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I measure every Grief I meet
With narrow, probing, eyes –
I wonder if It weighs like Mine –
Or has an Easier size.
I wonder if They bore it long –
Or did it just begin –
I could not tell the Date of Mine –
It feels so old a pain –
I wonder if it hurts to live –
And if They have to try –
And whether – could They choose between –
|
It would not be – to die –
|
I note that Some – gone patient long –
At length, renew their smile –
An imitation of a Light
|
In this stanza, Dickinson questions whether it would be more worth dying than continuing to carry your grief.
|
Emily Dickinson
|
I measure every Grief I meet 561
|
"I have no name
I am but two days old."
|
What shall I call thee?
|
"I happy am
Joy is my name."
Sweet joy befall thee!
|
The mother responds, forming an imagined dialogue, using the archaic affectionae form ‘thee’.
|
William Blake
|
Infant Joy
|
I left my place to know them by their name,
Finding them butterfly weed when I came.
The mower in the dew had loved them thus,
By leaving them to flourish, not for us,
Nor yet to draw one thought of ours to him.
But from sheer morning gladness at the brim.
The butterfly and I had lit upon,
Nevertheless, a message from the dawn,
That made me hear the wakening birds around,
And hear his long scythe whispering to the ground,
And feel a spirit kindred to my own;
So that henceforth I worked no more alone;
|
But glad with him, I worked as with his aid,
And weary, sought at noon with him the shade;
|
And dreaming, as it were, held brotherly speech
With one whose thought I had not hoped to reach.
Men work together,' I told him from the heart,
|
Felt happiness & content, in harmony with the mower emphasise the companionship of the mower – shared values etc.
|
Robert Frost
|
The Tuft of Flowers
|
My prime of youth is but a frost of cares,
My feast of joy is but a dish of pain,
My crop of corn is but a field of tares,
And all my good is but vain hope of gain.
The day is gone and I yet I saw no sun,
|
And now I live, and now my life is done.
|
The spring is past, and yet it hath not sprung,
The fruit is dead, and yet the leaves are green,
My youth is gone, and yet I am but young,
|
All three stanzas end with this refrain, a device known as epistrophe . This is the essence of the poet’s message. The oxymoron , a contradiction in terms, is rhythmic and hypnotic, gaining significance with each repetition
|
Chidiock Tichborne
|
Tichbornes Elegy
|
She must have been kicked unseen or brushed by a car.
Too young to know much, she was beginning to learn
To use the newspapers spread on the kitchen floor
And to win, wetting there, the words, "Good dog! Good dog!"
|
We thought her shy malaise was a shot reaction.
The autopsy disclosed a rupture in her liver.
As we teased her with play, blood was filling her skin
And her heart was learning to lie down forever.
|
Monday morning, as the children were noisily fed
And sent to school, she crawled beneath the youngest's bed.
We found her twisted and limp but still alive.
|
As the owner’s thought that the dog was just shy and timid, the dog was actually very sick with a failing liver. The liver was causing the dog to slowly die and whenever the owners tried to play with her she was just becoming more and more in pain as the liver was failing and the blood was starting to come from her liver. In result to her ruptured liver the dog’s heart was also starting to go causing the dog to be near death.This can be seen through the sentence “And her heart was learning to lie down forever.” This is a play on both the dog learning to lie down as her heart is also learning to lie down.
|
John Updike
|
Dogs Death
|
Whate'er is born of mortal birth
Must be consumed with the earth,
To rise from generation free:
|
Then what have I to do with thee?
|
The sexes sprung from shame and pride,
Blowed in the morn, in evening died;
But mercy changed death into sleep;
|
Blake dissociates himself from the physical world in this line. It is a rhetorical question , but the implication is negative; as if the poet is hoping for the answer ‘no and is seeking instead something beyond the physical.
|
William Blake
|
To Tirzah
|
You met him at some temple
Where they take your clothes at the door
He was just a numberless man in a chair
Who'd just come back from the war
And you wrap up his tired face in your hair
And he hands you the apple core
Then he touches your lips now so suddenly bare
Of all the kisses we put on some time before
And he gave you a German Shepherd to walk
With a collar of leather and nails
And he never once made you explain or talk
About all of the little details
|
Such as who had a word and who had a rock
|
And who had you through the mails
Now your love is a secret all over the block
And it never stops not even when your master fails
|
Can allude to lapidation (killing people by throwing stones and rocks at them) or the Biblical quote (from Matthew 7:9):
Which of you, if his son asks for bread, will give him a stone?
The word is the opposite of the rock, communication versus aggression.
|
Leonard Cohen
|
Master Song
|
Put out their Tongues, for Noon
It was not Frost, for on my Flesh
I felt Sirocos—crawl—
Nor Fire—for just my Marble feet
Could keep a Chancel, cool—
And yet, it tasted, like them all
The Figures I have seen
Set orderly, for Burial
Reminded me, of mine—
As if my life were shaven
And fitted to a frame
And could not breathe without a key
|
And 'twas like Midnight, some—
|
When everything that ticked—has stopped—
And Space stares all around—
Or Grisly frosts—first Autumn morns
|
The reference to Midnight is effective in that every reader will have their own associations. Midnight may suggest time passing, the supernatural, the awakening of ghostly spirits and, of course, death. The implication is threatening, a sinister trajectory for the speaker.
Note that this is an echo of the reference to “Noon” in stanza one. The speaker has progressed through the day, though the meaning is unclear.
Note the repetition of “And” and the beginning of three of the lines, an example of anaphora , building up tension.
The final dash forms another caesura , a pause to suggest mounting fear.
|
Emily Dickinson
|
It was not Death for I stood up 510
|
Let not young souls be smothered out before
They do quaint deeds and fully flaunt their pride.
It is the world's one crime its babes grow dull,
Its poor are ox-like, limp and leaden-eyed.
