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lock and
keys and heels
and blood-dried
guns.
Even sunshine dares
It's jail
and bail
then rails to run.
Guard grey men
serve plates of rattle
noise and concrete
death and beans.
|
Then pale sun stumbles
through the poles of
iron to warm the horror
of grey guard men.
|
It's jail
and bail
then rails to run.
|
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. The sunlight in this case shows the horror of the guard’s deposition, and only worsens the prisoners mood.
|
Maya Angelou
|
Prisoner
|
null |
Harlem
|
Langston Hughes
What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up
|
Harlem is a Neighborhood is Manhattan, NY. It is mostly populated by African-Americans. It has long been a center of black culture.
|
Langston Hughes
|
Harlem
|
Came to a public meeting; the speaker got up and said;
"If we let them in, they will steal our daily bread":
He was talking of you and me, my dear, he was talking of you and me.
Thought I heard the thunder rumbling in the sky;
It was Hitler over Europe, saying, "They must die":
O we were in his mind, my dear, O we were in his mind.
Saw a poodle in a jacket fastened with a pin,
Saw a door opened and a cat let in:
But they weren't German Jews, my dear, but they weren't German Jews.
Went down the harbour and stood upon the quay,
Saw the fish swimming as if they were free:
Only ten feet away, my dear, only ten feet away.
|
Walked through a wood, saw the birds in the trees;
|
They had no politicians and sang at their ease:
They weren't the human race, my dear, they weren't the human race.
Dreamed I saw a building with a thousand floors,
|
Birds are often used is poetry and lyrics to represent freedom. This applies especially and poignantly here.
|
W. H. Auden
|
Refugee Blues
|
null |
My daughter made drawings with the pens you sent,
|
line drawings that suggest the things they represent,
different from any drawings she — at ten — had done,
closer to real art, implying what the mind fills in.
|
John Skoyles, is an American poet and writer whom gifted pens to the daughter of Michael Ryan.
|
Michael Ryan
|
A Thank You Note
|
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!
|
The river glideth at his own sweet will:
Dear God! The very houses seem asleep;
And all that mighty heart is lying still!
|
As the bio of this poem states, the wondrous tone the speaker is ironic. In a time when London became overpopulated and overtaken by industrialization, it is difficult to take this peaceful moment seriously. It seems unlikely that there would be a “silent, bare” moment in London to bring about the speaker’s calm. Unless he is able to truly look past the bustle of the city and the landscape to find peace, there are some important characteristics of the city left out in this poem.
It is worth looking at Wordsworth’s near contemporary, William Hogarth’s paintings to see another artistic portrayal of London.
|
William Wordsworth
|
Composed upon Westminster Bridge September 3 1802
|
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.
|
Your man of strength, Gideon, emerging triumphant.
Although born into the brutal embrace of Apartheid, scarred by the savage atmosphere of racism, unjustly imprisoned in the bloody maws of South African dungeons.
Would the man survive? Could the man survive?
|
See the biblical account of David and Goliath in 1 Samuel 17.
|
Maya Angelou
|
His Day Is Done
|
Cradled through England between flooded fields
Rocking, rocking the rails, my head-phones on
The black box of my Walkman on the table
|
Hot tea trembles in its plastic cup
|
I'm thinking of you waking in our bed
Thinking of me on the train. Too soon to phone
The radio speaks in the suburbs, in commuter towns
|
Even the tea, an inanimate object, is personified , described as ‘trembling’ from the movement of the train. It also foreshadows the train crash/terrorist attack that is the ultimate subject of this poem.
|
Gillian Clarke
|
On The Train
|
I've known rivers:
I've known rivers ancient as the world and older than the
Flow of human blood in human veins.
My soul has grown deep like the rivers.
|
I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young.
|
I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep.
I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it.
I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln went down to New Orleans, and I've seen its muddy bosom turn all golden in the sunset.
|
The Euphrates was an ancient Mesopotamian river. Here it symbolizes the beginning of civilization. And dawn is (I hope you know) the beginning of the day, which here represents the same thing.
The idea of the “dawn” of time, and the “dawn” of the day connects, as the river and the blood do, the soul with the earth. Just as Euphrates is the dawn of civilization, the Black man rises at dawn to work the same earth he is “made of”. Hughes is constantly drawing parallels between the man and the earth, demonstrating the permanence, resilience and wisdom.
|
Langston Hughes
|
The Negro Speaks of Rivers
|
Driver drive faster and make a good run
Down the Springfield Line under the shining sun.
Fly like an aeroplane, don't pull up short
Till you brake for Grand Central Station, New York.
For there in the middle of the waiting-hall
Should be standing the one that I love best of all.
If he's not there to meet me when I get to town
I'll stand on the side-walk with tears rolling down.
|
For he is the one that I love to look on,
The acme of kindness and perfection.
|
He presses my hand and he says he loves me,
Which I find an admirable peculiarity.
The woods are bright green on both sides of the line,
|
As recounted in The Secret Auden, by Edward Mendelson Auden fell in love with a fellow named ‘Chester Kallman’ in 1939. He saw this as a marriage. Kallman left two years later, saying that he could not remain faithful.
Auden then realized he had begun to sense that he had caused the break between them by trying to reshape Kallman into an ideal figure, an imaginary lover whom he valued more than the real one.
|
W. H. Auden
|
Calypso
|
Does the road wind up-hill all the way?
Yes, to the very end.
Will the day's journey take the whole long day?
From morn to night, my friend.
But is there for the night a resting-place?
A roof for when the slow dark hours begin.
May not the darkness hide it from my face?
You cannot miss that inn.
Shall I meet other wayfarers at night?
|
Those who have gone before.
|
Then must I knock, or call when just in sight?
They will not keep you standing at that door.
Shall I find comfort, travel-sore and weak?
|
The second speaker answers that he will meet those who have ‘gone before’, that is have experience of the journey of life. In other words, it is a process shared by all humanity.
As the inn represents heaven, this could suggest that the ‘wayfarers’ have died.
|
Christina Rossetti
|
Up-hill
|
I, too, sing America.
|
I am the darker brother.
|
They send me to eat in the kitchen
When company comes.
But I laugh,
|
The speaker claims a place within the American family but also calls attention to the fact that he is different.
|
Langston Hughes
|
I Too sing America
|
Well, son, I'll tell you:
Life for me ain't been no crystal stair.
|
It's had tacks in it,
And splinters,
And boards torn up,
And places with no carpet on the floor—
Bare.
|
But all the time
I'se been a-climbin' on,
And reachin' landin's,
|
The short catalog here creates imagery that completely contrasts the perfect “crystal stair.” The polysyndeton of the word “and” suggests times when she thought her life couldn’t get any worse AND… it did. The rhythm of the short lines also feels like a climb—one hard step after another.
The em-dash followed by the word “Bare” slows down the pace of the poem and emphasizes the hard life the speaker’s mother has lived. It’s almost as if the poem has reached a landing, a short repose before continuing the climb.
|
Langston Hughes
|
Mother to Son
|
Of four young brothers, trailed
For miles along the lines.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
III
Something of his sad freedom
As he rode the tumbril
Should come to me, driving,
Saying the names
Tollund, Grauballe, Nebelgard,
Watching the pointing hands
Of country people,
Not knowing their tongue.
|
Out here in Jutland
|
In the old man-killing parishes
I will feel lost,
Unhappy and at home.
|
Jutland is part of Denmark. The location “out here” is ironic, as Heaney goes on to merge two violent communities; Northern Ireland during The Troubles and primitive Denmark.
|
Seamus Heaney
|
The Tollund Man
|
[Published with "Alastor", 1816.]
We are as clouds that veil the midnight moon;
How restlessly they speed, and gleam, and quiver,
Streaking the darkness radiantly!—yet soon
Night closes round, and they are lost for ever:
Or like forgotten lyres, whose dissonant strings
Give various response to each varying blast,
To whose frail frame no second motion brings
One mood or modulation like the last.
We rest.—A dream has power to poison sleep;
We rise.—One wandering thought pollutes the day;
|
We feel, conceive or reason, laugh or weep;
|
Embrace fond woe, or cast our cares away:
It is the same!—For, be it joy or sorrow,
The path of its departure still is free:
|
These three lines start with subject and verb, like echoes, a pattern known as syntactic parallels . The repetition gives emphasis to the idea of man’s inability to grasp life positively.
