robert Frost spent most of his life in New England and Vermont where apple orchards and others were very plentiful.The apple orchards which Frost speaks, have white apple blosoms that look beautiful and luscious during the day. By night, they appear like white ghosts hauting the very orchards he loves.
|
Robert Frost
|
A Prayer in Spring
|
Morning
And Island man wakes up
To the sound of blue surf
In his head
The steady breaking and wombing
Wild seabirds
And fisherman pulling out to sea
The sun surfacing defiantly
|
From the east
|
Of his small emerald island
He always comes back groggily groggily
Comes back to sands
|
This is because the sun rises in the East and it is a poem about morning. Also, Great Britain is East of the Caribbean across the Atlantic Ocean.
|
Grace Nichols
|
Island Man
|
A drop fell on the apple tree
Another on the roof
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
|
Yet again, we see personification, and yet again, it is used to create a carefree, happy tone. The sun doesn’t simply peek out from behind the clouds, he throws his hat away – almost as if he is at the height of a big number in a musical, getting ready for his solo performance.
|
Emily Dickinson
|
Summer Shower
|
I may be smelly, and I may be old,
Rough in my pebbles, reedy in my pools,
But where my fish float by I bless their swimming
And I like the people to bathe in me, especially women.
But I can drown the fools
Who bathe too close to the weir, contrary to rules.
And they take their time drowning
As I throw them up now and then in a spirit of clowning.
Hi yih, yippity-yap, merrily I flow,
O I may be an old foul river but I have plenty of go.
Once there was a lady who was too bold
She bathed in me by the tall black cliff where the water runs cold,
|
So I brought her down here
|
To be my beautiful dear.
Oh will she stay with me will she stay
This beautiful lady, or will she go away?
|
The famous painting of Ophelia by John Everett Millais shows the character of Ophelia in Hamlet drowned in the river.
|
Stevie Smith
|
The River God
|
And an old Troop-Sergeant muttered, "Let us go to the man who writes
The things on Balaclava the kiddies at school recites."
They went without bands or colours, a regiment ten-file strong,
To look for the Master-singer who had crowned them all in his song;
And, waiting his servant's order, by the garden gate they stayed,
A desolate little cluster, the last of the Light Brigade.
They strove to stand to attention, to straighten the toil-bowed back;
They drilled on an empty stomach, the loose-knit files fell slack;
With stooping of weary shoulders, in garments tattered and frayed,
They shambled into his presence, the last of the Light Brigade.
The old Troop-Sergeant was spokesman, and "Beggin' your pardon," he said,
"You wrote o' the Light Brigade, sir. Here's all that isn't dead.
|
An' it's all come true what you wrote, sir, regardin' the mouth of hell;
|
For we're all of us nigh to the workhouse, an' we thought we'd call an' tell.
"No, thank you, we don't want food, sir; but couldn't you take an' write
A sort of 'to be continued' and 'see next page' o' the fight?
|
Into the mouth of Hell Rode the six hundred.
Explicitly referring to (and affirming) Tennyson’s composition, the implicit critique this poem presents is not so much one of untruthfulness but one of severe limitation. While all described events may have effectively taken place as written, its aftermath—particularly in terms of the poor treatment of the veterans—had gone largely unnoticed.
|
Rudyard Kipling
|
The Last of the Light Brigade
|
Man I love
but won't let you devour
even tho'
I'm all watermelon
and starapple and plum
when you touch me
even tho
I'm all seamoss and jellyfish
and tongue
|
Come
|
leh we go to the carnival
You be banana
I be avocado
|
This is repeated, forming a refrain or anaphora , for emphasis. The speaker seems to be the assertive one of the couple.
|
Grace Nichols
|
Even Tho
|
No Madonna and Child could touch
|
Her tenderness for a son
|
She soon would have to forget. . . .
The air was heavy with odors of diarrhea,
Of unwashed children with washed-out ribs
|
There is a delicacy about the two lines. The alliterative ’t’s and soft ’s’s create a whispering effect, as if she were soothing her little boy.
|
Chinua Achebe
|
A Mother In A Refugee Camp
|
Sadie was one of the livingest chits
In all the land.
Sadie bore two babies
Under her maiden name.
Maud and Ma and Papa
Nearly died of shame.
Everyone but Sadie
Nearly died of shame.
When Sadie said her last so-long
Her girls struck out from home.
(Sadie had left as heritage
Her fine-tooth comb.)
|
Maud, who went to college,
Is a thin brown mouse.
|
She is living all alone
In this old house.
|
Implies that there was, in fact, a sort of compromise in choosing to go to college over staying home. Interestingly, this is the only place in the poem where color is mentioned in any way.
|
Gwendolyn Brooks
|
Sadie and Maud
|
I
Some day I will go to Aarhus
To see his peat-brown head,
The mild pods of his eye-lids,
His pointed skin cap.
In the flat country near by
Where they dug him out,
His last gruel of winter seeds
Caked in his stomach,
Naked except for
The cap, noose and girdle,
|
I will stand a long time.
|
Bridegroom to the goddess,
She tightened her torc on him
And opened her fen,
|
This confirms that Heaney’s imagination was captured by Tolland man. The story of his brutal death and man’s violence is disturbing.
|
Seamus Heaney
|
The Tollund Man
|
in the shine of copper-
bottomed pots, polished
wood, toilets she'd pull
the lid to--that look saying
Let's make a change, girl.
But Sunday mornings are hers--
church clothes starched
and hanging, a record spinning
on the console, the whole house
dancing. She raises the shades,
washes the rooms in light,
buckets of water, Octagon soap.
|
Cleanliness is next to godliness...
|
Windows and doors flung wide,
curtains two-stepping
forward and back, neck bones
|
A centuries-old proverb (but not, as is sometimes assumed, a biblical quotation).
Nearly every religious tradition and belief system in the world has rituals associated with cleaning, purging, or purification.
|
Natasha Trethewey
|
Domestic Work 1937
|
It sifts from Leaden Sieves -
It powders all the Wood
It fills with Alabaster Wool
The Wrinkles of the Road -
It makes an Even Face
Of Mountain, and of Plain -
Unbroken Forehead from the East
Unto the East again -
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It reaches to the Fence -
|
It wraps it Rail by Rail
Till it is lost in Fleeces -
It deals Celestial Veil
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The snow is falling everywhere. EVEN THE FENCES AREN’T SAFE.
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Emily Dickinson
|
It sifts from Leaden Sieves - 311
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Earth hath not anything to show more fair:
Dull would he be of soul who could pass by
A sight so touching in its majesty:
This City now doth, like a garment, wear
The beauty of the morning; silent, bare,
Ships, towers, domes, theatres and temples lie
Open unto the fields, and to the sky;
All bright and glittering in the smokeless air.
Never did sun more beautifully steep
In his first splendor, valley, rock, or hill;
Ne'er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep!