Not that they starve; but starve so dreamlessly,
Not that they sow, but that they seldom reap,
Not that they serve, but have no gods to serve,
|
Not that they die, but that they die like sheep.
| null |
Everyone dies. Some die after a fulfilling life of purpose and growth. Others simply expire after using up their usefulness, much like a farm animal blindly led to slaughter.
|
Vachel Lindsay
|
The Leaden Eyed
|
For John Callahan
Those four black girls blown up
in that Alabama church
remind me of five hundred
middle passage blacks,
in a net, under water
in Charleston harbor
so redcoats wouldn't find them.
|
Can't find what you can't see
can you?
| null |
This poem, entitled “American History,” ends with a question, which calls attention back to the title. History doesn’t end in question marks – but Harper is pointing out that American History has been whitewashed with this line.
The redcoats couldn’t find the slaves being drowned and the modern American also wouldn’t find such abhorrent acts in American History textbooks.
|
Michael S. Harper
|
American History
|
You used to smile and stroke my head,
And tell me how good children did;
But now, I wot not how it be,
You take me seldom on your knee,
Yet ne'ertheless I am right glad,
To sit beside you, Dad.
How lank and thin your beard hangs down!
Scant are the white hairs on your crown:
How wan and hollow are your cheeks,
Your brow is crossed with many streaks;
But yet although his strength be fled,
I love my own old Dad.
|
The housewives round their potions brew,
|
And gossips come to ask for you;
And for your weal each neighbour cares;
And good men kneel and say their prayers,
|
Women were described as ‘housewives’, this being their prime role. The refernce to ‘potions’ could be a sly hint at witchcraft.
|
Joanna Baillie
|
A Child To His Sick Grandfather
|
He is your field which you sow with love and reap with thanksgiving.
And he is your board and your fireside.
For you come to him with your hunger, and you seek him for peace.
When your friend speaks his mind you fear not the "nay" in your own mind, nor do you withhold the "ay."
And when he is silent your heart ceases not to listen to his heart;
For without words, in friendship, all thoughts, all desires, all expectations are born and shared, with joy that is unacclaimed.
When you part from your friend, you grieve not;
For that which you love most in him may be clearer in his absence, as the mountain to the climber is clearer from the plain.
And let there be no purpose in friendship save the deepening of the spirit.
For love that seeks aught but the disclosure of its own mystery is not love but a net cast forth: and only the unprofitable is caught.
And let your best be for your friend.
If he must know the ebb of your tide, let him know its flood also.
|
For what is your friend that you should seek him with hours to kill?
Seek him always with hours to live.
For it is his to fill your need, but not your emptiness.
|
And in the sweetness of friendship let there be laughter, and sharing of pleasures.
For in the dew of little things the heart finds its morning and is refreshed.
|
Gibran is stating that one should reserve the best for a friend. If one decides to meet with a friend while they are bored and has time to kill, that is abusing friendship and egocentric. Even if one is busy or has million of important things to do, one should make time for their dear friend. That is true friendship.
|
Kahlil Gibran
|
On Friendship
|
IV.
If I were a dead leaf thou mightest bear;
If I were a swift cloud to fly with thee;
A wave to pant beneath thy power, and share
The impulse of thy strength, only less free
Than thou, O Uncontrollable!If even
I were as in my boyhood, and could be
The comrade of thy wanderings over Heaven,
As then, when to outstrip thy skiey speed
Scarce seemed a vision; I would ne'er have striven
As thus with thee in prayer in my sore need.
Oh! lift me as a wave, a leaf, a cloud!
|
I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!
|
A heavy weight of hours has chained and bowed
One too like thee: tameless, and swift, and proud.
V.
|
This line offers an interesting juxtaposition between life, death, upsides of nature, and downsides of nature. “Thorns of life” is quite a muddled statement, especially in the context of Romanticism. Thorns are often regarded as the dark sides of beautiful flowers. Calling them the thorns “of life” gives them a special dualistic property that extends beyond their normal definition the connotations with which they come.
Shelley surrenders to the greatness of nature and accepts that he has no power over the unforgiving events of the world. He welcomes the storm of life and submits to it such that he may also be torn apart and recreated in a new form like a wave, leaf or cloud.
The final exclamatory statement, ‘I bleed’, now overtakes the invocation ‘O hear’ in the previous sections. The speaker is addressing his own troubled soul rather than the deity of the West Wind.
Bleeding from thorns could be a reference to the sacrifice of Jesus and submitting to a higher power in order to achieve a new era of brightness and peace. Here, nature is the divine power providing freedom from the pains of human life.
|
Percy Bysshe Shelley
|
Ode to the West Wind
|
Aunt Jennifer's tigers prance across a screen,
Bright topaz denizens of a world of green.
They do not fear the men beneath the tree;
They pace in sleek chivalric certainty.
Aunt Jennifer's fingers fluttering through her wool
Find even the ivory needle hard to pull.
|
The massive weight of Uncle's wedding band
|
Sits heavily upon Aunt Jennifer's hand.
When Aunt is dead, her terrified hands will lie
Still ringed with ordeals she was mastered by.
|
The wedding band is literally heavy and big.
The heaviness also seems symbolic of Uncle’s treatment toward Aunt Jennifer. He could be demanding, severe, violent, or oppressive. The speaker may not be speaking about the uncle directly but referring to Aunt Jennifer’s marriage as oppressive or suffocating.
|
Adrienne Rich
|
Aunt Jennifers Tigers
|
And oon of hem have I in remembraunce,
Whiche I shal seyn, with good-wyl, as I kan.
But sires, by cause I am a burel man,
At my bigynnyng first I yow biseche,
Have me excused of my rude speche.
I lerned nevere rethorik, certeyn;
Thyng that I speke, it moot be bare and pleyn.
I sleep nevere on the Mount of Parnaso,
Ne lerned Marcus Tullius Scithero.
Colours ne knowe I none, withouten drede,
But swiche colours as growen in the mede,
Or elles swiche, as men dye or peynte.
|
Colours of rethoryk been me to queynte,
|
My spirit feeleth noght of swich mateere;
But if yow list, my tale shul ye heere.
|
While in the lines above, the Franklin discusses colors as they would be discussed literally (for example, as they are in dye), he then switches to a metaphorical meaning. While he claims to be poor with the “colours of rethoryk,” he is in fact using language in a sophisticated way, creating a sense of irony.
|
Geoffrey Chaucer
|
The Franklins Prologue in Middle English
|
All things that pass
Are woman's looking-glass;
They show her how her bloom must fade,
And she herself be laid
With withered roses in the shade;
With withered roses and the fallen peach,
Unlovely, out of reach
Of summer joy that was.