Shelley juxtaposes opposites — dream and poison, laugh and weep —and creates a sense of uncertainty and floundering.
|
Percy Bysshe Shelley
|
Mutability
|
“When I was just as far as I could walk
From here to-day,
There was an hour
|
All still
|
When leaning with my head against a flower
I heard you talk.
Don't say I didn't, for I heard you say––
|
The spare line forces the reader to take a pause.
Frost creates parallelism between the narrative of the poem and its sound; everything comes to a pause.
|
Robert Frost
|
The Telephone
|
As long as you're
Down on your knees
So I knelt there at the delta
At the alpha and the omega
At the cradle of the river and the seas
And like a blessing come from heaven
For something like a second
I was healed and my heart
Was at ease
Ah baby I waited
So long for your kiss
For something to happen
|
Oh something like this
|
And you're weak and you're harmless
And you're sleeping in your harness
And the wind going wild
|
Almost “Something Like This” – Billy Joel’s version –
|
Leonard Cohen
|
Light as the Breeze
|
The milkweed brings up to my very door
The theme of wanton waste in peace and war
As it has never been to me before.
And so it seems a flower's coming out
That should if not be talked then sung about.
The countless wings that from the infinite
Make such a noiseless tumult over it
Do no doubt with their color compensate
For what the drab weed lacks of the ornate.
For drab it is its fondest must admit.
And yes, although it is a flower that flows
With milk and honey, it is bitter milk,
|
As anyone who ever broke its stem
And dared to taste the wound a little knows.
It tastes as if it might be opiate.
|
But whatsoever else it may secrete,
Its flowers' distilled honey is so sweet
It makes the butterflies intemperate.
|
looks like people do forage for milkweed pods
this site walks you through the parts of the milkweed plant and suggests how to eat it and how to use it in other ways:
of course, Frost is telling us this is yuck.
|
Robert Frost
|
Pod of the Milkweed
|
Here lodge as in a sanctuary!
Come often to us, fear no wrong;
Sit near us on the bough!
We'll talk of sunshine and of song,
And summer days, when we were young;
Sweet childish days, that were as long
As twenty days are now.
II.
Stay near me--do not take thy flight!
A little longer stay in sight!
Much converse do I find in thee,
Historian of my infancy!
|
Float near me; do not yet depart!
|
Dead times revive in thee:
Thou bring'st, gay creature as thou art!
A solemn image to my heart,
|
This line conveys Wordworth’s loneliness. The picture he has given us throughout the poem is of an old man observing and “conversing” with a butterfly that has landed nearby. The narrator develops a false sense of companionship with the butterfly after “talking” to it. When the butterfly begins to leave the loneliness the narrator was feeling returns.
|
William Wordsworth
|
To a Butterfly
|
null |
Only a man harrowing clods
In a slow silent walk
With an old horse that stumbles and nods
Half asleep as they stalk.
|
Only thin smoke without flame
From the heaps of couch-grass;
Yet this will go onward the same
|
Hardy begins by establishing the idea of the timelessness and measured pace of rural life. The reference in the title to the impact of war isn’t touched upon.
A man and his old horse carry out the action: plowing a field, breaking up the lumpy earth to prepare it for planting.
As in Channel Firing ), the first letter of each line is capitalised. Each line is a full clause, ending on a verb composed of a single accented rhyming syllable, and so it reads slowly, peacefully. The middle two lines in particular make a slow and calm start with two unstressed syllables.
The pastoral scene is spare and earthy, like an early Van Gogh painting.
The opening word “Only” suggests ironically that that this is a simple scene, though the underlying sinister presence of war is implied.
The alliteration of “slow silent,” “stumble,” and “stalk” give a soft musicality to the stanza, along with the calm long “o” of “Only” and “slow.” Both the man and his old horse – not an energetic stallion or ox – are “half asleep,” and so is this first section of the poem, since they alone populate it.
The rhythm of the words “stumbles and nods” along with the horse; it is difficult to get further from a military march than this.
This stanza is understated and doesn’t romanticise farm work.
Perhaps the “man harrowing clods” in the very first line is a smaller, more mundane version of “breaking of nations.” By immediately following the title with that image, Hardy contrasts the “annals of war” with ordinary pastoral life.
|
Thomas Hardy
|
In Time of The Breaking of Nations
|
There is a change--and I am poor;
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?
|
This is another balanced, rhythmic line. Note the alliterative and consonantly rhymed ‘blest’ and ‘bliss’. He speaker was in a state of extreme happiness.
|
William Wordsworth
|
A Complaint
|
It seems so long ago
None of us were strong;
Nancy wore green stockings
And she slept with everyone
She never said she'd wait for us
Although she was alone
I think she fell in love for us
In nineteen sixty one
In nineteen sixty one
It seems so long ago
Nancy was alone
A forty five beside her head
|
An open telephone
|
We told her she was beautiful
We told her she was free
But none of us would meet her in
|
It’s unlikely that Nancy actually had a telephone with her in the bathroom where she committed suicide. Leonard is telling us that she was trying to reach out to someone who could understand her, but couldn’t think of anyone since her relationships were all superficial.
|
Leonard Cohen
|
Seems So Long Ago Nancy
|
Fools of Brittania raped by all the slaves
Raped by all the slaves
Sorry Dad
Sorry for the good times that I had
They make me look so bad
Sorry mum
I'm sorry for the good things that I've done
It gave you hope when there was none
No how can ya
Teach that she was saved
Thus
Do svidaniya tell me I can live
|
Bicarb on a sieve
|
My baby coming with me now
For the outing
To the prison of my mind
|
Referring to sodium bicarbonate (baking soda) which is used to purify street heroin. In the early version of the song, the line was “Ammonia and sieve”. Household ammonia is also involved in the process of purifying heroin, a drug Peter Doherty is known for using.
|
Pete Doherty
|
Down for the Outing
|
Knowing that they can bring back thought
In the night that is still to be silent,
Reflecting this thing and that,
Before they sleep.
It is better that, as scholars,
They should think hard in the dark cuffs
Of voluminous cloaks,
And shave their heads and bodies.
It might well be that their mistress
Is no gaunt fugitive phantom.
She might, after all, be a wanton,
Abundantly beautiful, eager.
|
Fecund,
|
From whose being by starlight, on sea-coast,
The innermost good of their seeking
Might come in the simplest of speech.
|
The heavy enjambment from the previous line creates a very heavy focus of stress on this almost alien-sounding word, which sums up pretty well the kind of life– natural, reproductive– that the philosophers have shunned.
|
Wallace Stevens
|
Homunculus et La Belle Etoile
|
For her this rhyme is penned, whose luminous eyes,
Brightly expressive as the twins of Leda,
|
Shall find her own sweet name, that nestling lies
|
Upon the page, enwrapped from every reader.
Search narrowly the lines!- they hold a treasure
Divine- a talisman- an amulet
|
If the first letter of the first line, second letter of the second line, third letter of the third line, etc. are spelled out it will spell the name Frances Sargent Osgood a fellow poet who frequently exchanged love poems with Poe.
|
Edgar Allan Poe
|
A Valentine
|
'Now you put yo' paw dis way
While I hol' de spring back so,
Den you grab de meat an' go.'
Well, de bah he had to grin
Ez he put his big paw in,
Den he juked up, but--kerbing!
Weasel done let go de spring.
'Dah now,' says de weasel, 'dah,
I done cotched you, Mistah Bah!'
O, dat bah did sno't and spout,
Try'n' his bestes' to git out,
But de weasel say, 'Goo'-bye!
|
Weasel small, but weasel sly.'
|
Den he tu'ned his back an' run
Tol' de fa'mer whut he done.
So de fa'mer come down dah,
|
He may be small in stature but is very deceitful and has much wits about himself.
|
Paul Laurence Dunbar
|
A Cabin Tale
|
So often that demand such sacrifice;
More skilful in self-knowledge, even more pure,
As tempted more; more able to endure,
As more exposed to suffering and distress;
Thence, also, more alive to tenderness.
