prettyvampire/genius_poems_annotations · Datasets at Hugging Face

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The two executioners stalk along over the knolls, Bearing two axes with heavy heads shining and wide, And a long limp two-handled saw toothed for cutting great boles, And so they approach the proud tree that bears the death-mark on its side. Jackets doffed they swing axes and chop away just above ground, And the chips fly about and lie white on the moss and fallen leaves; Till a broad deep gash in the bark is hewn all the way round,	And one of them tries to hook upward a rope, which at last he achieves.	The saw then begins, till the top of the tall giant shivers: The shivers are seen to grow greater with each cut than before: They edge out the saw, tug the rope; but the tree only quivers,	The lumberjack has hooked a rope up to the tree, to make it easier to pull downwards.	Thomas Hardy	Throwing a Tree
As the winds use A crack in a wall Or a drain, Their joy or their pain To whistle through - Choose me, You English words? I know you: You are light as dreams, Tough as oak, Precious as gold, As poppies and corn,	Or an old cloak:	Sweet as our birds To the ear, As the burnet rose	Thomas uses humour here. The “old cloak” is unexpected and the reader can decide its significance; probably comfort and familiarity. Or the poet may just be teasing the reader. The colon creates a pause, a caesura to slow down the pace and maybe the reader might smile. This poem would work well read aloud in performance.	Edward Thomas	Words
My love is lyke to yse, and I to fyre; how comes it then that this her cold so great is not dissolv'd through my so hot desyre, but harder growes the more I her intreat? Or how comes it that my exceeding heat is not delayd by her hart frosen cold: but that I burne much more in boyling sweat, and feele my flames augmented manifold?	What more miraculous thing may be told that fire which all things melts, should harden yse: and yse which is congeald with senceless cold, should kindle fyre by wonderfull devyse.	Such is the powre of love in gentle mind, that it can alter all the course of kynd.	He’s marveling at the unbelievable–“miraculous”–fact that her “cold” rejection is inflaming his intense desire for her, while his intense desire is hardening her rejection. (It’s not so miraculous, Ed!)	Edmund Spenser	Amoretti: Sonnet 30
We slowly drove – He knew no haste And I had put away My labor and my leisure too For His Civility – We passed the School, where Children strove At Recess – in the Ring – We passed the Fields of Gazing Grain – We passed the Setting Sun – Or rather – He passed us – The Dews drew quivering and chill – For only Gossamer, my Gown – My Tippet – only Tulle –	We paused before a House that seemed A Swelling of the Ground – The Roof was scarcely visible – The Cornice – in the Ground –	Since then – 'tis Centuries – and yet Feels shorter than the Day I first surmised the Horses' Heads	Dickinson was an agoraphobic and hardly, if at all, left her house for the final 20 years of her life. Naturally, this would bring about an increased amount of anxiety and depression from staying away from people for such an extended period of time. Her poems are greatly riddled with thoughts of death and morbid mindsets that she does not necessarily make out to be negative. Dickinson is incredibly comfortable with the idea of death, personifying it as a gentleman and using her gravestone as a house. She attempts to make it clear that death is not to be feared since it is a natural part of the human life cycle. When she says they “paused” in front of her resting place, she makes it clear that that is all they did, pause. She therefore reminds readers that, in a Christian sense, when someone dies the do not reside under their gravestone but rather in the “eternity” that is heaven. Dickinson does not deny the spontaneity of death, nor does she mention the sadness that comes out of it. Rather, she plays death off as nothing more than a part to life and no more scary than going for a carriage ride.	Emily Dickinson	Because I Could Not Stop for Death
Whilst a thousand isles are illumined around, Earthquake is trampling one city to ashes, An hundred are shuddering and tottering; the sound Is bellowing underground. 3. But keener thy gaze than the lightening's glare, And swifter thy step than the earthquake's tramp; Thou deafenest the rage of the ocean; thy stare Makes blind the volcanoes; the sun's bright lamp To thine is a fen-fire damp. 4. From billow and mountain and exhalation	The sunlight is darted through vapour and blast;	From spirit to spirit, from nation to nation, From city to hamlet thy dawning is cast,— And tyrants and slaves are like shadows of night	This is a curious construction, with the sunlight passive (‘is darted’), as if controlled by a greater force.	Percy Bysshe Shelley	Liberty
The battle rent a cobweb diamond-strung And cut a flower beside a ground bird's nest Before it stained a single human breast. The stricken flower bent double and so hung.	And still the bird revisited her young.	A butterfly its fall had dispossessed A moment sought in air his flower of rest, Then lightly stooped to it and fluttering clung.	This emphasises the capacity of nature to continue, despite its vulnerability and the destructiveness of humans.	Robert Frost	Range-finding
For windy skies, Coldness for water, Obedience for a master. Shall memory restore The steps and the shore, The face and the meeting place; Shall the bird live, Shall the fish dive, And sheep obey In a sheep's way; Can love remember The question and the answer,	For love recover	What has been dark and rich and warm all over?	“recover” instead of “recovers” could be an old subjunctive: “such that love could recover,” “in order for love to recover.”	W. H. Auden	The Question
Who'll pay reparations on my soul? Many suggestions And documents written Many directions For the end that was given 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.	Tell me, Who'll pay reparations on my soul? Who'll pay reparations?	This is a rhetorical indictment on the empty rhetoric of the politicians, symbolized by the White House desk and the speeches given there. The seasons, symbolizing the circumstances of people’s lives, are experienced by people in their real lives however.	Gil Scott-Heron	Wholl Pay Reparations on My Soul?
null	To fling my arms wide In some place of the sun, To whirl and to dance	Till the white day is done. Then rest at cool evening Beneath a tall tree	This trio of lines evoke a sense of freedom, something the black man possessed in a technical sense- but not truly, in Hughes' lifetime.	Langston Hughes	Dream Variations
For David P—B The eye follows, the land Slips upward, creases down, forms The gentle buttocks of a young Giant. In the nestle, Old adobe bricks, washed of Whiteness, paled to umber, Await another century. Star Jasmine and old vines Lay claim upon the ghosted land,	Then quiet pools whisper	Private childhood secrets. Flush on inner cottage walls Antiquitous faces,	This implies that the house has a pool or is near a location of a river or ocean, but river being the probable pick since it is also in the mountains. Maya gives us another exaplme of personification with the fact that the pools “whisper”.	Maya Angelou	California Prodigal
Empty treasure chests dumped from departed ships And jettisoned slaves washed Into an arc from Jamaica to Guiana. Islands aborted from the belly of the sea Forever unborn in rock and swamp. Other fragments rot in the sun	Like cane chewed and spat	From coolie mouth. Haiti is a crab with broken claw. Cuba droops in fear at the foot of America.	This line is a form of symbolism as it depicts something that is only used for flavor, when a person is done succumbing all the juices and good flavor, it is spited out and tossed for garbage. Dabydeen depicts this picture in the readers mind to show the symbolism of these islands being used.After taking their “sweet juices” their resources, they are no longer cared for or given importance. Below is a picture of fresh canes, which can symbolize how the islands appear before they are chewed up. the next photo is the beginning of what happens when a sugar cane is cut. It is evident that it begins to loose its form and it’s sweetness furthermore, its taste is stripped down.	David Dabydeen	The Old Map
[Published by Mrs. Shelley, "Posthumous Poems", 1824. There is a fair draft amongst the Boscombe manuscripts.]	I.	The flower that smiles to-day To-morrow dies; All that we wish to stay	Each stanza of this poem is divided into their own separate part so that one may read each one individually and think of them as pieces of a puzzle, especially seeing that they each take on different tones and form. Part I takes on a blunt tone of disappointment and somewhat acceptance of the cruel realities of life. Though there is a clear ABABCCC rhyme scheme, the unsettling lack of flow due to varying line lengths and meter conveys a feeling of unexpected disappointment in the reader. This rhyme scheme is the only thing consistent throughout all three stanzas . Though there is no consistent meter in these lines, there are many hidden inner-rhymes and slant rhymes in this poem.	Percy Bysshe Shelley	Mutability II The flower that smiles today...
The great Overdog	That heavenly beast	With a star in one eye Gives a leap in the east. He dances upright	The Overdog is described as a paradox ; a mortal “beast” cannot at the same time be “heavenly” or God-like. This refers to the Greek myth in which Canis Major represented one of Orion ’s hunting dogs and became a constellation with Orion after his death. This phrase could also reveal the speaker’s belief that everyone, despite being mortal, can rise to the heavens and be one with God.	Robert Frost	Canis Major
null	Hurree Chunder Mookerjee, pride of Bow Bazaar,	Owner of a native press, "Barrishter-at-Lar," Waited on the Government with a claim to wear Sabres by the bucketful, rifles by the pair.	This character here appears as a cautionary example of a Bengali man who is allowed to carry arms by the British government and suffers an unspecified bad fate while villainous South Asians take up arms. However, this same character later appears in Kipling’s novel Kim as a canny operative who helps the Irish hero serve the British government. In the 2001 novel The Mandala of Sherlock Holmes (also known as Sherlock Holmes: The Missing Years ), Jamyang Norbu made Hurree Chunder Mookerjee the main character, as he meets the legendary London detective during the latter’s exile in India.	Rudyard Kipling	What Happened
Seems like a long time Since the waiter took my order. Grimy little luncheonette, The snow falling outside. Seems like it has grown darker Since I last heard the kitchen door Behind my back Since I last noticed Anyone pass on the street. A glass of ice-water	Keeps me company	At this table I chose myself Upon entering. And a longing,	There’s no-one else to keep him company.	Charles Simic	The Partial Explanation
null	'We were killing pigs when the	Yanks arrived. A Tuesday morning, sunlight and gutter-blood	The casual starkness of this introductory line is clearly aiming to shock. The directness draws the reader in.	Seamus Heaney	Testimony
(1) The day she visited the dissecting room They had four men laid out, black as burnt turkey, Already half unstrung. A vinegary fume Of the death vats clung to them; The white-smocked boys started working. The head of his cadaver had caved in, And she could scarcely make out anything In that rubble of skull plates and old leather. A sallow piece of string held it together. In their jars the snail-nosed babies moon and glow. He hands her the cut-out heart like a cracked heirloom.	(2)	In Brueghel's panorama of smoke and slaughter Two people only are blind to the carrion army: He, afloat in the sea of her blue satin	This second part refers to Brueghel’s painting, ‘the triumph of death’, painted in 1562, in which two lovers sit in the bottom right hand corner, clueless to their surroundings	Sylvia Plath	Two Views of a Cadaver Room
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,	This line is a reference to the first line of the Book of Ecclesiastes in the Old Testament. This allusion to Ecclesiastes 1:2 has shown how the speaker is battling against the pull of earthly desires to achieve a more spiritual life. Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities; all is vanity. It is repeated in every stanza, a device known as anaphora .	Christina Rossetti	Soeur Louise De La Misericorde
Made warm draughts in the open car. Signposts whitened relentlessly. Montrueil, Abbéville, Beauvais Were promised, promised, came and went, Each place granting its name's fulfilment. A combine groaning its way late Bled seeds across its work-light. A forest fire smouldered out. One by one small cafés shut. I thought of you continuously A thousand miles south where Italy Laid its loin to France on the darkened sphere.	Your ordinariness was renewed there.	null	The final line echoes the opening line, creating a cyclical pattern. But “ordinariness”, when “renewed”, is no longer ordinary. So, there is a sub-text relating to the nature of relationships — the fluctuations, growth, diminution, changes — and ultimate renewal. The final line is moving in its understatement	Seamus Heaney	Night Drive
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	Elysium, or the Elysian Fields, is an afterlife equivalent to heaven in Greek Mythology. Those who are heroes or specially chosen by the Gods are allowed entrance there after death. In the Elysian Fields, one is allowed to indulge in any pleasures they desire for eternity.	Edgar Allan Poe	Serenade
A still—Volcano—Life— That flickered in the night— When it was dark enough to do Without erasing sight—	A quiet—Earthquake Style—	Too subtle to suspect By natures this side Naples— The North cannot detect	The pattern of oxymora is continued here, this time with “quiet” and “Earthquake.” It should be noted that, in the oxymora of the first line of each stanza (“A still – Volcano – Life” / “A quiet – Earthquake Style” / “The Solemn – Torrid – Symbol –”), the opposites are used to define “Life,” “style,” and “Symbol.” In the second stanza, the idea of “style” could refer to both Dickinson’s poetic style (brief yet powerful) or, more personally, her own self (quiet yet quaking with perceptiveness).	Emily Dickinson	A still—Volcano—Life 601
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 Come leh we hug up and brace-up and sweet one another up	But then	leh we break free Yeh leh we break free And keep to de motion	The break is applied in the juxtaposition, followed by a pause or caesura before the next stanza, when the speaker makes clear the limitation of the relationship.	Grace Nichols	Even Tho
'Twas mercy brought me from my Pagan land, Taught my benighted soul to understand That there's a God, that there's a Saviour too:	Once I redemption neither sought nor knew.	Some view our sable race with scornful eye, "Their colour is a diabolic die." Remember, Christians, Negros, black as Cain,	While she was still in Africa, Phillis was ignorant of the fact that there was redemption from sin and as such, did not search for it.	Phillis Wheatley	On Being Brought from Africa to America
An' she'll fight for the young British soldier Fight, fight, fight for the soldier When shakin' their bustles like ladies so fine The guns o' the enemy wheel into line Shoot low at the limbers an' don't mind the shine For noise never startles the soldier Start-, start-, startles the soldier If your officer's dead and the sergeants look white Remember it's ruin to run from a fight: So take open order, lie down, and sit tight And wait for supports like a soldier Wait, wait, wait like a soldier	When you're wounded and left on Afghanistan's plains And the women come out to cut up what remains Jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains An' go to your Gawd like a soldier	null	The rule of empires since Classical times: if you invade Afghanistan, they will CUT you! Maybe George W Bush should’ve read this poem (too bad he can’t read..)	Rudyard Kipling	The Young British Soldier
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, But... They went home.	My praises were on all men's lips,	they liked my smile, my wit, my hips, they'd spend one night, or two or three. But...	The men just like her for her body and are only looking for a physical relationship.	Maya Angelou	They Went Home
I've stayed in the front yard all my life. I want a peek at the back Where it's rough and untended and hungry weed grows. A girl gets sick of a rose. I want to go in the back yard now And maybe down the alley, To where the charity children play. I want a good time today. They do some wonderful things. They have some wonderful fun. My mother sneers, but I say it's fine How they don't have to go in at quarter to nine.	My mother, she tells me that Johnnie Mae Will grow up to be a bad woman.	That George'll be taken to Jail soon or late (On account of last winter he sold our back gate). But I say it's fine. Honest, I do.	The mother is trying to scare the daughter away from hanging out with the children in the alley. Johnnie Mae will not grow up to be “good” because of the life she leads (see explanation below).	Gwendolyn Brooks	A Song in the Front Yard
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:	Had I not been awake I would have missed it	It came and went too unexpectedly And almost it seemed dangerously, Hurtling like an animal at the house,	This line comes exactly in the middle of the poem and is pivotal; the essence of the poem that forms the title. It expresses the sense of joy, of the need to seize life, and the danger of letting opportunities — bursts of inspiration — slip away.	Seamus Heaney	Had I not been awake I would have missed it
About the shark, phlegmatical one Pale sot of the Maldive sea The sleek little pilot-fish, azure and slim How alert in attendance be From his saw-pit of mouth, from his charnel of maw They have nothing of harm to dread But liquidly glide on his ghastly flank Or before his Gorgonian head; Or lurk in the port of serrated teeth In white triple tiers of glittering gates And there find a haven when peril's abroad An asylum in the jaws of Fate!	They are friends; and friendly they guide him to prey	Yet never partake of the treat Eyes and brains to the dotard lethargic and dull Pale ravener of horrible meat	Contrary to what the poet says, pilot fish do not in fact guide sharks to their prey, though they’re occasionally used as metaphors for scavengers or looters trailing in the wake of more dangerous criminals.	Herman Melville	The Maldive Shark