All things that pass
Are woman's tiring-glass;
|
The faded lavender is sweet,
|
Sweet the dead violet
Culled and laid by and cared for yet;
The dried-up violets and dried lavender
|
Note that lavender symbolises maturity, grace and elegance. So this line is saying that, even if faded, the lavender has positive attributes.
The repetition of ‘sweet’ at the end of one clause and the beginning of the next is a device known as anadiplosis . The effect is to build drama.
|
Christina Rossetti
|
Passing And Glassing
|
Di'n' I tell you th'ee las' night?
Go 'way, honey, you ain't right.
I got somep'n' else to do,
'Cides jes' tellin' tales to you.
Tell you jes' one? Lem me see
Whut dat one's a-gwine to be.
When you 's ole, yo membry fails;
Seems lak I do' know no tales.
Well, set down dah in dat cheer,
Keep still ef you wants to hyeah.
Tek dat chin up off yo' han's,
Set up nice now. Goodness lan's!
|
Hol' yo'se'f up lak yo' pa.
Bet nobidy evah saw
Him scrunched down lak you was den--
High-tone boys meks high-tone men.
|
Once dey was a ole black bah,
Used to live 'roun' hyeah some whah
In a cave. He was so big
|
He is signifying that the boy is young by telling him to sit up in his chair like a man. Younger children often think of their father as their hero, so the narrator coaxes the boy into sitting up straight by telling him that his father would never slouch.
|
Paul Laurence Dunbar
|
A Cabin Tale
|
Softly, in the dusk, a woman is singing to me;
Taking me back down the vista of years, till I see
A child sitting under the piano, in the boom of the tingling strings
And pressing the small, poised feet of a mother who smiles as she sings
In spite of myself, the insidious mastery of song
Betrays me back, till the heart of me weeps to belong
To the old Sunday evenings at home, with winter outside
|
And hymns in the cosy parlour, the tinkling piano our guide
|
So now it is vain for the singer to burst into clamour
With the great black piano appassionato. The glamour
Of childish days is upon me, my manhood is cast
|
The piano of his memory is an object of cohesion, bringing the family together, and is also a metaphor for the ‘guidance’ his mother gave to the family.
It is interesting that there is a contrast between the passion of the piano-playing of the woman in the present — representing the poet’s adult relationship and sexuality — and the mild-sounding ‘tinkling’ of the piano in his memory. Yet for the poet it is the latter that has the greatest strength.
This may indicate Lawrence’s failure to properly mature as a man. Lawrence’s semi-autobiographical novel – ‘Sons and Lovers’ – provides a good contextual link which validates this idea of maturation and its issues.
|
D. H. Lawrence
|
Piano
|
null |
Remember Thee! Remember Thee!
|
1.
Remember thee! remember thee!
Till Lethe quench life's burning stream
|
“The sequel of a temporary liaison formed by Lord Byron during his career in London, occasioned this impromptu. On the cessation of the connection, the fair one [Lady C. Lamb: see Letters, 1898, ii. 451] called one morning at her quondam lover’s apartments. His Lordship was from home; but finding Vathek on the table, the lady wrote in the first page of the volume the words, "Remember me!” Byron immediately wrote under the ominous warning these two stanzas.“ — Conversations of Lord Byron by Thomas Medwin, 1824, pp. 329, 330.
In Medwin’s work the euphemisms false and fiend are represented by asterisks.
|
Lord Byron
|
Remember Thee Remember Thee
|
5) It is not remembered. Remember
Most were peasants; their life
Was in rice and bamboo
When peaceful clouds were reflected in the paddies
And the water buffalo stepped surely along terraces
Maybe fathers told their sons old tales
When bombs smashed those mirrors
There was time only to scream
6) There is an echo yet
Of their speech which was like a song
It was reported their singing resembled
The flight of moths in moonlight
|
Who can say? It is silent now
| null |
The poet finishes with a rhetorical question which she answers herself, a device known as hypophora . The answer, however, is a non-answer because there is none. The silence has obliterated all answers to the conflict in Vietnam and to conflicts worldwide.
The end is neither shocking nor lyrical, but abrupt and final. The reader is left to contemplate the horrific implications.
|
Denise Levertov
|
What Were They Like
|
The great Overdog
That heavenly beast
With a star in one eye
|
Gives a leap in the east.
He dances upright
All the way to the west
|
And never once drops
On his forefeet to rest.
I'm a poor underdog,
|
This literally refers to the travel of the constellation from East to West throughout the night as it rises and sets. Figuratively, it refers to the passage of time from birth to death.
|
Robert Frost
|
Canis Major
|
The autumn moved across your skin
Got something in my eye
A light that doesn't need to live
And doesn't need to die
A riddle in the book of love
Obscure and obsolete
To witness tear and time and blood
A thousand kisses deep
And I'm still working with the wine
Still dancing cheek to cheek
The band is playing Auld Lang Syne
But the heart will not retreat
|
I ran with Dez, I sang with Ray
|
I never had their sweep
But once or twice they let me play
A thousand kisses deep
|
Leonard Cohen never sang with Ray but he admired him:
I love Ray Charles. He’s who the people have been hunting for, who people have always been worshiped – mot because of his faith but because he reaches their thoughts and hearts, and that is exactly the kind of singer I would like to be.
From ”En tunne vanhenevani lainkaan” – Leonard Cohen Soundissa 1976
|
Leonard Cohen
|
A Thousand Kisses Deep - Recitation w/ N.L. Live in London
|
In the forests of the night:
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?
In what distant deeps or skies
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand dare seize the fire?
And what shoulder, and what art
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
And when thy heart began to beat
What dread hand? & what dread feet?
What the hammer? what the chain?
|
In what furnace was thy brain?
|
What the anvil? What dread grasp
Dare its deadly terrors clasp?
When the stars threw down their spears
|
This section of the poem is clearly referring to God as a blacksmith. In forges, the furnace is generally used to heat up metal before shaping it into weapons or tools. It would have taken an extraordinary sort of forge to have fired into existence something as fearsome as the tyger.