—'Tis he whose law is reason; who depends
Upon that law as on the best of friends;
Whence, in a state where men are tempted still
To evil for a guard against worse ill,
And what in quality or act is best
Doth seldom on a right foundation rest,
He labours good on good to fix, and owes
|
To virtue every triumph that he knows:
|
—Who, if he rise to station of command,
Rises by open means; and there will stand
On honourable terms, or else retire,
|
Success comes from sticking to principles
|
William Wordsworth
|
Character of the Happy Warrior
|
I care not for these ladies,
That must be wooed and prayed:
Give me kind Amaryllis,
The wanton country maid.
Nature art disdaineth,
Her beauty is her own.
Her when we court and kiss,
She cries, “Forsooth, let go!”
But when we come where comfort is,
She never will say no.
If I love Amaryllis,
She gives me fruit and flowers:
|
But if we love these ladies,
We must give golden showers.
|
Give them gold, that sell love,
Give me the nut-brown lass,
Who, when we court and kiss,
|
He isn’t talking about peeing on women. He literally means showering these women (not Amaryllis) with gold coins.
|
Thomas Campion
|
I Care Not for These Ladies
|
And, softly dripping, drop by drop,
Upon the quiet mountain top,
Steals drowsily and musically
Into the universal valley.
The rosemary nods upon the grave;
The lily lolls upon the wave;
Wrapping the fog about its breast,
The ruin molders into rest;
Looking like Lethë, see! the lake
A conscious slumber seems to take,
And would not, for the world, awake.
All Beauty sleeps!—and lo! where lies
|
Irenë, with her Destinies!
|
O, lady bright! can it be right—
This window open to the night?
The wanton airs, from the tree-top,
|
Irene was the original title of the poem. In Greek mythology Irene (Eirene) was the goddess of peace and springtime, so Irene could also be a reference to the time of year the poem is set in as well as tying into the metaphor of the sleeper being at peace in death.
|
Edgar Allan Poe
|
The Sleeper
|
If but some vengeful god would call to me
From up the sky, and laugh: "Thou suffering thing,
Know that thy sorrow is my ecstasy,
That thy love's loss is my hate's profiting!"
Then would I bear it, clench myself, and die,
Steeled by the sense of ire unmerited;
Half-eased in that a Powerfuller than I
Had willed and meted me the tears I shed.
But not so. How arrives it joy lies slain,
And why unblooms the best hope ever sown?
—Crass Casualty obstructs the sun and rain,
And dicing Time for gladness casts a moan. . . .
|
These purblind Doomsters had as readily strown
Blisses about my pilgrimage as pain.
| null |
The speaker wishes that Fate and her henchmen – the Doomsters – would have been as liberal doling out happiness as they were pain upon his path.
|
Thomas Hardy
|
Hap
|
I'm truly sorry Man's dominion
Has broken Nature's social union
An' justifies that ill opinion
Which makes thee startle
At me, thy poor, earth-born companion
An' fellow-mortal!
I doubt na, whyles, but thou may thieve;
What then? poor beastie, thou maun live!
A daimen-icker in a thrave
'S a sma' request
I'll get a blessin wi' the lave
An' never miss't!
|
Thy wee-bit housie, too, in ruin!
It's silly wa's the win's are strewin!
An' naething, now, to big a new ane
O' foggage green!
An' bleak December's winds ensuin
Baith snell an' keen!
|
Thou saw the fields laid bare an' wast
An' weary Winter comin fast
An' cozie here, beneath the blast
|
Rough English translation:
Your small house, too, in ruin! Its feeble walls the winds are scattering! And nothing now, to build a new one, Of coarse grass green! And bleak December’s winds coming, Both bitter and keen!
Burns now turns attention to the ruin that he’s brought on the mouse’s existence. Her “house,” referring to her nest, is totally destroyed, and she has nothing to build a new one with before winter comes.
Once again the speaker is showing sympathy towards the mouse as its house is ruined and it does not have the necessary materials to rebuild it. The speaker uses odd contractions to convey the authentic Scottish dialect such as “wa’s” for walls and “win’s” for winds.
|
Robert Burns
|
To a Mouse
|
MISE EIRE
|
I won't go back to it –
|
my nation displaced
into old dactyls
oaths made
|
The first one-lined stanza is an emphatic declarative statement of intent that sets the tone of the poem. It can be taken as submissive and negative, or defiant and stubborn.
The dash forms a caesura , a break that creates drama and emphasis.
|
Eavan Boland
|
Mise Eire
|
I could hav been a builder
A painter or a swimmer
I dreamt of being a Rasta writer,
I fancied me a farmer
I could never be a barber
Once I was not sure about de future,
|
Got a sentence an I done it
|
Still me angry feelings groweth
Now I am jus a different fighter,
I sight de struggle up more clearly
|
This is a pun, and refers to the prison sentences he served as a teenager, as well as the sentences he writes as an author.
|
Benjamin Zephaniah
|
Its Work
|
null |
The little boy lost in the lonely fen,
|
Led by the wand'ring light,
Began to cry; but God, ever nigh,
Appear'd like his father, in white.
|
Blake chose chose to set his poem in ‘the lonely fen’, significantly because fenlands are swampy and can be treacherous at night. The Fens of East Anglia regularly take lives through drowning.
The simple, unadorned introduction leads the reader into the more complex, symbolic lines. The little boy is representative of vulnerable childhood as well as innocent but misguided humankind.
|
William Blake
|
The Little Boy Found Songs of Innocence
|
null |
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
|
Even though the person she works for is nice, that still doesn’t help the fact that the workload is massive.
That’s a lot of rooms.
|
Langston Hughes
|
Madam and Her Madam
|
Oh Crown of Light, oh Darkened One
I never thought we'd meet
You kiss my lips, and then it's done:
I'm back on Boogie Street
A sip of wine, a cigarette
And then it's time to go
I tidied up the kitchenette;
I tuned the old banjo
I'm wanted at the traffic-jam
They're saving me a seat
I'm what I am, and what I am
|
Is back on Boogie Street
|
And oh my love, I still recall
The pleasures that we knew;
The rivers and the waterfall
|
Cohen said in an interview on “Mc Lean’s” Magazine, 2001 :
There is an actual Boogie Street in the world. It’s in Singapore. I don’t know if it’s still there. I was coming home from a tour of Australia many years ago and during the day Boogie Street is a scene of intense commercial activity. In fact, there’s a lot of little stalls where bootleg records are sold. This was at a time when it was hard to find my records in the Western world. And they weren’t displayed. But I asked the man if they had any Leonard Cohen, and he went into the tent where he kept his inventory, and he brought an entire box of all my cassettes for a dollar apiece. There was that kind of bazaar feeling. And at night, it was a scene of intense and alarming sexual exchange. Prostitution, and … everything seemed to be available. I don’t even know if it was prostitution. It just seemed to be mutual availability.Boogie Street to me was that street of work and desire, the ordinary life and also the place we live in most of the time that is relieved by the embrace of your children, or the kiss of your beloved, or the peak experience in which you yourself are dissolved, and there is no one to experience it so you feel the refreshment when you come back from those moments. As my old teacher said: “Paradise is a good place to visit, but you can’t live there because there are no toilets or restaurants.” So we all hope for those heavenly moments, which we get in those embraces and those sudden perceptions of beauty and sensations of pleasure, but we’re immediately returned to Boogie Street.
|
Leonard Cohen
|
Boogie Street
|
Detroit Conference of Unity and Art
(For HRB)
We went there to confer
On the possibility of
Blackness
And the inevitability of
|
Revolution
|
We talked about
Black leaders
And
|
The Black Power Revolution in the late 1960’s and 1970’s was the movement to achieve self determination for African Americans. It emphasized racial pride and the establishment of social institutions to advance black values.