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The river glideth at his own sweet will:
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Dear God! The very houses seem asleep;
And all that mighty heart is lying still!
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The river is more in its natural state. It is not yet being churned and forcibly moved against its will by the work day’s boats and commercial fishing.
The river is personified as having a free will. The word ‘glideth’ is onomatopoeic , with its smooth, soft ‘l’ and elongated vowel . We must assume that Londoners hadn’t yet dumped the contents of their chamber pots into The Thames.
Yet, the poet chose to see the City as romantic. The archaism ‘glideth’ reinforces this.
Note that, in an inter-textual reference, this line was adopted by TS Eliot in his poem The Waste Land .
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William Wordsworth
|
Composed upon Westminster Bridge September 3 1802
|
Law 33. Discover Each Man's Thumbscrew
Law 34. Be Royal In Your Own Fashion: Act Like A King To Be Treated like One
Law 35. Master The Art Of Timing
Law 36. Disdain Things You Cannot Have: Ignoring Them Is The Best Revenge
Law 37. Create Compelling Spectacles
Law 38. Disdain Things You Cannot Have: Ignoring Them Is The Best Revenge
Law 39. Stir Up Waters To Catch Fish
Law 40. Despise The Free Lunch
Law 41. Avoid Stepping Into A Great Man's Shoes
Law 42. Strike The Shepherd And The Sheep Will Scatter
Law 43. Work On The Hearts And Minds Of Others
Law 44. Disarm And Infuriate With The Mirror Effect
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Law 45. Preach The Need For Change, But Never Reform Too Much At Once
|
Law 46. Never Appear Too Perfect
Law 47. Do Not Go Past The Mark You Aimed For; In Victory, Learn When To Stop
Law 48. Assume Formlessness
|
“Everyone understands the need for change in the abstract, but on the day-to-day level people are creatures of habit. Too much innovation is traumatic, and will lead to revolt. If you are new to a position of power, or an outsider trying to build a power base, make a show of respecting the old way of doing things. If change is necessary, make it feel like a gentle improvement on the past.” – Robert Greene
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Robert Greene
|
48 Laws of Power
|
Safe in their Alabaster Chambers—
Untouched by Morning
|
And untouched by Noon—
|
Sleep the meek members of the Resurrection—
Rafter of satin
And Roof of stone
|
The “meek members of the Resurrection” (the dead in their underground tombs) are touched only by night.
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Emily Dickinson
|
Safe in their Alabaster Chambers 216
|
null |
The word of a snail on the plate of a leaf?
It is not mine. Do not accept it.
Acetic acid in a sealed tin?
Do not accept it. It is not genuine.
|
A ring of gold with the sun in it?
Lies. Lies and a grief.
Frost on a leaf, the immaculate
|
Plath’s speaker uses two metaphors to convey distrust: a snail trying to sound convincing on a plate of its favored food, and some acetic acid in an impossible place (acetic acid is usually formed by exposing alcohol to air). She does not trust the words of other people or possibly someone in particular.
Another reading suggests that “The word of a snail” feels small and insubstantial, meaning empty words that lack sincerity or promise.
Acetic acid is sour, pungent and corrosive, which could be harsh, baseless words only meant to hurt and demean. The ‘sealed tin’ could imply that he is cut off from her and what he has inside him is ‘acidic’ and hurtful.
Note the repetition of ‘do not accept it’. Plath has no doubt where she stands. In one line she says “It is not mine. Do not accept it.” She reverses this two lines later when she says, “Do not accept it. It is not genuine.” The similarity is known as parallel syntax . The aim is emphasis and cohesion.
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Sylvia Plath
|
The Couriers
|
I'm bound for the freedom, freedom-bound
and oh Susyanna don't you cry for me
Runagate
Runagate
II.
Rises from their anguish and their power,
Harriet Tubman,
woman of earth, whipscarred,
a summoning, a shining
Mean to be free
And this was the way of it, brethren brethren,
way we journeyed from Can't to Can.
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Moon so bright and no place to hide,
|
the cry up and the patterollers riding,
hound dogs belling in bladed air.
And fear starts a-murbling, Never make it,
|
Often times slaves traveled at night following the north star, if the moon was to bright slaves would be easily caught due to high visibility.
|
Robert Hayden
|
Runagate Runagate
|
null |
Even sunlight dares
and trembles through
my bars
to shimmer
dances on
the floor.
|
A clang og
lock and
keys and heels
|
In the closed room of a jail cell, you see little from the outside world. In rare occasions, sunlight sometimes shimmers it’s glow through the cell bars over the window, almost dancing on the floor as the sunlight shines on.
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Maya Angelou
|
Prisoner
|
We both are ignorant, yet love bids me
These farewell lines to recommend to thee,
That when the knot's untied that made us one,
I may seem thine, who in effect am none.
And if I see not half my days that's due,
What nature would, God grant to yours and you;
The many faults that well you know I have
Let be interred in my oblivious grave;
If any worth or virtue were in me,
Let that live freshly in thy memory
And when thou feel'st no grief, as I no harmes,
Yet love thy dead, who long lay in thine arms,
|
And when thy loss shall be repaid with gains
|
Look to my little babes, my dear remains.
And if thou love thyself, or loved'st me,
These O protect from stepdame's injury.
|
Anne Bradstreet is stating here her gain through loss. In the Bible (ESV), John 12:24 says “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.”
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Anne Bradstreet
|
Before the Birth of One of Her Children
|
And staring face to face,
I shot at him as he at me,
And killed him in his place.
I shot him dead because —
Because he was my foe,
Just so: my foe of course he was;
That's clear enough; although
He thought he'd 'list, perhaps,
Off-hand like — just as I —
Was out of work — had sold his traps —
No other reason why.
Yes; quaint and curious war is!
|
You shoot a fellow down
|
You'd treat, if met where any bar is,
Or help to half-a-crown.
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The speaker changes from the first-person ‘I’ to the second-person ‘You’, as if drawing in the company around him and the reader … and maybe the world. The simple words ‘shoot a fellow down’ are in contrast to the magnitude of what humanity does in war.
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Thomas Hardy
|
The Man He Killed
|
We are things of dry hours and the involuntary plan,
Grayed in, and gray. “Dream” makes a giddy sound, not strong
Like “rent,” “feeding a wife,” “satisfying a man.”
|
But could a dream send up through onion fumes
|
Its white and violet, fight with fried potatoes
And yesterday's garbage ripening in the hall,
Flutter, or sing an aria down these rooms,
|
The dream not being practical or even realistic, it’s uncertain whether it could cut through the “onion fumes.” Cooking onions produces smells and smokes which are at once sharp and rather mundane.
|
Gwendolyn Brooks
|
Kitchenette building
|
All I know is a door into the dark.