Thy various works, imperial queen, we see,	How bright their forms! how deck'd with pomp by thee!	Thy wond'rous acts in beauteous order stand, And all attest how potent is thine hand. From Helicon's refulgent heights attend,	Imagination brightens and bedecks ordinary things, as if with fine clothes and accessories, thereby rendering them extraordinary. The poem consists of a series of rhymed iambic pentameter couplets, a.k.a. “heroic couplets.” This was the form favored by Alexander Pope, arguably the most famous and widely imitated poet in English in the 18th century. Pope wrote “the style of the age” and was the major influence on Wheatley’s own style.	Phillis Wheatley	On Imagination
Come down, O Christ, and help me! reach thy hand, For I am drowning in a stormier sea Than Simon on thy lake of Galilee: The wine of life is spilt upon the sand, My heart is as some famine-murdered land Whence all good things have perished utterly, And well I know my soul in Hell must lie If I this night before God's throne should stand. "He sleeps perchance, or rideth to the chase, Like Baal, when his prophets howled that name From morn to noon on Carmel's smitten height." Nay, peace, I shall behold, before the night,	The feet of brass, the robe more white than flame,	The wounded hands, the weary human face.	May be a reference to John’s vision of a spirit described in Revelation 1:14-15 : His head and his hair were white like wool, as white as snow. And his eyes were like flames of fire. His feet were like polished bronze refined in a furnace, and his voice thundered like mighty ocean waves."	Oscar Wilde	E. Tenebris
I shall hate you Like a dart of singing steel Shot through still air At even-tide. Or solemnly As pines are sober When they stand etched Against the sky	Hating you shall be a game Played with cool hands And slim fingers	Your heart will yearn For the lonely splendor Of the pine tree	The surface imagery of the darts in the beginning now makes more sense. There are two settings occurring side by side in this poem: an open forest and a billiard room. These lines evoke images of a game of pool, as a certain delicacy is required to achieve accuracy in cue ball games. The speaker is saying that she will hate the subject as if she were playing a game of pool- calm and collected, but deadly accurate when she has a target in mind.	Gwendolyn B. Bennett	Hatred
Such plainness of the pre-baroque Hardly involves the eye, until It meets his left-hand gauntlet, still Clasped empty in the other; and One sees, with a sharp tender shock His hand withdrawn, holding her hand. They would not think to lie so long Such faithfulnеss in effigy Was just a detail friends would see: A sculptor's sweet commissionеd grace Thrown off in helping to prolong The Latin names around the base.	They would not guess how early in	Their supine stationary voyage The air would change to soundless damage, Turn the old tenantry away;	The first lines of this and the previous stanzas are syntactic parallels , with anaphoric repetition of “They would not …”. This adds emphasis to the negative aspects of the scenario that Larkin is exploring.	Philip Larkin	An Arundel Tombb
Beloveds, now we know that we know nothing, now that our bright and shining star can slip away from our fingertips like a puff of summer wind. Without notice, our dear love can escape our doting embrace. Sing our songs among the stars and walk our dances across the face of the moon. In the instant that Michael is gone, we know nothing. No clocks can tell time. No oceans can rush our tides with the abrupt absence of our treasure. Though we are many, each of us is achingly alone, piercingly alone. Only when we confess our confusion can we remember that he was a gift to us and we did have him.	He came to us from the creator,	trailing creativity in abundance. Despite the anguish, his life was sheathed in mother love, family love, and he survived and did more than that.	Michael Jackson was special, he was a gift, created in God’s image and sent to us to spread love and happiness.	Maya Angelou	We Had Him
null	Frankie Laine, he was singing Jezebel	I pinned an Iron Cross to my lapel I walked up to the tallest and the blondest girl I said, "Look, you don't know me now but very soon you will	Frankie Laine was a popular singer in the 1950’s and 60’s. The reference plants the song ( “Jezabel” ) at a dance from Cohen’s teenage years. Introducing the song in 1985 , Cohen talked about his admiration for Frankie Lane: A song that I wrote with the great R'n'R master by the name of Phil Spector. A delightful chap. You really get to know him, you really did get to know him. And I had a Walther PPK. He had a just an ordinary 45. He flatted out on Sunset Boulevard. He got the tapes. He mixed them all alone. I think he was right. In this song we placed all our most irrelevant and banal adolescent recollections. It was everything that I learned in High School. One foot note : there is a singer mentioned in the first line of the first verse, the singer Frankie Laine. He’s to be remembered for his stellar rendition of “Jezebel”. Also for his sense of interpretation of “Swamp Girl”. That song has the memorable refrain, “That’s where my swamp girl lies”. Many’s the time these words come rushing to my mind. There’s another song of his :“Black Lace” : “Lady beware, every time that you wear lace, black lace”. Very good song. There is a better known : “Mule Train”, with the authentic cracking of bull hide whips. Mule train. So the Frankie Laine referred to in the very first two words of this song is the very Frankie Laine, the very Frankie Laine whose liver I have to describe.	Leonard Cohen	Memories
The sink is broke, The water don't run, And you ain't done a thing You promised to've done. Back window's cracked, Kitchen floor squeaks, There's rats in the cellar, And the attic leaks. He said, Madam, It's not up to me. I'm just the agent, Don't you see?	I said, Naturally, You pass the buck.	If it's money you want You're out of luck. He said, Madam,	Madam is aware of the power she has as it pertains to the “agents” job success in relation to her own deplorable living conditions and refuses to pay her rent in a form of resistance	Langston Hughes	Madam and The Rent Man
There is a pleasure in the pathless woods, There is a rapture on the lonely shore, There is society, where none intrudes, By the deep sea, and music in its roar:	I love not man the less, but Nature more,	From these our interviews, in which I steal From all I may be, or have been before, To mingle with the Universe, and feel	Lonely places seem to strike a responsive chord in most people, whether as a renunciation of society or find a sense of beauty that city streets and people do not satisfy.	Lord Byron	There Is Pleasure In The Pathless Woods
754 My Life had stood—a Loaded Gun In Corners—till a Day The Owner passed—identified	And carried Me away	And now We roam in Sovereign Woods And now We hunt the Doe And every time I speak for Him	The gun, the metaphorical speaker, is at this stage passive. The mystery remains; why is an instrument of violence unable or unwilling to assert herself? It is a paradox .	Emily Dickinson	My Life had stood—a Loaded Gun
THE artist is the creator of beautiful things. To reveal art and conceal the artist is art's aim. The critic is he who can translate into another manner or a new material his impression of beautiful things. The highest as the lowest form of criticism is a mode of autobiography. Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault. Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope. They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only beauty.	There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.	The nineteenth century dislike of realism is the rage of Caliban seeing his own face in a glass. The nineteenth century dislike of romanticism is the rage of Caliban not seeing his own face in a glass. The moral life of man forms part of the subject-matter of the artist, but the morality of art consists in the perfect use of an imperfect medium. No artist desires to prove anything. Even things that are true can be proved. No artist has ethical sympathies. An ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable mannerism of style. No artist is ever morbid. The artist can express everything. Thought and language are to the artist instruments of an art. Vice and virtue are to the artist materials for an art. From the point of view of form, the type of all the arts is the art of the musician. From the point of view of feeling, the actor's craft is the type. All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril. Those who read the symbol do so at their peril. It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors. Diversity of opinion about a work of art shows that the work is new, complex, and vital. When critics disagree, the artist is in accord with himself. We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it. The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely. All art is quite useless.	Art for Art’s Sake As a writer during the Aesthetic Movement , Oscar Wilde’s work reflected the temper of the times and focused on “art for art’s sake” . Art was defined by beauty and many lived life in a hedonistic, self-gratifying way. This was a sharp contrast to the strict morality of the Victorian Era. In this aphorism, Wilde is suggesting that books should be judged on their literary value instead of based on a subjective moral judgement. Speaking in a broader context, art should be judged solely on an aesthetic level, instead of being deciphered for deeper meanings. Sometimes art is just frivolous, yet nice to look at. To Wilde, Art and books alike should have no ulterior purpose of informing the reader of moral obligations. Instead, Art and books should be enjoyed strictly for pleasure. Wilde suggests that artists and writers should have the freedom to express their creative visions without being judged against a standard. Works of art should be taken as they are. As an author, Wilde received criticism for the decadence and homosexual allusions in The Picture of Dorian Gray . In a sense, Wilde’s defiance to judgement against homosexuality is portrayed through his writing.	Oscar Wilde	The Picture of Dorian Gray Preface
And did those feet in ancient time Walk upon England's mountains green? And was the holy Lamb of God On England's pleasant pastures seen? And did the Countenance Divine Shine forth upon our clouded hills? And was Jerusalem builded here Among these dark satanic mills? Bring me my bow of burning gold! Bring me my arrows of desire! Bring me my spear! O clouds, unfold! Bring me my chariot of fire!	I will not cease from mental fight,	Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand Till we have built Jerusalem In England's green and pleasant land.	Contrasting with the repetition of violent tools, Blake describes a “mental fight.” This means Blake understands that the challenges faced cannot only be solved through force, but also through intelligence or emotion. This follows his reasoning in his poem London , in which he powerfully describes the terrible lives of people trapped in poverty, but also refers to mind-forged manacles — his belief that we are also trapped in our own negativity and limitations. Here he is asserting his determination to overcome inner emotional and mental barriers.	William Blake	And Did Those Feet In Ancient Time
Nuclear power will be taken over by the many Explosions will continually shake the earth Radiated robot men will stalk each other The rich and the chosen will watch from space platforms Dante's Inferno will be made to look like a children's playground The sun will not be seen and it will always be night Trees will die All vegetation will die Radiated men will eat the flesh of radiated men The sea will be poisoned The lakes and rivers will vanish Rain will be the new gold	The rotting bodies of men and animals will stink in the dark wind	The last few survivors will be overtaken by new and hideous diseases And the space platforms will be destroyed by attrition The petering out of supplies	The natural smell will always be of death and rot.	Charles Bukowski	Dinosauria We
And you ain't done a thing You promised to've done. Back window's cracked, Kitchen floor squeaks, There's rats in the cellar, And the attic leaks. He said, Madam, It's not up to me. I'm just the agent, Don't you see? I said, Naturally, You pass the buck.	If it's money you want You're out of luck.	He said, Madam, I ain't pleased! I said, Neither am I.	Alberta K. Johnson is saying that if she can’t have the living situation that she want’s the the rent man can’t have the money have the he wants.	Langston Hughes	Madam and The Rent Man
So, we'll go no more a-roving So late into the night, Though the heart be still as loving,	And the moon be still as bright.	For the sword outwears its sheath, And the soul wears out the breast, And the heart must pause to breathe,	The construction of the last two lines are grammatically similar, an example of syntactic parallelism . This creates a satisfying, gentle rhythm, ironically lyrical given that the speaker is bemoaning the after-effects of a debauched night. This line forms the title of Ray Bradbury’s short story “June 2001: —And The Moon Be Still As Bright”, part of The Martian Chronicles .	Lord Byron	So well go no more a-roving
From low to high doth dissolution climb,	And sink from high to low, along a scale	Of awful notes, whose concord shall not fail; A musical but melancholy chime, Which they can hear who meddle not with crime,	Dissolution can ascend by climbing, but can also descend by sinking. Either way, there is no escape.	William Wordsworth	Mutability
Or too much weight to fly - I was much refreshed by your strong Letter - Thank you for Greatness - I will have deserved it in a longer time! I thought I spoke to you of the shadow - It affects me - This was still another - I saw it's notice in the Papers just before you came - Is there a magazine called the "Woman's Journal"? I think it was said to be in that - a Gate, or Door, or Latch - Someone called me suddenly, and I never found it - You told me Mrs Lowell was Mr Lowell's "inspiration" What is inspiration? You place the truth in opposite - because the fear is mine, dear friend, and the power your's - 'Tis Glory's far sufficiency [overtakelessness] that make's our trying poor - [running]	With the Kingdom of Heaven on his knee, could Mr Emerson hesitate?	"Suffer little Children" - Could you not come without the Lecture, if the project failed?	Dickinson imagines the glories of Heaven as powerfully seductive–an example of her subtly outrageous eroticization of religious imagery. Harold Bloom: “The question, whether open or rhetorical, is dangerous and wonderful, and provokes considerable rumination.” Mr Emerson : essayist and poet Ralph Waldo Emerson, the most famous American writer of his era and a major influence on Dickinson.	Emily Dickinson	Letter 353 about October 1870 T. W. Higginson
"Cross" My old man's a white old man And my old mother's black. If ever I cursed my white old man I take my curses back. If ever I cursed my black old mother	And wished she were in hell,	I'm sorry for that evil wish And now I wish her well. My old man died in a fine big house.	Notice the neatness and songlike quality of the poem thus far. With alliteration, repetition, and a driving meter, the poem very much feels like a blues song, which was very common in Hughes' writing. Hughes thought the blues was a high form of art because of its narrative succinctness and ability to evoke deep human emotion through subtle, and often comic narrative. While the narrative of “Cross” is not comical, it is able to explore some very complicated cultural problems with very simple language and form.	Langston Hughes	Cross
null	'Twas mercy brought me from my Pagan land,	Taught my benighted soul to understand That there's a God, that there's a Saviour too: Once I redemption neither sought nor knew.	Philis Wheatley was brought to America as a slave from Africa (where paganism is mostly practised). It is quite normal to assume she is referring to her history. However, this line is referring to the transformation of an individual. In Christianity, salvation is obtained by God’s mercy. Wheatley seems to be happy to have been brought to America, a land of Christianity. Notice that she uses the word “brought” instead of the similar sounding (and accurate) “bought,” as if to passivly protest against slavery. Her happiness is based on the fact that she found divine mercy in Christianity, and God alone – not worldly circumstances – caused it to happen. Dr. Dana A. Williams, English Department Chair at Howard University, reads this poem to be “deeply ironic and deeply sarcastic.” She argues that Wheatley is suggesting Christianity’s debt to her native Africa’s paganism. See her commentary in this video .	Phillis Wheatley	On Being Brought from Africa to America
null	Symbols of democracy, pinned up against the coast	Outhouse of bureaucracy, surrounded by a moat Citizens of poverty are barely out of sight Overlords escape in the evening with people of the night	All of the institutions that represent “democracy” in the U.S.	Gil Scott-Heron	Washington D.C.
Showing, while millions of souls hurry on, The virtues of collars, from sunset till dawn, By dart or by tumble of whirl within whirl, Starting new fads for the shame-weary girl, By maggotry motions in sickening line Proclaiming a hat or a soup or a wine, While there far above the steep cliffs of the street The stars sing a message elusive and sweet. Now man cannot rest in his pleasure and toil His clumsy contraptions of coil upon coil Till the thing he invents, in its use and its range, Leads on to the marvelous CHANGE BEYOND CHANGE	Some day this old Broadway shall climb to the skies, As a ribbon of cloud on a soul-wind shall rise. And we shall be lifted, rejoicing by night, Till we join with the planets who choir their delight. The signs in the street and the signs in the skies Shall make me a Zodiac, guiding and wise, And Broadway make one with that marvelous stair That is climbed by the rainbow-clad spirits of prayer.	null	This is the point where the poem turns surrealistic and fantastical. Lindsay muses how that man’s constant quest for preoccupation through work, or his constant need to have and make things for entertainment, may eventually lead to “this old broadway” (I’m assuming he’s personifying the neon sign from the first stanza) reaching the skies and joining the stars from the second stanza’s first line. (There’s inversion in the “choir the delight” of line 20) At this point he is employing extremely vivid imagery to describe how neon signs shall reach the heavens and the cosmos, and become a sort of “stairway to heaven” where he, and the rest of humankind, shall climb up, clad in the effervescent colors of the neon signs he initially so deplored. Whether such a fantastic tone for a poem that started off as biting social commentary is Lindsay being facetious or sarcastic, or simply a delightful daydream, is up for the debate.	Vachel Lindsay	A Rhyme About an Electrical Advertising Sign