Blake makes a connection between Satan and God. The free-willed brain was made in the furnace; which has an obvious resemblance to hell.
|
William Blake
|
The Tyger
|
Oh, give us pleasure in the flowers to-day;
And give us not to think so far away
|
As the uncertain harvest; keep us here
All simply in the springing of the year.
|
Oh, give us pleasure in the orchard white,
Like nothing else by day, like ghosts by night;
And make us happy in the happy bees,
|
Frost is describing how the “uncertain harvest” alludes to life. How waiting and being patient like how a harvest moon will illuminate through the night which allows you to work and make life springing towards something new and improved.
|
Robert Frost
|
A Prayer in Spring
|
I could hardly speak.
I thought every German was you.
And the language obscene,
An engine, an engine
Chuffing me off like a Jew,
A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen.
I began to talk like a Jew.
I think I may well be a Jew.
The snows of the Tyrol, the clear beer of Vienna,
Are not very pure or true.
With my gipsy ancestress and my weird luck
And my Taroc pack and my Taroc pack
|
I may be a bit of a Jew.
|
I have always been scared of you.
With your Luftwaffe, your gobbledygoo.
And your neat mustache
|
Aligns her father, through his Teutonic roots, with the Nazis and through that metaphor explains her fear of him.
|
Sylvia Plath
|
Daddy
|
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,
|
It seems as though the speaker, full of dread and despair, confronts her approaching motherhood.
One would think that incense could also be used to make one’s room or home smell good.
In this instance, it implicates eager expectations of Sylvia having a child.
This line also hints at memories of death of her deceased father.
|
Sylvia Plath
|
The Manor Garden
|
And pearl and crystal shining bright
And within it opens into a world
And a little lovely moony night
Another England there I saw
Another London with its Tower
Another Thames and other hills
And another pleasant Surrey bower
Another Maiden like herself,
Translucent, lovely, shining clear
Threefold each in the other clos'd
O, what a pleasant trembling fear!
O, what a smile! a threefold smile
|
Fill'd me, that like a flame I burn'd
|
I bent to kiss the lovely Maid
And found a threefold kiss return'd
I strove to seize the inmost form
|
The speaker’s desire is only realized (“like a flame”) and not yet actualized (“hands of flame”).
|
William Blake
|
The Crystal Cabinet
|
null |
The land was ours before we were the land's.
She was our land more than a hundred years
Before we were her people. She was ours
|
In Massachusetts, in Virginia,
But we were England's, still colonials,
Possessing what we still were unpossessed by,
|
From one perspective, this poem may seem to be nothing more than a triumphantly patriotic work; Frost himself once compared it to “The Star-Spangled Banner.” The colonists in America initially struggled to become one with the land because of their ties to England. As years passed, however, they were able to build a commitment to the land and establish their identities as Americans because of their efforts to build a land that was not based on the traditions of Europe. In this way, the poem can be read as Frost’s personal celebration of manifest destiny.
|
Robert Frost
|
The Gift Outright
|
L said, “A Lamp pray keep alight, to make some barley tea.”
M said, “A Mulberry or two might give him satisfaction.”
N said, “Some Nuts, if rolled about, might be a slight attraction.”
O said, “An Owl might make him laugh, if only it would wink.”
P said, “Some Poetry might be read aloud, to make him think.”
Q said, “A Quince I recommend,—A Quince, or else a Quail.”
R said, “Some Rats might make him move, if fastened by their tail.”
S said, “A Song should now be sung, in hopes to make him laugh!”
T said, “A Turnip might avail, if sliced or cut in half.”
U said, “An Urn, with water hot, place underneath his chin!”
V said, “I'll stand upon a chair, and play a Violin!”
W said, “Some Whiskey-Whizzgigs fetch, some marbles and a ball!”
|
X said, “Some double XX ale would be the best of all!”
|
Y said, “Some Yeast mised up with salt would make a perfect plaster!”
Z said, “Here is a box of Zinc! Get in my little master!
We'll shut you up! We'll nail you down!
|
Likely a reference to the old-fashioned practice of designating beer X, XX, or XXX according to its alcohol content.
Nothing to do with Dos Equis beer, first brewed in 1897, 9 years after Lear’s death. (The name was a reference to the coming twentieth–XX–century.)
|
Edward Lear
|
Alphabet Poem A tumbled down...
|
The lights jig in the river
With a concertina movement
And the sun comes up in the morning
Like barley-sugar on the water
And the mist on the Wicklow hills
Is close, as close
As the peasantry were to the landlord,
As the Irish to the Anglo-Irish,
As the killer is close one moment
To the man he kills,
Or as the moment itself
Is close to the next moment.
|
She is not an Irish town
And she is not English,
|
Historic with guns and vermin
And the cold renown
Of a fragment of Church latin,
|
For a long period of its history Dublin was the seat of English rule in Ireland, so English influence is felt keenly. However, English identity did not take deep enough root for its natives to be defined by it.
|
Louis MacNeice
|
Dublin
|
Is the million-coloured bow;
The sphere-fire above its soft colours wove,
While the moist Earth was laughing below.
I am the daughter of Earth and Water,
And the nursling of the Sky;
I pass through the pores of the ocean and shores;
I change, but I cannot die.
For after the rain when with never a stain
The pavilion of Heaven is bare,
And the winds and sunbeams with their convex gleams
Build up the blue dome of air,
I silently laugh at my own cenotaph,
|
And out of the caverns of rain,
|
Like a child from the womb, like a ghost from the tomb,
I arise and unbuild it again.
|
The ‘caverns of rain’ may need interpreting. It seems like a contradiction in terms; a cavern is an enclosed space and rain falls in the open air. However, this cavern seems to incubate the cloud and instead the rain falls in an enclosed womb-like space. Yet, this enables it to “arise and unbuild it again”, so the cyclical process continues. The poem is built of contrasts and opposites.
|
Percy Bysshe Shelley
|
The Cloud
|
Remember me when I am gone away,
Gone far away into the silent land;
When you can no more hold me by the hand,
Nor I half turn to go yet turning stay.