Outside, old axles and iron hoops rusting;
Inside, the hammered anvil's short-pitched ring,
The unpredictable fantail of sparks
Or hiss when a new shoe toughens in water.
|
The anvil must be somewhere in the centre,
|
Horned as a unicorn, at one end and square,
Set there immoveable: an altar
Where he expends himself in shape and music.
|
The fact that the anvil “must be somewhere in the centre” reinforces its alchemical symbolism. The anvil is the central force from which the horseshoe/soul emerges from the “door into the dark”; an echoe of the first line.
So the work done by the blacksmith is to shape the metal and eliminate its impurities and rust. The anvil is a tool of refining not only the metal but also the human self, represented by both the blacksmith and the poet.
|
Seamus Heaney
|
The Forge
|
Make me, O Lord, thy Spining Wheele compleate.
Thy Holy Worde my Distaff make for mee.
Make mine Affections thy Swift Flyers neate
And make my Soule thy holy Spoole to bee.
My Conversation make to be thy Reele
And reele the yarn thereon spun of thy Wheele.
Make me thy Loome then, knit therein this Twine:
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And make thy Holy Spirit, Lord, winde quills:
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Then weave the Web thyselfe. The yarn is fine.
Thine Ordinances make my Fulling Mills.
Then dy the same in Heavenly Colours Choice,
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quills : spindles or bobbins on which thread is wound.
Taylor beseeches God to send the Holy Spirit to prepare him for work as a “Loom,” or instrument of God, before “weaving” his works.
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Edward Taylor
|
Huswifery
|
null |
I, too, sing America.
|
I am the darker brother.
They send me to eat in the kitchen
When company comes.
|
Hughes alludes to and expands Walt Whitman’s poem, “I Hear America Singing.” In Whitman’s poem, the poet tries to capture and celebrate the many varied voices of America. Langston Hughes crucially adds the “too” to this line to show that although many walks of life are portrayed in Whitman’s poem, the African American is not. This poem is the song of the neglected voice, in which Hughes positions himself as both heir to and critic of Whitman.
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Langston Hughes
|
I Too sing America
|
null |
Sonnet. IIII.
|
New yeare forth looking out of Janus gate,
Doth seeme to promise hope of new delight:
and bidding th'old Adieu, his passed date
|
Spenser, and Renaissance writers in general, seem to have just disliked the Roman numeral “V,” so Spenser will always write four as “IIII” instead of the traditional “IV.”
Note : Some believe the Renaissance writers didn’t know how to use Roman numerals properly, but this seems unlikely because Shakespeare and Spenser definitely read Ovid’s Metamorphoses and likely many other major Latin texts. They just seemed to want to change the trend.
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Edmund Spenser
|
Amoretti: Sonnet 4
|
After great pain, a formal feeling comes –
The Nerves sit ceremonious, like Tombs –
The stiff Heart questions ‘was it He, that bore,'
And ‘Yesterday, or Centuries before'?
The Feet, mechanical, go round –
A Wooden way
Of Ground, or Air, or Ought –
Regardless grown,
A Quartz contentment, like a stone –
This is the Hour of Lead –
|
Remembered, if outlived,
|
As Freezing persons, recollect the Snow –
First – Chill – then Stupor – then the letting go –
|
The narrator will of course remember the pain of the ordeal, but only if she survives. She wonders if it is better to live in pain or die, or whether death is a worthwhile escape. This may once again point back to Dickinson’s constant internal religious conflict.
(credit to: ) Probably the kind of clock Dickinson had.
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Emily Dickinson
|
After great pain a formal feeling comes J341 F372
|
I would fill jampotfuls of the jellied
Specks to range on window-sills at home,
On shelves at school, and wait and watch until
The fattening dots burst into nimble-
Swimming tadpoles. Miss Walls would tell us how
The daddy frog was called a bullfrog
And how he croaked and how the mammy frog
Laid hundreds of little eggs and this was
Frogspawn. You could tell the weather by frogs too,
For they were yellow in the sun and brown
In rain.
Then one hot day when fields were rank
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With cowdung in the grass the angry frogs
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Invaded the flax-dam; I ducked through hedges
To a coarse croaking that I had not heard
Before. The air was thick with a bass chorus.
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The aggression of the frogs and the maturation of the adolescent poet are the essence of the poem. Note the realistic, brutal, descriptive language in the second stanza compared to the childish language of the first. He has clearly matured. The frog spawn and the boy are both growing up; both in a phase of aggression and cynicsm. The world is now hostile, not benign. This is important to understand the poem at a deeper level.
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Seamus Heaney
|
Death of A Naturalist
|
Don't do it because you hate people,
do it just to spit in their eye.
Don't do it for the money,
do it and be damned to the money.
Don't do it for equality,
do it because we've got too much equality
and it would be fun to upset the apple-cart
and see which way the apples would go a-rolling.
Don't do it for the working classes.
Do it so that we can all of us be little aristocracies on our own
and kick our heels like jolly escaped asses.
Don't do it, anyhow, for international Labour.
|
Labour is the one thing a man has had too much of.
|
Let's abolish labour, let's have done with labouring!
Work can be fun, and men can enjoy it; then it's not labour.
Let's have it so! Let's make a revolution for fun!
|
A generation or two later, another English poet, Philip Larkin, would begin a poem as follows:
Why should I let the toad work Squat on my life? Can’t I use my wit as a pitchfork And drive the brute off?
|
D. H. Lawrence
|
A Sane Revolution
|
null |
The old woman across the way
is whipping the boy again
|
and shouting to the neighborhood
her goodness and his wrongs.
Wildly he crashes through elephant ears,
|
The “again” is what makes this particularly troubling, a suggestion that the whippings were common.
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Robert Hayden
|
The Whipping
|
Escape
|
Shadows, shadows,
Hug me round
|
So that I shall not be found
By sorrow:
She pursues me
|
The repetition of these two lines highlights their importance. The hug of these shadows is what ultimately protects the narrator, and this is her cry for help. The repetition appears as more of a plea than the first two lines of the poem; perhaps there is more desperation in the lines at this point in the text.
The repeated use of “shadows” throughout the poem also presents an alliteration. In addition, the “s” and “sh” sounds are by far the most common consonant sounds in the whole poem. This gives it a very soothing, soft sound that can be related to the safe feeling of being in the shadows, but also relates to the quiet menacing of sorrow.
“Shadows,” “sorrow,” “she,” abyss,“ "solitude”
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Georgia Douglas Johnson
|
Escape
|
The day is gone and I yet I saw no sun,
And now I live, and now my life is done.
The spring is past, and yet it hath not sprung,
The fruit is dead, and yet the leaves are green,
My youth is gone, and yet I am but young,
I saw the world, and yet I was not seen,
My thread is cut, and yet it was not spun,
And now I live, and now my life is done.
I sought my death and found it in my womb,
I look't for life and saw it was a shade,
I trode the earth and knew it was my tomb,
And now I die, and now I am but made.
