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I'm falling up flights of stairs, scraping myself from the sidewalk Jumping from rivers to bridges, drowning in pure air Hip hop is lying on the side of the road, half dead to itself Blood scrawled over its mangled flesh, like jazz Stuffed into an oversized record bag Tuba lips swollen beyond recognition Diamond studded teeth strewn like rice at Karma's wedding The ring bearer bore bad news Minister of information wrote the wrong proclamation Now everyone's singing the wrong song Dissonant chords find necks like nooses That nigga kicked the chair from under my feet
Harlem shaking from a rope, but still on beat
"Damn, that loop is tight," that nigga found a way to sample the way, the truth, the light Can't wait to play myself at the party tonight Niggas are gonna die!
This refers to the now popular dance, the Harlem Shake. The imagery of frantically shaking while on beat is haunting. And kudos to Williams for following up this line with “that loop is tight”, simultaneously bringing it back to a musical context.
Saul Williams
Telegram
Well my friends are gone and my hair is grey I ache in the places where I used to play And I'm crazy for love but I'm not coming on I'm just paying my rent every day In the Tower of Song I said to Hank Williams, ''How lonely does it get?'' Hank Williams hasn't answered yet But I hear him coughing all night long Oh, a hundred floors above me In the Tower of Song I was born like this, I had no choice
I was born with the gift of a golden voice
And twenty-seven angels from the Great Beyond They tied me to this table right here In the Tower of Song
This is a sarcastic reference to his not-so-typically-beautiful singing voice. In live concerts, Cohen’s fans cheer at this line. Upon accepting the Juno Award for Best Male Vocalist in Canada (1992), Cohen remarked about his voice: Only in Canada could somebody with a voice like mine win Vocalist of the Year.
Leonard Cohen
Tower of Song
Made me think the damp must still be in them But when I took my corners of the linen And pulled against her, first straight down the hem And then diagonally, then flapped and shook The fabric like a sail in a cross-wind, They made a dried-out undulating thwack. So we'd stretch and fold and end up hand to hand For a split second as if nothing had happened For nothing had that had not always happened Beforehand, day by day, just touch and go, Coming close again by holding back In moves where I was x and she was o
Inscribed in sheets she'd sewn from ripped-out flour sacks
null
The final line is unexpected. The gap between them is accepted. There is a definite note of respect implied in the last line; the poet’s mother sews sheets from flour sacks, an indication of their frugal lives and how hard women like his mother worked. The reader is left with a feeling that the relationship involved unspoken love and respect as well as awkwardness.
Seamus Heaney
Clearances V
I, being born a woman and distressed By all the needs and notions of my kind, Am urged by your propinquity to find Your person fair, and feel a certain zest To bear your body's weight upon my breast:
So subtly is the fume of life designed,
To clarify the pulse and cloud the mind, And leave me once again undone, possessed. Think not for this, however, the poor treason
A moment of more philosophical reflection – the fume of life echoes the ‘fume of sighs’ which Romeo uses to describe love .
Edna St. Vincent Millay
I being born a woman and distressed Sonnet XLI
For three days we waited, a bowl of dull quartz for sky. At night the valley dreamed of snow, lost Christmas angels with dark-white wings flailing the hills. I dreamed a poem, perfect as the first five-pointed flake, that melted at dawn: a Janus-time to peer back at guttering dark days, trajectories of the spent year.
And then snow fell.
Within an hour, a world immaculate as January's new-hung page. We breathe the radiant air like men new-born.
Ah, finally. As the speaker broods on the past (which is associated with darkness and death, ‘guttering dark’, ‘spent’), the falling of snow changes the mood from finality to possibility. James Joyce probably still holds bragging rights for ‘most profound use of snow in literature’ , though.
Frances Horovitz
New Year Snow
Somewhere or other there must surely be The face not seen, the voice not heard, The heart that not yet--never yet--ah me!
Made answer to my word.
Somewhere or other, may be near or far; Past land and sea, clean out of sight; Beyond the wandering moon, beyond the star
This means that her ‘word’ or internal longing produces no response from the ‘face not seen etc.’ Note that the metre — iambic tetrameter or four metrical feet per line — provides a broad framework, but the poet departs from this readily. The fourth line of the stanza, for example, is a trimeter or three metrical feet per line. The irregular rhythm is unsettling and suggests the emotional pain of the speaker.
Christina Rossetti
Somewhere or Other
raccoons clean their meat in the creek. On the circles, green statues ride like South American liberators above the breeding vegetation— prongs and spearheads of some equatorial backland that will inherit the globe. The elect, the elected . . . they come here bright as dimes, and die dishevelled and soft. We cannot name their names, or number their dates— circle on circle, like rings on a tree— but we wish the river had another shore, some further range of delectable mountains, distant hills powdered blue as a girl's eyelid.
It seems the least little shove would land us there,
that only the slightest repugnance of our bodies we no longer control could drag us back.
Lowell believes that it would not take much effort to get us to his ideal government of America.
Robert Lowell
July in Washington
She's in her dotage. Thirsting for The hierarchic privacy Of Queen Victoria's century, She buys up all The eyesores facing her shore, And lets them fall. The season's ill— We've lost our summer millionaire, Who seemed to leap from an L. L. Bean Catalogue. His nine-knot yawl Was auctioned off to lobstermen.
A red fox stain covers Blue Hill.
And now our fairy Decorator brightens his shop for fall; His fishnet's filled with orange cork,
Blue Hill is a town in Maine. “Red fox stain” is a reference to foxes' urine, which smells like skunk spray. Robert Lowell is suggesting Blue Hill is contaminated; or perhaps this is another reference to the economy.
Robert Lowell
Skunk Hour
with multiple chins, masses of cellulite. I was his Jacuzzi. But he was my cook, my only pleasure the rush of fast food, his pleasure, to watch me swell like forbidden fruit. His breadfruit. His desert island after shipwreck. Or a beached whale on a king-size bed craving a wave. I was a tidal wave of flesh too fat to leave, too fat to buy a pint of full-fat milk, too fat to use fat as an emotional shield, too fat to be called chubby, cuddly, big-built. The day I hit thirty-nine, I allowed him to stroke my globe of a cheek. His flesh, my flesh flowed.
He said, Open wide, poured olive oil down my throat.
Soon you'll be forty… he whispered, and how could I not roll over on top. I rolled and he drowned in my flesh. I drowned his dying sentence out.
This is clearly a man who gives orders and is accustomed to being obeyed. The obsession with fattening her is blatant; without subtlety. He doesn’t even pretend to give her a pleasant tasting cake. Instead this pouring of oil is a metaphor for extreme physical abuse. Note also the interesting suggestion by one reader that the assonant ‘o’s could imitate the sound of choking.
Patience Agbabi
Eat Me
Day creeps down. The moon is creeping up. The sun is a corbeil of flowers the moon Blanche Places there, a bouquet. Ho-ho…The dump is full Of images. Days pass like papers from a press. The bouquets come here in the papers. So the sun, And so the moon, both come, and the janitor's poems Of every day, the wrapper on the can of pears, The cat in the paper-bag, the corset, the box From Esthonia: the tiger chest, for tea.
The freshness of night has been fresh a long time.
The freshness of morning, the blowing of day, one says That it puffs as Cornelius Nepos reads, it puffs More than, less than or it puffs like this or that.
Presumably, this means it is no longer fresh.
Wallace Stevens
The Man on the Dump
All things within this fading world hath end, Adversity doth still our joys attend; No ties so strong, no friends so dear and sweet, But with death's parting blow are sure to meet. The sentence past is most irrevocable, A common thing, yet oh, inevitable. How soon, my Dear, death may my steps attend, How soon't may be thy lot to lose thy friend, We both are ignorant, yet love bids me These farewell lines to recommend to thee, That when the knot's untied that made us one,
I may seem thine, who in effect am none.
And if I see not half my days that's due, What nature would, God grant to yours and you; The many faults that well you know I have
She mentioned that the death may look like the husband did it.