[ ]
|
Nikki Giovanni
|
Detroit Conference of Unity and Art For HRB
|
I can wade Grief—
Whole Pools of it—
I'm used to that—
But the least push of Joy
Breaks up my feet—
And I tip—drunken—
Let no Pebble—smile—
'Twas the New Liquor—
|
That was all!
|
Power is only Pain—
Stranded, thro' Discipline,
Till Weights—will hang—
|
The joy is only fleeting. It has no influence on her general emotional state, it just briefly interrupts her consistent endurance of pain.
|
Emily Dickinson
|
I can wade Grief 252
|
It's coming through a hole in the air
From those nights in Tiananmen Square
It's coming from the feel
That it ain't exactly real
|
Or it's real, but it ain't exactly there
|
From the war against disorder
From the sirens night and day
From the fires of the homeless
|
In contrast to the idea in the previous line that American Democracy isn’t real, Cohen suggests that American Democracy is real but not truly present in America.
In other words, American democracy is an ideal that America has never lived up to.
This sets up the later idea that America is home to a “spiritual thirst” for democracy
|
Leonard Cohen
|
Democracy
|
Here come real stars to fill the upper skies,
And here on earth come emulating flies,
That though they never equal stars in size,
(And they were never really stars at heart)
Achieve at times a very star-like start.
|
Only, of course, they can't sustain the part.
| null |
Nothing Gold Can Stay
People inevitably yield to time, to age, and to reality. Consequently, they tend to lose their initial fascination with fireflies.
However, the fascination lives on in the next generation of children, in the next “star-like start.”
Frost, in other words, may be using these “emulating flies” as symbols of human lives, human intellects, or human artists, who must inevitably be humbled in their attempts to “equal” the brilliance and power of the stars.
|
Robert Frost
|
Fireflies in the Garden
|
‘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.
|
Arras, France was the scene of a 1917 battle which resulted in mass casualties.
|
Siegfried Sassoon
|
The General
|
Wee, sleekit, cowrin, tim'rous beastie
O, what panic's in thy breastie!
Thou need na start awa sae hasty
Wi' bickering brattle!
I wad be laith to rin an' chase thee
Wi' murd'ring pattle!
I'm truly sorry Man's dominion
Has broken Nature's social union
An' justifies that ill opinion
Which makes thee startle
At me, thy poor, earth-born companion
An' fellow-mortal!
|
I doubt na, whyles, but thou may thieve;
What then? poor beastie, thou maun live!
A daimen-icker in a thrave
‘S a sma' request
I'll get a blessin wi' the lave
An' never miss't!
|
Thy wee-bit housie, too, in ruin!
It's silly wa's the win's are strewin!
An' naething, now, to big a new ane
|
Rough English Translation:
I doubt not, sometimes, but you may steal; What then? Poor little beast, you must live! An odd ear in twenty-four sheaves Is a small request; I will get a blessing with what is left, And never miss it.
Although the mouse doubtless has stolen from him before, Burns forgives the little beast; it’s only taking what it needs to survive. After all, he grows much more than he needs only to sell the excess. He won’t truly miss the little bit that gets stolen to feed the mouse and its family.
In these lines Robert Burns displays a principal effort of the Romantic writers. Nature, being a common theme in Romantic writing, falls secondary to Burn’s focus on man finding his position within nature. Such a position would exist in harmony with the natural state. In this poem, Burns ascribes human qualities to the mouse on a level that exceeds standard personification — anthropomorphism is a more accurate description. The concept of “thieving” and “making a request” are actions distinct to humans because they involve direct interaction between two people. Burns has not only equated the mouse with himself in recognizing the mouse’s request, but also acknowledges the disruptive position within the natural state man currently occupies i.e. the Industrial Revolution.
|
Robert Burns
|
To a Mouse
|
You say I O.K.ed
LONG DISTANCE?
O.K.ed it when?
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
|
If she does not pay the long distance charges on top of her bill, they will discontinue her phone service.
|
Langston Hughes
|
Madam and the Phone Bill
|
Body my house
my horse my hound
what will I do
when you are fallen
Where will I sleep
How will I ride
What will I hunt
Where can I go
without my mount
all eager and quick
|
How will I know
in thicket ahead
is danger or treasure
when Body my good
bright dog is dead
|
How will it be
to lie in the sky
without roof or door
|
In a 1998 “Poet’s Choice” newspaper column, former U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Hass shared an anecdote about this passage:
When Mark McGwire was taking his victory lap the other night, half dancing and half jogging around the bases after hitting his sixty-second home run home run of the season [ breaking a 36-year-old record ], my companion [poet Brenda Hillman], who is exceptionally literate and takes a philosophical interest in the bodies of baseball players, regarded his strangely bulked-up torso and murmured, musingly, “When Body my good bright dog is dead…”
McGwire was then widely rumored, and later found, to be using steroids, which can shorten “Body’s” lifespan considerably.
|
May Swenson
|
Question
|
null |
MISE EIRE
|
I won't go back to it –
my nation displaced
into old dactyls
|
The title of this poem is a play on words. “Mise Eire” is Irish Gaelic for “I am Ireland”. It is also a homophone for “misery” in English. Finally, it is a near-homophone for the “Miserere mei, Deus ” of the 51st Psalm , meaning “Have mercy upon me, O God”. The device of multiple meanings such as these is known as a polyseme .
|
Eavan Boland
|
Mise Eire
|
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?
So many graves to fill
|
The star of David, and the tip of a mosque, representing Judaism and Islam.
Another recurring theme in Cohen’s career is criticism of the wars between Muslims and Jews in the Middle East.
|
Leonard Cohen
|
The Faith
|
For her this rhyme is penned, whose luminous eyes,
|
Brightly expressive as the twins of Leda,
|
Shall find her own sweet name, that nestling lies
Upon the page, enwrapped from every reader.
Search narrowly the lines!- they hold a treasure
|
This references Leda the mother of the famous twins Castor and Pollox who make up the Gemini constellation.
As Poe gets lost in the twinkle of the stars above, so to does he get lost in the eyes of his lover.
|
Edgar Allan Poe
|
A Valentine
|
Though deeper within darkness
Is entering the loneliness:
Cold, delicately as the dark snow
A fox's nose touches twig, leaf;
Two eyes serve a movement, that now
And again now, and now, and now
Sets neat prints into the snow
Between trees, and warily a lame
Shadow lags by stump and in hollow
Of a body that is bold to come
Across clearings, an eye,
A widening deepening greenness,
|
Brilliantly, concentratedly,
|
Coming about its own business
Till, with a sudden sharp hot stink of fox
It enters the dark hole of the head.
|
Two more long, slow adverbs complete the description. The meaning of the two words in this context are similar, a device known as hendiadys .
|
Ted Hughes
|
The Thought-Fox
|
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!
Longing and love, pangs of a perished pleasure,
Longing and love, a disenkindled fire,
|
And memory a bottomless gulf of mire,
|
And love a fount of tears outrunning measure;
Oh vanity of vanities, desire!
Now from my heart, love's deathbed, trickles, trickles,
|
She views the past as lacking fulfilment; memories of passion aren’t happy, but instead hollow, a matter of regret. The word ‘mire’ shows that she feels muddy, unclean.
|
Christina Rossetti
|
Soeur Louise De La Misericorde
|
Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.
My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.
He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound's the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.
|
The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
|
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.
|
Here the woods may function as a metaphor for death. Our narrator is world-weary; the rest that death could provide would be “lovely, dark, and deep.” Lulled into the woods, he’s effectively forsaken his sense of prudence and self-preservation.
In other words, this may be a death fantasy that the speaker entertains before yielding to his everyday obligations (“promises to keep”). He is excited by the possibility of the world without his life, or human life wholly, a tantalizing, impossible vision of the outlines of a stranger universe. It seems to promise everything new, because it is so distant, but it is an unstable, brief vision which obscures reality. Talk about seeing the forest through the trees! See Frost’s “Birches” for the development of a similar idea, also linked with an image of trees:
I’d like to get away from earth awhile, And then come back to it and begin over….
I’d like to go by climbing a birch tree And climb black branches up a snow-white trunk
Toward heaven, till the tree could bear no more, But dipped its top and set me down again.
Compare also one of Frost’s earliest poems, “Into My Own,” in which “dark trees” represent some form of dark and primal knowledge, which the speaker wishes would extend to “the edge of doom.” Frost returns to a similar setting and theme in “Come In.”