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The glass is full, and now the glass is run,
|
And now I live, and now my life is done.
|
This is another oxymoron, a contradiction in terms. The full glass may represent his still-vigorous life. It merges with the empty glass, his approaching execution, the negation of his life. But his martyrdom is his fulfillment. Life and death, execution and spiritual triumph, are conflated.
Note that the technique of juxtaposing the same word but in its different meanings is antistatis . Here “glass” refers in the first clause to a receptacle for drink, and in the second clause it is an hour glass symbolising time.
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Chidiock Tichborne
|
Tichbornes Elegy
|
The sun does arise
And make happy the skies
The merry bells ring
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
|
Church bells signify praise to God and were a means of summoning a rural community to prayer or gatherings.
|
William Blake
|
The Echoing Green
|
Yet if Hope has flown away
In a night, or in a day,
In a vision, or in none,
Is it therefore the less gone?
All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream.
I stand amid the roar
Of a surf-tormented shore
And I hold within my hand
Grains of the golden sand —
How few! yet how they creep
Through my fingers to the deep,
|
While I weep — while I weep!
|
O God! can I not grasp
Them with a tighter clasp?
O God! can I not save
|
The narrator becomes very sad as he weeps out of the realization that nothing really matters and ultimately makes his life feel worthless because it will all slip away – life the grains of sand creeping through his hands.
The repetition of “while I weep” serves to reinforce the fact that he is losing all of his happiness. He cannot seem to cope with the changing aspect of life because it doesn’t work out in his favor. The first instance of “while I weep” sets the scene for him crying, but the second emphasizes the importance of his incapability to do anything to help himself but sob.
The water from his tears just as much reflects his depression as it does continue washing away sand from his hands.
The line says a lot about Poe’s style of writing, marked by intense horror, sadness and darkness. Psychologists have good reason to believe he suffered from depression, among other psychological conditions .
When describing Poe in terms of the Five-Factor Model of personality we can conclude that he would be high on Neuroticism – evident by the constant nervous anxiety he was said to have, as well as his melancholy and irritability. Poe would also be described as being low in Agreeableness and Conscientiousness since he was argumentative, untrusting, and lacked self-control (i.e. his drinking, his failure to pursue education).
|
Edgar Allan Poe
|
A Dream Within A Dream
|
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
Like Lazarus
|
But you can call me lazzy, lazy
|
Yea I'm lazy cause I'd rather sit and build
Than work and plow a field
Worshiping a daily yield of cash green crops
|
“Lazzy,” short for Lazarus, and “lazy,” as in someone who won’t work hard.
|
Saul Williams
|
Amethyst Rocks
|
W'en dat bah was mad; an' laws!
But you ought to seen his paws!
Did I see 'em? How you 'spec
I 's a-gwine to ricollec'
Dis hyeah ya'n I 's try'n' to spin
Ef you keeps on puttin' in?
You keep still an' don't you cheep
Less I 'll sen' you off to sleep.
Dis hyeah bah 'd go trompin' 'roun'
Eatin' evahthing he foun';
No one could n't have a fa'm
But dat bah 'u'd do' em ha'm;
|
And dey could n't ketch de scamp.
Anywhah he wan'ed to tramp.
|
Dah de scoun'el 'd mek his track,
Do his du't an' come on back.
He was sich a sly ole limb,
|
No one could catch him, no matter where he made trouble. He was too slick .
|
Paul Laurence Dunbar
|
A Cabin Tale
|
‘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.
|
The soldiers blame the next-in-line officers, perhaps impressed with the General, unsure of where the responsibility lies for the dire decisions that were made and resulted in such terrible casualties.
The language of the men is imitated in the contemptuous “incompetent swine”.
|
Siegfried Sassoon
|
The General
|
All kinds of kids will die
Who don't believe in lies, and bribes, and contentment
And a lousy peace.
Of course, the wise and the learned
Who pen editorials in the papers,
And the gentlemen with Dr. in front of their names
White and black,
Who make surveys and write books
Will live on weaving words to smother the kids who die,
And the sleazy courts,
And the bribe-reaching police,
And the blood-loving generals,
|
And the money-loving preachers
|
Will all raise their hands against the kids who die,
Beating them with laws and clubs and bayonets and bullets
To frighten the people—
|
Many crooked preachers will often take a cut of the donations given to the church, feeling that they deserve it for spreading the word of god.
|
Langston Hughes
|
Kids Who Die
|
Behind blown-empty bellies. Other mothers there
Had long ceased to care, but not this one:
She held a ghost-smile between her teeth,
And in her eyes the memory
Of a mother's pride. . . . She had bathed him
And rubbed him down with bare palms.
She took from their bundle of possessions
A broken comb and combed
The rust-colored hair left on his skull
And then—humming in her eyes—began carefully to part it.
In their former life this was perhaps
A little daily act of no consequence
|
Before his breakfast and school; now she did it
|
Like putting flowers on a tiny grave.
|
This suggests that they lived a normal life and there was sufficient money to send the little boy to school. The act of combing his hair is like a loving task and an attempt to eke out the last of her mother’s duties for him.
|
Chinua Achebe
|
A Mother In A Refugee Camp
|
Leaving stains upon the tongue and lust for
Picking. Then red ones inked up and that hunger
Sent us out with milk cans, pea tins, jam-pots
Where briars scratched and wet grass bleached our boots.
Round hayfields, cornfields and potato-drills
We trekked and picked until the cans were full,
Until the tinkling bottom had been covered
With green ones, and on top big dark blobs burned
Like a plate of eyes. Our hands were peppered
With thorn pricks, our palms sticky as Bluebeard's.
We hoarded the fresh berries in the byre.
But when the bath was filled we found a fur,
|
A rat-grey fungus, glutting on our cache.
|
The juice was stinking too. Once off the bush
The fruit fermented, the sweet flesh would turn sour.
I always felt like crying. It wasn't fair
|
Heaney endows the fungus with the intelligence of a plague-spreading rat.
“Glutting” is an especially well chosen word to convey this ugly kind of decay. It feels like the young speaker, whom we can assume will go on to be a poet, is learning about the imaginative possibilities the natural world holds. Note that ‘glutting’ means gorging or stuffing, from which the word ‘gluttony’ derives. Therefore, the fungus was gobbling the ‘cache’ and destroying it.
Note also that ‘cache’ echoes the earlier word ‘hoard’, suggesting things greedily hidden away.
|
Seamus Heaney
|
Blackberry Picking
|
By shallow rivers to whose falls
Melodious birds sing madrigals.
There I will make thee beds of roses
And a thousand fragrant posies,
A cap of flowers, and a kirtle
Embroider'd all with leaves of myrtle;
A gown made of the finest wool
Which from our pretty lambs we pull;
Fair linèd slippers for the cold,
With buckles of the purest gold;
A belt of straw and ivy buds,
With coral clasps and amber studs;
|
And if these pleasures may thee move,
|
Come live with me, and be my love.
