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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 studde... | 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 h... | 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 spl... | 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 un... | 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 metric... | 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 nam... | 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 l... | 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... | 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... | 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 ... | 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 ot... | 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,
the... | 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 leisur... | 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. ( Fore... | 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 c... | 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 pl... | 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 lov... | 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?... | 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 actio... | 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 th... | 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 es... | 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... | 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 a... | 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” – ... | 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 wh... | 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 carr... | 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 tha... | 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 agai... | 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... | 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 dee... | 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 contenaun... | 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 characte... | 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 ca... | 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 d... | 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 felin... | 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 a... | He saw the last sea-serpent iris-mailed
Which, with a spear transfixèd, yet availed
To pluck the sun down into the dead sea. | null |
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 epil... | 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
W... | 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, D... | 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 th... | Dear God! The very houses seem asleep;
And all that mighty heart is lying still! | null | 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 me... | 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 k... | 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 ... | 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... | 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 ... | 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 ... | 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 th... | 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 h... | 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
M... | 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 ste... | 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... | Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn. | null | 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 materiali... | William Wordsworth | The world is too much with us... |
null | “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 no... | 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 co... | 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... | 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 ... | Robert Penn Warren | A Way To Love God |
null | 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 conve... | 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 ... | 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 Lil... | 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 ... | 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. ... | 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 sunles... | 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 |
null | 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 approximat... | 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... | 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... | What I can ne'er express, yet cannot all conceal. | null | 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 throu... | 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... | 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, th... | 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 ... | 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, whe... | 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 s... | 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 ... | 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 s... | 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 s... | 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... | Never such innocence again. | null | 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 dr... | 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... | 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 enlighten... | 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 ... | 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 ... | 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 bil... | 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 prisoner... | 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 c... | 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 unload... | 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.... | 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 thron... | And laugh — but smile no more | null | 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... | Edgar Allan Poe | The Haunted Palace |
null | 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 ... | Emily Dickinson | 258 |
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