Anne Bradstreet
Before the Birth of One of Her Children
Earth hath not anything to show more fair: Dull would he be of soul who could pass by
A sight so touching in its majesty:
This City now doth, like a garment, wear The beauty of the morning; silent, bare, Ships, towers, domes, theatres and temples lie
The view is powerful—and the speaker’s reaction is sincere. There is a kind of antithesis here as well—usually things described as ‘touching’ are small and have small effects, where as the definition of ‘majesty’ is large. Note that ‘majesty and 'by’ at the end of the preceding line are consonantly rhymed . All other rhymes in the poem are perfect. This maybe because Wordsworth wished to create a sense of order and regularity; ironically in a poem about a chaotic city. This is an uncommon statement for Wordsworth, a poet who usually writes about the beauty found in nature rather than in the artificial world created by humans. It is interesting to note that even the sight he finds so “touching in its majesty” is a sight populated by buildings and landmarks, rather than by human beings.
William Wordsworth
Composed upon Westminster Bridge September 3 1802
Not for that city of the level sun Its golden streets and glittering gates ablaze— The shadeless, sleepless city of white days White nights, or nights and days that are as one— We weary, when all is said , all thought, all done
We strain our eyes beyond this dusk to see
What, from the threshold of eternity We shall step into. No, I think we shun The splendour of that everlasting glare
We try to see beyond the present (dusk) and see our place in the future
Charlotte Mew
Not for that City
Where that lamb fell down Was I supposed to praise my Lord Make some kind of joyful sound? He said, "Listen, listen to me now I go round and round And you, you are my only child." Do not leave me now Do not leave me now I'm broken down From a recent fall Blood upon my body And ice upon my soul
Lead on, my son, is your world
{Instrumental}
God is telling mankind that they are now in charge of running the world, and it’s their responsibility to create justice in it. The same sentiment is Fully expressed in another Leonard Cohen song “The Captain"
Leonard Cohen
The Butcher
null
The end of the affair is always death.
She's my workshop. Slippery eye, out of the tribe of myself my breath finds you gone. I horrify
This is a reference to “la petite mort,” (“the little death”) meaning the orgasm.
Anne Sexton
The Ballad of the Lonely Masturbator
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...
null
Insecure and low self-esteem which can be a result of the rejection that she is referring to. It shows that she is expecting to be mistreated by the men she is with but yet they still go home to their wives
Maya Angelou
They Went Home
Out on the lawn I lie in bed, Vega conspicuous overhead In the windless nights of June, As congregated leaves complete Their day's activity; my feet Point to the rising moon. Lucky, this point in time and space Is chosen as my working-place, Where the sexy airs of summer, The bathing hours and the bare arms, The leisured drives through a land of farms Are good to a newcomer.
Equal with colleagues in a ring
I sit on each calm evening Enchanted as the flowers The opening light draws out of hiding
Auden records an experience he had while teaching at the Downs : One fine summer night in June 1933 I was sitting on a lawn after dinner with three colleagues…. [Q]uite suddenly and unexpectedly, something happened…. For the first time in my life I knew exactly…what it means to love one’s neighbor as oneself. ( Forewords and Afterwords 69)
W. H. Auden
A Summer Night to Geoffrey Hoyland
The bees argue, in their black ball, A flying hedgehog, all prickles. The man with gray hands stands under the honeycomb Of their dream, the hived station Where trains, faithful to their steel arcs, Leave and arrive, and there is no end to the country. Pom! Pom! They fall Dismembered, to a tod of ivy. So much for the charioteers, the outriders, the Grand Army! A red tatter, Napoleon! The last badge of victory. The swarm is knocked into a cocked straw hat.
Elba, Elba, bleb on the sea!
The white busts of marshals, admirals, generals Worming themselves into niches. How instructive this is!
Elba , named twice, is the island on which Napoleon was exiled. Plath describes it as a ‘bleb’, which means a blister. This negative idea is designed to denigrate Napoleon. In reality the island has a warm Mediterranean climate and is not far from Corsica where Napoleon was born. His life there was busy socially and pleasant. However, after his defeat at Waterloo he was exiled to the windy, exposed and isolated Atlantic Island of St Helena.
Sylvia Plath
The Swarm
My dog lay dead five days without a grave In the thick of summer, hid in a clump of pine And a jungle of grass and honey-suckle vine. I who had loved him while he kept alive Went only close enough to where he was To sniff the heavy honeysuckle-smell
Twined with another odor heavier still
And hear the flies' intolerable buzz. Well, I was ten and very much afraid. In my kind world the dead were out of range
He feels guilty and doesn’t want to authenticate his dead dog but the smell is outweighing his ignorance.
Richard Wilbur
The Pardon
XIII
When I was one-and-twenty
I heard a wise man say, "Give crowns and pounds and guineas But not your heart away;
The speaker is reflecting back on the man he was a year ago. Twenty-one is about college age. Housman himself, while an undergraduate at Oxford, developed strong feelings for his roommate Moses Jackson. Jackson was heterosexual and didn’t reciprocate, but helped inspire many of Housman’s later poems of thwarted love. In the collection More Poems , one lyric begins: Because I liked you better Than suits a man to say, It irked you and I promised To throw the thought away. Moses Jackson
A. E. Housman
When I Was One-and-Twenty
“Peace upon earth!” was said. We sing it And pay a million priests to bring it.
After two thousand years of mass
We've got as far as poison-gas.
‘Mass’ is the Roman Catholic name for the Eucharist. In 1924, it’d been about 2000 years since the birth of Christ. Why does Hardy use the Roman Catholic name? Why, to set up a dope-ass rhyme of course…
Thomas Hardy
Christmas: 1924
Call the roller of big cigars, The muscular one, and bid him whip In kitchen cups concupiscent curds. Let the wenches dawdle in such dress As they are used to wear, and let the boys Bring flowers in last month's newspapers. Let be be finale of seem.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.
Take from the dresser of deal, Lacking the three glass knobs, that sheet On which she embroidered fantails once,
At this point, the reader is not yet aware that this poem is describing a funeral. The first iteration of this line indicates naivete, due to the simplicity and childishness of the declaration. This contrasts with the darker mood of the second stanza.
Wallace Stevens
The Emperor of Ice Cream
A drop fell on the apple tree Another on the roof A half a dozen kissed the eaves And made the gables laugh A few went out to help the brook That went to help the sea Myself conjectured, Were they pearls What necklaces could be! The dust replaced in hoisted roads
The birds jocoser sung
The sunshine threw his hat away The orchards spangles hung The breezes brought dejected lutes
Jocose means “playful or humorous.” The birds are playfully singing their praises of the rain. The weather seems to have brought them a new life.
Emily Dickinson
Summer Shower
Have I spoken this day of aught else? Is not religion all deeds and all reflection, And that which is neither deed nor reflection, but a wonder and a surprise ever springing in the soul, even while the hands hew the stone or tend the loom? Who can separate his faith from his actions, or his belief from his occupations? Who can spread his hours before him, saying, "This for God and this for myself; This for my soul, and this other for my body?" All your hours are wings that beat through space from self to self. He who wears his morality but as his best garment were better naked. The wind and the sun will tear no holes in his skin.
And he who defines his conduct by ethics imprisons his song-bird in a cage.
The freest song comes not through bars and wires. And he to whom worshiping is a window, to open but also to shut, has not yet visited the house of his soul whose windows are from dawn to dawn. Your daily life is your temple and your religion.
According to Paul Fitzgerald of the University of Santa Clara, the idea of a moral code bound by religious standards creates a uniform believer: To be in a faith tradition is to participate actively in a whole world of thought and action, of motive and image, of attraction and intuition. By designating one’s actions according to such a code of ethics, they surrender their freedom to subjectively choose the difference between right and wrong. Although religious himself , Gibran warns against the confinement of subjectivity imposed by religion. The caged bird is a common trope in literature used to illustrate the imprisonment of one’s will.
Kahlil Gibran
On Religion
O thou with dewy locks, who lookest down Through the clear windows of the morning, turn Thine angel eyes upon our western isle, Which in full choir hails thy approach, O Spring! The hills tell one another, and the listening Valleys hear; all our longing eyes are turn'd Up to thy bright pavilions: issue forth And let thy holy feet visit our clime!
Come o'er the eastern hills, and let our winds Kiss thy perfumèd garments; let us taste Thy morn and evening breath; scatter thy pearls Upon our lovesick land that mourns for thee.