It's a weary life, it is, she said: Doubly blank in a woman's lot: I wish and I wish I were a man: Or, better then any being, were not: Were nothing at all in all the world, Not a body and not a soul: Not so much as a grain of dust Or a drop of water from pole to pole.	Still the world would wag on the same,	Still the seasons go and come: Blossoms bloom as in days of old, Cherries ripen and wild bees hum.	The playful expression ‘that’s the way the world wags’, rarely used now, sounds bleak from this woman’s mouth. The alliterative ‘world would wag’ could be humorous but not in this context. The world is indifferent to the suffering of women, wherever and whoever they are.	Christina Rossetti	From The Antique
The sun is hot on my neck as I observe The spikes of crocus. The smell of the earth is good. It is apparent that there is no death. But what does that signify? Not only under ground are the brains of men Eaten by maggots. Life in itself Is nothing, An empty cup, a flight of uncarpeted stairs. It is not enough that yearly, down this hill, April	Comes like an idiot, babbling and strewing flowers.	null	Millay calls out the futility of April and its false promise, and ends it with words that call up Macbeth’s fury at the pointlessness of life itself: it is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing." In Millay’s telling, the idiot’s tale may start with flowers, but the babbling has a fury all its own, and the end is just as deadly.	Edna St. Vincent Millay	Spring
Dostoyevsky lined up against a wall to be shot Crane off the back of a boat into the propeller the impossibility Sylvia with her head in the oven like a baked potato Harry Crosby leaping into that Black Sun Lorca murdered in the road by Spanish troops the impossibility Artaud sitting on a madhouse bench Chatterton drinking rat poison Shakespeare a plagiarist Beethoven with a horn stuck into his head against deafness the impossibility the impossibility	Nietzsche gone totally mad	the impossibility of being human all too human this breathing	German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche suffered a mental breakdown in public (possibly the result of syphilis) and was institutionalized for the last several years of his life.	Charles Bukowski	Beasts Bounding Through Time
Till many a city there is built, And many a pleasant shepherd's home. But when they find the Frowning Babe, Terror strikes thro' the region wide: They cry ‘The Babe! the Babe is born!' And flee away on every side. For who dare touch the Frowning Form, His arm is wither'd to its root; Lions, boars, wolves, all howling flee, And every tree does shed its fruit. And none can touch that Frowning Form, Except it be a Woman Old;	She nails him down upon the rock, And all is done as I have told.	null	…And so the cycle begins again. There is a sense of doomed repetition, of a curse hanging over the land.	William Blake	The Mental Traveller
My skin is kind of sort of brownish Pinkish yellowish white. My eyes are grayish blueish green, But I'm told they look orange in the night. My hair is reddish blondish brown, But it's silver when it's wet. And all the colors I am inside	Have not been invented yet.	null	Human beings are like perpetually incomplete paintings. Some of our colors, or qualities, have yet to be developed! We invent new inner colors when we formulate new opinions and are influenced by new ideas, and we can even change some of our outer colors by dressing differently or getting a hair dye job. People are always changing and evolving as a group and individually, and that is what makes us beautiful. The speaker of the poem could be anybody, and that is ok, because everyone has a message worth hearing.	Shel Silverstein	Colors
Thirsty? They race across ampersands, scrolling. He isn't sure it's his head. There's a delay right now. Smoke backed up. Ladies please remove hats. It was all over by morning. The village idiot was surprised to see us. "...thought you were in Normandy."	Like all pendulums we were surprised,	then slightly miffed at what seemed to be happening back in the bushes. Keep your ornaments, if that's what they are. Return to sender, arse.	A pendulum moves in a constant and predictable motion, back and forth. The surprises earlier change the current situation, and things are no longer so predictable. Pendulums are also a mechanism in grandfather clocks and metronomes, suggesting an air of antiquity and mechanism. They are surprised by the new advancements in technology, digital devices that replace older mechanical devices and perform their tasks with increasing accuracy, similar to the village idiot, who is astounded by progress.	John Ashbery	Elective Infinities
That strange flower, the sun, Is just what you say. Have it your way.	The world is ugly, And the people are sad.	That tuft of jungle feathers, That animal eye, Is just what you say.	For more on the comedy that Wallace Stevens sees in life, see his poems “The Man on the Dump” and “Not Ideas About the Thing, but the Thing Itself.”	Wallace Stevens	Gubbinal
Don't drop the beat on me Don't drop the beat no Ah I am not the son of sha-klak klak I am before that I am before I am before before before death is eternity after death is eternity There is no death there's only eternity And I be riding on the wings of eternity like CLA CLA CLA SHA KLACK KLACK GET ME THE FUCK OFF THIS TRACK As if the heart beat wasn't enough	They got us using drum machines now	Drums live in machines Tryin' to make our drums humdrums Tryin' to mute our magic	This appears to be a criticism of the often formulaic nature of modern electronic music. It may also allude to Marx’s concept of alienation : workers' detachment from their human nature, resulting from the evolution of the ‘mode of production’ in Capitalist society into a mechanized process, where workers become increasingly more divided from eachother, the products of their labour, and their own natural creative drives. As the creation of music becomes more industrialized, this same process occurs, with the result that musicians are often detached from the human, emotional forces which from which it originated.	Saul Williams	Twice the First Time
Or child's face dreaming near the glass, the writher Advances in a godlike wreath Of its own wrath. Chilled by such fragile reeling A hundred blows of a boot-heel Shall not quell, the dreamer wakes and hungers. Percussive pulses, drum or gong, Build in his skull their loud entrancement, Volutions of a Hindu dance. His hands move clumsily in the first conventional Gestures of assent. He is willing to undergo the volition and fervor Of many fleshlike arms, observe	These in their holiness of indirection	Destroy, adore, evolve, reject— Till on glass rigid with his own seizure At length the sucking jewels freeze.	Merill is finding divinity in chaos, in wandering indirection. This relates to the octopus’s motion and tentacles but also to subconscious thoughts that are wandering intangibly and chaotically through a spiritual plane.	James Merrill	The Octopus
null	Have you forgotten yet?...	For the world's events have rumbled on since those gagged days, Like traffic checked while at the crossing of city-ways: And the haunted gap in your mind has filled with thoughts that flow	Note the repetition of “Have you forgotten yet?” in lines 1, 9, and 26. The stanzas that contain these lines are directed at the reader, and reference civilian life. That sets the reader in the post war civilian role. The question itself is rhetorical; he hopes that you won’t forget, but knows that you will. The stanzas in the middle describe his war experience, which was radically different from what the civilian populace would have lived through. This juxtaposition highlights again the differing experiences of the First World War, and the disconnect that existed at the time. There were no embedded reporters, and all the news was second-hand and government censored.	Siegfried Sassoon	Aftermath
null	I would to heaven that I were so much clay,	As I am blood, bone, marrow, passion, feeling - Because at least the past were passed away - And for the future - (but I write this reeling,	Clay as in what one’s body becomes after decomposition, here it seems Byron partly wishes to die to escape this onslaught of emotions and partly asks to become something more inanimate and insensate (clay), something that cannot be wildly blown by the whims of “passion” and “feeling.”	Lord Byron	Headpiece to Don Juan I would to Heaven
null	When I was young my teachers were the old.	I gave up fire for form till I was cold. I suffered like a metal being cast. I went to school to age to learn the past.	Perhaps more dead than old. Although Frost attended both Dartmouth and Harvard, he didn’t come close to receiving a degree at either. A lifetime later, Frost ended up with 44 honorary degrees from colleges around the country, joking that he was “educated by degrees” and “would rather get a degree than an education.”	Robert Frost	What Fifty Said
null	The Thames nocturne of blue and gold	Changed to a Harmony in grey: A barge with ochre-coloured hay Dropt from the wharf: and chill and cold	As said in the description, it is highly believed that Wilde’s impressions-poems were inspired by the paintings of his acquaintance, James Whistler. Whistler was known for his Nocturne paintings, one of them being Nocturne in Blue and Gold , depicting the Thames River:	Oscar Wilde	Impression Du Matin
No more walks in the wood: The trees have all been cut Down, and where once they stood Not even a wagon rut Appears along the path Low brush is taking over. No more walks in the wood; This is the aftermath Of afternoons in the clover	Fields where we once made love	Then wandered home together Where the trees arched above, Where we made our own weather	As a poet writing “an old-fashioned song” in the twentieth century, Hollander gets to have it both ways here: he might mean “making love” in its more innocent, old-fashioned sense (wooing, flirting), or he might mean sex in the great outdoors. The phrase “fields of play,” later on, is similarly ambiguous.	John Hollander	An Old-Fashioned Song
The young man bent on glory, and that other Who seeks a burden. Knowing as she does What will become of them in bloody field Or Tuscan garden, it may be that at times She sees their first and final selves at once, As a god might to whom all time is now. Or, having lived so much herself, perhaps She meets them this time with a wiser eye, Noting that Julien's calculating head Is from the first too severed from his heart. But the true wonder of it is that she, For all that she may know of consequences,	Still turns enchanted to the next bright page Like some Natasha in the ballroom door— Caught in the flow of things wherever bound,	The blind delight of being, ready still To enter life on life and see them through.	A reference to the scene in War and Peace where Natasha Rostova attends her first Society ball. Upon entering the ballroom, Natasha is overwhelmed by the rush and all she can do is follow her family and marvel at the spectacle.	Richard Wilbur	The Reader
If I should die, think only this of me: That there's some corner of a foreign field That is for ever England. There shall be In that rich earth a richer dust concealed; A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware, Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam, A body of England's, breathing English air, Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home. And think, this heart, all evil shed away,	A pulse in the eternal mind, no less	Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given; Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day; And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness,	All the evil of the world faced by the soldier will be forgotten in his afterlife. Once the ‘pulse’ of purification has passed the the speaker can bask in joy. The idea of ‘eternal mind’ is interesting, a Pantheistic view that there is a merging of souls with God’s universal presence, though this is an over-simplification.	Rupert Brooke	The Soldier
null	This is my letter to the World	That never wrote to Me The simple News that Nature told, With tender Majesty	The speaker in this poem, like so many of Dickinson’s, both reaches out to the reader and attempts to the world at bay. If “this” is the speaker’s “letter to the World” there is an implied desire that it be read, and perhaps even responded to, but the speaker does not offer more than “this.” The speaker asks the reader to both acknowledge the communication and be satisfied that this is enough. Though one should always be cautious about equating a poem’s speaker with its author, Dickinson tempts her readers in this direction even more than most. Dickinson was famously isolated for much of her life, and in many ways her writing was her primary contact with the world beyond her home.	Emily Dickinson	This is My Letter to the World
The census man,	The day he came round,	Wanted my name To put it down. I said, Johnson,	The United States census is conducted every five years. The census was last taken in the year 2012.	Langston Hughes	Madam and the Census Man
[Published by Rossetti, "Complete Poetical Works of P. B. S.", 1870.]	A hater he came and sat by a ditch,	And he took an old cracked lute; And he sang a song which was more of a screech 'Gainst a woman that was a brute.	Is this the first time the word “hater” was used in its modern sense? That would be amazing.	Percy Bysshe Shelley	A Hate-Song
Come down, O Christ, and help me! reach thy hand, For I am drowning in a stormier sea Than Simon on thy lake of Galilee: The wine of life is spilt upon the sand, My heart is as some famine-murdered land Whence all good things have perished utterly, And well I know my soul in Hell must lie If I this night before God's throne should stand. "He sleeps perchance, or rideth to the chase,	Like Baal, when his prophets howled that name	From morn to noon on Carmel's smitten height." Nay, peace, I shall behold, before the night, The feet of brass, the robe more white than flame,	By the Bible, Baal was known to be a false idol depicted as a statue of a bull. In 1 Kings 18:22-30 , the prophet Elijah challenged the four hundred and fifty followers of Baal. Then said Elijah unto the people, I, even I only, remain a prophet of the LORD; but Baal’s prophets are four hundred and fifty men."	Oscar Wilde	E. Tenebris
Oh chosen love, Oh frozen love Oh tangle of matter and ghost Oh darling of angels, demons and saints And the whole broken-hearted host Gentle this soul And come forth from the cloud of unknowing And kiss the cheek of the moon The New Jerusalem glowing Why tarry all night in the ruin And leave no word of discomfort And leave no observer to mourn But climb on your tears and be silent	Like a rose on its ladder of thorns	Oh chosen love, Oh frozen love... Oh tangle of matter and ghost Oh darling of angels, demons and saints	Cohen conflates here two mystic Christian images: Mary as the “mystic rose” or “rose without thorns” and Jacob’s ladder , a connection between earth and heaven, seen by Jacob in a dream.	Leonard Cohen	The Window
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. Come. And be my baby.	Some prophets say the world is gonna end tomorrow	But others say we've got a week or two The paper is full of every kind of blooming horror And you sit wondering	Well, not really Maya, but we did have a feeling it might in 2012 by these Mayans. That was later disproved.	Maya Angelou	Come And Be My Baby
From my bed I watch 3 birds On a telephone Wire.	One flies Off. Then Another. One is left, Then It too Is gone.	My typewriter is Tombstone Still.	The birds all flying off the wire and into the depths of the sky possibly make Bukowski jealous because he wishes he too could fly off into the depths of his mind in order to conjure up a decent poem.	Charles Bukowski	8 Count
null	It is the pain, it is the pain endures.	Your chemic beauty burned my muscles through. Poise of my hands reminded me of yours. What later purge from this deep toxin cures?	[Refrain 1] In context, this could be read as an answer to the preceding questions. What cures? What kindness? It is the pain, it is the pain endures.	William Empson	Villanelle It is the pain...
But for loving, why, you would not, Sweet, Tho' we prayed you, Paid you, brayed you In a mortar—for you could not, Sweet! So, we leave the sweet face fondly there, Be its beauty Its sole duty! Let all hope of grace beyond, lie there! And while the face lies quiet there, Who shall wonder That I ponder A conclusion? I will try it there.	As,—why must one, for the love foregone Scout mere liking? Thunder-striking Earth,—the heaven, we looked above for, gone!	Why, with beauty, needs there money be, Love with liking? Crush the fly-king	It’s stanzas like this that led Browning’s detractors to dismiss him as simultaneously prosy and obscure. See for instance Wilde’s famous (or, famous enough at least to make in on Forbes' ‘ Thoughts on the Business of Life : “Meredith is a prose Browning, and so is Browning; he used poetry as a medium for writing in prose.” A prize for anyone who can explain the function of m-dashes or the grammatical role of “Thunder-striking” in this unpretty consonant-clustral stanza.	Robert Browning	A Pretty Woman
Panzer-man, panzer-man, O You-- Not God but a swastika So black no sky could squeak through. Every woman adores a Fascist, The boot in the face, the brute Brute heart of a brute like you. You stand at the blackboard, daddy, In the picture I have of you, A cleft in your chin instead of your foot, But no less a devil for that, no not Any less the black man who Bit my pretty red heart in two.	I was ten when they buried you.	At twenty I tried to die And get back, back, back to you. I thought even the bones would do.	Sylvia Plath was actually only eight when her father died, but ten is chosen for several reasons, partially because it is the first of a triad of major death-related incidents that occurred at ten year intervals: her father’s death, her suicide attempt at twenty, and her successful suicide at age thirty, as well as the last composition of the poems which make up Ariel , her final book of poems.	Sylvia Plath	Daddy