Frost may even be tracing a link between the contemplation of death and the perception of sublime beauty. (See his contemporary Wallace Stevens’s famous phrase: “Death is the mother of beauty.” )
However, we don’t have to read the woods as a death symbol. The part of the speaker that’s wild may simply want to be free, to live in the lovely (natural and organic), dark (primitive, dense with life), and deep (rich in true meanings and morals). Death is arguably none of these things, but rather nothingness itself.
|
Robert Frost
|
Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening
|
On a white heal-all, holding up a moth
Like a white piece of rigid satin cloth--
Assorted characters of death and blight
Mixed ready to begin the morning right
Like the ingredients of a witches' broth--
A snow-drop spider, a flower like a froth
And dead wings carried like a paper kite
What had that flower to do with being white
The wayside blue and innocent heal-all?
What brought the kindred spider to that height
Then steered the white moth thither in the night?
What but design of darkness to appall?--
|
If design govern in a thing so small
|
1936
|
Does design = fate? Frost could be arguing that fate only applies to large things, or maybe only great men. Fate only has control over the powerful and strong, the heroes of life. Does this mean that fate does not have control over common things, and is there not a certain freedom in being small?
|
Robert Frost
|
Design
|
[Published with "Alastor", 1816.]
We are as clouds that veil the midnight moon;
How restlessly they speed, and gleam, and quiver,
Streaking the darkness radiantly!—yet soon
Night closes round, and they are lost for ever:
Or like forgotten lyres, whose dissonant strings
Give various response to each varying blast,
To whose frail frame no second motion brings
One mood or modulation like the last.
We rest.—A dream has power to poison sleep;
We rise.—One wandering thought pollutes the day;
We feel, conceive or reason, laugh or weep;
|
Embrace fond woe, or cast our cares away:
|
It is the same!—For, be it joy or sorrow,
The path of its departure still is free:
Man's yesterday may ne'er be like his morrow;
|
Again the juxtaposition of opposites.
It is interesting to note the slow, heavy, long vowels in ‘embrace fond woe’, reflecting the sadness; this compares to the lighter, skipping rhythm of ‘cast our cares away’, with alliterative ‘c’s. Shelley crafts this line superbly.
|
Percy Bysshe Shelley
|
Mutability
|
Three sang of love together: one with lips
Crimson, with cheeks and bosom in a glow,
Flushed to the yellow hair and finger-tips;
And one there sang who soft and smooth as snow
Bloomed like a tinted hyacinth at a show;
And one was blue with famine after love,
Who like a harpstring snapped rare harsh and low
The burden of what those were singing of.
One shamed herself in love; one temperately
Grew gross in soulless love, a sluggish wife;
One famished died for love. Thus two of three
Took death for love and won him after strife;
|
One droned in sweetness like a fattened bee:
|
All on the threshold, yet all short of life.
|
It is unclear why the third “droned in sweetness”, but it could be that she lived on unhappily and, on behalf of her fellow women, took to song as a consolation for what their lives lacked. The oxymoron “droned in sweetness” and the “fattened bee” are unpleasant-sounding and reinforce the idea of endless but pointless activity and unhappiness.
|
Christina Rossetti
|
A Triad
|
Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.
My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.
|
He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
|
The only other sound's the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.
The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
|
Driven by a sense of duty, or perhaps fear, the horse seeks to rouse his master from contemplation. Instinctively he feels out of place stopping here.
The horse is attributed with an understanding of human emotions and ability to communicate with the speaker. Having developed a connection to his rider, he would be lost without him. The domesticated horse represents society. At first he is ironically more drawn to returning home than his human master.
The “harness bells” – they confine, and communicate by making sound – may be metaphoric for language, whether spoken or unspoken, which reign us in and bring us back to our social lives. However, the speaker is moving away from society in his thoughts, which are more free to contain and express his spirituality.
The horse may carry symbolic associations, suggesting a source of strength, progress, or productivity that the speaker has temporarily lost touch with.
|
Robert Frost
|
Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening
|
I knew a simple soldier boy
Who grinned at life in empty joy,
Slept soundly through the lonesome dark,
|
And whistled early with the lark.
|
In winter trenches, cowed and glum,
With crumps and lice and lack of rum,
He put a bullet through his brain.
|
A lark is a bird known for it’s singing. Having the boy whistle in the early morning with this bird showed that he was happy and carefree.
|
Siegfried Sassoon
|
Suicide in the Trenches
|
null |
From my bed
|
I watch
3 birds
On a telephone
|
Bukowski often spent whole afternoons in bed recovering from hangovers and did not believe in the old adage, “early to bed, early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise” .
|
Charles Bukowski
|
8 Count
|
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
|
and empty grows every bed.
|
We associate the sea here with both Berryman’s Mother and his birth, and with Berryman’s Father, his death. This brings back the question whether or not Dream Song 1 is about Berrymans Father’s death.
|
John Berryman
|
Dream Song 1
|
How pleasant an existence it is
That this emerald charms philosophers,
Until they become thoughtlessly willing
To bathe their hearts in later moonlight,
Knowing that they can bring back thought
In the night that is still to be silent,
Reflecting this thing and that,
Before they sleep.
It is better that, as scholars,
They should think hard in the dark cuffs
Of voluminous cloaks,
And shave their heads and bodies.
|
It might well be that their mistress
Is no gaunt fugitive phantom.
She might, after all, be a wanton,
Abundantly beautiful, eager.
|
Fecund,
From whose being by starlight, on sea-coast,
The innermost good of their seeking
|
Stevens speculates that Plato and is ilk would would be seduced by the worldly pleasures Florida, illuminated by the particular kind of light he mentions, leaving behind their dedication to other-worldliness.
|
Wallace Stevens
|
Homunculus et La Belle Etoile
|
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.
| null |
The ideal image of the girl is only in the artist dreams.
This poem in a way reflects that ‘beauty in in the eye of the beholder.’ “In an Artist’s Studio.” Impracticalcriticism. Wordpress, 3 Nov. 2011. Web. 05 Nov. 2014.
|
Christina Rossetti
|
In An Artists Studio
|
O
Out of a bed of love
When that immortal hospital made one more moove to soothe
The curless counted body,
And ruin his causes
Over the barbed and shooting sea assumed an army
And swept into our wounds and houses,
I climb to greet the war in which I have no heart but only
That one dark I owe my light,
Call for confessor and wiser mirror but there is none
To glow after the god stoning night
And I am struck as lonely as a holy marker by the sun
|
No
|
Praise that the spring time is all
Gabriel and radiant shrubbery as the morning grows joyful
Out of the woebegone pyre
|
The first stanza is full of very sad and depressing images. This next stanza is almost a relief to the first, so the speaker begins the relief stanza with “No” to, in a way, contradict the sadness expressed in the first stanza.
|
Dylan Thomas
|
Holy Spring
|
The words- the syllables! Do not forget
The trivialest point, or you may lose your labor
And yet there is in this no Gordian knot
Which one might not undo without a sabre,
If one could merely comprehend the plot.
Enwritten upon the leaf where now are peering
Eyes scintillating soul, there lie perdus
Three eloquent words oft uttered in the hearing
Of poets, by poets- as the name is a poet's, too,
Its letters, although naturally lying
Like the knight Pinto- Mendez Ferdinando-
Still form a synonym for Truth- Cease trying!
|
You will not read the riddle, though you do the best you can do.
| null |
Poe challenges his love to find the riddle in the poem. The solution is to take the first letter of the first line, the second letter of the second line, and so on until the final line of the poem.
What do you get?
Frances Sargent Osgood
The name of his lady love is revealed! How romantic.
|
Edgar Allan Poe
|
A Valentine
|
The woman is perfected.
Her dead
Body wears the smile of accomplishment,
The illusion of a Greek necessity
Flows in the scrolls of her toga,
Her bare
Feet seem to be saying:
We have come so far, it is over.
|
Each dead child coiled, a white serpent,
|
One at each little
Pitcher of milk, now empty.
She has folded
|
The poem moves from imagery of a perfected dead woman to serpent-like dead children. When seen as something outside of Plath’s personal life, this line could be understood as mid-century social critique of feminism . Children are not only absent, but like a serpent they are a threat and a risk to women’s liberation.
Note that white serpents are symbols of purity and positive energy. Therefore, Plath may see her children in this way, a positive factor in her life.