O deck her forth with thy fair fingers; pour Thy soft kisses on her bosom; and put Thy golden crown upon her languish'd head,
Have you ever walked in a field of flowers and winds come by and you can smell the fragrance of the flowers? That’s what Blake is describing in this stanza. Especially with the use of pearls. Pearls could either mean dew drops, or rain drops but for this stanza they could mean small white flowers like this. It especially clicks when one knows that a lot of white flowers are the most fragrant. The flowers are her garments at pearls that the wind blows and scatters. The imagery here of the personification of morning coming “o'er easter hills” comes from poetic convention: But, look, the morn, in russet mantle clad, Walks o'er the dew of yon high eastward hill:“ ( Hamlet 1.1) Blake uses this convention as imagery for a spring morning.
William Blake
To Spring
Some gentlemen in cloth succinct and black; Some patronise a dog-cart, some a hack, Some think a painted clarence only right. Youth is not always such a pleasing sight, Witness a man with tassels on his back; Or woman in a great-coat like a sack Towering above her sex with horrid height. If all the world were water fit to drown There are some whom you would not teach to swim, Rather enjoying if you saw them sink; Certain old ladies dressed in girlish pink, With roses and geraniums on their gown: —
Go to the Bason, poke them o'er the rim. —
null
Note the rhyme scheme in the last six lines, where the reader’s expectations are upset in that ‘rim’ rhymes with ‘swim’ five lines earlier, rather than in a rhyming couplet. This has an unsettling effect. There is a resolution in the single line that sums up the whole poem. The ‘Basin’ is capitalised, giving ironic and humorous weight to this universal washing-up bowl. The final ‘poke them o'er the rim’ is colloquial and cruel, horrifying social cleansing — yet funny.
Christina Rossetti
Some ladies dress in muslin full and white
Only a man harrowing clods In a slow silent walk With an old horse that stumbles and nods Half asleep as they stalk. Only thin smoke without flame From the heaps of couch-grass; Yet this will go onward the same Though Dynasties pass. Yonder a maid and her wight Come whispering by:
War's annals will cloud into night Ere their story die.
null
The human relationship, exemplified by the young woman and her man, is what lives on, in the form of “story”. Hardy sees enormous power and importance in this unassuming, calm scene. The two people in the scene are peaceful, symbolic of hope and the future. “Go whispering by” is not the same as “Go by whispering” – “whispering” describes their movement as much as what they are doing as they move. It also suggests that there is a “story” of ensuing generations that the might be conveying to the reader and relates to ongoing humanity. “Cloud into night” is the only metaphor in this poem, and its ambiguity, the “war’s annals”, remain in question. The chronicles of war will be forgotten and covered over long before the story of human relationships.
Thomas Hardy
In Time of The Breaking of Nations
null
My son has birds in his head.
I know them now. I catch the pitch of their calls. Their shrill cacophonies, their chitterings, their coos.
This replicates the opening line, a refrain or anaphora , the visual and poetic representation of the cage that encloses the birds that are Icarus. The reader knows that this cage will soon open and destroy the boy. And so the poem ends, its sad tone and detachment a sign of Daedalus’s disappointment and grief at what will happen.
Alastair Reid
Daedalus
I'm a riddle in nine syllables, An elephant, a ponderous house, A melon strolling on two tendrils. O red fruit, ivory, fine timbers! This loaf's big with its yeasty rising. Money's new-minted in this fat purse. I'm a means, a stage, a cow in calf.
I've eaten a bag of green apples,
Boarded the train there's no getting off.
Green apples are notably sour, and apples are associated with Adam and Eve, the cost of desire etc. The speaker has eaten a whole bag, not just a bite. The literal image is of the physical sense of fullness and carrying weight. It is clearly a negative feeling– guilt, physical discomfort of overeating equates to carrying weight of new life.
Sylvia Plath
Metaphors
Burroughs killing his wife with a gun 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
English poet Thomas Chatterton committed suicide by poisoning himself with arsenic.
Charles Bukowski
Beasts Bounding Through Time
null
At the earliest ending of winter,
In March, a scrawny cry from outside Seemed like a sound in his mind. He knew that he heard it,
Here, at the end of his life, Wallace Stevens reflects on what is to come in the hereafter. (Source: Open Yale Courses. )
Wallace Stevens
Not Ideas About the Thing but the Thing Itself
To drive the pilings down. I thought I saw the still sun Strike the side of a hammer in flight And from it a sea bird be born To take off over the marshes. As the gray climbs the side of my head And cuts my brain off from the world, I walk and wish mainly for birds, For the one bird no one has looked for To spring again from a flash Of metal, perhaps from the scratched Wedding band on my ring finger.
Recalling the chains of their feet,
I stand and look out over grasses At the bridge they built, long abandoned, Breaking down into water at last,
The “chains” of the workers building the bridge.
James Dickey
At Darien Bridge
As I walked out one evening, Walking down Bristol Street, The crowds upon the pavement Were fields of harvest wheat. And down by the brimming river I heard a lover sing
Under an arch of the railway:
'Love has no ending. 'I'll love you, dear, I'll love you Till China and Africa meet,
Arches have endings, whereas rivers flow infinitely, like Time.
W. H. Auden
As I Walked Out One Evening
425
Good Morning — Midnight
I'm coming Home Day — got tired of Me How could I — of Him?
This powerful opening line, where one of Dickinson’s characteristic dashes both separates (typographically) and unites (semantically; in the reader’s mind) the greeting of “Good Morning” and the time that seems to be its opposite, “midnight”, was taken by Jean Rhys as the title of her 1934 novel Good Morning, Midnight .
Emily Dickinson
Good Morning — Midnight
The daisies grow. All her bright golden hair Tarnished with rust, She that was young and fair Fallen to dust. Lily-like, white as snow, She hardly knew She was a woman, so Sweetly she grew. Coffin-board, heavy stone, Lie on her breast, I vex my heart alone,
She is at rest.
Peace, peace, she cannot hear Lyre or sonnet, All my life's buried here,
Wilde never claims that Isola, his sister, died –both in this poem, and in general. The envelope that contained Isola Wilde’s hair was carried everywhere by Oscar from her death in 1867 to his own death in 1900. The envelope was labelled: My Isola’s Hair Obiit Feb XXIII 1867 She is not dead but sleepeth. Wilde believed that Isola never died, for she was always in his heart.
Oscar Wilde
Requiescat
The fountains are dry and the roses over. Incense of death. Your day approaches.
The pears fatten like little Buddhas.
A blue mist is dragging the lake. You move through the era of fishes, The smug centuries of the big—
Her pregnancy brings unhappy self-reflection. She seems to compare the pears to her fat, Buddha frame.
Sylvia Plath
The Manor Garden
The curtains were half drawn, the floor was swept And strewn with rushes, rosemary and may Lay thick upon the bed on which I lay, Where through the lattice ivy-shadows crept. He leaned above me, thinking that I slept And could not hear him; but I heard him say: "Poor child, poor child": and as he turned away Came a deep silence, and I knew he wept. He did not touch the shroud, or raise the fold That hid my face, or take my hand in his, Or ruffle the smooth pillows for my head:
He did not love me living; but once dead
He pitied me; and very sweet it is To know he still is warm though I am cold.
The man did not care nor love the narrator when she was alive but only realizing that he did when she had passed away. It is as if he realized “you don’t know what you got until it’s gone”.
Christina Rossetti
After Death
I placed a jar in Tennessee, And round it was, upon a hill. It made the slovenly wilderness Surround that hill. The wilderness rose up to it, And sprawled around, no longer wild. The jar was round upon the ground And tall and of a port in air. It took dominion every where.
The jar was gray and bare. It did not give of bird or bush, Like nothing else in Tennessee.
null
Unlike the bird and bush, the jar, or man’s industrialization, was not natural, and as such, was like nothing else in Tennessee, which at this time was still a very wilderness-filled state.