That wee-bit heap o' leaves an' stibble Has cost thee monie a weary nibble! Now thou's turn'd out, for a' thy trouble But house or hald To thole the Winter's sleety dribble An' cranreuch cauld! But Mousie, thou art no thy-lane In proving foresight may be vain The best laid schemes o' Mice an' Men Gang aft agley An' lea'e us nought but grief an' pain For promis'd joy!	Still, thou art blest, compar'd wi' me! The present only toucheth thee But Och! I backward cast my e'e On prospects drear! An' forward, tho' I canna see I guess an' fear!	null	Rough English translation: Still you are blessed, compared with me! The present only touches you: But oh! I backward cast my eye, On prospects dreary! And forward, though I cannot see, I guess and fear! Still, the mouse is blessed compared to Burns. She can simply keep living in the present, beginning work on a new nest. Burns has the curse of foresight, and of hindsight. He can see the mistakes he’s made in the past and foresee how bleak his prospects are in the future.	Robert Burns	To a Mouse
Helen, thy beauty is to me	Like those Nicean barks of yore	That gently, o'er a perfum'd sea, The weary, way-worn wanderer bore To his own native shore.	Direct allusion to Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Youth and Age where he says, How lightly then it flashed along, Like those trim skiffs, unknown of yore. Nicean barks refers to the moment that the victorious Greek ships sailed home after the Trojan War. As beautiful as this moment was, Helen is even more beautiful. The mention of Nicea is important to emphasize the majesty of victory as Nicea is named for the Greek goddess of victory Nike (yes the shoe company is named after this goddess) Notice the use of the word like , meaning that this is a simile. A simile that extends for many lines, like this one, is referred to as a Homeric simile or an epic simile.	Edgar Allan Poe	To Helen
Sundays too my father got up early And put his clothes on in the blueblack cold, Then with cracked hands that ached From labor in the weekday weather made Banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him. I'd wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking. When the rooms were warm, he'd call,	And slowly I would rise and dress, Fearing the chronic angers of that house,	Speaking indifferently to him, Who had driven out the cold And polished my good shoes as well.	The ‘chronic angers’ suggest ongoing conflict within the family that are never expressed in the form of quarrels, that result in the coldness towards their father. There seems to be no affection for house itself, implied by the use of ‘that’ instead of ‘our’ as a designation. It is not referred to as ‘home’. The use of ‘house’ to mean the family is an example of metonymy . The emphasis on a troubled house is similar to the opening sentence of Toni Morrison’s 1987 novel Beloved, which begins “124 was spiteful,” foreshadowing the haunting presence of a ghost in the house. The speaker in Hayden’s poem “ The Whipping ” also references some of those painful childhood memories .	Robert Hayden	Those Winter Sundays
To feed those outlaws prowling about the Domain, Those furtive she-cats and those villainous toms. Proudly they step to meet her, they march together With an arching of backs and a waving of plumy tails And smiles that swear they never would harm a feather. They rub at her legs for the bounty that never fails, They think she is a princess out of a tower, And so she is, she is trembling with love and power. 2 Meat, it is true, is meat, and demands attention But this is the sweetest moment that they know Whose courtship even is a hiss, a howl and a blow.	At so much kindness passing their comprehension	– Beggars and rogues who never deserved this pension – Some recollection of old punctilio Dawns in their eyes, and as she moves to go	characterisation: the lady is portrayed as a figure of pure kindness and generosity, but the cats are so stupid they would never understand how kind she is.	Douglas Stewart	Lady Feeding The Cats
If I should die, think only this of me: That there's some corner of a foreign field That is for ever England. There shall be In that rich earth a richer dust concealed; A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware, Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam, A body of England's, breathing English air, Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home. And think, this heart, all evil shed away, A pulse in the eternal mind, no less	Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given;	Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day; And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness, In hearts at peace, under an English heaven.	The speaker feels that the gift with which he has been endowed, that of Englishness, he can give back through death, by merging with, one assumes, the ‘eternal mind’. On a practical level, it isn’t clear who should be the recipients of his gift — maybe the foreign country’s population or those back home. Given the jingoistic and outdated nature of this sentiment it is odd that this poem remains so popular. However, the innocence and gentle pride of lines like these often provoke amongst students tolerant smiles rather than annoyance. Note the clever balance of the structure of this line, with the grammatical reversal of two clause, a device known as chiasmus .	Rupert Brooke	The Soldier
null	Calling	Mexico, 1969 Why not make a fiction of the mind's fictions? I want to say	This word may refer to the word “vocation”. A vocation is an “occupation to which a person is specially drawn.” This could be used in a religious sense meaning an entry into the priesthood or a divine call to the religious life. It may also be used in a non-religious sense to mean “a strong feeling of suitability for a particular career or occupation.”	Natasha Trethewey	Calling
I wandered lonely as a Cloud That floats on high o'er vales and Hills, When all at once I saw a crowd, A host of golden Daffodils; Along the lake, beneath the trees, Ten thousand dancing in the breeze. Continuous as the stars that shine And twinkle on the milky way,	They stretched in never-ending line	Along the margin of a bay: Ten thousand saw I at a glance, Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.	The sibilance in ‘stretched’, and the words ‘never-ending’ add a sense of continuity, spirituality and aimlessness that Wordsworth started the poem off with (‘wandered’ and ‘cloud’). He also adds a sense of permanence and constancy with the word ‘line’ since a line is straight and unwavering, like his loneliness and solitude.	William Wordsworth	I Wandered Lonely As a Cloud
‘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	This “line” emphasises the chasm between the general and his soldiers. He greets his subordinates spiritedly, but only as they move past him and closer to the line of fire. There is no true communication.	Siegfried Sassoon	The General
When I am an old woman I shall wear purple With a red hat which doesn't go, and doesn't suit me. And I shall spend my pension on brandy and summer gloves And satin sandals, and say we've no money for butter. I shall sit down on the pavement when I'm tired And gobble up samples in shops and press alarm bells And run my stick along the public railings	And make up for the sobriety of my youth.	I shall go out in my slippers in the rain And pick flowers in other people's gardens And learn to spit.	This little statement dropped in is a key line, the motive for this late rebellion. The speaker has been conformist in her youth and clearly yearns to be outrageous.	Jenny Joseph	Warning
He will speak these words of wisdom Like a sage, a man of vision Though he knows he's really nothing But the brief elaboration of a tube Going home without my sorrow Going home sometime tomorrow Going home to where it's better Than before Going home without my burden Going home behind the curtain Going home without this costume That I wore	He wants to write a love song	An anthem of forgiving A manual for living With defeat	Some of Leonard Cohen’s many love songs: Hallelujah Chelsea Hotel A Thousand Kisses Deep Bird On A Wire I’m Your Man	Leonard Cohen	Going Home
null	You were	water to me deep and bold and fathoming You were	The poem begins with the words ‘you were’ to indicate the poet’s mother may no longer be alive. Each stanza begins with this refrain , a device known as anaphora . The repetition gives emphasis.	Grace Nichols	Praise Song for My Mother
Mailer stabbing his the impossibility of being human Maupassant going mad in a rowboat Dostoyevsky lined up against a wall to be shot Crane off the back of a boat into the propeller the impossibility Sylvia with her head in the oven like a baked potato Harry Crosby leaping into that Black Sun Lorca murdered in the road by Spanish troops the impossibility Artaud sitting on a madhouse bench Chatterton drinking rat poison	Shakespeare a plagiarist	Beethoven with a horn stuck into his head against deafness the impossibility the impossibility Nietzsche gone totally mad	The poet and playwright William Shakespeare is often rumored to have stolen ideas, lines, and other material from his rival dramatists. It is known that he collaborated with fellow members of his theatrical company on the writing of some plays, although how many and to what extent is still a topic of scholarly debate. Most of his plots were freely adapted from existing stories, though he radically transformed many of them and gave them a philosophical and psychological depth not previously seen in English literature. For all these reasons, Shakespeare takes flak from some camps for being a fraud. (He wasn’t – he was a vastly talented and original writer, as even his contemporaries recognized. But to a limited extent the charge of “plagiarism” sticks. “Good artists copy, great artists steal…”)	Charles Bukowski	Beasts Bounding Through Time
Look hyeah, Moses, go tell Pher'oh Fu' to let dem chillun go.' 'An' ef he refuse to do it, I will make him rue de houah, Fu' I'll empty down on Egypt All de vials of my powah.' Yes, he did - an' Pher'oh's ahmy Was n't wuth a ha'f a dime; Fu' de Lawd will he'p his chillun, You kin trust him evah time. An' yo' enemies may 'sail you In de back an' in de front;	But de Lawd is all aroun' you,	Fu' to ba' de battle's brunt. Dey kin fo'ge yo' chains an' shackles F'om de mountains to de sea;	The lord is always around wherever you are. Through any situation He will be there by your side.	Paul Laurence Dunbar	An Ante-Bellum Sermon
And the cry of hounds came tumbling invisibly with their echoes down through the draggle of trees, Swinging across the wall of dark woodland, The stag dropped in to strange country. And turned at the river Hearing the hound-pack smash the undergrowth, hearing the bell-note Of the voice carried all others, Then while the limbs all cried different directions to his lungs, which only wanted to rest, The blue horsemen on the bank opposite Pulled aside the camouflage of their terrible planet. And the stag doubled back weeping and looking for home up a valley and down a valley While the strange trees struck him and the brambles lashed him, And the strange earth came galloping after him carrying the loll-tongued hounds to fling all over him	And his heart became just a club beating his ribs and his own hooves shouted with hounds' voices,	And the crowd on the road got back into their cars Wet-through and disappeared.	The stag, in Hughes' imagination, loses its sense of self, and seems to have absorbed the violence, with the heart a club assaulting its ribs, and the hooves ‘shouting’ like the dogs. Its own body is now merged with the hunt and the killing. The reader understands that this is a metaphor for the killing of the prey.	Ted Hughes	The Stag
null	I am silver and exact. I have no preconceptions. Whatever you see I swallow immediately Just as it is, unmisted by love or dislike.	I am not cruel, only truthful--- The eye of a little god, four-cornered. Most of the time I meditate on the opposite wall.	The speaker of this poem is a mirror. It begins by saying that it does not have a preconceived idea of what it’s looking at: it will take in and reflect exactly what it sees, and will not be affected by how much it hates or loves you. The mirror reflects the truth. This line, and the poem as a whole, could also reflect the numbness that resulted from Plath’s severe depression: she became unable to feel anything, let alone love or hate anything. The short, sharp sentences reflect this numbness and lack of feeling. There is no suggestion of warmth or softness in this opening.	Sylvia Plath	Mirror
null	Booker T.	Was a practical man. He said, Till the soil And learn from the land.	(Booker Taliaferro Washington) (April 5, 1856 – November 14, 1915)[ ] was an African-American educator, author, orator, and advisor to presidents of the United States. Between 1890 and 1915, Washington was the dominant leader in the African-American community.	Langston Hughes	Ballad of Booker T.
Symbols of democracy, pinned up against the coast Outhouse of bureaucracy, surrounded by a moat	Citizens of poverty are barely out of sight	Overlords escape in the evening with people of the night Morning brings the tourists, peering eyes and rubber necks To catch a glimpse of the cowboy making the world a nervous wreck	Homelessness and poverty is rampant in D.C.	Gil Scott-Heron	Washington D.C.
null	Against the rubber tongues of cows and the hoeing hands of men	Thistles spike the summer air Or crackle open under a blue-black pressure. Every one a revengeful burst	Hughes yokes together images of nature and of the natural world. The ‘rubber’ tongues of cows is simple but unexpectedly imaginative.	Ted Hughes	Thistles
In a beautiful pea-green boat, They took some honey, and plenty of money, Wrapped up in a five-pound note. The Owl looked up to the stars above, And sang to a small guitar, "O lovely Pussy! O Pussy, my love, What a beautiful Pussy you are, You are, You are! What a beautiful Pussy you are!" II Pussy said to the Owl, "You elegant fowl!	How charmingly sweet you sing!	O let us be married! too long we have tarried: But what shall we do for a ring?" They sailed away, for a year and a day,	She is delighted by his melodic exploits. Clearly Lear knew that chicks dig guys with guitars.	Edward Lear	The Owl and the Pussycat
Since you ask, most days I cannot remember. I walk in my clothing, unmarked by that voyage. Then the almost unnameable lust returns. Even then I have nothing against life. I know well the grass blades you mention, the furniture you have placed under the sun. But suicides have a special language.	Like carpenters they want to know which tools.	They never ask why build. Twice I have so simply declared myself, have possessed the enemy, eaten the enemy,	Speaking from experience, Sexton views the suicidal in a light where they don’t question their actions, they only question the steps to complete said action. Therefore, the tools (aka, pills, weapons, a noose, etc..) are viewed as a means to a literal end. The tools could also be symbolic towards the suicidal. Both have a job. Both just do, not think.	Anne Sexton	Wanting To Die
There are many monsters that a glassen surface Restrains. And none more sinister Than vision asleep in the eye's tight translucence. Rarely it seeks now to unloose Its diamonds. Having divined how drab a prison The purest mortal tissue is, Rarely it wakes. Unless, coaxed out by lusters Extraordinary, like the octopus	From the gloom of its tank half-swimming half-drifting Toward anything fair, a handkerchief	Or child's face dreaming near the glass, the writher Advances in a godlike wreath Of its own wrath. Chilled by such fragile reeling	The octopus is drifting almost aimlessly in its tank, as subconscious thought is drifting, displaced and floating in the depths of the mind. It approaches ‘anything fair’ attempting to find an opening in the conscious mind that is penetrable. A handkerchief is something extremely delicate and fragile. The apparition searches for a delicate target and finds that in the child’s face.	James Merrill	The Octopus
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. The window is starless still; the clock ticks,	The fox’s concentration on its own business alerts the poet to his own task, the business of the writing.	Ted Hughes	The Thought-Fox
The Maiden caught me in the wild Where I was dancing merrily She put me into her Cabinet And lock'd me up with a golden key	This cabinet is form'd of gold And pearl and crystal shining bright	And within it opens into a world And a little lovely moony night Another England there I saw	There is no literal cabinet, he’s just locked in her embrace. He’s completely consumed with her. And there is no gold, pearl, or crystal, it’s just showing what he sees the relationship as at first. In the beginning, he sees it as completely perfect and wonderful, like gold, pearl, and crystal.	William Blake	The Crystal Cabinet
I empty myself of the names of others. I empty my pockets. I empty my shoes and leave them beside the road. At night I turn back the clocks; I open the family album and look at myself as a boy. What good does it do? The hours have done their job.	I say my own name. I say goodbye. The words follow each other downwind.	I love my wife but send her away. My parents rise out of their thrones into the milky rooms of clouds. How can I sing?	You have to literally imagine Mark (or anyone) saying these two things one after the other, it’s extremely depressing once you grasp it. To accept the fact you are one day no longer going to be able to make a difference in this world is immensely horrifying. We all have to eventually say goodbye to ourselves, and at the same time accept the fact that that goodbye may never be heard by anybody.	Mark Strand	The Remains
NUTTING. ——————————— It seems a day, (I speak of one from many singled out) One of those heavenly days which cannot die, When forth I sallied from our Cottage-door*, And with a wallet o'er my shoulder slung, A nutting crook in hand, I turned my steps Towards the distant woods, a Figure quaint, Tricked out in proud disguise of Beggar's weeds Put on for the occasion, by advice And exhortation of my frugal Dame. Motley accoutrement! of power to smile	*The house at which I was boarded during the time I was at School.	At thorns, and brakes, and brambles, and, in truth, More ragged than need was. Among the woods, And o'er the pathless rocks, I forced my way	Williams Wordsworth went to school first at Hawkshead Grammar school, then furthered his education at Cambridge University in October of 1787.	William Wordsworth	Nutting 1805 Lyrical Ballads
They shut me up in Prose As when a little Girl They put me in the Closet Because they liked me "still" Still! Could themself have peeped And seen my Brain — go round	They might as wise have lodged a Bird For Treason — in the Pound	Himself has but to will And easy as a Star Abolish his Captivity	Dickinson again compares her being shut up to a bird being put away in the pound.	Emily Dickinson	They Shut Me Up in Prose