Remember me when no more, day by day,
You tell me of our future that you planned:
Only remember me; you understand
|
It will be late to counsel then or pray.
|
Yet if you should forget me for a while
And afterwards remember, do not grieve:
For if the darkness and corruption leave
|
The use of ‘counsel’ and ‘pray’ suggests a spiritual connection between speaker and listener, implying that the listener is concerned for the state of the speaker’s soul.
The claim that after death it will be ‘late’ to pray indicates that the speaker just wants to be remembered. Note that she does not share John Newman’s belief in the validity of prayers for the dead. So after death the spiritual fate of the departed is sealed. The Anglican Church did not encourage praying for the dead so she may be expressing this. Rossetti was a High Anglican, and this fits her beliefs.
|
Christina Rossetti
|
Remember
|
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
|
At its foundation, the song, rather poem, is critical of the vast sum of money given to NASA’s scientific exploration and ambition of getting Whitey – the crew of the Apollo 11 who are white – to the Moon, while there exist problems on Earth related to the financial burdens of black Americans. More specifically, the most significant problems relating to the speaker are about housing, medical expenses, and allocation of tax dollars, all which are overlooked by the popularity of the Space Race.
|
Gil Scott-Heron
|
Whitey on the Moon
|
Grey brick upon brick,
|
Declamatory bronze
On somber pedestals -
|
O'Connell, Grattan, Moore -
And the brewery tugs and the swans
On the balustraded stream
|
Statues of important historical figures abound on Dublin’s streets. They give us various insights into its rich and often contradictory cultural heritage.
|
Louis MacNeice
|
Dublin
|
I never saw a wild thing
sorry for itself.
|
A small bird will drop frozen dead from a bough
without ever having felt sorry for itself.
| null |
This is reminiscent of what Jesus said in his Sermon on the Mount:
Behold the fowls of the air: for they sow not, neither do they reap, nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feedeth them. Are ye not much better than they? – Matthew 6:26, KJV
If Lawrence’s imagery serves the same purpose of that of Jesus, this sentence asks the question: if a bird will live and die without self-pity, why should we humans, supposedly more intelligent and capable, feel sorry for ourselves?
The cold imagery of death invoked here ( dropped frozen dead from a bough ) is parallel to Lawrence’s own circumstances – he was a very ill person throughout his life, dying of tuberculosis at the age of 44. Yet he was very industrious and prolific in his work – he probably didn’t let self-pity get in the way of being an accomplished writer and academic.
Maybe having some amount of self-pity is unavoidable for humans. Having the so-called higher-order emotions comes at the price of envying the freedom the wild things have from these feelings that hold us back.
|
D. H. Lawrence
|
Self-Pity
|
I have been one acquainted with the night.
I have walked out in rain—and back in rain.
I have outwalked the furthest city light.
I have looked down the saddest city lane.
I have passed by the watchman on his beat
And dropped my eyes, unwilling to explain.
I have stood still and stopped the sound of feet
When far away an interrupted cry
Came over houses from another street
But not to call me back or say good-bye;
And further still at an unearthly height
|
One luminary clock against the sky
|
Proclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right.
I have been one acquainted with the night.
|
Is this a literal clock, or a metaphor for the full moon? Critics have debated the point extensively, but Frost is now “acquainted with the night” as in “dead,” so we’ll never know for sure.
ACCEPTED COMMENT: Many have also thought that the “luminary clock” was referring to the Big Ben in London, the largest city in England, as Robert Frost spent a few years living in England. He wrote and published many poems while there, such as “The Road Not Taken”.
|
Robert Frost
|
Acquainted with the Night
|
And that his reactions to advertisements were normal in every way.
Policies taken out in his name prove that he was fully insured,
And his Health-card shows that he was once in hospital but left it cured.
Both Producers Research and High--Grade Living declare
He was fully sensible to the advantages of the Installment Plan
And had everything necessary to the Modern Man,
A phonograph, a radio, a car and a Frigidaire.
Our researchers into Public Opinion are content
That he held the proper opinions for the time of the year;
When there was peace he was for peace; when there was war he went.
He was married and added five children to the population,
which our Eugenist says was the right number for a parent of his generation,
|
And our teachers report he never interfered with their education.
|
Was he free? Was he happy? The question is absurd:
Had anything been wrong, we should certainly have heard.
|
Notice how the speaker calls them ‘'our’‘ teachers and not ’‘theirs’‘.
The speaker implies the unknown citizen was a good parent since he never ‘'interfered’‘ with the education. This basically means that the control of the education was left in the state’s hands, and this is something they value. Giving the state (or government) control of the kids education allows for the government to further breed “unknown citizens.”
|
W. H. Auden
|
The Unknown Citizen
|
With a fine-tooth comb.
She didn't leave a tangle in.
Her comb found every strand.
Sadie was one of the livingest chits
In all the land.
Sadie bore two babies
Under her maiden name.
Maud and Ma and Papa
Nearly died of shame.
Everyone but Sadie
Nearly died of shame.
When Sadie said her last so-long
|
Her girls struck out from home.
|
(Sadie had left as heritage
Her fine-tooth comb.)
Maud, who went to college,
|
Once again, Sadie’s children draw a parallel between Sadie and Maud. Only this time, both children leave home. In this instance, it is clear that there is no compromise to be had, both leave home (perhaps to go to college) but retain their mother’s independent or hardy traits.
|
Gwendolyn Brooks
|
Sadie and Maud
|
Tremors of your network
cause kings to disappear.
Your open mouth in anger
makes nations bow in fear.
Your bombs can change the seasons,
obliterate the spring.
|
What more do you long for?
|
Why are you suffering?
You control the human lives
in Rome and Timbuktu.
|
Why would people in this world want to see people get hurt and die? Why would they want these terrible situations to happen, sometimes to people they consider brothers.
|
Maya Angelou
|
These Yet to be United States
|
When the voices of children are heard on the green,
And whisperings are in the dale,
The days of my youth rise fresh in my mind,
|
My face turns green and pale.
|
Then come home, my children, the sun is gone down,
And the dews of night arise;
Your spring and your day are wasted in play,
|
Ah, jealousy! Her face is green with envy—she wishes she could be in their position.
|
William Blake
|
Nurses Song Songs of Experience
|
null |
I am not resigned to the shutting away of loving hearts in the hard ground.
|
So it is, and so it will be, for so it has been, time out of mind:
Into the darkness they go, the wise and the lovely. Crowned
With lilies and with laurel they go; but I am not resigned.
|
“I am not resigned” becomes a kind of insistent refrain (repeated tag phrase) throughout the poem.