Wallace Stevens
Anecdote of the Jar
"Thow lookest as thou woldest fynde an hare, For ever upon the ground I se thee stare. Approche neer, and looke up murily; Now war yow, sires, and lat this man have place. He in the waast is shape as wel as I; This were a popet in an arm tenbrace For any womman smal, and fair of face. He semeth elvyssh by his contenaunce, For unto no wight dooth he daliaunce. Sey now somwhat, syn oother folk han sayd, Telle us a tale of myrthe, and that anon." "Hooste," quod I, "ne beth nat yvele apayed,
For oother tale certes kan I noon
But of a ryme I lerned longe agoon." "Ye, that is good," quod he, "now shul we heere Som deyntee thyng, me thynketh by his cheere."
Chaucer the pilgrim is suggesting to his audience that he does not know many tales, and can only recall a single rhyme that he learned a long time ago. This is rather humorous, since, knowing Chaucer the author, he clearly knows many tales and is a skilled story-teller. It is also possible that by making his character out to be a bad story-teller, the opposite of his true self, that he is trying to remove his bias from the stories and create an omniscient narrator as much as he possibly can.
Geoffrey Chaucer
The Prologue of Sir Thopas in Middle English
If the moon smiled, she would resemble you. You leave the same impression Of something beautiful, but annihilating. Both of you are great light borrowers. Her O-mouth grieves at the world; yours is unaffected,
And your first gift is making stone out of everything.
I wake to a mausoleum; you are here, Ticking your fingers on the marble table, looking for cigarettes, Spiteful as a woman, but not so nervous,
The moon and the rival both turn everything grey and immovable: the moon literally, in that bright moonlight, turns the world grey as stone, and figuratively, through her domination and judgement, makes a body afraid to move as any action will displease her. The rival, on the other hand, petrifies a situation into careful and trope-tastic roles: Wife, Rival, Husband/Object. No one can move under either gaze, or at least, not in this situation. In further contrast, the moon is turning the world to stone out of pity, grieving for the world’s pain. However, The Rival is ‘unaffected’ by the world’s pain and it can therefore be presumed is turning the world/a room/ Plath herself to stone maliciously. The line may also be an allusion to Medusa, a monster in Greek mythology who was so dreadful she would turn all who looked at her to stone. Indeed, Plath wrote a poem called Medusa for the same collection, which explores her relationship with her mother. In this poem, her mother is portrayed as overbearing and suffocating.
Sylvia Plath
The Rival
It visits with inconstant glance Each human heart and countenance; Like hues and harmonies of evening,— Like clouds in starlight widely spread,— Like memory of music fled,— Like aught that for its grace may be Dear, and yet dearer for its mystery. 2. Spirit of BEAUTY, that dost consecrate With thine own hues all thou dost shine upon Of human thought or form,—where art thou gone? Why dost thou pass away and leave our state,
This dim vast vale of tears, vacant and desolate?
Ask why the sunlight not for ever Weaves rainbows o'er yon mountain-river, Why aught should fail and fade that once is shown,
The ‘vale of tears’ is from Psalm 84.6 , a reference to human tribulation. The phrase ‘this dim, vast, vale of tears’ comprises slow monosyllables, that seem to imitate the dragging feeling of unhappiness; this line has a slow, deliberate ‘tread’. The alliterative ’d’s and ‘v’s are also heavy and dirge-like.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
Hymn To Intellectual Beauty
Tyger! Tyger! burning bright
In the forests of the night:
What immortal hand or eye Could frame thy fearful symmetry? In what distant deeps or skies
The night is complex, morally corrupt and impedes vision and judgement just as a forest does. Blake may be describing the only environment in which he believes such a fearful creature could exist. Alternatively, he could be implying that the tyger is a shining contrast to the dark forest. Dante uses forest and feline imagery similarly in the beginning of Inferno : MIDWAY upon the journey of our life I found myself within a forest dark, For the straightforward pathway had been lost. Ah me! how hard a thing it is to say What was this forest savage, rough, and stern, Which in the very thought renews the fear. An alternative view is that the forest is London or other growing cities, places of terrible corruption, suffering and squalor, conditions exacerbated by the beginning of the Industrial Revolution.
William Blake
The Tyger
Of earth and air and water, growing more And louder, shriller, heavier, a roar Up the dun atmosphere did overwhelm His ears; and as he looked affrighted round Every manner of beast innumerable All thro' the shadows crying grew, until The wailing was like grass upon the ground. Asudden then within his human side Their anguish, since the goad he wielded first, And, since he gave them not to drink, their thirst, Darted compressed and vital.—As he died, Low in the East now lighting gorgeously
He saw the last sea-serpent iris-mailed Which, with a spear transfixèd, yet availed To pluck the sun down into the dead sea.
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Compare the Beast that emerges from the sea in The Book of Revelation; see Rev. 11:7, 13:1-10, and 13:11-18. The Beast isn’t very serpentlike, but is given power by The Dragon (the serpent, or Satan).
Trumbull Stickney
And the Last Day Being Come Man Stood Alone
We have a poem here, it's called "Whitey On The Moon" It was inspired by some whiteys on the moon So I wanna give credit where credit is due
A rat done bit my sister Nell
With whitey on the moon Her face and arms began to swell And whitey's on the moon
Written to set an image of the poor living conditions experienced by black americans in historically poor neighborhoods in which rats, or other vermin commonly seen as unsanitary, are abundant. Could also be in reference to a particular case of Rat-Bite fever briefly discussed in The Autobiography of Malcolm X’s epilogue section in which Alex Haley describes X exclaiming: “Now, just read that, just think of that a minute! Suppose it was your child! Where’s that slum lord–on some beach in Miami!”, in response to reading a newspaper clipping he brought to a biography writing session–though this could just be interesting insight as I’m unaware just how common Rat-Bite Fever is/was.
Gil Scott-Heron
Whitey on the Moon
I love to rise in a summer morn
When the birds sing on every tree
The distant huntsman winds his horn And the sky-lark sings with me O! what sweet company
The birds singing ‘on every tree’ is an affirmation of the natural world and the joy it brings. Blake was aware that children relate to birds and animals by creating in their imaginations ‘friendships’, attributing human characteristics to the creatures around them.
William Blake
The Schoolboy
Begin, and cease, and then again begin, With tremulous cadence slow, and bring The eternal note of sadness in. Sophocles long ago Heard it on the Aegean, and it brought Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow Of human misery; we Find also in the sound a thought, Hearing it by this distant northern sea. The Sea of Faith Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar, Retreating, to the breath Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
The use of the first person pronoun; from time to time the poet brings the reader back from the observations of universal significance to his own emotional response. This adds to the scope of the poem; to represent the whole of humanity and the individual.
Matthew Arnold
Dover Beach
Safe in their Alabaster Chambers— Untouched by Morning And untouched by Noon— Sleep the meek members of the Resurrection— Rafter of satin And Roof of stone Light laughs the breeze In her Castle above them— Babbles the Bee in a stolid Ear Pipe the Sweet Birds in gorant cadence— Ah, what sagacity perished here!
Version of 1862
***** Safe in their Alabaster Chambers— Untouched by Morning
This poem first appeared in 1862 in the Springfield Daily Republican and was originally titled “The Sleeping.” Susan Gilbert, Dickinson’s sister-in-law, with whom she often exchanged letters and whose opinion she valued, offered a critique of “The Sleeping,” and although this particular letter has never been found, Dickinson clearly took it seriously enough to change the entire second stanza of the poem, leaving us with the version of the poem that is best known today.
Emily Dickinson
Safe in their Alabaster Chambers 216
Earth hath not anything to show more fair: Dull would he be of soul who could pass by A sight so touching in its majesty: This City now doth, like a garment, wear The beauty of the morning; silent, bare, Ships, towers, domes, theatres and temples lie Open unto the fields, and to the sky; All bright and glittering in the smokeless air. Never did sun more beautifully steep In his first splendor, valley, rock, or hill; Ne'er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep! The river glideth at his own sweet will:
Dear God! The very houses seem asleep; And all that mighty heart is lying still!
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These lines acknowledge that although the scene he sets is completely devoid of human life, there is a “mighty heart” that lies in wait underneath, ready to spring to life. ‘Dear God’ is exclamatory, address to a higher Power, expressing the poet’s overwhelming emotion. The ‘houses seem asleep’ is an example of metonomy where the houses represent the people living within them. The last four words could be considered a paradox because a living heart does not lie still but is always beating. Wordsworth is referring to the heart of the city which exits in the people and infrastructure. The personification of a non-existent mighty heart of the city lying still is the paradox. There is also a possible interpretation of “lying still” meaning ‘still telling a falsehood’, that of the terrible reality of London poverty and squalor, compared to the romantic, imaginative,poetic vision.