The two executioners stalk along over the knolls, Bearing two axes with heavy heads shining and wide, And a long limp two-handled saw toothed for cutting great boles, And so they approach the proud tree that bears the death-mark on its side. Jackets doffed they swing axes and chop away just above ground, And the chips fly about and lie white on the moss and fallen leaves; Till a broad deep gash in the bark is hewn all the way round,

And one of them tries to hook upward a rope, which at last he achieves.

The saw then begins, till the top of the tall giant shivers: The shivers are seen to grow greater with each cut than before: They edge out the saw, tug the rope; but the tree only quivers,

The lumberjack has hooked a rope up to the tree, to make it easier to pull downwards.

Thomas Hardy

Throwing a Tree

As the winds use A crack in a wall Or a drain, Their joy or their pain To whistle through - Choose me, You English words? I know you: You are light as dreams, Tough as oak, Precious as gold, As poppies and corn,

Or an old cloak:

Sweet as our birds To the ear, As the burnet rose

Thomas uses humour here. The “old cloak” is unexpected and the reader can decide its significance; probably comfort and familiarity. Or the poet may just be teasing the reader. The colon creates a pause, a caesura to slow down the pace and maybe the reader might smile. This poem would work well read aloud in performance.

Edward Thomas

Words

My love is lyke to yse, and I to fyre; how comes it then that this her cold so great is not dissolv'd through my so hot desyre, but harder growes the more I her intreat? Or how comes it that my exceeding heat is not delayd by her hart frosen cold: but that I burne much more in boyling sweat, and feele my flames augmented manifold?

What more miraculous thing may be told that fire which all things melts, should harden yse: and yse which is congeald with senceless cold, should kindle fyre by wonderfull devyse.

Such is the powre of love in gentle mind, that it can alter all the course of kynd.

He’s marveling at the unbelievable–“miraculous”–fact that her “cold” rejection is inflaming his intense desire for her, while his intense desire is hardening her rejection. (It’s not so miraculous, Ed!)

Edmund Spenser

Amoretti: Sonnet 30

We slowly drove – He knew no haste And I had put away My labor and my leisure too For His Civility – We passed the School, where Children strove At Recess – in the Ring – We passed the Fields of Gazing Grain – We passed the Setting Sun – Or rather – He passed us – The Dews drew quivering and chill – For only Gossamer, my Gown – My Tippet – only Tulle –

We paused before a House that seemed A Swelling of the Ground – The Roof was scarcely visible – The Cornice – in the Ground –

Since then – 'tis Centuries – and yet Feels shorter than the Day I first surmised the Horses' Heads

Dickinson was an agoraphobic and hardly, if at all, left her house for the final 20 years of her life. Naturally, this would bring about an increased amount of anxiety and depression from staying away from people for such an extended period of time. Her poems are greatly riddled with thoughts of death and morbid mindsets that she does not necessarily make out to be negative. Dickinson is incredibly comfortable with the idea of death, personifying it as a gentleman and using her gravestone as a house. She attempts to make it clear that death is not to be feared since it is a natural part of the human life cycle. When she says they “paused” in front of her resting place, she makes it clear that that is all they did, pause. She therefore reminds readers that, in a Christian sense, when someone dies the do not reside under their gravestone but rather in the “eternity” that is heaven. Dickinson does not deny the spontaneity of death, nor does she mention the sadness that comes out of it. Rather, she plays death off as nothing more than a part to life and no more scary than going for a carriage ride.

Emily Dickinson

Because I Could Not Stop for Death

Whilst a thousand isles are illumined around, Earthquake is trampling one city to ashes, An hundred are shuddering and tottering; the sound Is bellowing underground. 3. But keener thy gaze than the lightening's glare, And swifter thy step than the earthquake's tramp; Thou deafenest the rage of the ocean; thy stare Makes blind the volcanoes; the sun's bright lamp To thine is a fen-fire damp. 4. From billow and mountain and exhalation

The sunlight is darted through vapour and blast;

From spirit to spirit, from nation to nation, From city to hamlet thy dawning is cast,— And tyrants and slaves are like shadows of night

This is a curious construction, with the sunlight passive (‘is darted’), as if controlled by a greater force.

Percy Bysshe Shelley

Liberty

The battle rent a cobweb diamond-strung And cut a flower beside a ground bird's nest Before it stained a single human breast. The stricken flower bent double and so hung.

And still the bird revisited her young.

A butterfly its fall had dispossessed A moment sought in air his flower of rest, Then lightly stooped to it and fluttering clung.

This emphasises the capacity of nature to continue, despite its vulnerability and the destructiveness of humans.

Robert Frost

Range-finding

For windy skies, Coldness for water, Obedience for a master. Shall memory restore The steps and the shore, The face and the meeting place; Shall the bird live, Shall the fish dive, And sheep obey In a sheep's way; Can love remember The question and the answer,

For love recover

What has been dark and rich and warm all over?

“recover” instead of “recovers” could be an old subjunctive: “such that love could recover,” “in order for love to recover.”

W. H. Auden

The Question

Who'll pay reparations on my soul? Many suggestions And documents written Many directions For the end that was given 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.

Tell me, Who'll pay reparations on my soul? Who'll pay reparations?

This is a rhetorical indictment on the empty rhetoric of the politicians, symbolized by the White House desk and the speeches given there. The seasons, symbolizing the circumstances of people’s lives, are experienced by people in their real lives however.

Gil Scott-Heron

Wholl Pay Reparations on My Soul?

null

To fling my arms wide In some place of the sun, To whirl and to dance

Till the white day is done. Then rest at cool evening Beneath a tall tree

This trio of lines evoke a sense of freedom, something the black man possessed in a technical sense- but not truly, in Hughes' lifetime.

Langston Hughes

Dream Variations

For David P—B The eye follows, the land Slips upward, creases down, forms The gentle buttocks of a young Giant. In the nestle, Old adobe bricks, washed of Whiteness, paled to umber, Await another century. Star Jasmine and old vines Lay claim upon the ghosted land,

Then quiet pools whisper

Private childhood secrets. Flush on inner cottage walls Antiquitous faces,

This implies that the house has a pool or is near a location of a river or ocean, but river being the probable pick since it is also in the mountains. Maya gives us another exaplme of personification with the fact that the pools “whisper”.

Maya Angelou

California Prodigal

Empty treasure chests dumped from departed ships And jettisoned slaves washed Into an arc from Jamaica to Guiana. Islands aborted from the belly of the sea Forever unborn in rock and swamp. Other fragments rot in the sun

Like cane chewed and spat

From coolie mouth. Haiti is a crab with broken claw. Cuba droops in fear at the foot of America.

This line is a form of symbolism as it depicts something that is only used for flavor, when a person is done succumbing all the juices and good flavor, it is spited out and tossed for garbage. Dabydeen depicts this picture in the readers mind to show the symbolism of these islands being used.After taking their “sweet juices” their resources, they are no longer cared for or given importance. Below is a picture of fresh canes, which can symbolize how the islands appear before they are chewed up. the next photo is the beginning of what happens when a sugar cane is cut. It is evident that it begins to loose its form and it’s sweetness furthermore, its taste is stripped down.

David Dabydeen

The Old Map

[Published by Mrs. Shelley, "Posthumous Poems", 1824. There is a fair draft amongst the Boscombe manuscripts.]

I.

The flower that smiles to-day To-morrow dies; All that we wish to stay

Each stanza of this poem is divided into their own separate part so that one may read each one individually and think of them as pieces of a puzzle, especially seeing that they each take on different tones and form. Part I takes on a blunt tone of disappointment and somewhat acceptance of the cruel realities of life. Though there is a clear ABABCCC rhyme scheme, the unsettling lack of flow due to varying line lengths and meter conveys a feeling of unexpected disappointment in the reader. This rhyme scheme is the only thing consistent throughout all three stanzas . Though there is no consistent meter in these lines, there are many hidden inner-rhymes and slant rhymes in this poem.

Percy Bysshe Shelley

Mutability II The flower that smiles today...

The great Overdog

That heavenly beast

With a star in one eye Gives a leap in the east. He dances upright

The Overdog is described as a paradox ; a mortal “beast” cannot at the same time be “heavenly” or God-like. This refers to the Greek myth in which Canis Major represented one of Orion ’s hunting dogs and became a constellation with Orion after his death. This phrase could also reveal the speaker’s belief that everyone, despite being mortal, can rise to the heavens and be one with God.

Robert Frost

Canis Major

null

Hurree Chunder Mookerjee, pride of Bow Bazaar,

Owner of a native press, "Barrishter-at-Lar," Waited on the Government with a claim to wear Sabres by the bucketful, rifles by the pair.

This character here appears as a cautionary example of a Bengali man who is allowed to carry arms by the British government and suffers an unspecified bad fate while villainous South Asians take up arms. However, this same character later appears in Kipling’s novel Kim as a canny operative who helps the Irish hero serve the British government. In the 2001 novel The Mandala of Sherlock Holmes (also known as Sherlock Holmes: The Missing Years ), Jamyang Norbu made Hurree Chunder Mookerjee the main character, as he meets the legendary London detective during the latter’s exile in India.

Rudyard Kipling

What Happened

Seems like a long time Since the waiter took my order. Grimy little luncheonette, The snow falling outside. Seems like it has grown darker Since I last heard the kitchen door Behind my back Since I last noticed Anyone pass on the street. A glass of ice-water

Keeps me company

At this table I chose myself Upon entering. And a longing,

There’s no-one else to keep him company.

Charles Simic

The Partial Explanation

null

'We were killing pigs when the

Yanks arrived. A Tuesday morning, sunlight and gutter-blood

The casual starkness of this introductory line is clearly aiming to shock. The directness draws the reader in.

Seamus Heaney

Testimony

(1) The day she visited the dissecting room They had four men laid out, black as burnt turkey, Already half unstrung. A vinegary fume Of the death vats clung to them; The white-smocked boys started working. The head of his cadaver had caved in, And she could scarcely make out anything In that rubble of skull plates and old leather. A sallow piece of string held it together. In their jars the snail-nosed babies moon and glow. He hands her the cut-out heart like a cracked heirloom.

(2)

In Brueghel's panorama of smoke and slaughter Two people only are blind to the carrion army: He, afloat in the sea of her blue satin

This second part refers to Brueghel’s painting, ‘the triumph of death’, painted in 1562, in which two lovers sit in the bottom right hand corner, clueless to their surroundings

Sylvia Plath

Two Views of a Cadaver Room

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,

This line is a reference to the first line of the Book of Ecclesiastes in the Old Testament. This allusion to Ecclesiastes 1:2 has shown how the speaker is battling against the pull of earthly desires to achieve a more spiritual life. Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities; all is vanity. It is repeated in every stanza, a device known as anaphora .

Christina Rossetti

Soeur Louise De La Misericorde

Made warm draughts in the open car. Signposts whitened relentlessly. Montrueil, Abbéville, Beauvais Were promised, promised, came and went, Each place granting its name's fulfilment. A combine groaning its way late Bled seeds across its work-light. A forest fire smouldered out. One by one small cafés shut. I thought of you continuously A thousand miles south where Italy Laid its loin to France on the darkened sphere.

Your ordinariness was renewed there.

null

The final line echoes the opening line, creating a cyclical pattern. But “ordinariness”, when “renewed”, is no longer ordinary. So, there is a sub-text relating to the nature of relationships — the fluctuations, growth, diminution, changes — and ultimate renewal. The final line is moving in its understatement

Seamus Heaney

Night Drive

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

Elysium, or the Elysian Fields, is an afterlife equivalent to heaven in Greek Mythology. Those who are heroes or specially chosen by the Gods are allowed entrance there after death. In the Elysian Fields, one is allowed to indulge in any pleasures they desire for eternity.

Edgar Allan Poe

Serenade

A still—Volcano—Life— That flickered in the night— When it was dark enough to do Without erasing sight—

A quiet—Earthquake Style—

Too subtle to suspect By natures this side Naples— The North cannot detect

The pattern of oxymora is continued here, this time with “quiet” and “Earthquake.” It should be noted that, in the oxymora of the first line of each stanza (“A still – Volcano – Life” / “A quiet – Earthquake Style” / “The Solemn – Torrid – Symbol –”), the opposites are used to define “Life,” “style,” and “Symbol.” In the second stanza, the idea of “style” could refer to both Dickinson’s poetic style (brief yet powerful) or, more personally, her own self (quiet yet quaking with perceptiveness).

Emily Dickinson

A still—Volcano—Life 601

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 Come leh we hug up and brace-up and sweet one another up

But then

leh we break free Yeh leh we break free And keep to de motion

The break is applied in the juxtaposition, followed by a pause or caesura before the next stanza, when the speaker makes clear the limitation of the relationship.

Grace Nichols

Even Tho

'Twas mercy brought me from my Pagan land, Taught my benighted soul to understand That there's a God, that there's a Saviour too:

Once I redemption neither sought nor knew.

Some view our sable race with scornful eye, "Their colour is a diabolic die." Remember, Christians, Negros, black as Cain,

While she was still in Africa, Phillis was ignorant of the fact that there was redemption from sin and as such, did not search for it.

Phillis Wheatley

On Being Brought from Africa to America

An' she'll fight for the young British soldier Fight, fight, fight for the soldier When shakin' their bustles like ladies so fine The guns o' the enemy wheel into line Shoot low at the limbers an' don't mind the shine For noise never startles the soldier Start-, start-, startles the soldier If your officer's dead and the sergeants look white Remember it's ruin to run from a fight: So take open order, lie down, and sit tight And wait for supports like a soldier Wait, wait, wait like a soldier

When you're wounded and left on Afghanistan's plains And the women come out to cut up what remains Jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains An' go to your Gawd like a soldier

null

The rule of empires since Classical times: if you invade Afghanistan, they will CUT you! Maybe George W Bush should’ve read this poem (too bad he can’t read..)

Rudyard Kipling

The Young British Soldier

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, But... They went home.

My praises were on all men's lips,

they liked my smile, my wit, my hips, they'd spend one night, or two or three. But...

The men just like her for her body and are only looking for a physical relationship.

Maya Angelou

They Went Home

I've stayed in the front yard all my life. I want a peek at the back Where it's rough and untended and hungry weed grows. A girl gets sick of a rose. I want to go in the back yard now And maybe down the alley, To where the charity children play. I want a good time today. They do some wonderful things. They have some wonderful fun. My mother sneers, but I say it's fine How they don't have to go in at quarter to nine.

My mother, she tells me that Johnnie Mae Will grow up to be a bad woman.

That George'll be taken to Jail soon or late (On account of last winter he sold our back gate). But I say it's fine. Honest, I do.

The mother is trying to scare the daughter away from hanging out with the children in the alley. Johnnie Mae will not grow up to be “good” because of the life she leads (see explanation below).

Gwendolyn Brooks

A Song in the Front Yard

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:

Had I not been awake I would have missed it

It came and went too unexpectedly And almost it seemed dangerously, Hurtling like an animal at the house,

This line comes exactly in the middle of the poem and is pivotal; the essence of the poem that forms the title. It expresses the sense of joy, of the need to seize life, and the danger of letting opportunities — bursts of inspiration — slip away.

Seamus Heaney

Had I not been awake I would have missed it

About the shark, phlegmatical one Pale sot of the Maldive sea The sleek little pilot-fish, azure and slim How alert in attendance be From his saw-pit of mouth, from his charnel of maw They have nothing of harm to dread But liquidly glide on his ghastly flank Or before his Gorgonian head; Or lurk in the port of serrated teeth In white triple tiers of glittering gates And there find a haven when peril's abroad An asylum in the jaws of Fate!

They are friends; and friendly they guide him to prey

Yet never partake of the treat Eyes and brains to the dotard lethargic and dull Pale ravener of horrible meat

Contrary to what the poet says, pilot fish do not in fact guide sharks to their prey, though they’re occasionally used as metaphors for scavengers or looters trailing in the wake of more dangerous criminals.