Alternatively, another strand of feminism accepts the biological fact that women are child-bearers and sees it as a strength; a source of power as women can then most influence children to grow and fight the subjugation of previous generations. As with many of Plath’s poems, this is full of contradictions.
Yet another interpretation is that this is a reference to Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra , where Cleopatra killed herself by obtaining an asp which bit her.
Dost thou not see my baby at my breast, That sucks the nurse asleep?
Within the context of her life this may also be symbolic of her multiple miscarriages. Also, her use of color in every poem is important. White in her poems typically represents emptiness; echoing perhaps an empty womb. “White serpent” could also be viewed as an oxymoron , as white has connotations of purity, but, particularly through a biblical lens, snakes are portrayed as representing sin and the devil (e.g the snake in the garden of Eden).
There is also a suggestion that the dead children could represent the Greek tragedy ‘Medea’, in which the heroine kills her own children. It has been suggested in some biographies that Plath might have contemplated killing her two children when she committed suicide.
|
Sylvia Plath
|
Edge
|
null |
Because I could not stop for Death –
He kindly stopped for me –
|
The Carriage held but just Ourselves –
And Immortality
We slowly drove – He knew no haste
|
This poem may not only be about death, but more so about the death of a female’s individuality when she enters into marriage. Upon her return from Mount Holyoke Dickinson was frustrated by the expected role of a single woman. A woman in mid nineteenth century America would have been expected to re-arrange their life around their husband’s. Seeing as how Dickinson did not marry I think that what she may be saying is that death is the only man who will ever slow her down. Possibly because he “kindly stopped for her” unlike a mortal man would have. Throughout the poem Dickinson alludes to death’s patience, and also them as a couple essentially. In lines such as, “We slowly drove” and “We paused before the House.” Death and her are moving as one, he is letting her take her time and also not trying to control her. That is why in the end of the poem she willingly lets him take her.
|
Emily Dickinson
|
Because I Could Not Stop for Death
|
Now the flames they followed Joan of Arc
As she came riding through the dark
No moon to keep her armour bright
No man to get her through this very smoky night
She said, "I'm tired of the war
I want the kind of work I had before
|
A wedding dress or something white
|
To wear upon my swollen appetite"
Well, I'm glad to hear you talk this way
You know I've watched you riding every day
|
One of the charges against Joan for which she was burned at the stake was that she wore man’s clothing. The church officials saw this as a perversion of God’s natural order and evidence that she was a witch rather than a follower of God. She wore men’s clothing for practical reasons, not because she wanted to—riding horses day and night, fighting in many battles, and for her own safety, considering that she was a 16 year old girl living and traveling with male soldiers. The officials who imprisoned her demanded that she dress like a woman and confess that the voices that instructed her were not of God, but she refused, put the men’s clothing back on and was burned at the stake.
|
Leonard Cohen
|
Joan of Arc
|
There is an evening coming in
Across the fields, one never seen before,
That lights no lamps.
Silken it seems at a distance, yet
When it is drawn up over the knees and breast
It brings no comfort.
Where has the tree gone, that locked
Earth to the sky? What is under my hands,
That I cannot feel?
|
What loads my hands down?
| null |
The last stanza, also a rhetorical question , is a single line, to give it added emphasis. What “loads my hands down?” isn’t explained, but we can assume it is death.
|
Philip Larkin
|
Going
|
I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.
Exiled Thucydides knew
All that a speech can say
About Democracy
And what dictators do,
The elderly rubbish they talk
To an apathetic grave;
Analysed all in his book,
The enlightenment driven away,
|
The habit-forming pain,
|
Mismanagement and grief:
We must suffer them all again.
Into this neutral air
|
The ‘habit-forming pain’ is a philosophical allusion to the fact that history keeps repeating itself; with nations reaching for familiar aggressive “solutions”.
|
W. H. Auden
|
September 1 1939
|
As imperceptibly as Grief
The Summer lapsed away —
Too imperceptible, at last
To seem like Perfidy —
A Quietness distilled
As Twilight long begun
Or Nature spending with herself
|
Sequestered Afternoon —
|
The Dusk drew earlier in —
The Morning foreign shone —
A courteous, yet harrowing Grace
|
“Sequestered” means hidden. So nature is hidden away.
At this stage it is worth looking at the construction of the stanzas and the lines. The frequency of dashes may indicate a desire to convey the essence of the speaker’s thoughts; a wish to not even include the ‘scaffolding’ of sentences with full syntax. The frequent pauses, caesurae , enable the reader to infer what hasn’t been said.
|
Emily Dickinson
|
As Imperceptibly as Grief
|
Hey, boy!
A nickel,
A dime,
A dollar,
Two dollars a day.
Hey, boy!
A nickel,
A dime,
A dollar,
Two dollars a day
Buy shoes for the baby.
House rent to pay.
|
Gin on Saturday,
Church on Sunday.
|
My God!
Babies and gin and church
And women and Sunday
|
These lines contrast Sunday, a day of worship, with the rest of the week. The specific example of “Gin on Saturday” is a particularly stark contrast since alcohol and church rarely mix in many Christian churches.
Hughes went to church every Sunday as a child, so it was a big part of his family and childhood.
Hughes’s poem, Salvation further demonstrates his close relationship with spirituality.
|
Langston Hughes
|
Brass Spittoons
|
I don't know?
For instance, what can
Them other girls do
That Alberta K. Johnson
Can't do--and more, too?
What's that, Central?
You say you don't care
Nothing about my
Private affair?
Well, even less about your
PHONE BILL, does I care!
Un-humm-m! . . . Yes!
|
You say I gave my O.K.?
Well, that O.K. you may keep--
|
But I sure ain't gonna pay!
|
She disputes whether she gave the O.K. to those calls. Either way, the phone company can keep whatever it is they claim to have because she will not give anything else.
|
Langston Hughes
|
Madam and the Phone Bill
|
Beating them with laws and clubs and bayonets and bullets
To frighten the people—
For the kids who die are like iron in the blood of the people—
And the old and rich don't want the people
To taste the iron of the kids who die,
Don't want the people to get wise to their own power,
To believe an Angelo Herndon, or even get together
Listen, kids who die—
Maybe, now, there will be no monument for you
Except in our hearts
Maybe your bodies'll be lost in a swamp
Or a prison grave, or the potter's field,
|
Or the rivers where you're drowned like Leibknecht
|
But the day will come—
Your are sure yourselves that it is coming—
When the marching feet of the masses
|
Leibknecht was a German socialist who was murdered by paramilitary forces for his role in the failed Sparticist Uprising of 1919.
|
Langston Hughes
|
Kids Who Die
|
But at least, in May, that even a rat should be alive.
The week's work here is as good as done. There is just one bough
On the roped bole, in the fine grey rain,
Green and high
And lonely against the sky.
(Down now!—)
And but for that,
If an old dead rat
Did once, for a moment, unmake the Spring, I might never have thought of him again.
It is not for a moment the Spring is unmade to-day;
These were great trees, it was in them from root to stem:
When the men with the ‘Whoops' and the ‘Whoas' have carted the whole of the whispering loveliness away
|
Half the Spring, for me, will have gone with them.
|
It is going now, and my heart has been struck with the hearts of the planes;
Half my life it has beat with these, in the sun, in the rains,
In the March wind, the May breeze,
|
This line is perhaps the dramatic climax of the poem, a statement of sadness and loss. The trees, with the Spring season and the life force they represent,, have gone. The poet is left with only ‘half the Spring.’ Her sense of loss is clearly strong.
|
Charlotte Mew
|
The Trees Are Down
|
Remember Thee! Remember Thee!
1.
|
Remember thee! remember thee!
|
Till Lethe quench life's burning stream
Remorse and Shame shall cling to thee,
And haunt thee like a feverish dream!
|
In this first stanza, Byron ironically reverses the meaning of “remember thee” from “remember you” to “you’ll remember.”