William Wordsworth
Composed upon Westminster Bridge September 3 1802
Did you hear 'bout Ticklish Tom?
He got tickled by his mom.
Wiggled and giggled and fell on the floor, Laughed and rolled right out the door. All the way to school and then
Tom’s mom is such a jerk. He didn’t ask to be tickled, he didn’t want to be tickled but did she care? No. She just went along her merry way tickling kids who don’t want to be. Because of her he fell on the ground. I don’t know the exact definition of child abuse but I’m pretty sure pushing your kid the the ground and kicking him out of the house isn’t legal.
Shel Silverstein
Ticklish Tom
Having a wheel and four legs of its own
Has never availed the cumbersome grindstone To get it anywhere that I can see.
These hands have helped it go, and even race; Not all the motion, though, they ever lent, Not all the miles it may have thought it went,
This line and the entire poem play on the folk-wisdom phrase “keep your nose to the grindstone.”
Robert Frost
The Grindstone
Father, father, where are you going O do not walk so fast. Speak father, speak to your little boy
Or else I shall be lost,
The night was dark no father was there The child was wet with dew. The mire was deep, & the child did weep
The rhythm changes in an appropriately unsettling way. Lines two and four end in consonantly rhymed ‘fast’ and ‘lost’, creating an uneasy mood.
William Blake
The Little Boy Lost Songs of Experience
From dead men to their kind You look round on your mother earth As if she for no purpose bore you; As if you were her first-born birth And none had lived before you!" One morning thus, by Esthwaite lake When life was sweet I knew not why To me my good friend Matthew spake And thus I made reply "The eye it cannot chuse but see We cannot bid the ear be still; Our bodies feel, where'er they be
Against, or with our will
"Nor less I deem that there are powers Which of themselves our minds impress That we can feed this mind of ours
This line “Against, or with our will” really highlights the lack of control that comes with being a living entity. You are born into a body, seemingly without choice, that needs to be taken care of, that is, nourished, cleansed, protected, etc. You assume this responsibility of having a body without choice, just as, as Wordsworth is speaking of, not having a choice in the external stimuli that you take in. Our five senses are constantly experiencing stimuli and sensations, and it seems that Wordsworth is delighting in the fact of just sitting still and being able to just take it all in; to just take it all in while sitting still, what he sees, what he hears, what he smells, what he feels, what he tastes, is more than enough for him to stay occupied reflecting on. I think this poem sends a great message for urban society where life is all about the hustle and bustle, and for my generation that always has a cell phone, or a laptop, or a iPad, or a tablet, or whatever in their hands while simultaneously sitting in class or at their work desk or at the dinner table…what this poem is really saying is that sometimes you need to just STOP, breathe, and take it all in and just be in the moment of being alive and let that be your enjoyment instead of constantly occupying yourself with a million and one things.
William Wordsworth
Expostulation and Reply
Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding. Even as the stone of the fruit must break, that its heart may stand in the sun, so must you know pain. And could you keep your heart in wonder at the daily miracles of your life, your pain would not seem less wondrous than your joy; And you would accept the seasons of your heart, even as you have always accepted the seasons that pass over your fields. And you would watch with serenity through the winters of your grief.
Much of your pain is self-chosen.
It is the bitter potion by which the physician within you heals your sick self. Therefore trust the physician, and drink his remedy
Some truths are hard to accept, and this is one of them. How could my pain be self-chosen? Why would I have chosen to endure these things and this suffering? But Kahlil, like many other philosophers, draws a line between the events that bring suffering into our life and our reaction to those events. No one would ever choose to have things not work out the way they wanted or experience an event that introduced sorrow into their life. But you can control your reaction to those events, whether to let your pain define you, or to learn from it, and rise again. Seattle rapper Macklemore put it this way: I don’t control life, but I can control how I react to it So Kahlil is saying, you need to realize that this pain is a tool , not a prison. You need to let it educate you and follow it as you will, into escape.
Kahlil Gibran
On Pain
Title divine—is mine! The Wife—without the Sign!
Acute Degree—conferred on me—
Empress of Calvary! Royal—all but the Crown! Betrothed—without the swoon
This is ambiguous. The adjective “acute” means perceptive or insightful. Alternatively “acute” means sharp and is often used in conjuction with pain, so there is a negative association. The phrase “conferred on me” brings to mind either an award or prize, or alternatively something imposed on a passive person. So the reader may see what follows — “Empress of Calvery” — as both positive and negative.
Emily Dickinson
Title divine—is mine
Somewhere or other there must surely be The face not seen, the voice not heard, The heart that not yet--never yet--ah me! Made answer to my word. Somewhere or other, may be near or far; Past land and sea, clean out of sight; Beyond the wandering moon, beyond the star That tracks her night by night.
Somewhere or other, may be far or near;
With just a wall, a hedge, between; With just the last leaves of the dying year Fallen on a turf grown green.
The opening line of each stanza is repeated with slight variations, a device known as anaphora . This emphasises the message of the poem; the speaker’s yearning for love. Note that the second and third stanzas are almost identical apart from the reversal of ‘near or far’ to ‘far or near’. If spoken aloud this line has a rhythmic sonority that draws the reader in.
Christina Rossetti
Somewhere or Other
Ay, Ay, Ay, Ay Take this waltz, take this waltz With its "I'll never forget you, you know!" This waltz, this waltz, this waltz, this waltz ... With its very own breath of brandy and death Dragging its tail in the sea And I'll dance with you in Vienna I'll be wearing a river's disguise The hyacinth wild on my shoulder My mouth on the dew of your thighs And I'll bury my soul in a scrapbook With the photographs there, and the moss
And I'll yield to the flood of your beauty
My cheap violin and my cross And you'll carry me down on your dancing To the pools that you lift on your wrist
Mirroring earlier that he is wearing a river’s disguise, but here it is he who will capitulate under the onslaught of her beauty even if it is a beauty that is a fixture of memory and idealization.
Leonard Cohen
Take This Waltz
Not for that city of the level sun Its golden streets and glittering gates ablaze— The shadeless, sleepless city of white days White nights, or nights and days that are as one— We weary, when all is said , all thought, all done We strain our eyes beyond this dusk to see What, from the threshold of eternity We shall step into. No, I think we shun The splendour of that everlasting glare The clamour of that never-ending song And if for anything we greatly long
It is for some remote and quiet stair
Which winds to silence and a space for sleep Too sound for waking and for dreams too deep
For some people a place in the next world is natural, and their lives are quiet and alone. Could Mew be pushing for another concept of the afterlife? An alternative to the golden city? The remote, quiet stair… What is the value of this staircase?
Charlotte Mew
Not for that City
Getting and spending , we lay waste our powers: Little we see in Nature that is ours; We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon! The Sea that bares her bosom to the moon; The winds that will be howling at all hours, And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers; For this, for everything, we are out of tune; It moves us not.—Great God! I'd rather be A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn; So might I, standing on this pleasant lea, Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn; Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn.
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Triton is Poseidon ’s son, who is able to calm the waves with his conch-shell horn. Here he is with a nymph: This is another reference to Greek mythology, or the Pagan religion. The allusions to Pagan religions in this line and the last are used to further emphasize the conflict between the modern materialistic world and the old, nature-centered ways of the old world. It serves to show there was a time when people found the time to observe nature, and live as Wordsworth wishes they would live.
William Wordsworth
The world is too much with us...
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“We're going,” they said, “to the end of the world.”
So they stopped the car where the river curled, And we scrambled down beneath the bridge On the gravel track of a narrow ridge.
Not a request or an invitation, but a fact or insistence.
Dana Gioia
The End of the World
About suffering they were never wrong, The Old Masters; how well they understood Its human position; how it takes place While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along; How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting For the miraculous birth, there always must be Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating On a pond at the edge of the wood: They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
This refers to the martyrdom of Jesus, echoing the ‘miraculous birth’. It may also allude to the debunking of what Auden called the ‘heroic ideal’ and his view that war was ‘dreadful’. Note that he experienced soldiering at first hand in the front lines of the Spanish Civil War and the Sino-Japanese War , and it coloured his view of life thereafter.