Herman Melville

The Maldive Shark

Thy various works, imperial queen, we see,

How bright their forms! how deck'd with pomp by thee!

Thy wond'rous acts in beauteous order stand, And all attest how potent is thine hand. From Helicon's refulgent heights attend,

Imagination brightens and bedecks ordinary things, as if with fine clothes and accessories, thereby rendering them extraordinary. The poem consists of a series of rhymed iambic pentameter couplets, a.k.a. “heroic couplets.” This was the form favored by Alexander Pope, arguably the most famous and widely imitated poet in English in the 18th century. Pope wrote “the style of the age” and was the major influence on Wheatley’s own style.

Phillis Wheatley

On Imagination

Come down, O Christ, and help me! reach thy hand, For I am drowning in a stormier sea Than Simon on thy lake of Galilee: The wine of life is spilt upon the sand, My heart is as some famine-murdered land Whence all good things have perished utterly, And well I know my soul in Hell must lie If I this night before God's throne should stand. "He sleeps perchance, or rideth to the chase, Like Baal, when his prophets howled that name From morn to noon on Carmel's smitten height." Nay, peace, I shall behold, before the night,

The feet of brass, the robe more white than flame,

The wounded hands, the weary human face.

May be a reference to John’s vision of a spirit described in Revelation 1:14-15 : His head and his hair were white like wool, as white as snow. And his eyes were like flames of fire. His feet were like polished bronze refined in a furnace, and his voice thundered like mighty ocean waves."

Oscar Wilde

E. Tenebris

I shall hate you Like a dart of singing steel Shot through still air At even-tide. Or solemnly As pines are sober When they stand etched Against the sky

Hating you shall be a game Played with cool hands And slim fingers

Your heart will yearn For the lonely splendor Of the pine tree

The surface imagery of the darts in the beginning now makes more sense. There are two settings occurring side by side in this poem: an open forest and a billiard room. These lines evoke images of a game of pool, as a certain delicacy is required to achieve accuracy in cue ball games. The speaker is saying that she will hate the subject as if she were playing a game of pool- calm and collected, but deadly accurate when she has a target in mind.

Gwendolyn B. Bennett

Hatred

Such plainness of the pre-baroque Hardly involves the eye, until It meets his left-hand gauntlet, still Clasped empty in the other; and One sees, with a sharp tender shock His hand withdrawn, holding her hand. They would not think to lie so long Such faithfulnеss in effigy Was just a detail friends would see: A sculptor's sweet commissionеd grace Thrown off in helping to prolong The Latin names around the base.

They would not guess how early in

Their supine stationary voyage The air would change to soundless damage, Turn the old tenantry away;

The first lines of this and the previous stanzas are syntactic parallels , with anaphoric repetition of “They would not …”. This adds emphasis to the negative aspects of the scenario that Larkin is exploring.

Philip Larkin

An Arundel Tombb

Beloveds, now we know that we know nothing, now that our bright and shining star can slip away from our fingertips like a puff of summer wind. Without notice, our dear love can escape our doting embrace. Sing our songs among the stars and walk our dances across the face of the moon. In the instant that Michael is gone, we know nothing. No clocks can tell time. No oceans can rush our tides with the abrupt absence of our treasure. Though we are many, each of us is achingly alone, piercingly alone. Only when we confess our confusion can we remember that he was a gift to us and we did have him.

He came to us from the creator,

trailing creativity in abundance. Despite the anguish, his life was sheathed in mother love, family love, and he survived and did more than that.

Michael Jackson was special, he was a gift, created in God’s image and sent to us to spread love and happiness.

Maya Angelou

We Had Him

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Frankie Laine, he was singing Jezebel

I pinned an Iron Cross to my lapel I walked up to the tallest and the blondest girl I said, "Look, you don't know me now but very soon you will

Frankie Laine was a popular singer in the 1950’s and 60’s. The reference plants the song ( “Jezabel” ) at a dance from Cohen’s teenage years. Introducing the song in 1985 , Cohen talked about his admiration for Frankie Lane: A song that I wrote with the great R'n'R master by the name of Phil Spector. A delightful chap. You really get to know him, you really did get to know him. And I had a Walther PPK. He had a just an ordinary 45. He flatted out on Sunset Boulevard. He got the tapes. He mixed them all alone. I think he was right. In this song we placed all our most irrelevant and banal adolescent recollections. It was everything that I learned in High School. One foot note : there is a singer mentioned in the first line of the first verse, the singer Frankie Laine. He’s to be remembered for his stellar rendition of “Jezebel”. Also for his sense of interpretation of “Swamp Girl”. That song has the memorable refrain, “That’s where my swamp girl lies”. Many’s the time these words come rushing to my mind. There’s another song of his :“Black Lace” : “Lady beware, every time that you wear lace, black lace”. Very good song. There is a better known : “Mule Train”, with the authentic cracking of bull hide whips. Mule train. So the Frankie Laine referred to in the very first two words of this song is the very Frankie Laine, the very Frankie Laine whose liver I have to describe.

Leonard Cohen

Memories

The sink is broke, The water don't run, And you ain't done a thing You promised to've done. Back window's cracked, Kitchen floor squeaks, There's rats in the cellar, And the attic leaks. He said, Madam, It's not up to me. I'm just the agent, Don't you see?

I said, Naturally, You pass the buck.

If it's money you want You're out of luck. He said, Madam,

Madam is aware of the power she has as it pertains to the “agents” job success in relation to her own deplorable living conditions and refuses to pay her rent in a form of resistance

Langston Hughes

Madam and The Rent Man

There is a pleasure in the pathless woods, There is a rapture on the lonely shore, There is society, where none intrudes, By the deep sea, and music in its roar:

I love not man the less, but Nature more,

From these our interviews, in which I steal From all I may be, or have been before, To mingle with the Universe, and feel

Lonely places seem to strike a responsive chord in most people, whether as a renunciation of society or find a sense of beauty that city streets and people do not satisfy.

Lord Byron

There Is Pleasure In The Pathless Woods

754 My Life had stood—a Loaded Gun In Corners—till a Day The Owner passed—identified

And carried Me away

And now We roam in Sovereign Woods And now We hunt the Doe And every time I speak for Him

The gun, the metaphorical speaker, is at this stage passive. The mystery remains; why is an instrument of violence unable or unwilling to assert herself? It is a paradox .

Emily Dickinson

My Life had stood—a Loaded Gun

THE artist is the creator of beautiful things. To reveal art and conceal the artist is art's aim. The critic is he who can translate into another manner or a new material his impression of beautiful things. The highest as the lowest form of criticism is a mode of autobiography. Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault. Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope. They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only beauty.

There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.

The nineteenth century dislike of realism is the rage of Caliban seeing his own face in a glass. The nineteenth century dislike of romanticism is the rage of Caliban not seeing his own face in a glass. The moral life of man forms part of the subject-matter of the artist, but the morality of art consists in the perfect use of an imperfect medium. No artist desires to prove anything. Even things that are true can be proved. No artist has ethical sympathies. An ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable mannerism of style. No artist is ever morbid. The artist can express everything. Thought and language are to the artist instruments of an art. Vice and virtue are to the artist materials for an art. From the point of view of form, the type of all the arts is the art of the musician. From the point of view of feeling, the actor's craft is the type. All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril. Those who read the symbol do so at their peril. It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors. Diversity of opinion about a work of art shows that the work is new, complex, and vital. When critics disagree, the artist is in accord with himself. We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it. The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely. All art is quite useless.

Art for Art’s Sake As a writer during the Aesthetic Movement , Oscar Wilde’s work reflected the temper of the times and focused on “art for art’s sake” . Art was defined by beauty and many lived life in a hedonistic, self-gratifying way. This was a sharp contrast to the strict morality of the Victorian Era. In this aphorism, Wilde is suggesting that books should be judged on their literary value instead of based on a subjective moral judgement. Speaking in a broader context, art should be judged solely on an aesthetic level, instead of being deciphered for deeper meanings. Sometimes art is just frivolous, yet nice to look at. To Wilde, Art and books alike should have no ulterior purpose of informing the reader of moral obligations. Instead, Art and books should be enjoyed strictly for pleasure. Wilde suggests that artists and writers should have the freedom to express their creative visions without being judged against a standard. Works of art should be taken as they are. As an author, Wilde received criticism for the decadence and homosexual allusions in The Picture of Dorian Gray . In a sense, Wilde’s defiance to judgement against homosexuality is portrayed through his writing.

Oscar Wilde

The Picture of Dorian Gray Preface

And did those feet in ancient time Walk upon England's mountains green? And was the holy Lamb of God On England's pleasant pastures seen? And did the Countenance Divine Shine forth upon our clouded hills? And was Jerusalem builded here Among these dark satanic mills? Bring me my bow of burning gold! Bring me my arrows of desire! Bring me my spear! O clouds, unfold! Bring me my chariot of fire!

I will not cease from mental fight,

Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand Till we have built Jerusalem In England's green and pleasant land.

Contrasting with the repetition of violent tools, Blake describes a “mental fight.” This means Blake understands that the challenges faced cannot only be solved through force, but also through intelligence or emotion. This follows his reasoning in his poem London , in which he powerfully describes the terrible lives of people trapped in poverty, but also refers to mind-forged manacles — his belief that we are also trapped in our own negativity and limitations. Here he is asserting his determination to overcome inner emotional and mental barriers.

William Blake

And Did Those Feet In Ancient Time

Nuclear power will be taken over by the many Explosions will continually shake the earth Radiated robot men will stalk each other The rich and the chosen will watch from space platforms Dante's Inferno will be made to look like a children's playground The sun will not be seen and it will always be night Trees will die All vegetation will die Radiated men will eat the flesh of radiated men The sea will be poisoned The lakes and rivers will vanish Rain will be the new gold

The rotting bodies of men and animals will stink in the dark wind

The last few survivors will be overtaken by new and hideous diseases And the space platforms will be destroyed by attrition The petering out of supplies

The natural smell will always be of death and rot.

Charles Bukowski

Dinosauria We

And you ain't done a thing You promised to've done. Back window's cracked, Kitchen floor squeaks, There's rats in the cellar, And the attic leaks. He said, Madam, It's not up to me. I'm just the agent, Don't you see? I said, Naturally, You pass the buck.

If it's money you want You're out of luck.

He said, Madam, I ain't pleased! I said, Neither am I.

Alberta K. Johnson is saying that if she can’t have the living situation that she want’s the the rent man can’t have the money have the he wants.

Langston Hughes

Madam and The Rent Man

So, we'll go no more a-roving So late into the night, Though the heart be still as loving,

And the moon be still as bright.

For the sword outwears its sheath, And the soul wears out the breast, And the heart must pause to breathe,

The construction of the last two lines are grammatically similar, an example of syntactic parallelism . This creates a satisfying, gentle rhythm, ironically lyrical given that the speaker is bemoaning the after-effects of a debauched night. This line forms the title of Ray Bradbury’s short story “June 2001: —And The Moon Be Still As Bright”, part of The Martian Chronicles .

Lord Byron

So well go no more a-roving

From low to high doth dissolution climb,

And sink from high to low, along a scale

Of awful notes, whose concord shall not fail; A musical but melancholy chime, Which they can hear who meddle not with crime,

Dissolution can ascend by climbing, but can also descend by sinking. Either way, there is no escape.

William Wordsworth

Mutability

Or too much weight to fly - I was much refreshed by your strong Letter - Thank you for Greatness - I will have deserved it in a longer time! I thought I spoke to you of the shadow - It affects me - This was still another - I saw it's notice in the Papers just before you came - Is there a magazine called the "Woman's Journal"? I think it was said to be in that - a Gate, or Door, or Latch - Someone called me suddenly, and I never found it - You told me Mrs Lowell was Mr Lowell's "inspiration" What is inspiration? You place the truth in opposite - because the fear is mine, dear friend, and the power your's - 'Tis Glory's *far sufficiency* [overtakelessness] that make's our *trying* poor - [running]

With the Kingdom of Heaven on his knee, could Mr Emerson hesitate?

"Suffer little Children" - Could you not come without the Lecture, if the project failed?

Dickinson imagines the glories of Heaven as powerfully seductive–an example of her subtly outrageous eroticization of religious imagery. Harold Bloom: “The question, whether open or rhetorical, is dangerous and wonderful, and provokes considerable rumination.” Mr Emerson : essayist and poet Ralph Waldo Emerson, the most famous American writer of his era and a major influence on Dickinson.

Emily Dickinson

Letter 353 about October 1870 T. W. Higginson

"Cross" My old man's a white old man And my old mother's black. If ever I cursed my white old man I take my curses back. If ever I cursed my black old mother

And wished she were in hell,

I'm sorry for that evil wish And now I wish her well. My old man died in a fine big house.

Notice the neatness and songlike quality of the poem thus far. With alliteration, repetition, and a driving meter, the poem very much feels like a blues song, which was very common in Hughes' writing. Hughes thought the blues was a high form of art because of its narrative succinctness and ability to evoke deep human emotion through subtle, and often comic narrative. While the narrative of “Cross” is not comical, it is able to explore some very complicated cultural problems with very simple language and form.

Langston Hughes

Cross

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'Twas mercy brought me from my Pagan land,

Taught my benighted soul to understand That there's a God, that there's a Saviour too: Once I redemption neither sought nor knew.

Philis Wheatley was brought to America as a slave from Africa (where paganism is mostly practised). It is quite normal to assume she is referring to her history. However, this line is referring to the transformation of an individual. In Christianity, salvation is obtained by God’s mercy. Wheatley seems to be happy to have been brought to America, a land of Christianity. Notice that she uses the word “brought” instead of the similar sounding (and accurate) “bought,” as if to passivly protest against slavery. Her happiness is based on the fact that she found divine mercy in Christianity, and God alone – not worldly circumstances – caused it to happen. Dr. Dana A. Williams, English Department Chair at Howard University, reads this poem to be “deeply ironic and deeply sarcastic.” She argues that Wheatley is suggesting Christianity’s debt to her native Africa’s paganism. See her commentary in this video .

Phillis Wheatley

On Being Brought from Africa to America

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Symbols of democracy, pinned up against the coast

Outhouse of bureaucracy, surrounded by a moat Citizens of poverty are barely out of sight Overlords escape in the evening with people of the night

All of the institutions that represent “democracy” in the U.S.

Gil Scott-Heron

Washington D.C.

Showing, while millions of souls hurry on, The virtues of collars, from sunset till dawn, By dart or by tumble of whirl within whirl, Starting new fads for the shame-weary girl, By maggotry motions in sickening line Proclaiming a hat or a soup or a wine, While there far above the steep cliffs of the street The stars sing a message elusive and sweet. Now man cannot rest in his pleasure and toil His clumsy contraptions of coil upon coil Till the thing he invents, in its use and its range, Leads on to the marvelous CHANGE BEYOND CHANGE

Some day this old Broadway shall climb to the skies, As a ribbon of cloud on a soul-wind shall rise. And we shall be lifted, rejoicing by night, Till we join with the planets who choir their delight. The signs in the street and the signs in the skies Shall make me a Zodiac, guiding and wise, And Broadway make one with that marvelous stair That is climbed by the rainbow-clad spirits of prayer.

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This is the point where the poem turns surrealistic and fantastical. Lindsay muses how that man’s constant quest for preoccupation through work, or his constant need to have and make things for entertainment, may eventually lead to “this old broadway” (I’m assuming he’s personifying the neon sign from the first stanza) reaching the skies and joining the stars from the second stanza’s first line. (There’s inversion in the “choir the delight” of line 20) At this point he is employing extremely vivid imagery to describe how neon signs shall reach the heavens and the cosmos, and become a sort of “stairway to heaven” where he, and the rest of humankind, shall climb up, clad in the effervescent colors of the neon signs he initially so deplored. Whether such a fantastic tone for a poem that started off as biting social commentary is Lindsay being facetious or sarcastic, or simply a delightful daydream, is up for the debate.

