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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 ... | 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 perfor... | 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 augment... | 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, ... | 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 mindse... | 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
Make... | 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 ... | 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... | 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 eve... | 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 ... | 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... | (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 i... | 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... | 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... | 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 t... | 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 wo... | 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... | 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 ... | 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 t... | 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... | 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 sculpto... | 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,... | 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 ... | 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... | 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 ... | 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... | 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 ... | 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 live... | 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
... | 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 ... | 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 Jo... | 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, t... | 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 e... | 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 ... | 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 si... | 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 ... | 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)... | 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 year... | 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 ... | 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 drin... | 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 f... | 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 alw... | 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 advancement... | 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 THI... | 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 incre... | 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 ... | 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 stanza... | 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... | 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... | 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-simpl... | 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... | 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 t... | 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 ... | 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 wi... | 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 pr... | 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... | 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... | 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... | 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... | 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.... | 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... | 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 thi... | 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... | 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 ... | 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 fo... | 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 so... | 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 ... | 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 thi... | 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... | 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... | 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 ma... | 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 th... | 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 refle... | 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, "Yo... | 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 hav... | 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 apparitio... | 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... | 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 th... | 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 disg... | *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 |
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