W. H. Auden
Musée des Beaux Arts
“Peace upon earth!” was said. We sing it
And pay a million priests to bring it.
After two thousand years of mass We've got as far as poison-gas.
Hardy lashes out not only at the concept of paying priests (for a long time, the priesthood was a very well paid and desirable profession), but also how ineffective they are. If they cannot spread Christ’s ideas of peace and love, and produce practical benefits from them, what’s the point?
Thomas Hardy
Christmas: 1924
But without sound. The lips, They were trying to say something very important. But I had forgotten to mention an upland Of wind-tortured stone white in darkness, and tall, but when No wind, mist gathers, and once on the Sarré at midnight, I watched the sheep huddling. Their eyes Stared into nothingness. In that mist-diffused light their eyes Were stupid and round like the eyes of fat fish in muddy water, Or of a scholar who has lost faith in his calling. Their jaws did not move. Shreds Of dry grass, gray in the gray mist-light, hung From the side of a jaw, unmoving.
You would think that nothing would ever again happen.
That may be a way to love God.
When you have forgotten your way and it seems like nothing in thw world has meaning or is moving remember that God is every where and he is the creator of life so he is every thing, and when all seems lost and you think that nothing would ever happen again that is a way to remember your love for God because one’s love for God is strongest when they lose faith but remember that God has a plan.
Robert Penn Warren
A Way To Love God
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It was wet & white & swift and where I am we don't know. It was dark and then it isn't. I wish the barker would come. There seems to be eat nothing. I am usually tired. I'm alone too. If only the strange one with so few legs would come, I'd say my prayers out of my mouth, as usual. Where are his note I loved?
There may be horribles; it's hard to tell. The barker nips me but somehow I feel he too is on my side.
This poem is written in the voice of a sheep. The “barker” is a reference to a sheepdog; the “strange one with so few legs” is undoubtedly the shepherd. In the history of poetry, the shepherd is a central poetic image/character beginning with the Greeks. This genre is often known as “pastoral” poetry and the convention is still us, though it was in the Renaissance that the trope really took off. These literary shepherds were read (often) as metaphorical poets, their flutes, for example, harkening back to Pan’s reed flute (Pan being the Greek god of music). Hence, the lost sheep’s reference to the missing shepherd’s instrument, “where are his notes I loved?”
John Berryman
Dream Song 28: Snow Line
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
Emily compares the they confining her to when she was younger and they put her in the closet for acting out.
Emily Dickinson
They Shut Me Up in Prose
And a flowering cherry tree On his walking shoulder held Under the lion sun. When he was old and blind He sat in a curved chair All day by the kitchen fire. Many hours he had seen The stars in their drunken dancing Through the burning-glass of his mind And sober knew the green Boughs of heaven folding The winter world in their hand.
The pride of his heart was dumb.
He knew in the hour he died That his heart had never spoken In song or bridal bed.
This is a dramatic and key line, suggesting that the ‘pride’ or power and feelings he was capable of had no expression.
James K. Baxter
Elegy for My Fathers Father
To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee.
One clover, and a bee, And revery.
The revery alone will do, If bees are few.
Damn, all out of revery. OK to substitute parsley? “Revery” = daydreaming, imagining. Dickinson, as a poet/daydreamer, prizes this ingredient over the others.
Emily Dickinson
To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee
As I came to the edge of the woods,
Thrush music -- hark!
Now if it was dusk outside, Inside it was dark. Too dark in the woods for a bird
Frost probably chose the thrush because he had experience listening to their clarinet-like tones every summer in Vermont. The thrush also appears in a number of other famous poems in English, including Thomas Hardy’s “The Darkling Thrush” (in which it’s an ambiguous symbol of hope) and Walt Whitman’s “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d,” where it’s associated with both poetry and death: Solitary the thrush, The hermit withdrawn to himself, avoiding the settlements, Sings by himself a song. Song of the bleeding throat, Death’s outlet song of life (for well dear brother I know, If thou wast not granted to sing thou would'st surely die).
Robert Frost
Come In
Time was away and somewhere else, There were two glasses and two chairs And two people with the one pulse (Somebody stopped the moving stairs)
Time was away and somewhere else.
And they were neither up nor down; The stream's music did not stop Flowing through heather, limpid brown,
The pattern continues so that the stanza is bracketed with the line. This repeats the refrain in stanza one, another example of anaphora .
Louis MacNeice
Meeting Point
Tightly-folded bud, I have wished you something None of the others would: Not the usual stuff About being beautiful, Or running off a spring Of innocence and love — They will all wish you that,
And should it prove possible,
Well, you're a lucky girl. But if it shouldn't, then May you be ordinary;
This implies that beauty and love aren’t always given to everyone.
Philip Larkin
Born Yesterday - To Sally Amis
When the green woods laugh with the voice of joy And the dimpling stream runs laughing by When the air does laugh with our merry wit And the green hill laughs with the noise of it When the meadows laugh with lively green And the grasshopper laughs in the merry scene When Mary and Susan and Emily With their sweet round mouths sing "Ha, ha he!" When the painted birds laugh in the shade
Where our table with cherries and nuts is spread
Come live, and be merry, and join with me To sing the sweet chorus of "Ha, ha, he!"
Blake for the first time refers to the humans in this setting. Significantly, they eat a meal al fresco that is not dissimilar to what birds and animals eat. So the humans are, in effect, are partaking of the bounty of nature, linking with the Garden of Eden and suggesting a loving God still provides for mankind. The relaxed, joyous nature of the poem denies the biblical suggestion that man is punished by having to toil for food, instead emphasising the loving God nurturing his creations.
William Blake
Laughing Song
Mad Song by William Blake The wild winds weep, And the night is a-cold; Come hither, Sleep, And my griefs infold:
But lo! the morning peeps
Over the eastern steeps, And the rustling birds of dawn The earth do scorn.
But lo(behold)! the morning peeps(starts) The Morning is interrupting his attempts at sleep. He has been up all night surviving his grievances when the Sun rise ruins his chances of getting sleep or relief.
William Blake
Mad Song
Thy parent sun, who bade thee view Pale skies, and chilling moisture sip, Has bathed thee in his own bright hue, And streaked with jet thy glowing lip. Yet slight thy form, and low thy seat, And earthward bent thy gentle eye, Unapt the passing view to meet When loftier flowers are flaunting nigh. Oft, in the sunless April day, Thy early smile has stayed my walk; But midst the gorgeous blooms of May, I passed thee on thy humble stalk.
So they, who climb to wealth, forget The friends in darker fortunes tried.
I copied them—but I regret That I should ape the ways of pride. And when again the genial hour
Here Bryant is connecting nature to life and friendships. Some friendships do not last due to one’s wealth and eventually leaving their friend behind. Bryant is suggesting that true and genuine friends are hard to find.
William Cullen Bryant
The Yellow Violet
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I shall never get you put together entirely,
Pieced, glued, and properly jointed. Mule-bray, pig-grunt and bawdy cackles Proceed from your great lips.
The ‘you’ to which Plath is referring to, is The Colossus a massive statue constructed by the people of Rhodes after they were victorious over Demetrius’ invasion of the city in 305 BC. It was a representation of the sun god Helios built on the Island of Rhodes in Greece. The statue only remained intact for approximately 50 years before an earthquake shook the city in 224 BC destroying it. Given the content of the poem and her many references to ancient Greek culture, it is safe to assume that Plath was referring to the specific statue the Colossus of Rhodes. (Image portrayal of the Colossus standing over the city of Rhodes)
Sylvia Plath
The Colossus
And it's here they got the spiritual thirst It's here the family's broken And it's here the lonely say That the heart has got to open In a fundamental way Democracy is coming to the U.S.A It's coming from the women and the men Oh baby, we'll be making love again We'll be going down so deep The river's going to weep And the mountain's going to shout Amen! It's coming like the tidal flood
Beneath the lunar sway
Imperial, mysterious In amorous array Democracy is coming to the U.S.A
A reference to science: that the gravitational pull between the moon and sun affects the tides on earth.