Millay sets the poem up as an elegy, or lament, not for one dead person in particular but for the cruel destructiveness of death in general.
|
Edna St. Vincent Millay
|
Dirge Without Music
|
They gave us
Pieces of silver and pieces of gold
Tell me,
Who'll pay reparations on my soul?
Many fine speeches (oh yeah)
From the White House desk (uh huh)
Written on the cue cards
That were never really there
Yes, but the heat and the summer were there
And the freezing winter's cold
Now tell me,
Who'll pay reparations on my soul?
|
Call my brother a junkie cause he ain't got no job (no job, no job)
Told my old man to leave me when times got hard (so hard)
Told my mother she got to carry me all by herself
|
And now that I want to be a man (be a man) who can depend on no one else (oh yeah)
What about the red man
Who met you at the coast?
|
This illustrates the dysfunctional family scenario common in families of Black and Third World people in Amerika. While unemployment and fatherless homes are viewed by some as stereotypes of Blacks in Amerika, the reality is that Amerika and its methods of racial oppression caused this problem.
This is similar to the concept of how even after the oppressors are not seen in the community, the victims of oppression still carry a violent, self-hating mentality, depicted in the above photo, as a white man forces a Black man to whip another Black man.
|
Gil Scott-Heron
|
Wholl Pay Reparations on My Soul?
|
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;
|
In these lines Wordsworth praises the union of man-made structures in the presence of natural phenomena. Though Wordsworth is traditionally regarded as “the Nature Poet” it was his goal not to solely praise nature but also explore how the passions of men could be incorporated into a natural world. Here Wordsworth reflects on the beauty of such an incorporation as the architecture of the buildings compliments the natural skyline.
There is a rhythmic balance to this line that characterises Wordsworth’s style in this poem.
|
William Wordsworth
|
Composed upon Westminster Bridge September 3 1802
|
Law 29. Plan All The Way To The End
Law 30. Make Your Accomplishments Seem Effortless
Law 31. Control The Options: Get Others To Play With The Cards You Deal
Law 32. Play To People's Fantasies
Law 33. Discover Each Man's Thumbscrew
Law 34. Be Royal In Your Own Fashion: Act Like A King To Be Treated like One
Law 35. Master The Art Of Timing
Law 36. Disdain Things You Cannot Have: Ignoring Them Is The Best Revenge
Law 37. Create Compelling Spectacles
Law 38. Disdain Things You Cannot Have: Ignoring Them Is The Best Revenge
Law 39. Stir Up Waters To Catch Fish
Law 40. Despise The Free Lunch
|
Law 41. Avoid Stepping Into A Great Man's Shoes
|
Law 42. Strike The Shepherd And The Sheep Will Scatter
Law 43. Work On The Hearts And Minds Of Others
Law 44. Disarm And Infuriate With The Mirror Effect
|
“What happens first always appears better and more original than what comes after. If you succeed a great man or have a famous parent, you will have to accomplish double their achievements to outshine them. Do not get lost in their shadow, or stuck in a past not of your own making: Establish your own name and identity by changing course. Slay the overbearing father, disparage his legacy, and gain power by shining in your own way.”
|
Robert Greene
|
48 Laws of Power
|
Claude has been dead a long time
And apostrophes are forbidden on the funicular.
Marx has ruined Nature,
For the moment.
For myself, I live by leaves,
So that corridors of clouds,
Corridors of cloudy thoughts,
Seem pretty much one:
I don't know what.
But in Claude how near one was
(In a world that is resting on pillars,
That was seen through arches)
|
To the central composition,
The essential theme.
What composition is there in all this:
|
Stockholm slender in a slender light,
And Adriatic riva rising,
Statues and stars,
|
In spite of Claude’s Baroque trappings, nature is still a genuine focal point, the “essential theme,” of the art.
|
Wallace Stevens
|
Botanist on Alp No. 1
|
Law 27. Play On People's Need To Believe To Create A Cultlike Following
Law 28. Enter Action With Boldness
Law 29. Plan All The Way To The End
Law 30. Make Your Accomplishments Seem Effortless
Law 31. Control The Options: Get Others To Play With The Cards You Deal
Law 32. Play To People's Fantasies
Law 33. Discover Each Man's Thumbscrew
Law 34. Be Royal In Your Own Fashion: Act Like A King To Be Treated like One
Law 35. Master The Art Of Timing
Law 36. Disdain Things You Cannot Have: Ignoring Them Is The Best Revenge
Law 37. Create Compelling Spectacles
Law 38. Disdain Things You Cannot Have: Ignoring Them Is The Best Revenge
|
Law 39. Stir Up Waters To Catch Fish
|
Law 40. Despise The Free Lunch
Law 41. Avoid Stepping Into A Great Man's Shoes
Law 42. Strike The Shepherd And The Sheep Will Scatter
|
“Anger and emotion are strategically counterproductive. You must always stay calm and objective. But if you can make your enemies angry while staying calm yourself, you gain a decided advantage. Put your enemies off-balance: Find the chink in their vanity through which you can rattle them and you hold the strings.”
|
Robert Greene
|
48 Laws of Power
|
null |
My candle burns at both ends;
It will not last the night;
|
But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends—
It gives a lovely light!
|
“Burning the candle at both ends” has become a proverbial expression thanks to this poem. It’s a metaphor for overextending yourself–pushing yourself past your limits, whether through work or play. Whatever the narrator is doing to herself is so unsustainable, she will soon give out.
|
Edna St. Vincent Millay
|
First Fig My candle burns at both ends...