Thy silver dishes for thy meat
As precious as the gods do eat,
|
This is an off-rhyme in most varieties of modern English, but in Marlowe’s time it would have been a perfect rhyme. (Off-rhymes weren’t really used widely until Wilfred Owen in the early twentieth century).
|
Christopher Marlowe
|
The Passionate Shepherd to His Love
|
XLIV
|
Shot? so quick, so clean an ending?
|
Oh that was right, lad, that was brave:
Yours was not an ill for mending,
'Twas best to take it to the grave.
|
The poem was inspired, according to Housman’s brother Laurence, by a daily paper’s paragraph notice of an 18-year-old Woolwich Cadet’s suicide.
|
A. E. Housman
|
Shot? so quick so clean an ending?
|
Your love hath been, nor long ago,
A fountain at my fond heart's door,
Whose only business was to flow;
And flow it did; not taking heed
Of its own bounty, or my need.
What happy moments did I count!
Blest was I then all bliss above!
Now, for that consecrated fount
Of murmuring, sparkling, living love,
What have I? Shall I dare to tell?
A comfortless and hidden well.
A well of love--it may be deep--
|
I trust it is,--and never dry:
|
What matter? If the waters sleep
In silence and obscurity.
--Such change, and at the very door
|
The choppy phrases interspersed with dashes suggest choking emotions. This well of deep love will never be dry and his feelings won’t go away — they will just stay hidden and compressed at the bottom of his heart.
|
William Wordsworth
|
A Complaint
|
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
Blasts the new-born Infant's tear,
|
The acrostic that runs down the first letters of the lines in this stanza makes up the word ‘HEAR’. This could be a call to all those in authority to listen to the complaints and cries of the populace. Or else, those with power and money who have been an integral part of the system that wrought such suffering on people, may indeed be able to hear but choose to do nothing about it.
Blake envisions beautiful revolution, the soldier’s blood a symbol of the people fighting back against their monarchical oppressors–visions inspired by the French and American Revolutions and independence movements.
The “blood down palace walls” may refer to the corrupt European governments of the Romantic era. Those who were oppressed under the monarchy and powerful financial interests shed blood. Examples of those harmed and killed by the government are mentioned in the previous three lines. For example, the “hapless soldier” perhaps died because of corruption or mismanagement in the government and the military. Blake accuses the monarchy of wasting lives on causes that have no meaning for ordinary people.
The “palace walls” form a barrier between the rich, privileged men in power and the poor soldiers. In a corrupt military system the ‘leaders’ refused to take responsibility for the death of the troops.
|
William Blake
|
London
|
I worked for a woman,
She wasn't mean--
But she had a twelve-room
House to clean.
Had to get breakfast,
Dinner, and supper, too--
Then take care of her children
When I got through.
Wash, iron, and scrub,
Walk the dog around--
|
It was too much,
Nearly broke me down.
|
I said, Madam,
Can it be
You trying to make a
|
Being a maid for a 12-room house is no easy task, and the load was weighing down on Alberta. Even though her boss was nice to her, it is still rough on maids because they’re away taking care of another person’s house and family instead of spending time with their own.
|
Langston Hughes
|
Madam and Her Madam
|
A very little boy stood upon a heap of gravel for the honor of Rum Alley. He was throwing stones at howling urchins from Devil's Row who were circling madly about the heap and pelting at him
His infantile countenance was livid with fury. His small body was writhing in the delivery of great, crimson oaths
"Run, Jimmie, run! Dey'll get yehs," screamed a retreating Rum Alley child
"Naw," responded Jimmie with a valiant roar, "dese micks can't make me run."
|
Howls of renewed wrath went up from Devil's Row throats. Tattered gamins on the right made a furious assault on the gravel heap. On their small, convulsed faces there shone the grins of true assassins. As they charged, they threw stones and cursed in shrill chorus
|
The little champion of Rum Alley stumbled precipitately down the other side. His coat had been torn to shreds in a scuffle, and his hat was gone. He had bruises on twenty parts of his body, and blood was dripping from a cut in his head. His wan features wore a look of a tiny, insane demon
On the ground, children from Devil's Row closed in on their antagonist. He crooked his left arm defensively about his head and fought with cursing fury. The little boys ran to and fro, dodging, hurling stones and swearing in barbaric trebles
From a window of an apartment house that upreared its form from amid squat, ignorant stables, there leaned a curious woman. Some laborers, unloading a scow at a dock at the river, paused for a moment and regarded the fight. The engineer of a passive tugboat hung lazily to a railing and watched. Over on the Island, a worm of yellow convicts came from the shadow of a grey ominous building and crawled slowly along the river's bank
|
By saying that “Howls of RENEWED wrath went up from Devil’s Row throats”, Crane suggests that this rivalry and controversy between the Rum Alley and the kids from Devil’s Row has been existent in the past as well. Crane gives the second sentence of the paragraph an almost war-like feel to it by word choice like “furious assault” and “gravel heap”, as if the scene was some sort of legendary battle that would be remembered for the ages to come.
The children’s “small” yet “convulsed” faces once again creates another contradiction in the text, offering the reader a clearer suggestion that these kids have not been raised in what most people would call “normal conditions”. Cranes language re-assures the reader that the tenements is a place where children are raised with an almost natural sense aggression by using words like “true assassins”. The final sentence is sort of a transition back into the reality of the situation, in which various small children proceed to throw stones at each other while screaming furiously back and forth, pointlessly.
|
Stephen Crane
|
The Honor of Rum Alley I
|
By God, the old man could handle a spade.
Just like his old man.
My grandfather could cut more turf in a day
Than any other man on Toner's bog.
Once I carried him milk in a bottle
Corked sloppily with paper. He straightened up
To drink it, then fell to right away
Nicking and slicing neatly, heaving sods
Over his shoulder, digging down and down
For the good turf. Digging.
The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap
Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge
|
Through living roots awaken in my head.
|
But I've no spade to follow men like them.
Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests.
|
These ‘roots’ are ambiguous, referring to the remains of the potato crop from the previous year, but also the emotional identification by the poet with the land and people of his home. Also, ‘roots’ is a homophone and may be read as ‘routes’, in that the memories trigger more memories, like a journey.
|
Seamus Heaney
|
Digging
|
null |
Even the sun-clouds this morning cannot manage such skirts.
|
Nor the woman in the ambulance
Whose red heart blooms through her coat so astoundingly –
A gift, a love gift
|
The sun shining on the clouds can’t make a red as beautiful as the poppies Plath is looking at.
She’s just stunned by these flowers.
Note the inversion here too – they can’t be ‘sun-clouds’ since clouds in fact obstruct the view of the sun. This, therefore, is an oxymoron , a contradiction in terms. The suggestion is that, despite her originality, Plath ‘cannot manage’ to outdo the natural. There’s a suggestion of solar flares, too.