Vachel Lindsay

A Rhyme About an Electrical Advertising Sign

It's a weary life, it is, she said: Doubly blank in a woman's lot: I wish and I wish I were a man: Or, better then any being, were not: Were nothing at all in all the world, Not a body and not a soul: Not so much as a grain of dust Or a drop of water from pole to pole.

Still the world would wag on the same,

Still the seasons go and come: Blossoms bloom as in days of old, Cherries ripen and wild bees hum.

The playful expression ‘that’s the way the world wags’, rarely used now, sounds bleak from this woman’s mouth. The alliterative ‘world would wag’ could be humorous but not in this context. The world is indifferent to the suffering of women, wherever and whoever they are.

Christina Rossetti

From The Antique

The sun is hot on my neck as I observe The spikes of crocus. The smell of the earth is good. It is apparent that there is no death. But what does that signify? Not only under ground are the brains of men Eaten by maggots. Life in itself Is nothing, An empty cup, a flight of uncarpeted stairs. It is not enough that yearly, down this hill, April

Comes like an idiot, babbling and strewing flowers.

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Millay calls out the futility of April and its false promise, and ends it with words that call up Macbeth’s fury at the pointlessness of life itself: it is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing." In Millay’s telling, the idiot’s tale may start with flowers, but the babbling has a fury all its own, and the end is just as deadly.

Edna St. Vincent Millay

Spring

Dostoyevsky lined up against a wall to be shot Crane off the back of a boat into the propeller the impossibility Sylvia with her head in the oven like a baked potato Harry Crosby leaping into that Black Sun Lorca murdered in the road by Spanish troops the impossibility Artaud sitting on a madhouse bench Chatterton drinking rat poison Shakespeare a plagiarist Beethoven with a horn stuck into his head against deafness the impossibility the impossibility

Nietzsche gone totally mad

the impossibility of being human all too human this breathing

German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche suffered a mental breakdown in public (possibly the result of syphilis) and was institutionalized for the last several years of his life.

Charles Bukowski

Beasts Bounding Through Time

Till many a city there is built, And many a pleasant shepherd's home. But when they find the Frowning Babe, Terror strikes thro' the region wide: They cry ‘The Babe! the Babe is born!' And flee away on every side. For who dare touch the Frowning Form, His arm is wither'd to its root; Lions, boars, wolves, all howling flee, And every tree does shed its fruit. And none can touch that Frowning Form, Except it be a Woman Old;

She nails him down upon the rock, And all is done as I have told.

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…And so the cycle begins again. There is a sense of doomed repetition, of a curse hanging over the land.

William Blake

The Mental Traveller

My skin is kind of sort of brownish Pinkish yellowish white. My eyes are grayish blueish green, But I'm told they look orange in the night. My hair is reddish blondish brown, But it's silver when it's wet. And all the colors I am inside

Have not been invented yet.

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Human beings are like perpetually incomplete paintings. Some of our colors, or qualities, have yet to be developed! We invent new inner colors when we formulate new opinions and are influenced by new ideas, and we can even change some of our outer colors by dressing differently or getting a hair dye job. People are always changing and evolving as a group and individually, and that is what makes us beautiful. The speaker of the poem could be anybody, and that is ok, because everyone has a message worth hearing.

Shel Silverstein

Colors

Thirsty? They race across ampersands, scrolling. He isn't sure it's his head. There's a delay right now. Smoke backed up. Ladies please remove hats. It was all over by morning. The village idiot was surprised to see us. "...thought you were in Normandy."

Like all pendulums we were surprised,

then slightly miffed at what seemed to be happening back in the bushes. Keep your ornaments, if that's what they are. Return to sender, arse.

A pendulum moves in a constant and predictable motion, back and forth. The surprises earlier change the current situation, and things are no longer so predictable. Pendulums are also a mechanism in grandfather clocks and metronomes, suggesting an air of antiquity and mechanism. They are surprised by the new advancements in technology, digital devices that replace older mechanical devices and perform their tasks with increasing accuracy, similar to the village idiot, who is astounded by progress.

John Ashbery

Elective Infinities

That strange flower, the sun, Is just what you say. Have it your way.

The world is ugly, And the people are sad.

That tuft of jungle feathers, That animal eye, Is just what you say.

For more on the comedy that Wallace Stevens sees in life, see his poems “The Man on the Dump” and “Not Ideas About the Thing, but the Thing Itself.”

Wallace Stevens

Gubbinal

Don't drop the beat on me Don't drop the beat no Ah I am not the son of sha-klak klak I am before that I am before I am before before before death is eternity after death is eternity There is no death there's only eternity And I be riding on the wings of eternity like CLA CLA CLA SHA KLACK KLACK GET ME THE FUCK OFF THIS TRACK As if the heart beat wasn't enough

They got us using drum machines now

Drums live in machines Tryin' to make our drums humdrums Tryin' to mute our magic

This appears to be a criticism of the often formulaic nature of modern electronic music. It may also allude to Marx’s concept of alienation : workers' detachment from their human nature, resulting from the evolution of the ‘mode of production’ in Capitalist society into a mechanized process, where workers become increasingly more divided from eachother, the products of their labour, and their own natural creative drives. As the creation of music becomes more industrialized, this same process occurs, with the result that musicians are often detached from the human, emotional forces which from which it originated.

Saul Williams

Twice the First Time

Or child's face dreaming near the glass, the writher Advances in a godlike wreath Of its own wrath. Chilled by such fragile reeling A hundred blows of a boot-heel Shall not quell, the dreamer wakes and hungers. Percussive pulses, drum or gong, Build in his skull their loud entrancement, Volutions of a Hindu dance. His hands move clumsily in the first conventional Gestures of assent. He is willing to undergo the volition and fervor Of many fleshlike arms, observe

These in their holiness of indirection

Destroy, adore, evolve, reject— Till on glass rigid with his own seizure At length the sucking jewels freeze.

Merill is finding divinity in chaos, in wandering indirection. This relates to the octopus’s motion and tentacles but also to subconscious thoughts that are wandering intangibly and chaotically through a spiritual plane.

James Merrill

The Octopus

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Have you forgotten yet?...

For the world's events have rumbled on since those gagged days, Like traffic checked while at the crossing of city-ways: And the haunted gap in your mind has filled with thoughts that flow

Note the repetition of “Have you forgotten yet?” in lines 1, 9, and 26. The stanzas that contain these lines are directed at the reader, and reference civilian life. That sets the reader in the post war civilian role. The question itself is rhetorical; he hopes that you won’t forget, but knows that you will. The stanzas in the middle describe his war experience, which was radically different from what the civilian populace would have lived through. This juxtaposition highlights again the differing experiences of the First World War, and the disconnect that existed at the time. There were no embedded reporters, and all the news was second-hand and government censored.

Siegfried Sassoon

Aftermath

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I would to heaven that I were so much clay,

As I am blood, bone, marrow, passion, feeling - Because at least the past were passed away - And for the future - (but I write this reeling,

Clay as in what one’s body becomes after decomposition, here it seems Byron partly wishes to die to escape this onslaught of emotions and partly asks to become something more inanimate and insensate (clay), something that cannot be wildly blown by the whims of “passion” and “feeling.”

Lord Byron

Headpiece to Don Juan I would to Heaven

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When I was young my teachers were the old.

I gave up fire for form till I was cold. I suffered like a metal being cast. I went to school to age to learn the past.

Perhaps more dead than old. Although Frost attended both Dartmouth and Harvard, he didn’t come close to receiving a degree at either. A lifetime later, Frost ended up with 44 honorary degrees from colleges around the country, joking that he was “educated by degrees” and “would rather get a degree than an education.”

Robert Frost

What Fifty Said

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The Thames nocturne of blue and gold

Changed to a Harmony in grey: A barge with ochre-coloured hay Dropt from the wharf: and chill and cold

As said in the description, it is highly believed that Wilde’s impressions-poems were inspired by the paintings of his acquaintance, James Whistler. Whistler was known for his Nocturne paintings, one of them being Nocturne in Blue and Gold , depicting the Thames River:

Oscar Wilde

Impression Du Matin

No more walks in the wood: The trees have all been cut Down, and where once they stood Not even a wagon rut Appears along the path Low brush is taking over. No more walks in the wood; This is the aftermath Of afternoons in the clover

Fields where we once made love

Then wandered home together Where the trees arched above, Where we made our own weather

As a poet writing “an old-fashioned song” in the twentieth century, Hollander gets to have it both ways here: he might mean “making love” in its more innocent, old-fashioned sense (wooing, flirting), or he might mean sex in the great outdoors. The phrase “fields of play,” later on, is similarly ambiguous.

John Hollander

An Old-Fashioned Song

The young man bent on glory, and that other Who seeks a burden. Knowing as she does What will become of them in bloody field Or Tuscan garden, it may be that at times She sees their first and final selves at once, As a god might to whom all time is now. Or, having lived so much herself, perhaps She meets them this time with a wiser eye, Noting that Julien's calculating head Is from the first too severed from his heart. But the true wonder of it is that she, For all that she may know of consequences,

Still turns enchanted to the next bright page Like some Natasha in the ballroom door— Caught in the flow of things wherever bound,

The blind delight of being, ready still To enter life on life and see them through.

A reference to the scene in War and Peace where Natasha Rostova attends her first Society ball. Upon entering the ballroom, Natasha is overwhelmed by the rush and all she can do is follow her family and marvel at the spectacle.

Richard Wilbur

The Reader

If I should die, think only this of me: That there's some corner of a foreign field That is for ever England. There shall be In that rich earth a richer dust concealed; A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware, Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam, A body of England's, breathing English air, Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home. And think, this heart, all evil shed away,

A pulse in the eternal mind, no less

Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given; Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day; And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness,

All the evil of the world faced by the soldier will be forgotten in his afterlife. Once the ‘pulse’ of purification has passed the the speaker can bask in joy. The idea of ‘eternal mind’ is interesting, a Pantheistic view that there is a merging of souls with God’s universal presence, though this is an over-simplification.

Rupert Brooke

The Soldier

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This is my letter to the World

That never wrote to Me The simple News that Nature told, With tender Majesty

The speaker in this poem, like so many of Dickinson’s, both reaches out to the reader and attempts to the world at bay. If “this” is the speaker’s “letter to the World” there is an implied desire that it be read, and perhaps even responded to, but the speaker does not offer more than “this.” The speaker asks the reader to both acknowledge the communication and be satisfied that this is enough. Though one should always be cautious about equating a poem’s speaker with its author, Dickinson tempts her readers in this direction even more than most. Dickinson was famously isolated for much of her life, and in many ways her writing was her primary contact with the world beyond her home.

Emily Dickinson

This is My Letter to the World

The census man,

The day he came round,

Wanted my name To put it down. I said, Johnson,

The United States census is conducted every five years. The census was last taken in the year 2012.

Langston Hughes

Madam and the Census Man

[Published by Rossetti, "Complete Poetical Works of P. B. S.", 1870.]

A hater he came and sat by a ditch,

And he took an old cracked lute; And he sang a song which was more of a screech 'Gainst a woman that was a brute.

Is this the first time the word “hater” was used in its modern sense? That would be amazing.

Percy Bysshe Shelley

A Hate-Song

Come down, O Christ, and help me! reach thy hand, For I am drowning in a stormier sea Than Simon on thy lake of Galilee: The wine of life is spilt upon the sand, My heart is as some famine-murdered land Whence all good things have perished utterly, And well I know my soul in Hell must lie If I this night before God's throne should stand. "He sleeps perchance, or rideth to the chase,

Like Baal, when his prophets howled that name

From morn to noon on Carmel's smitten height." Nay, peace, I shall behold, before the night, The feet of brass, the robe more white than flame,

By the Bible, Baal was known to be a false idol depicted as a statue of a bull. In 1 Kings 18:22-30 , the prophet Elijah challenged the four hundred and fifty followers of Baal. Then said Elijah unto the people, I, even I only, remain a prophet of the LORD; but Baal’s prophets are four hundred and fifty men."

Oscar Wilde

E. Tenebris

Oh chosen love, Oh frozen love Oh tangle of matter and ghost Oh darling of angels, demons and saints And the whole broken-hearted host Gentle this soul And come forth from the cloud of unknowing And kiss the cheek of the moon The New Jerusalem glowing Why tarry all night in the ruin And leave no word of discomfort And leave no observer to mourn But climb on your tears and be silent

Like a rose on its ladder of thorns

Oh chosen love, Oh frozen love... Oh tangle of matter and ghost Oh darling of angels, demons and saints

Cohen conflates here two mystic Christian images: Mary as the “mystic rose” or “rose without thorns” and Jacob’s ladder , a connection between earth and heaven, seen by Jacob in a dream.

Leonard Cohen

The Window

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. Come. And be my baby.

Some prophets say the world is gonna end tomorrow

But others say we've got a week or two The paper is full of every kind of blooming horror And you sit wondering

Well, not really Maya, but we did have a feeling it might in 2012 by these Mayans. That was later disproved.

Maya Angelou

Come And Be My Baby

From my bed I watch 3 birds On a telephone Wire.

One flies Off. Then Another. One is left, Then It too Is gone.

My typewriter is Tombstone Still.

The birds all flying off the wire and into the depths of the sky possibly make Bukowski jealous because he wishes he too could fly off into the depths of his mind in order to conjure up a decent poem.

Charles Bukowski

8 Count

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It is the pain, it is the pain endures.

Your chemic beauty burned my muscles through. Poise of my hands reminded me of yours. What later purge from this deep toxin cures?

[Refrain 1] In context, this could be read as an answer to the preceding questions. What cures? What kindness? It is the pain, it is the pain endures.

William Empson

Villanelle It is the pain...

But for loving, why, you would not, Sweet, Tho' we prayed you, Paid you, brayed you In a mortar—for you could not, Sweet! So, we leave the sweet face fondly there, Be its beauty Its sole duty! Let all hope of grace beyond, lie there! And while the face lies quiet there, Who shall wonder That I ponder A conclusion? I will try it there.

As,—why must one, for the love foregone Scout mere liking? Thunder-striking Earth,—the heaven, we looked above for, gone!

Why, with beauty, needs there money be, Love with liking? Crush the fly-king

It’s stanzas like this that led Browning’s detractors to dismiss him as simultaneously prosy and obscure. See for instance Wilde’s famous (or, famous enough at least to make in on Forbes' ‘ Thoughts on the Business of Life : “Meredith is a prose Browning, and so is Browning; he used poetry as a medium for writing in prose.” A prize for anyone who can explain the function of m-dashes or the grammatical role of “Thunder-striking” in this unpretty consonant-clustral stanza.

Robert Browning

A Pretty Woman

Panzer-man, panzer-man, O You-- Not God but a swastika So black no sky could squeak through. Every woman adores a Fascist, The boot in the face, the brute Brute heart of a brute like you. You stand at the blackboard, daddy, In the picture I have of you, A cleft in your chin instead of your foot, But no less a devil for that, no not Any less the black man who Bit my pretty red heart in two.

I was ten when they buried you.

At twenty I tried to die And get back, back, back to you. I thought even the bones would do.

Sylvia Plath was actually only eight when her father died, but ten is chosen for several reasons, partially because it is the first of a triad of major death-related incidents that occurred at ten year intervals: her father’s death, her suicide attempt at twenty, and her successful suicide at age thirty, as well as the last composition of the poems which make up Ariel , her final book of poems.

Sylvia Plath

Daddy

That wee-bit heap o' leaves an' stibble Has cost thee monie a weary nibble! Now thou's turn'd out, for a' thy trouble But house or hald To thole the Winter's sleety dribble An' cranreuch cauld! But Mousie, thou art no thy-lane In proving foresight may be vain The best laid schemes o' Mice an' Men Gang aft agley An' lea'e us nought but grief an' pain For promis'd joy!