Leonard Cohen
Democracy
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.
The moment his lips touch the ice-water.
Charles Simic
The Partial Explanation
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
What I can ne'er express, yet cannot all conceal.
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A feeling that resonates with most – a deep psychological connection to nature. Byron expresses his admiration for nature by informing the reader that if he were to put it into words it would only limit his love. Words can only capture a finite understanding of his emotions and yet he reveals his endearment to us through prose because he “cannot all conceal”.
Lord Byron
There Is Pleasure In The Pathless Woods
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.
What did I know, what did I know
Of love's austere and lonely offices?
The repetition of ‘What did I know, what did I know’ is dramatic and draws the reader to the emotional climax. It is not clear if this means that the child is trying to excuse himself, to justify his lack of responsiveness because he was so young. Or is it a statement of guilt for the sin of omission, implying that, though young, he should have known better. If read aloud this line could be given enormous emotional heft. The poem would work well in performance.
Robert Hayden
Those Winter Sundays
I am a poor freezingly cold soul So far from where I intended to go Scavenging through life's very constant lulls So far from where I'm determined to go Wish I knew the way to reach the one I love There is no way Wish I had the charm to attract the one I love But you see, I've got no charm
Tonight I've consumed much more than I can hold
Oh, this is very clear to you And you can tell I have never really loved You can tell by the way I sleep all day
An intentional ambiguity as to whether it is emotion or drink that the narrator has consumed “more than he can hold”, as either are a natural tendency in the throes of unrequited love. Of course, having too much to drink can mirror the physical symptoms of being “seasick”.
Morrissey
Seasick Yet Still Docked
The frothy breakers cover'd. For in the fisherman's lone shed A murder'd man was laid, With ten wide gashes in his head, And deep was made his sandy bed Where the green billows play'd. A shipwreck'd mariner was he, Doom'd from his home to sever Who swore to be through wind and sea Firm and undaunted ever! And when the wave resistless roll'd, About his arm he made
A packet rich of Spanish gold,
And, like a British sailor bold, Plung'd where the billows play'd. The spectre band, his messmates brave,
The man’s riches present a very good motive for why the mariner was killed by the fisherman. The fisherman could have seen an oppurtunity to gain a great wealth by taking the life and gold of the mariner.
Mary Robinson
The Haunted Beach
And lovely long thin daisies, dear — She said that you are weeds! She said, " Oh, what a fine bouquet! " But afterwards I heard her say, " She's always dragging in those weeds. " III Everybody but just me Despises burdocks. Mother, she Despises 'em the most because They stick so to my socks-and drawers. But father, when he sits on some, Can't speak a decent word for 'em.
IV
I know a hundred ways to die. I've often thought I'd try one: Lie down beneath a motor truck
Part IV of this mini-collection is not the only time Millay famously mocks death, a popular theme in her writing. Her most famous incidents are Moriturus and The Suicide though they are not as satirical as this one.
Edna St. Vincent Millay
From a Very Little Sphinx
Others abide our question. Thou art free. We ask and ask: Thou smilest and art still, Out-topping knowledge. For the loftiest hill That to the stars uncrowns his majesty, Planting his stedfast footsteps in the sea, Making the Heaven of Heavens his dwelling-place, Spares but the cloudy border of his base To the foil'd searching of mortality: And thou, who didst the stars and sunbeams know,
Self-school'd, self-scann'd, self-honour'd, self-secure, Didst walk on Earth unguess'd at. Better so!
All pains the immortal spirit must endure, All weakness that impairs, all griefs that bow, Find their sole voice in that victorious brow.
Arnold states that although Shakespeare was self taught, no one could make suggestions to him because he was the best. Arnold has no problem with this as a fan of Shakespeare.
Matthew Arnold
Shakespeare
Had a poem here somewhere called "Enough" That I'd like to do Because every once in a while A brother gets shot somewhere for no reason
A brother gets his head kicked in, for no reason
And you wonder just exactly what in the hell is enough And that's what this poem is about It was not enough that we were bought en brought to this home of the slaves
Rodney King
Gil Scott-Heron
Enough
When beechen buds begin to swell, And woods the blue-bird's warble know, The yellow violet's modest bell Peeps from the last year's leaves below. Ere russet fields their green resume, Sweet flower, I love, in forest bare, To meet thee, when thy faint perfume Alone is in the virgin air. Of all her train, the hands of Spring First plant thee in the watery mould, And I have seen thee blossoming Beside the snow-bank's edges cold.
Thy parent sun, who bade thee view
Pale skies, and chilling moisture sip, Has bathed thee in his own bright hue, And streaked with jet thy glowing lip.
The sun serves as a parent to this violet while providing the essential light needed for it to grow.
William Cullen Bryant
The Yellow Violet
Make me, O Lord, thy Spining Wheele compleate. Thy Holy Worde my Distaff make for mee. Make mine Affections thy Swift Flyers neate And make my Soule thy holy Spoole to bee. My Conversation make to be thy Reele
And reele the yarn thereon spun of thy Wheele.
Make me thy Loome then, knit therein this Twine: And make thy Holy Spirit, Lord, winde quills: Then weave the Web thyselfe. The yarn is fine.
The speaker is surrendering his entire self to God, in asking him to master the direction in his life and spiritual journey. “Yarn” can sometimes be an idiom for a tale or story. This use of yarn may be interpreted to represent the Lord not only spinning the metaphorical garment, but also “spinning the yarn” of the speaker’s life and faith. Taylor uses huswifery and the process of making clothes as a metaphor that his Puritan audience can understand and relate to.
Edward Taylor
Huswifery
Detroit Conference of Unity and Art (For HRB)
We went there to confer On the possibility of Blackness
And the inevitability of Revolution We talked about
In May of 1967, Nikki Giovanni attended the Detroit Conference of Unity and Art, where she first became acquainted with many African-American leaders of the Black Arts movement and the Black Power movement.
Nikki Giovanni
Detroit Conference of Unity and Art For HRB
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? What kindness now could the old salve renew? It is the pain, it is the pain endures. The infection slept (custom or changes inures) And when pain's secondary phase was due Poise of my hands reminded me of yours. How safe I felt, whom memory assures, Rich that your grace safely by heart I knew. It is the pain, it is the pain endures.
My stare drank deep beauty that still allures.
My heart pumps yet the poison draught of you. Poise of my hands reminded me of yours. You are still kind whom the same shape immures.
If the beauty that still allures were a liquid, the stare would be drinking it. The visual beauty entered, flowed into the eyes like a drink would into the mouth. Here, the word deep holds ambiguity. It could be an adjective modifying beauty, or it could be describing the manner in which the stare drank.
William Empson
Villanelle It is the pain...
Shadowing Domesday lines Under wheat's restless silence; The differently-dressed servants With tiny rooms in huge houses, The dust behind limousines; Never such innocence, Never before or since, As changed itself to past Without a word- the men Leaving the gardens tidy, The thousands of marriages Lasting a little while longer:
Never such innocence again.
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The final line repeats for emphasis the first in the stanza, the reference to innocence irreversably lost. The word “again” reinforces it, as does the only full stop in the poem. So Larkin ends with a masterpiece of understated drama.
Philip Larkin
MCMXIV re-transcribed
Even the sun-clouds this morning cannot manage such skirts. Nor the woman in the ambulance Whose red heart blooms through her coat so astoundingly –
A gift, a love gift
Utterly unasked for By a sky Palely and flamily
It’s very easy for readers to miss the implied scenario of this poem. Plath appears to be standing in a street, looking at poppies in October (when poppies, especially in England, are no longer in flower), but this is impossible as poppies are never sold as fresh cut flowers, least of all in October. An ambulance drives by and men are walking on the street but Plath is focused on the flowers. So she is describing a hypothetical and not literal world. In her mind she may see the flowers as an imaginary gift, something special and lovely offered to her. Maybe they represent her skill as a poet. The ‘love-gift’, however, does have a possible literal meaning, in that it also suggests pregnancy and perhaps a baby outside marriage. This may link with the woman bleeding, possibly from a miscarriage — though the poem suggests it’s her heart — in the ambulance. This element of the poem seems not, as far as the reader is aware, to be autobiographical. There is no evidence that Sylvia Plath had a miscarriage at the time this was written. Whatever the source of the idea, the ‘love-gift’ implies joy in motherhood and pleasure in life.