An alternative view is that ‘sun-clouds’ is typical Plath-style compression, conflating two related images, the sun being a noun-modifier for the clouds. Sunrises and sunsets are enhanced in beauty when partially obscured by clouds; the glow is highlighted by the contours and pattern of clouds.
Note also the ambiguity of ‘skirts’. In the first line they are a metaphor for the sun rays, but in the second line, with the reference to the woman and her coat, they take on a literal meaning.
|
Sylvia Plath
|
Poppies in October
|
943
A Coffin — is a small Domain
Yet able to contain
A Citizen of Paradise
In it diminished Plane
|
A Grave — is a restricted Breadth
|
Yet ampler than the Sun
And all the Seas He populates
And Lands He looks upon
|
Breadth is defined as as a area of wide range or extant. A grave is visualized as a narrow 6x6 ditch. Emily Dickinson intends this line to mean the grave is physically minimal in space, but is spiratually and supernaturally limitless.
|
Emily Dickinson
|
A Coffin — is a small Domain
|
The provinces of his body revolted,
The squares of his mind were empty,
Silence invaded the suburbs,
The current of his feeling failed; he became his admirers.
Now he is scattered among a hundred cities
And wholly given over to unfamiliar affections,
To find his happiness in another kind of wood
And be punished under a foreign code of conscience.
The words of a dead man
Are modified in the guts of the living.
But in the importance and noise of to-morrow
When the brokers are roaring like beasts on the floor of the Bourse,
|
And the poor have the sufferings to which they are fairly accustomed,
|
And each in the cell of himself is almost convinced of his freedom,
A few thousand will think of this day
As one thinks of a day when one did something slightly unusual.
|
This is a rather dry statement. Auden’s concern for the poor seems limited — “fairly accustomed” implies that the poor are more or less resigned to their fate.
|
W. H. Auden
|
In Memory of W. B. Yeats
|
The night has a thousand eyes,
And the day but one;
Yet the light of the bright world dies
With the dying sun.
The mind has a thousand eyes,
And the heart but one;
|
Yet the light of a whole life dies
When love is done.
| null |
The mind can rationalize, create and learn but the whole system is disabled by a broken heart.
|
Francis William Bourdillon
|
The Night Has a Thousand Eyes
|
So sweet the hour, so calm the time,
I feel it more than half a crime,
When Nature sleeps and stars are mute,
To mar the silence ev'n with lute.
At rest on ocean's brilliant dyes
An image of Elysium lies:
Seven Pleiades entranced in Heaven,
|
Form in the deep another seven:
|
Endymion nodding from above
Sees in the sea a second love.
Within the valleys dim and brown,
|
Not only is the number seven a symbol of perfection, Biblical-wise, the number seven has great significance. From the first chapter of Genesis 2:2 , God creates the heavens and the Earth in 7 days; down to the last chapter of Revelation 15:1 , where seven angels and seven plagues are witnessed. In fact, the number seven is mentioned at least 800 times in the whole Bible.
|
Edgar Allan Poe
|
Serenade
|
The sun will not be seen and it will always be night
Trees will die
All vegetation will die
Radiated men will eat the flesh of radiated men
The sea will be poisoned
The lakes and rivers will vanish
Rain will be the new gold
The rotting bodies of men and animals will stink in the dark wind
The last few survivors will be overtaken by new and hideous diseases
And the space platforms will be destroyed by attrition
The petering out of supplies
The natural effect of general decay
|
And there will be the most beautiful silence never heard
|
Born out of that.
The sun still hidden there
Awaiting the next chapter.
|
The beautiful silence comes with the death of humanity. All of the violence and suffering was only ended with the end of humanity. The speaker is saying the only way the world finally came to peace was with the death of humanity.
|
Charles Bukowski
|
Dinosauria We
|
I think I was enchanted
When first a sombre Girl—
I read that Foreign Lady—
The Dark—felt beautiful—
And whether it was noon at night—
Or only Heaven—at Noon—
For very Lunacy of Light
I had not power to tell—
|
The Bees—became as Butterflies—
|
The Butterflies—as Swans—
Approached—and spurned the narrow Grass—
And just the meanest Tunes
|
Everything seemed to morph into something progressively more beautiful.
|
Emily Dickinson
|
I think I was enchanted 593
|
null |
Nondum amabam, et amare amabam,
quærebam quid amarem, amans amare.
Confess. St. August.
|
Preface
The poem entitled "ALASTOR," may be considered as allegorical of one of the most interesting situations of the human mind. It represents a youth of uncorrupted feelings and adventurous genius led forth by an imagination inflamed and purified through familiarity with all that is excellent and majestic, to the contemplation of the universe. He drinks deep of the fountains of knowledge, and is still insatiate. The magnificence and beauty of the external world sinks profoundly into the frame of his conceptions, and affords to their modifications a variety not to be exhausted. So long as it is possible for his desires to point towards objects thus infinite and unmeasured, he is joyous, and tranquil, and self-possessed. But the period arrives when these objects cease to suffice. His mind is at length suddenly awakened and thirsts for intercourse with an intelligence similar to itself. He images to himself the Being whom he loves. Conversant with speculations of the sublimest and most perfect natures, the vision in which he embodies his own imaginations unites all of wonderful, or wise, or beautiful, which the poet, the philosopher, or the lover could depicture. The intellectual faculties, the imagination, the functions of sense, have their respective requisitions on the sympathy of corresponding powers in other human beings. The Poet is represented as uniting these requisitions, and attaching them to a single image. He seeks in rain for a prototype of his conception. Blasted by his disappointment, he descends to an untimely grave.
The picture is not barren of instruction to actual men. The Poet's self-centred seclusion was avenged by the furies of an irresistible passion pursuing him to speedy ruin. But that Power which strikes the luminaries of the world with sudden darkness and extinction, by awakening them to too exquisite a perception of its influences, dooms to a slow and poisonous decay those meaner spirits that dare to abjure its dominion. Their destiny is more abject and inglorious as their delinquency is more contemptible and pernicious. They who, deluded by no generous error, instigated by no sacred. thirst of doubtful knowledge, duped by no illustrious superstition, loving nothing on this earth, and cherishing no hopes beyond, yet keep aloof from sympathies with their kind, rejoicing neither in human joy nor mourning with human grief; these, and such as they, have their apportioned curse. They languish, because none feel with them their common nature. They are morally dead. They are neither friends, nor lovers, nor fathers, nor citizens of the world, nor benefactors of their country. Among those who attempt to exist without human sympathy, the pure and tender-hearted perish through the intensity and passion of their search after its communities, when the vacancy of their spirit suddenly makes itself felt. All else, selfish, blind, and torpid, are those unforeseeing multitudes who constitute together with their own, the lasting misery and loneliness of the world. Those who love not their fellow-beings live unfruitful lives, and prepare for their old age a miserable grave.
|
The epigraph to the poem is from St. Augustine’s Confessions , III , i, written between 397 and 398 AD.