|
It sifts from Leaden Sieves -
It powders all the Wood
It fills with Alabaster Wool
The Wrinkles of the Road -
It makes an Even Face
Of Mountain, and of Plain -
Unbroken Forehead from the East
Unto the East again -
It reaches to the Fence -
|
It wraps it Rail by Rail
|
Till it is lost in Fleeces -
It deals Celestial Veil
To Stump, and Stack - and Stem -
|
The snow covers the fence rails. Dickinson lived in Amherst, Massachusetts, which (like most of 19th-century America) was a farming community – so, plenty of fences, plenty of rails .
|
Emily Dickinson
|
It sifts from Leaden Sieves - 311
|
Has passed away
Or what is yet to be
Yeah the wars they will
Be fought again
The holy dove
She will be caught again
Bought and sold
And bought again
The dove is never free
Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack, a crack in everything
|
That's how the light gets in
|
We asked for signs
The signs were sent:
The birth betrayed
|
There is an intertext between this line and the verse from the 13th century Persian poet Jalaluddin Rumi which runs:
I said: what about my eyes? God said: Keep them on the road. I said: what about my passion? God said: Keep it burning. I said: what about my heart? God said: Tell me what you hold inside it? I said: pain and sorrow? He said: Stay with it. The wound is the place where the Light enters you.
Cohen was a great admirer of Rumi’s poetry .
|
Leonard Cohen
|
Anthem
|
There sat down, once, a thing on Henry's heart
só heavy, if he had a hundred years
& more, & weeping, sleepless, in all them time
Henry could not make good.
Starts again always in Henry's ears
the little cough somewhere, an odour, a chime.
|
And there is another thing he has in mind
|
like a grave Sienese face a thousand years
would fail to blur the still profiled reproach of. Ghastly,
with open eyes, he attends, blind.
|
Berryman is referring to another event in his life that has left him so bitter and full of grief. This would be when his wife left him.
|
John Berryman
|
Dream Song 29
|
The Thames nocturne of blue and gold
|
Changed to a Harmony in grey:
|
A barge with ochre-coloured hay
Dropt from the wharf: and chill and cold
The yellow fog came creeping down
|
This is another reference to one of Whistler’s paintings–this time, being his Harmony in Grey–Chelsea in Ice :
Most of Whistler’s poems were highly inspired by music, and therefore titled with “Harmony”, “Nocturne”, or “Symphony”.
|
Oscar Wilde
|
Impression Du Matin
|
Shut, too, in a tower of words, I mark
On the horizon walking like the trees
The wordy shapes of women, and the rows
Of the star-gestured children in the park.
Some let me make you of the vowelled beeches,
Some of the oaken voices, from the roots
Of many a thorny shire tell you notes,
Some let me make you of the water's speeches.
Behind a pot of ferns the wagging clock
Tells me the hour's word, the neural meaning
Flies on the shafted disk, declaims the morning
And tells the windy weather in the cock.
|
Some let me make you of the meadow's signs;
|
The signal grass that tells me all I know
Breaks with the wormy winter through the eye.
Some let me tell you of the raven's sins.
|
Thomas' drafts of his poems often feature, in their early stages, marginal glossaries, lists of words which he is debating using in the place of others. (for more on this see Ackerman’s Dylan Thomas: His Life and Work )
Supposing he had as options ‘glade’s’ and ‘lores’ for ‘meadow’s’ & ‘signs’, respectively: why should he have chosen the words he did? For alliteration & assonance, as signified by bold and italics , thus:
S o m e l e t m e m ake you of the m ea dow’s s igns
|
Dylan Thomas
|
Especially when the October wind
|
null |
The rent man knocked.
He said, Howdy-do?
|
I said, What
Can I do for you?
He said, You know
|
Living in certain conditions can force someone to know exactly when the rent is due, so the narrator likely already knows that the landlord is at the door as soon as he knocks.
|
Langston Hughes
|
Madam and The Rent Man
|
There's rats in the cellar,
And the attic leaks.
He said, Madam,
It's not up to me.
I'm just the agent,
Don't you see?
I said, Naturally,
You pass the buck.
If it's money you want
You're out of luck.
He said, Madam,
I ain't pleased!
|
I said, Neither am I.
So we agrees!
| null |
The speaker points out that they have something in common since they are both displeased. They also point out that there is no moving forward until either party gets what they want.
|
Langston Hughes
|
Madam and The Rent Man
|
Another London with its Tower
Another Thames and other hills
And another pleasant Surrey bower
Another Maiden like herself,
Translucent, lovely, shining clear
Threefold each in the other clos'd
O, what a pleasant trembling fear!
O, what a smile! a threefold smile
Fill'd me, that like a flame I burn'd
I bent to kiss the lovely Maid
And found a threefold kiss return'd
I strove to seize the inmost form
|
With ardor fierce and hands of flame
But burst the Crystal Cabinet
|
And like a weeping Babe became
A weeping Babe upon the wild
And weeping Woman pale reclin'd
|
The speaker is now filled with fire and passion that breaks the crystal cabinet, symbolically breaking the maiden’s hold on him, setting him free back into the wild.
|
William Blake
|
The Crystal Cabinet
|
More than I, if truth were told,
Have stood and sweated hot and cold,
And through their reins in ice and fire
Fear contended with desire.
Agued once like me were they,
But I like them shall win my way
Lastly to the bed of mould
Where there's neither heat nor cold.
But from my grave across my brow
Plays no wind of healing now,
|
And fire and ice within me fight
|
Beneath the suffocating night.
|
See also Robert Frost’s Fire and Ice , about the fight between fear and desire on a grander scale.
|
A. E. Housman
|
Others I am not the first
|
We slowly drove – He knew no haste
And I had put away
My labor and my leisure too
For His Civility –
We passed the School, where Children strove
At Recess – in the Ring –
We passed the Fields of Gazing Grain –
We passed the Setting Sun –
Or rather – He passed us –
The Dews drew quivering and chill –
For only Gossamer, my Gown –
My Tippet – only Tulle –
|
We paused before a House that seemed
A Swelling of the Ground –
The Roof was scarcely visible –
The Cornice – in the Ground –
|
Since then – 'tis Centuries – and yet
Feels shorter than the Day
I first surmised the Horses' Heads
|
This description of the house can be deemed as something deeper than just a house but more of a grave. A house a permanent dwelling space for people when they are living and when they die a grave becomes their permanent dwelling space. The speaker describes the house as a swelling of the ground which parallels to that of a grave when you die you are buried in the ground.
|
Emily Dickinson
|
Because I Could Not Stop for Death
|
She said "No you cannot see
My naked body"
So we're dancing close, the band is playing Stardust
The balloons and paper streamers they're floating down on us
She says, "You've got a minute left to fall in love"
In solemn moments such as this I have put my trust
And all my faith to see
I said all my faith to see
I said all my faith to see
Her naked body
Naked body
All my faith...
|
(...you cheated you lied)
| null |
A brief allusion to The Shields' “ You Cheated ” can be heard in the outro.