Sylvia Plath
Poppies in October
To drift with every passion till my soul Is a stringed lute on which all winds can play Is it for this that I have given away Mine ancient wisdom, and austere control? Methinks my life is a twice-written scroll Scrawled over on some boyish holiday With idle songs for pipe and virelay, Which do but mar the secret of the whole. Surely there was a time I might have trod The sunlit heights, and from life's dissonance Struck one clear chord to reach the ears of God: Is that time dead? Lo, with a little rod
I did but touch the honey of romance—
And must I lose a soul's inheritance?
A reference to the story of Saul and his son Johnathan in 1 Samuel 14 , wherein Saul forbids the Israelites to eat until their enemies, the Philistines, surrendered. His son later confessed to eating a honeycomb: Then said Jonathan, My father hath troubled the land: see, I pray you, how mine eyes have been enlightened, because I tasted a little of this honey. (Samuel 14:29)
Oscar Wilde
Hélas
Now the Swan it floated on the English river Ah the Rose of High Romance it opened wide A sun tanned woman yearned me through the summer And the judges watched us from the other side I told my mother "Mother I must leave you Preserve my room but do not shed a tear Should rumour of a shabby ending reach you It was half my fault and half the atmosphere"
But the Rose I sickened with a scarlet fever
And the Swan I tempted with a sense of shame She said at last I was her finest lover And if she withered I would be to blame
William Blake’s poem “The Sick Rose” uses a similar imagery: O Rose thou art sick. The invisible worm, That flies in the night In the howling storm: Has found out thy bed Of crimson joy: And his dark secret love Does thy life destroy. Scarlet fever here obviously is a metaphor for a venereal disease. Blake’s poem, too, can be interpreted) as a veiled depiction of the threat of venereal diseases.
Leonard Cohen
The Traitor
Where the green billows play'd. And since that hour the fisherman Has toil'd and toil'd in vain; For all the night the moony light Gleams on the specter'd main! And when the skies are veil'd in gloom, The murderer's liquid way Bounds o'er the deeply yawning tomb, And flashing fires the sands illume, Where the green billows play. Full thirty years his task has been, Day after day more weary;
For Heaven design'd his guilty mind Should dwell on prospects dreary. Bound by a strong and mystic chain, He has not power to stray;
But destined misery to sustain, He wastes, in solitude and pain, A loathsome life away.
The fisherman is stuck on that beach; he is the living ghost who haunts there for his crime. He committed murder for the Spanish gold and now his guilt makes it so he cannot leave.
Mary Robinson
The Haunted Beach
The hunchback in the park A solitary mister Propped between trees and water From the opening of the garden lock That lets the trees and water enter Until the Sunday sombre bell at dark
Eating bread from a newspaper
Drinking water from the chained cup That the children filled with gravel In the fountain basin where I sailed my ship
The hunchback has the bare minimum to stay alive; bread, the cheapest staple food, and not even a plate. Newspapers are thrown away, unwanted after a day, then taken by homeless people for warmth and, in this case, to eat from. The hunchback’s diet, bread and water, is no different from that given to Victorian prisoners. The image of imprisonment and chains continues throughout the poem; this is the totality of the hunchback’s life.
Dylan Thomas
The Hunchback in the Park
I knew a simple soldier boy Who grinned at life in empty joy, Slept soundly through the lonesome dark, And whistled early with the lark. In winter trenches, cowed and glum, With crumps and lice and lack of rum,
He put a bullet through his brain.
No one spoke of him again. You smug-faced crowds with kindling eye Who cheer when soldier lads march by,
This shows the impact of war on a once innocent person and how one thing can change your whole life for better or for worse. The events that drove this young and once innocent man to his demise consisted of seeing his friends dead and the possibility of suffering the same fate himself. British Vickers machine gun crew during the Battle of Menin Road Ridge, World War I (1917). Image Credit
Siegfried Sassoon
Suicide in the Trenches
In my old torn bathrobe I'm hung over Hair down in my eyes Barefoot Gingerly walking on the Small sharp rocks In my path Still afraid of pain behind my four-day Beard The young housewife next door shakes a rug Out of her window and sees me: "hello, Hank!"
God damn! it's almost like being shot in the ass With a .22
"hello," I say Gathering up my Visa card bill, my Pennysaver coupons A Dept. of Water and Power past-due notice
His neighbor saying hello to him is annoying, Bukowski was a bit of a misanthrope
Charles Bukowski
Back to the machine gun
Somewhere or other there must surely be The face not seen, the voice not heard,
The heart that not yet--never yet--ah me!
Made answer to my word. Somewhere or other, may be near or far; Past land and sea, clean out of sight;
The speaker’s sadness is such that she is unable to complete sentences — the syntax fails and all she can do is end with the archaic lament, ‘ah me!’.
Christina Rossetti
Somewhere or Other
The word of a snail on the plate of a leaf? It is not mine. Do not accept it. Acetic acid in a sealed tin? Do not accept it. It is not genuine. A ring of gold with the sun in it? Lies. Lies and a grief.
Frost on a leaf, the immaculate Cauldron, talking and crackling All to itself on top of each Of nine black Alps.
A disturbance in mirrors, The sea shattering its grey one-- Love, love, my season.
There seems to be a sarcastic edge to these lines, conveying the sinister charm of her ex-lover, “the immaculate / Cauldron,” and mocking his self-absorbed arrogance, “All to itself on top of each / Of nine black Alps.”
Sylvia Plath
The Couriers
Cradled through England between flooded fields Rocking, rocking the rails, my head-phones on The black box of my Walkman on the table Hot tea trembles in its plastic cup I'm thinking of you waking in our bed Thinking of me on the train. Too soon to phone The radio speaks in the suburbs, in commuter towns In cars unloading children at school gates Is silenced in dark parkways down the line Before locks click and footprints track the frost And trains slide out of stations in the dawn
Dreaming their way towards the blazing bone-ship
The vodaphone you are calling May have been switched off Please call later. And calling later
This stanza is one of contrasts, the ordinary and the disturbing and unexpected. ‘Dreaming’ conveys the idea of sleepy obliviousness. The ‘blazing bone-ship’ is designed to startle the reader. It is a reference to a Viking burial ship — the connotations are of death, a rib-cage burnt bare of flesh, a conflagration. The plosive ‘b’s and hissing, sibilant 'z’ are like an assault on the ears.
Gillian Clarke
On The Train
I look at the world From awakening eyes in a black face—
And this is what I see:
This fenced-off narrow space Assigned to me. I look then at the silly walls
This line refers to what an African American see’s in the world surrounding him/her.
Langston Hughes
I Look At The World
And round about his home the glory That blushed and bloomed Is but a dim-remembered story Of the old time entombed And travellers, now, within that valley Through the red-litten windows See Vast forms, that move fantastically To a discordant melody While, like a ghastly rapid river Through the pale door A hideous throng rush out forever
And laugh — but smile no more
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Laughing seen as a sign of wickedness, madness or psychological instability as apposed to the general use of laughter telling the reader that while they seem to have gone mad, they no longer care and are perhaps embracing it. This madness comes at a price though – they will never truly be or know what it is to be happy ever again.
Edgar Allan Poe
The Haunted Palace
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There's a certain Slant of light, Winter Afternoons −
That oppresses, like the Heft Of Cathedral Tunes − Heavenly Hurt, it gives us −
Dickinson begins the poem with a sense of vagueness. Generally, “light” represents goodness and positivity within literature; however, Dickinson’s continuation of the “Winter Afternoons” brings doubt towards the tone of the poem. The image of a “Slant of light” is often used to describe religious and holy scenes, as the ray symbolizes a natural spotlight that shines through the windows of churches and chapels. By mentioning “Winter Afternoons,” Dickinson uses seasonal imagery and manipulates the associations of winter. In terms of the winter, it relates to heavy snow and chilling temperatures; in terms of emotions, it is often related to depression.
Emily Dickinson
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