The English translation of the Latin is: ‘I was not yet in love, and I loved to be in love, I sought what I might love, in love with loving.’
|
Percy Bysshe Shelley
|
Preface to Alastor
|
The fire in leaf and grass
so green it seems
each summer the last summer.
The wind blowing, the leaves
shivering in the sun,
each day the last day.
|
A red salamander
|
so cold and so
easy to catch, dreamily
moves his delicate feet
|
A salamander is a particularly interesting choice of animal–it has a long history in human myth . Somewhat oddly, it is associated with fire; less oddly, it is associated with rebirth.
The salamander’s “fire” connects to the first line, while its bewitched nature may connect to its alleged role as a witch’s familiar (or alternate form for escaping from fires).
Biologically, many salamanders are capable of regenerating lost limbs. Bright red coloration also indicates a possible toxicity.
|
Denise Levertov
|
Living
|
null |
They went home and told their wives,
that never once in all their lives,
had they known a girl like me,
But... They went home.
|
They said my house was licking clean,
no word I spoke was ever mean,
I had an air of mystery,
|
This poem is about a woman who has had relationships with a number of married men. The men all claim to find her more attractive than their wives, in fact better in every way, but they still will return home to their family.
|
Maya Angelou
|
They Went Home
|
I fell in love with a girl
|
O and a gash
|
I'll bet she now has seven lousy children
(I've three myself, one being off the record.)
I wish she'd read my book & write to me
|
“Gash” is slang for the vagina. The context suggests other metaphorical possibilities as well: that the girl represents a psychic wound for the poet, that he cherishes that psychic wound, etc. The line is a blunt, cynical comedown from the one before, and the rest of the stanza follows in that style.
|
John Berryman
|
Her It
|
TELL me not, Sweet, I am unkind,
That from the nunnery
Of thy chaste breast and quiet mind
To war and arms I fly.
|
True, a new mistress now I chase,
The first foe in the field;
|
And with a stronger faith embrace
A sword, a horse, a shield.
Yet this inconstancy is such
|
His new ‘mistress’ is his role as a soldier. The verb ‘chase’ is an ironic echo of ‘chaste’. His focus and priorities have changed.
The alliterative ‘f’s in line two, and the long vowels —in 'first’, ‘foe’ and ‘field’ — are emphatic. It is clear his mind is no longer on Locasta, but on the excitement of the future battles.
|
Richard Lovelace
|
To Lucasta Going to the Wars
|
The sea so deep and blind
The sun, the wild regret
The club, the wheel, the mind
O love, aren't you tired yet?
The blood, the soil, the faith
These words you can't forget
Your vow, your holy place
O love, aren't you tired yet?
The blood, the soil, the faith
O love, aren't you tired yet?
|
A cross on every hill
|
A star, a minaret
So many graves to fill
O love, aren't you tired yet?
|
The cross is a common grave marker in the Christian tradition.
Christ himself was nailed to a cross on a hill.
Leonard Cohen uses the hill as a symbol in If It Be Your Will : “From this broken hill, all your praises shall ring”.
|
Leonard Cohen
|
The Faith
|
your understanding.
Even as the stone of the fruit must break, that its
heart may stand in the sun, so must you know pain.
And could you keep your heart in wonder at the
daily miracles of your life, your pain would not seem
less wondrous than your joy;
And you would accept the seasons of your heart,
even as you have always accepted the seasons that
pass over your fields.
And you would watch with serenity through the
winters of your grief.
Much of your pain is self-chosen.
|
It is the bitter potion by which the physician within
you heals your sick self.
|
Therefore trust the physician, and drink his remedy
in silence and tranquillity:
For his hand, though heavy and hard, is guided by
|
This is a medical metaphor for the fact that our bodies and souls know things our conscious minds do not.
Your pain is the potion. “Potion” here means “medicine” or “remedy,” rather than the magical sense of the word. It is bitter, because it is difficult to deal with, accept, allow yourself to feel, or manage your pain. So many remedies are, in fact, bitter. The slogan of the cough syrup Buckley’s, for example, is “It tastes awful… but it works!”
The physician within yourself is your instinct. Often our bodies know things that we do not. For example, fear is a powerful, reptilian, evolutionary response. Often we don’t know what we’re afraid of or why, but our body and our species remembers, and tells us to get out of there. Fear, like pain, is unpleasant or even crippling, but it is useful.
Pokémon fans… I couldn’t resist.
|
Kahlil Gibran
|
On Pain
|
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.
| null |
This shocking and dramatic final line is all the more effective because of its brief terseness. The fictional Cathy died in childbirth; Emily Bronte died of tuberculosis in 1848. The “baby-cry on the moor” could be the novel — the creation or baby of the writer — as well as the fictional cry of a motherless baby.
|
Ted Hughes
|
Emily Brontë
|
This strange thing must have crept
Right out of hell.
It resembles a bird's foot
|
Worn around the cannibal's neck.
|
As you hold it in your hand,
As you stab with it into a piece of meat,
It is possible to imagine the rest of the bird:
|
Cannibals, at least in cartoons, often wear necklaces made of teeth, bird’s feet, etc.
|
Charles Simic
|
Fork
|
Not quite the Frog-Prince. Maybe the Swineherd
Stealing this daughter's pedigree dreams
From under her watchtowered searchlit future.
No ceremony could conscript me
Out of my uniform. I wore my whole wardrobe -
Except for the odd, spare, identical item.
My wedding, like Nature, wanted to hide.
However, - if we were going to be married
It had better be Westminster Abbey. Why not?
The Dean told us why not. That is how
I learned that I had a Parish Church.
St George of the Chimney Sweeps.
|
So we squeezed into marriage finally.
|
Your mother, brave even in this
US Foreign Affairs gamble.
Acted all bridesmaids and all guests,
|
A neat conclusion, suggesting that this marriage had to be cobbled together, and they made the best of what they could organise.
|
Ted Hughes
|
A Pink Wool Knitted Dress
|
Tomorrow
Will it really come?
And if it does come
Will I still be human?
All I ask of you is one thing that you never do
Would you put your arms around me?
|
I won't tell anyone
|
Tomorrow
Does it have to come?
All I ask of you is one thing that you'll never do
|
Moz is notoriously secretive about his love life, and that’s always been a huge part of his mystique. Upon releasing his memoir Autobiography in 2013, he said:
Unfortunately, I am not homosexual. In technical fact, I am humasexual. I am attracted to humans. But, of course, not many.
|
Morrissey
|
Tomorrow
|
Be proud, my Race, in mind and soul;
Thy name is writ on Glory's scroll
In characters of fire.