This entire first stanza is really Byron’s version of “You ruined it now, I hope you can’t sleep and you dream about it.”
|
Lord Byron
|
Remember Thee Remember Thee
|
Hemingway's brains dropping into
the orange juice;
Pascal cutting his wrists
in the bathtub;
Artaud locked up with the mad;
Dostoevsky stood up against a wall;
Crane jumping into a boat propeller;
Lorca shot in the road by Spanish
troops;
Berryman jumping off a bridge;
Burroughs shooting his wife;
Mailer knifing his.
|
-that's what they want:
A God damned show
a lit billboard
in the middle of hell.
|
that's what they want,
that bunch of
dull
|
Bukowski is fighting the notion that to become accepted by the norm an artist as to be tortured or suffer in any way to add to his romantic appeal.
|
Charles Bukowski
|
What they want
|
We were runnin' for the money and the flesh
And that was called love for the workers in song
Probably still is for those of them left
Yeah, but you got away, didn't you babe?
You just turned your back on the crowd
When you got away, I never once heard you say
I need you
I don't need you
I need you
I don't need you
And all of that jivin' around
I remember you well in the Chelsea Hotel
|
You were famous, your heart was a legend
|
You told me again, you preferred handsome men
But for me you would make an exception
And clenching your fist for the ones like us
|
Her heart is famous because she dated many celebrities and Piece of My Heart is one of her most famous songs.
|
Leonard Cohen
|
Chelsea Hotel No. 2
|
null |
I heard a Fly buzz – when I died –
|
The Stillness in the Room
Was like the Stillness in the Air –
Between the Heaves of Storm –
|
The speaker seems to be on her deathbed and telling this story at the moment of death or from beyond the grave. This follows a pattern that appears in a number of Emily Dickinson poems (see “I died for Beauty – but was scarce” .
As an opening line it is unsettling — the fly reference is trivial and the buzzing will stir in readers of irritating memories. And yet death is momentous and the fly has great significance in the poem.
|
Emily Dickinson
|
I heard a Fly buzz 465
|
null |
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,
|
“The worms” begin to consume Badroulbadour’s corpse. They are “her chariot” perhaps to convey her to the next life, be it heaven or hell.
Badroulbadour was a Far Eastern princess, who married Aladdin , as told the Arabic folk tale collection, “ One Thousand and One Nights .” (She is better known as ‘Jasmine’, from Disney’s “Aladdin.”) Badroulbadour translates from Arabic to “full moon of full moons.”
That the idealized, romantic story of Aladdin and Badroulbadour should be examined in this fashion—we watch as Baldroulbadour’s corpse is consumed by worms—conveys a striking contrast between life and the bleak realities of death. Like “ Nothing Gold Can Stay ,” a less macabre treatment of the same subject, it reminds us that everything decays. (Thanks to Robert Frost for such a convenient reference)
|
Wallace Stevens
|
The Worms at Heavens Gate
|
Love
Is a brown man's fist
With hard knuckles
Crushing the lips
Blackening the eyes, --
Hit me again,
|
Says Clorinda.
| null |
This final line makes us step away from the Love metaphor and consider if this is really an abusive relationship.
Perhaps Hughes is trying to say that love in Beale Street means hitting your girl, and we are left to wonder whether this poem is metaphorical (Love is violent, but we still desire it) or literal (love in Beale Street is abusive).
|
Langston Hughes
|
Beale Street Love
|
so hugely)stood my father's dream
his flesh was flesh his blood was blood:
no hungry man but wished him food;
no cripple wouldn't creep one mile
uphill to only see him smile
Scorning the Pomp of must and shall
my father moved through dooms of feel;
his anger was as right as rain
his pity was as green as grain
Septembering arms of year extend
Yes humbly wealth to foe and friend
Than he to foolish and to wise
|
Offered immeasurable is
|
Proudly and(by octobering flame
Beckoned)as earth will downward climb
So naked for immortal work
|
Here, “is”; a verb; is being used as a noun. This word is a conjugated form of “to be”, therefore meaning that his father gave away much “existence” or “life”–and to anyone , considering the fact that “is” is third person verb rather than “am”.
|
E. E. Cummings
|
My father moved through dooms of love
|
For even so I still remain your lover in captivity
Green sleeves, you're all alone
The leaves have fallen, the men have gone
Green sleeves, there's no one home
Not even the Lady Green Sleeves
I sang my songs, I told my lies
To lie between your matchless thighs
And ain't it fine, ain't it wild
To finally end our exercise
Then I saw you naked in the early dawn
Oh, I hoped you would be someone new
I reached for you but you were gone
|
So Lady I'm going too
|
Green sleeves, you're all alone
The leaves have fallen, the men are gone
Green sleeves, you're all alone
|
The last verse of the original also sees the lover go but he still hopes for Greensleeves to one day recognize his constant love:
Ah, Greensleeves, now farewell, adieu To God I pray to prosper thee For I am still thy lover true Come once again and love me
|
Leonard Cohen
|
Leaving Green Sleeves
|
What should I be but a prophet and a liar,
Whose mother was a leprechaun, whose father was a friar?
Teethed on a crucifix and cradled under water,
What should I be but the fiend's god-daughter?
And who should be my playmates but the adder and the frog,
That was got beneath a furze-bush and born in a bog?
And what should be my singing, that was christened at an altar,
|
But Aves and Credos and Psalms out of the Psalter?
|
You will see such webs on the wet grass, maybe,
As a pixie-mother weaves for her baby,
You will find such flame at the wave's weedy ebb
|
All Christian prayers of various sorts (a Psalter is a book containing the Book of Psalms).
|
Edna St. Vincent Millay
|
The Singing-Woman from the Woods Edge
|
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
Cauldron, talking and crackling
All to itself on top of each
|
Marriage, while seemingly hopeful, soon becomes deceitful.
Note the anger expressed in the repetition of ‘lies’. The one word sentence gives it emphasis. It is interesting that Plath writes ‘a grief’ — the indefinite article is included. Perhaps this is to give it emphasis. Or else it may imply that this is only one of many griefs.
|
Sylvia Plath
|
The Couriers
|
They gave us
Pieces of silver and pieces of gold
Tell me,
Who'll pay reparations on my soul?
Many fine speeches (oh yeah)
From the White House desk (uh huh)
Written on the cue cards
That were never really there
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)
|
The official unemployment began to soar in 1970, when this song was created. The seventies was a decade of stagflation , which is the phenomenon in which the economy experience both a high inflation rate and a high unemployment rate.
|
Gil Scott-Heron
|
Wholl Pay Reparations on My Soul?
|
Driver drive faster and make a good run
Down the Springfield Line under the shining sun.
Fly like an aeroplane, don't pull up short
Till you brake for Grand Central Station, New York.
|
For there in the middle of the waiting-hall
Should be standing the one that I love best of all.
|
If he's not there to meet me when I get to town
I'll stand on the side-walk with tears rolling down.
For he is the one that I love to look on,
|
Likely referring to the “Main Concourse” of the Grand Central Terminal. An information booths sits at the center, making it a convenient place to meet someone–especially before cell phones!
With its ceiling of constellations, the “Main Concourse” is indeed an ideal spot for a romantic rendezvous.
|
W. H. Auden
|
Calypso
|
null |
I've watched this city burn twice
In my lifetime
|
And the most notable thing
Was the arrival of the
Politicians in the
|
This poem was written immediately after the Rodney King Riots in 1992. Bukowski also remembers the Watts Riots in 1965.
|
Charles Bukowski
|
The riots
|
Home is so sad. It stays as it was left,
Shaped to the comfort of the last to go
As if to win them back. Instead, bereft
Of anyone to please, it withers so,
Having no heart to put aside the theft
|
And turn again to what it started as,
|
A joyous shot at how things ought to be,
Long fallen wide. You can see how it was:
Look at the pictures and the cutlery.
|
The enjambed stanzas create a smooth transition between the sad present and the ‘joyous past’. The idea of ‘turning again’ suggests a never-ending circular process, an ongoing comparison between past and present that may persist in the mind of the speaker.
|
Philip Larkin
|
Home is so Sad
|
Often beneath the wave, wide from this ledge
The dice of drowned men's bones he saw bequeath
An embassy. Their numbers as he watched,
Beat on the dusty shore and were obscured.