Still, thou art blest, compar'd wi' me! The present only toucheth thee But Och! I backward cast my e'e On prospects drear! An' forward, tho' I canna see I guess an' fear!

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Rough English translation: Still you are blessed, compared with me! The present only touches you: But oh! I backward cast my eye, On prospects dreary! And forward, though I cannot see, I guess and fear! Still, the mouse is blessed compared to Burns. She can simply keep living in the present, beginning work on a new nest. Burns has the curse of foresight, and of hindsight. He can see the mistakes he’s made in the past and foresee how bleak his prospects are in the future.

Robert Burns

To a Mouse

Helen, thy beauty is to me

Like those Nicean barks of yore

That gently, o'er a perfum'd sea, The weary, way-worn wanderer bore To his own native shore.

Direct allusion to Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Youth and Age where he says, How lightly then it flashed along, Like those trim skiffs, unknown of yore. Nicean barks refers to the moment that the victorious Greek ships sailed home after the Trojan War. As beautiful as this moment was, Helen is even more beautiful. The mention of Nicea is important to emphasize the majesty of victory as Nicea is named for the Greek goddess of victory Nike (yes the shoe company is named after this goddess) Notice the use of the word like , meaning that this is a simile. A simile that extends for many lines, like this one, is referred to as a Homeric simile or an epic simile.

Edgar Allan Poe

To Helen

Sundays too my father got up early And put his clothes on in the blueblack cold, Then with cracked hands that ached From labor in the weekday weather made Banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him. I'd wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking. When the rooms were warm, he'd call,

And slowly I would rise and dress, Fearing the chronic angers of that house,

Speaking indifferently to him, Who had driven out the cold And polished my good shoes as well.

The ‘chronic angers’ suggest ongoing conflict within the family that are never expressed in the form of quarrels, that result in the coldness towards their father. There seems to be no affection for house itself, implied by the use of ‘that’ instead of ‘our’ as a designation. It is not referred to as ‘home’. The use of ‘house’ to mean the family is an example of metonymy . The emphasis on a troubled house is similar to the opening sentence of Toni Morrison’s 1987 novel Beloved, which begins “124 was spiteful,” foreshadowing the haunting presence of a ghost in the house. The speaker in Hayden’s poem “ The Whipping ” also references some of those painful childhood memories .

Robert Hayden

Those Winter Sundays

To feed those outlaws prowling about the Domain, Those furtive she-cats and those villainous toms. Proudly they step to meet her, they march together With an arching of backs and a waving of plumy tails And smiles that swear they never would harm a feather. They rub at her legs for the bounty that never fails, They think she is a princess out of a tower, And so she is, she is trembling with love and power. 2 Meat, it is true, is meat, and demands attention But this is the sweetest moment that they know Whose courtship even is a hiss, a howl and a blow.

At so much kindness passing their comprehension

– Beggars and rogues who never deserved this pension – Some recollection of old punctilio Dawns in their eyes, and as she moves to go

characterisation: the lady is portrayed as a figure of pure kindness and generosity, but the cats are so stupid they would never understand how kind she is.

Douglas Stewart

Lady Feeding The Cats

If I should die, think only this of me: That there's some corner of a foreign field That is for ever England. There shall be In that rich earth a richer dust concealed; A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware, Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam, A body of England's, breathing English air, Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home. And think, this heart, all evil shed away, A pulse in the eternal mind, no less

Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given;

Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day; And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness, In hearts at peace, under an English heaven.

The speaker feels that the gift with which he has been endowed, that of Englishness, he can give back through death, by merging with, one assumes, the ‘eternal mind’. On a practical level, it isn’t clear who should be the recipients of his gift — maybe the foreign country’s population or those back home. Given the jingoistic and outdated nature of this sentiment it is odd that this poem remains so popular. However, the innocence and gentle pride of lines like these often provoke amongst students tolerant smiles rather than annoyance. Note the clever balance of the structure of this line, with the grammatical reversal of two clause, a device known as chiasmus .

Rupert Brooke

The Soldier

null

Calling

Mexico, 1969 Why not make a fiction of the mind's fictions? I want to say

This word may refer to the word “vocation”. A vocation is an “occupation to which a person is specially drawn.” This could be used in a religious sense meaning an entry into the priesthood or a divine call to the religious life. It may also be used in a non-religious sense to mean “a strong feeling of suitability for a particular career or occupation.”

Natasha Trethewey

Calling

I wandered lonely as a Cloud That floats on high o'er vales and Hills, When all at once I saw a crowd, A host of golden Daffodils; Along the lake, beneath the trees, Ten thousand dancing in the breeze. Continuous as the stars that shine And twinkle on the milky way,

They stretched in never-ending line

Along the margin of a bay: Ten thousand saw I at a glance, Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.

The sibilance in ‘stretched’, and the words ‘never-ending’ add a sense of continuity, spirituality and aimlessness that Wordsworth started the poem off with (‘wandered’ and ‘cloud’). He also adds a sense of permanence and constancy with the word ‘line’ since a line is straight and unwavering, like his loneliness and solitude.

William Wordsworth

I Wandered Lonely As a Cloud

‘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

This “line” emphasises the chasm between the general and his soldiers. He greets his subordinates spiritedly, but only as they move past him and closer to the line of fire. There is no true communication.

Siegfried Sassoon

The General

When I am an old woman I shall wear purple With a red hat which doesn't go, and doesn't suit me. And I shall spend my pension on brandy and summer gloves And satin sandals, and say we've no money for butter. I shall sit down on the pavement when I'm tired And gobble up samples in shops and press alarm bells And run my stick along the public railings

And make up for the sobriety of my youth.

I shall go out in my slippers in the rain And pick flowers in other people's gardens And learn to spit.

This little statement dropped in is a key line, the motive for this late rebellion. The speaker has been conformist in her youth and clearly yearns to be outrageous.

Jenny Joseph

Warning

He will speak these words of wisdom Like a sage, a man of vision Though he knows he's really nothing But the brief elaboration of a tube Going home without my sorrow Going home sometime tomorrow Going home to where it's better Than before Going home without my burden Going home behind the curtain Going home without this costume That I wore

He wants to write a love song

An anthem of forgiving A manual for living With defeat

Some of Leonard Cohen’s many love songs: Hallelujah Chelsea Hotel A Thousand Kisses Deep Bird On A Wire I’m Your Man

Leonard Cohen

Going Home

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You were

water to me deep and bold and fathoming You were

The poem begins with the words ‘you were’ to indicate the poet’s mother may no longer be alive. Each stanza begins with this refrain , a device known as anaphora . The repetition gives emphasis.

Grace Nichols

Praise Song for My Mother

Mailer stabbing his the impossibility of being human Maupassant going mad in a rowboat Dostoyevsky lined up against a wall to be shot Crane off the back of a boat into the propeller the impossibility Sylvia with her head in the oven like a baked potato Harry Crosby leaping into that Black Sun Lorca murdered in the road by Spanish troops the impossibility Artaud sitting on a madhouse bench Chatterton drinking rat poison

Shakespeare a plagiarist

Beethoven with a horn stuck into his head against deafness the impossibility the impossibility Nietzsche gone totally mad

The poet and playwright William Shakespeare is often rumored to have stolen ideas, lines, and other material from his rival dramatists. It is known that he collaborated with fellow members of his theatrical company on the writing of some plays, although how many and to what extent is still a topic of scholarly debate. Most of his plots were freely adapted from existing stories, though he radically transformed many of them and gave them a philosophical and psychological depth not previously seen in English literature. For all these reasons, Shakespeare takes flak from some camps for being a fraud. (He wasn’t – he was a vastly talented and original writer, as even his contemporaries recognized. But to a limited extent the charge of “plagiarism” sticks. “Good artists copy, great artists steal…”)

Charles Bukowski

Beasts Bounding Through Time

Look hyeah, Moses, go tell Pher'oh Fu' to let dem chillun go.' 'An' ef he refuse to do it, I will make him rue de houah, Fu' I'll empty down on Egypt All de vials of my powah.' Yes, he did - an' Pher'oh's ahmy Was n't wuth a ha'f a dime; Fu' de Lawd will he'p his chillun, You kin trust him evah time. An' yo' enemies may 'sail you In de back an' in de front;

But de Lawd is all aroun' you,

Fu' to ba' de battle's brunt. Dey kin fo'ge yo' chains an' shackles F'om de mountains to de sea;

The lord is always around wherever you are. Through any situation He will be there by your side.

Paul Laurence Dunbar

An Ante-Bellum Sermon

And the cry of hounds came tumbling invisibly with their echoes down through the draggle of trees, Swinging across the wall of dark woodland, The stag dropped in to strange country. And turned at the river Hearing the hound-pack smash the undergrowth, hearing the bell-note Of the voice carried all others, Then while the limbs all cried different directions to his lungs, which only wanted to rest, The blue horsemen on the bank opposite Pulled aside the camouflage of their terrible planet. And the stag doubled back weeping and looking for home up a valley and down a valley While the strange trees struck him and the brambles lashed him, And the strange earth came galloping after him carrying the loll-tongued hounds to fling all over him

And his heart became just a club beating his ribs and his own hooves shouted with hounds' voices,

And the crowd on the road got back into their cars Wet-through and disappeared.

The stag, in Hughes' imagination, loses its sense of self, and seems to have absorbed the violence, with the heart a club assaulting its ribs, and the hooves ‘shouting’ like the dogs. Its own body is now merged with the hunt and the killing. The reader understands that this is a metaphor for the killing of the prey.

Ted Hughes

The Stag

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I am silver and exact. I have no preconceptions. Whatever you see I swallow immediately Just as it is, unmisted by love or dislike.

I am not cruel, only truthful--- The eye of a little god, four-cornered. Most of the time I meditate on the opposite wall.

The speaker of this poem is a mirror. It begins by saying that it does not have a preconceived idea of what it’s looking at: it will take in and reflect exactly what it sees, and will not be affected by how much it hates or loves you. The mirror reflects the truth. This line, and the poem as a whole, could also reflect the numbness that resulted from Plath’s severe depression: she became unable to feel anything, let alone love or hate anything. The short, sharp sentences reflect this numbness and lack of feeling. There is no suggestion of warmth or softness in this opening.

Sylvia Plath

Mirror

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Booker T.

Was a practical man. He said, Till the soil And learn from the land.

(Booker Taliaferro Washington) (April 5, 1856 – November 14, 1915)[ ] was an African-American educator, author, orator, and advisor to presidents of the United States. Between 1890 and 1915, Washington was the dominant leader in the African-American community.

Langston Hughes

Ballad of Booker T.

Symbols of democracy, pinned up against the coast Outhouse of bureaucracy, surrounded by a moat

Citizens of poverty are barely out of sight

Overlords escape in the evening with people of the night Morning brings the tourists, peering eyes and rubber necks To catch a glimpse of the cowboy making the world a nervous wreck

Homelessness and poverty is rampant in D.C.

Gil Scott-Heron

Washington D.C.

null

Against the rubber tongues of cows and the hoeing hands of men

Thistles spike the summer air Or crackle open under a blue-black pressure. Every one a revengeful burst

Hughes yokes together images of nature and of the natural world. The ‘rubber’ tongues of cows is simple but unexpectedly imaginative.

Ted Hughes

Thistles

In a beautiful pea-green boat, They took some honey, and plenty of money, Wrapped up in a five-pound note. The Owl looked up to the stars above, And sang to a small guitar, "O lovely Pussy! O Pussy, my love, What a beautiful Pussy you are, You are, You are! What a beautiful Pussy you are!" II Pussy said to the Owl, "You elegant fowl!

How charmingly sweet you sing!

O let us be married! too long we have tarried: But what shall we do for a ring?" They sailed away, for a year and a day,

She is delighted by his melodic exploits. Clearly Lear knew that chicks dig guys with guitars.

Edward Lear

The Owl and the Pussycat

Since you ask, most days I cannot remember. I walk in my clothing, unmarked by that voyage. Then the almost unnameable lust returns. Even then I have nothing against life. I know well the grass blades you mention, the furniture you have placed under the sun. But suicides have a special language.

Like carpenters they want to know which tools.

They never ask why build. Twice I have so simply declared myself, have possessed the enemy, eaten the enemy,

Speaking from experience, Sexton views the suicidal in a light where they don’t question their actions, they only question the steps to complete said action. Therefore, the tools (aka, pills, weapons, a noose, etc..) are viewed as a means to a literal end. The tools could also be symbolic towards the suicidal. Both have a job. Both just do, not think.

Anne Sexton

Wanting To Die

There are many monsters that a glassen surface Restrains. And none more sinister Than vision asleep in the eye's tight translucence. Rarely it seeks now to unloose Its diamonds. Having divined how drab a prison The purest mortal tissue is, Rarely it wakes. Unless, coaxed out by lusters Extraordinary, like the octopus

From the gloom of its tank half-swimming half-drifting Toward anything fair, a handkerchief

Or child's face dreaming near the glass, the writher Advances in a godlike wreath Of its own wrath. Chilled by such fragile reeling

The octopus is drifting almost aimlessly in its tank, as subconscious thought is drifting, displaced and floating in the depths of the mind. It approaches ‘anything fair’ attempting to find an opening in the conscious mind that is penetrable. A handkerchief is something extremely delicate and fragile. The apparition searches for a delicate target and finds that in the child’s face.

James Merrill

The Octopus

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. The window is starless still; the clock ticks,

The fox’s concentration on its own business alerts the poet to his own task, the business of the writing.

Ted Hughes

The Thought-Fox

The Maiden caught me in the wild Where I was dancing merrily She put me into her Cabinet And lock'd me up with a golden key

This cabinet is form'd of gold And pearl and crystal shining bright

And within it opens into a world And a little lovely moony night Another England there I saw

There is no literal cabinet, he’s just locked in her embrace. He’s completely consumed with her. And there is no gold, pearl, or crystal, it’s just showing what he sees the relationship as at first. In the beginning, he sees it as completely perfect and wonderful, like gold, pearl, and crystal.

William Blake

The Crystal Cabinet

I empty myself of the names of others. I empty my pockets. I empty my shoes and leave them beside the road. At night I turn back the clocks; I open the family album and look at myself as a boy. What good does it do? The hours have done their job.

I say my own name. I say goodbye. The words follow each other downwind.

I love my wife but send her away. My parents rise out of their thrones into the milky rooms of clouds. How can I sing?

You have to literally imagine Mark (or anyone) saying these two things one after the other, it’s extremely depressing once you grasp it. To accept the fact you are one day no longer going to be able to make a difference in this world is immensely horrifying. We all have to eventually say goodbye to ourselves, and at the same time accept the fact that that goodbye may never be heard by anybody.

Mark Strand

The Remains

NUTTING. ——————————— It seems a day, (I speak of one from many singled out) One of those heavenly days which cannot die, When forth I sallied from our Cottage-door*, And with a wallet o'er my shoulder slung, A nutting crook in hand, I turned my steps Towards the distant woods, a Figure quaint, Tricked out in proud disguise of Beggar's weeds Put on for the occasion, by advice And exhortation of my frugal Dame. Motley accoutrement! of power to smile

*The house at which I was boarded during the time I was at School.

At thorns, and brakes, and brambles, and, in truth, More ragged than need was. Among the woods, And o'er the pathless rocks, I forced my way

Williams Wordsworth went to school first at Hawkshead Grammar school, then furthered his education at Cambridge University in October of 1787.

William Wordsworth

Nutting 1805 Lyrical Ballads

They shut me up in Prose As when a little Girl They put me in the Closet Because they liked me "still" Still! Could themself have peeped And seen my Brain — go round

They might as wise have lodged a Bird For Treason — in the Pound

Himself has but to will And easy as a Star Abolish his Captivity

Dickinson again compares her being shut up to a bird being put away in the pound.

Emily Dickinson

They Shut Me Up in Prose