High 'mid the clouds of Fame's bright sky
Thy banner's blazoned folds now fly,
And truth shall lift them higher.
Thou hast the right to noble pride,
Whose spotless robes were purified
By blood's severe baptism.
Upon thy brow the cross was laid,
And labour's painful sweat-beads made
A consecrating chrism.
|
No other race, or white or black,
When bound as thou wert, to the rack,
|
So seldom stooped to grieving;
No other race, when free again,
Forgot the past and proved them men
|
Although it seems that Dunbar is being inclusive of all people of African descent, this statement implies that he distinctly means enslaved Africans, hence being bound to racks.
|
Paul Laurence Dunbar
|
Ode To Ethiopia
|
People who broke through with joy and madness and with
Insurmountable force
In tiny rented rooms I was struck by miracles
And even now after decades of listening I still am able to hear
A new work never heard before that is totally
Bright, a fresh-blazing sun
There are countless sub-stratas of rising surprise from the
Human firmament
Music has an expansive and endless flow of ungodly
Exploration
Writers are confined to the limit of sight and feeling upon the
Page while musicians leap into unrestricted immensity
|
Right now it's just old Tchaikowsky moaning and groaning his
Way through symphony #5
|
But it's just as good as when I first heard it
I haven't heard one of my favorites, Eric Coates, for some time
But I know that if I keep drinking the good red and listening
|
Symphony No. 5 by Russian composer Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky:
|
Charles Bukowski
|
Me and Faulkner
|
For three days we waited,
a bowl of dull quartz for sky.
At night the valley dreamed of snow,
lost Christmas angels with dark-white wings
flailing the hills.
|
I dreamed a poem, perfect
as the first five-pointed flake,
that melted at dawn:
|
a Janus-time
to peer back at guttering dark days,
trajectories of the spent year.
|
Obviously Horovitz’s forgotten (‘melted’) poem was perfect. Obviously. Because we can’t prove otherwise.
The speaker is willing a more substantial snowfall than this one.
There’s also something in these lines that recall Coleridge’s Kubla Khan. Beyond simply the dreaming of a perfect poem that through either human condition (Horowitz) or accident (Coleridge) can’t be fully recalled, there’s also the odd mirroring of the hyphen: ‘five-pointed’ and ‘pleasure-dome’.
|
Frances Horovitz
|
New Year Snow
|
As I came to the edge of the woods,
Thrush music -- hark!
Now if it was dusk outside,
Inside it was dark.
Too dark in the woods for a bird
By sleight of wing
To better its perch for the night,
Though it still could sing.
|
The last of the light of the sun
|
That had died in the west
Still lived for one song more
In a thrush's breast.
|
The light is serving as an image of one last hope, like “the light at the end of the tunnel.”
|
Robert Frost
|
Come In
|
null |
I love to rise in a summer morn
|
When the birds sing on every tree
The distant huntsman winds his horn
And the sky-lark sings with me
|
The opening line has immediate impact, the voice of the child declaring his or her love of waking up, a metaphor for life. The ‘summer morn’ is the hardest time for children to go to school, when outdoor play and long days are so tempting.
|
William Blake
|
The Schoolboy
|
added his heat to the nimbus
of our intent, here where
we make ourselves:
something difficult
lifted, pressed or curled,
Power over beauty,
power over power!
Though there's something more
tender, beneath our vanity,
our will to become objects
of desire: we sweat the mark
of our presence onto the cloth.
|
Here is some halo
the living made together.
| null |
The sweat mark forms an organic and malleable symbol. At the beginning the stain was characterized as being gross and a symbol of selfishness. However, in the last two lines of the poem, the once “salt-stain spot” (1) is now something much more important than that.
Doty suggests that even though working out for the sole purpose of physical beauty is not a good mind set to have, the fact that someone has the ability to do that in the first place is still something to take pride in. The stain is a product only of healthy and living people; it is significant because it shows the importance of life.
|
Mark Doty
|
At the Gym
|
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.
|
“Traverse” means to travel or through
|
Emily Dickinson
|
There is no frigate like a book 1263
|
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
where you're going to turn.
I got it.
|
Some people not only smoke, (or instead of smoking), turn to alcohol to attempt to drown life’s problems. It only makes it worse in the end, and this line kind of goes along with a lyric by rapper Kendrick Lamar in his track “Swimming Pools”:
Now I done grew up Round some people living their lifes in bottles
|
Maya Angelou
|
Come And Be My Baby
|
Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land,
Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
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.
|
The poet draws the reader back from the past and from the references to the Aigean, and relates his story to his present, standing at the window with his beloved. That the sea is “northern” suggests, perhaps, a suitably colder and more threatening climate.
|
Matthew Arnold
|
Dover Beach
|
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
|
“Behind” suggests that the husbands are there for support and comfort but the use of the word “intervals” hints at the idea that the husbands were often absent at work. The mothers are left on their own to look after themselves and their children. Their respective lives have become distant from each other.
Note that “Behind them” is echoed in the penultimate line of the poem as “Before them”. The significance of this comes clear later in the stanza.
|
Philip Larkin
|
Afternoons
|
(To JS/07 M 378
This Marble Monument
Is Erected by the State)
He was found by the Bureau of Statistics to be
One against whom there was no official complaint,
And all the reports of his conduct agree
That, in the modern sense of the old-fashioned word, he was a saint,
For in everything he did he served the Greater Community.
Except for the war till the day he retired
He worked in a factory and never got fired,
|
But satisfied his employers, Fudge Motors Inc.
Yet he wasn't a scab or odd in his views,
For his union reports that he paid his dues,
(Our report of his union shows it was sound)
And our Social Psychology workers found
That he was popular with his mates and liked a drink.
The Press are convinced that he bought a paper every day,
And that his reactions to advertisements were normal in every way.
Policies taken out in his name prove that he was fully insured,
And his Health-card shows that he was once in hospital but left it cured.
Both Producers Research and High--Grade Living declare
He was fully sensible to the advantages of the Installment Plan
And had everything necessary to the Modern Man,
A phonograph, a radio, a car and a Frigidaire.
Our researchers into Public Opinion are content
That he held the proper opinions for the time of the year;
When there was peace he was for peace; when there was war he went.
|
He was married and added five children to the population,
which our Eugenist says was the right number for a parent of his generation,
And our teachers report he never interfered with their education.
|
This part reinforces again and again the main theme of the poem: conformity .
The mystery man simply followed the beliefs of the society around him without forming his own thoughts. He just went the direction the wind blew. If there was war, he went to war. If there was time for peace, he settled for peace. The poem ridicules this character for so foolishly accepting the norms and standards of the government and the society. He was the governments idea of a perfect man. His views were not odd so he did not commence a stance against the government. He bought a paper every day and reacted in a normal way making him a good American consumer. He only went to the hospital once so he didn’t bother the health system.
|
W. H. Auden
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The Unknown Citizen
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