And wrecks passed without sound of bells,
The calyx of death's bounty giving back
A scattered chapter, livid hieroglyph,
The portent wound in corridors of shells.
|
Then in the circuit calm of one vast coil,
|
Its lashings charmed and malice reconciled,
Frosted eyes there were that lifted altars;
And silent answers crept across the stars.
|
Another whirlpool image. This stanza evokes the close of Moby-Dick , in which all the sailors of the Pequod (Ishmael excepted) sink in the vortex of the sea.
|
Hart Crane
|
At Melvilles Tomb
|
I like to see it lap the Miles
And lick the valleys up
And stop to feed itself at tanks;
And then, prodigious, step
Around a pile of mountains
And, supercilious, peer
In shanties by the sides of roads;
And then a quarry pare
To fit its sides, and crawl between
Complaining all the while
In horrid, hooting stanza;
|
Then chase itself down hill
|
And neigh like Boanerges;
Then, punctual as a star
Stop—docile and omnipotent—
|
This wry description using the reflexive suggests the train has a life and will of its own. The speaker clearly doesn’t admire this new invention.
|
Emily Dickinson
|
I like to see it lap the Miles 43
|
My mother bore me in the southern wild,
And I am black, but O! my soul is white;
White as an angel is the English child:
But I am black as if bereav'd of light.
My mother taught me underneath a tree
And sitting down before the heat of day,
She took me on her lap and kissed me,
And pointing to the east began to say.
Look on the rising sun: there God does live
And gives his light, and gives his heat away.
And flowers and trees and beasts and men receive
Comfort in morning joy in the noonday.
|
And we are put on earth a little space,
|
That we may learn to bear the beams of love,
And these black bodies and this sun-burnt face
Is but a cloud, and like a shady grove.
|
A humbling line, reminding us that we are actually rather small.
|
William Blake
|
The Little Black Boy Songs of Innocence
|
I got you like a habit
And I'll never get enough
There ain't no cure
There ain't no cure
There ain't no cure for love
There ain't no cure for love
There ain't no cure for love
All the rocket ships are climbin' through the sky
The holy books are open wide
The doctors working day and night
But they'll never ever find that cure for love
Ain't no drink no drug
|
(Ah tell them, angels)
|
There's nothing pure enough to be a cure for love
I see you in the subway and I see you on the bus
I see you lyin' down with me, I see you wakin' up
|
Surprisingly for such a seemingly non-religious song, Cohen gave a Christian explanation for this song in Nuremberg, 10/05/88 :
It seems to me that when the Prince of Peace was hanging from the cross he looked toward the heaven and he cried out those immortal words “My Lord, my Lord, why hast thou forsaken me ? ” And then he looked around him from horizon to horizon and He understood that a cosmic lever had been thrown in the Universe and nothing would be the same as it was before. And he said “consummatum est – it is finished.” And he looked beneath him, at the Romans and the Jews and all the mankind looking up at him with the various positions of indifference, guilt, remorse, ecstasy, indifference. And he understood then, finally, what it was to be a human. He understood there ain’t no cure for love…
|
Leonard Cohen
|
Aint No Cure for Love
|
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
|
Birds migrate to the South for the winter. They are able to avoid the cold and bitter weather, unlike humans who must face their sufferings head on.
|
Emily Dickinson
|
Tis not that Dying hurts us so
|
null |
These are the letters which Endymion wrote
|
To one he loved in secret and apart,
And now the brawlers of the auction-mart
Bargain and bid for each tear-blotted note,
|
Wilde here is referring Keats to Endymion, the hero of Keats’s poem Endymion . The opening line of this poem can describe Keats’s letters quite well:
A thing of beauty is a joy for ever:
|
Oscar Wilde
|
Sonnet: On the Sale by Auction of Keats’ Love Letters
|
[Pre-Chorus]
Take a broken love song
Keep it by your side
Never be lonely
Find a place to hide
|
By the westway
|
Inside the scrubs
How long must we wait?
For they're killing us?
|
Westway is a 3.5-mile (5.6 km) long elevated dual carriageway section of the A40 trunk road in west London running from Paddington to North Kensington.
|
Pete Doherty
|
Broken Love Song - 447705
|
In the greenest of our valleys
By good angels tenanted
Once a fair and stately palace —
Radiant palace — reared its head
In the monarch Thought's dominion —
It stood there!
Never seraph spread a pinion
Over fabric half so fair!
Banners yellow, glorious, golden
|
On its roof did float and flow
|
(This — all this — was in the olden
Time long ago,)
And every gentle air that dallied
|
The palace symbolizes a human head and the golden banners symbolize blonde hair flowing down the head. Poe uses assonance and alliteration in this line and the previous one.
|
Edgar Allan Poe
|
The Haunted Palace
|
The sun of the first day
Put the question
To the new manifestation of life -
|
Who are you?
|
There was no answer.
Years passed by.
The last sun of the last day
|
The sun is asking the person this question, “Who are you?”
It demands the observer to 1. identify who he truly are 2. state the purpose of his existence in this new life (i.e., What is your role? or position?)
|
Rabindranath Tagore
|
The Sun of the First Day
|
For Lincoln MacVeagh
Never tell me that not one star of all
|
That slip from heaven at night and softly fall
|
Has been picked up with stones to build a wall
Some laborer found one faded and stone-cold
And saving that its weight suggested gold
|
Frost is describing, however fancifully, a meteorite
|
Robert Frost
|
A Star in a Stone-Boat
|
The great Overdog
That heavenly beast
With a star in one eye
Gives a leap in the east.
He dances upright
All the way to the west
And never once drops
On his forefeet to rest.
I'm a poor underdog,
But to-night I will bark
With the great Overdog
|
That romps through the dark.
| null |
Frost wrote this poem in dimeter , with each line containing two stresses from a combination of iambs and/or anapests . Along with the rhymes every other line, this simulates a light romping or dancing feeling throughout the poem, mirroring the poem’s content.
The final line of the poem also contains an iamb (“That romps”) after four lines of all anapests. Thus, the stressed syllable, “romps,” is emphasized even more as the underdog joins in the dancing.
|
Robert Frost
|
Canis Major
|
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.
|
This place of darkness is not fit for something that only aims to provide pleasure through song.
|
Robert Frost
|
Come In
|
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—
|
Like writing poetry: the feeling can emerge at any hour, demanding to be written and heard.
Conventional depicticions of night and day seem not to fit here.
|
Emily Dickinson
|
I think I was enchanted 593
|
Prospered through dreams of heat
Wake to their residue,
Sweat, and a clinging sheet.
My flesh was its own shield:
Where it was gashed, it healed.
I grew as I explored
The body I could trust
Even while I adored
The risk that made robust,
A world of wonders in
Each challenge to the skin.
I cannot but be sorry
|
The given shield was cracked,
|
My mind reduced to hurry,
My flesh reduced and wrecked.
I have to change the bed,
|
All that he was resilient towards, all that he fought through and combated against, was finally too much. He has become broken, but still is pushing on.
|
Thom Gunn
|
The Man with Night Sweats
|
null |
Here, where the world is quiet;
|
Here, where all trouble seems
Dead winds' and spent waves' riot
In doubtful dreams of dreams;
|
This line inspired the motto of the secret organization V.F.D., “The World is Quiet Here,” in Lemony Snicket’s “A Series of Unfortunate Events.”
|
Algernon Charles Swinburne
|
The Garden Of Proserpine
|
Across your dreams in pale battalions go,
Say not soft things as other men have said,
That you'll remember. For you need not so.
Give them not praise. For, deaf, how should they know
It is not curses heaped on each gashed head?
Nor tears. Their blind eyes see not your tears flow.
Nor honour. It is easy to be dead.
Say only this, 'They are dead.' Then add thereto,
'Yet many a better one has died before.'
Then, scanning all the o'ercrowded mass, should you
Perceive one face that you loved heretofore,
It is a spook. None wears the face you knew.
|
Great death has made all his for evermore.
| null |
The poem resolves emphatically, the unequivocal statement that “great death” has taken the young men. The smooth flow of this final sentence matches the smoothness of the opening sentence. As harsh as it is, there can be no denial; there is no link between the living and the dead and no reaching out to cross the divide.
|
Charles Sorley
|
When you see millions of the mouthless dead
|
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