(via 1heckofaguy ) From Editor’s note from The New Inquiry Magazine, No. 9: Concept Album:
“You cheated, you lied; you cheated, you lied,” sings Leonard Cohen, almost inaudibly, over the long fade of “Memories,” a characteristically ambivalent track from his shambolic 1973 album Death of a Ladies Man. These lines, lifted from a canonical doo-wop hit, are ostensibly directed at a high school flame, two-and-a-half decades after the fact, for failing to be true. The wounds over the furtive, frustrating efforts to achieve some sort of sublime contact at a high school dance remain fresh for the man in his 40s singing the song. But he might just as well be singing about old songs themselves, the ones that promised more than he ended up getting. His jaded disappointment can’t fully conceal how stunned he continues to be that the yearning so palpable in love songs never quite translated into a lasting unity, that listening to those songs yields only a fleeting connection that’s already dissolving into a dubious memory before the record ends.
|
Leonard Cohen
|
Memories
|
Two crownèd Kings, and One that stood alone
With no green weight of laurels round his head,
|
But with sad eyes as one uncomforted,
|
And wearied with man's never-ceasing moan
For sins no bleating victim can atone,
And sweet long lips with tears and kisses fed.
|
Even in modern society, the ones who lose tend to be the ones who suffer the most. In this poem, this is the case, too.
|
Oscar Wilde
|
A Vision
|
And I don't know whether to live or die
I kept my love for her locked deep inside
It cuts like a knife
She's out of my life
Out of my life, out of my hair
Out of my mind, there's no love in there
I move on, move on
Dear God, I wasn't breast fed
And most of my conversations with men seem to revolve around music
I'm no musician but the pain has been instrumental
My sense finally tune the instruments of - of - of
Of being lonely, of being lost, of being loved, of being human
|
Man I could use a metaphor but I can't get beyond this shit
|
I could use someone to talk to
But most of my conversations with men seem to revolve around music
I am a poet who composes what the world proses
|
Saul, ordinarily great with words, can’t find a good metaphor to describe his feelings right now. This shows how shaken he is.
|
Saul Williams
|
Fearless
|
But for him it was his last afternoon as himself,
An afternoon of nurses and rumours;
The provinces of his body revolted,
The squares of his mind were empty,
Silence invaded the suburbs,
The current of his feeling failed; he became his admirers.
Now he is scattered among a hundred cities
And wholly given over to unfamiliar affections,
To find his happiness in another kind of wood
And be punished under a foreign code of conscience.
The words of a dead man
Are modified in the guts of the living.
|
But in the importance and noise of to-morrow
|
When the brokers are roaring like beasts on the floor of the Bourse,
And the poor have the sufferings to which they are fairly accustomed,
And each in the cell of himself is almost convinced of his freedom,
|
Though a few will remember the day of Yeats death and find it significant, life goes on as normal: As scholar James Sucon writes, “These two elements—the poet’s death as national and natural crisis and the poet’s death as almost completely insignificant—describe a tension within which Auden explores the life of the work after the death of the author.”
|
W. H. Auden
|
In Memory of W. B. Yeats
|
So that each March I may gleam into leaf,
Nor am I the beauty of a garden bed
Attracting my share of Ahs and spectacularly painted,
Unknowing I must soon unpetal.
Compared with me, a tree is immortal
And a flower-head not tall, but more startling,
And I want the one's longevity and the other's daring.
Tonight, in the infinitesimal light of the stars,
The trees and the flowers have been strewing their cool odors.
I walk among them, but none of them are noticing.
Sometimes I think that when I am sleeping
I must most perfectly resemble them --
|
Thoughts gone dim.
|
It is more natural to me, lying down.
Then the sky and I are in open conversation,
And I shall be useful when I lie down finally:
|
We don’t “think” as consciously when we’re asleep– Plat suggests that this is a more direct pathway to the sentience of plants.
|
Sylvia Plath
|
I Am Vertical
|
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
in silence and tranquillity:
|
For his hand, though heavy and hard, is guided by
the tender hand of the Unseen,
And the cup he brings, though it burn your lips, has
|
Again, allow yourself to fully feel your pain, don’t shy away from it: experience it and move on. Trust the doctor who can heal your wounds. Trust your own soul .
One of my favorite rock bands, Weatherbox , wrote a beautiful set of lines at the end of their song suite “Tripping The Life Fantastic.”
Oh, to understand You must spend time alone To comprehend You must spend time alone To be together We must spend time alone
And I am the only thing that’s controlling My functions, my habits, and hands… We’ve become breathlessly dark And we’re coming up for light
Those lines speak to Kahlil’s intent. You need to realize that you are, to use William Ernest Henley ’s words, “the captain of your soul.” If you need time alone to listen to your instincts, then so be it: seclusion and silence have been tricks of the trade in every religion for thousands of years.
|
Kahlil Gibran
|
On Pain
|
They sentenced me to twenty years of boredom
For tryin' to change the system from within
I'm coming now, I'm coming to reward them
|
First we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin
|
I'm guided by a signal in the heavens
I'm guided by this birthmark on my skin
I'm guided by the beauty of our weapons
|
Leonard Cohen is drawing a parallel here between Berlin and Manhattan, and since he’s writing about “taking” Berlin, we can assume he means the communist East (as it was back then).
He’s suggesting that control systems are in place in Manhattan that are very different, but just as effective, strict (and restrictive) as those of Berlin, e.g. the near-fascistic nature of the fashion industry (you must be wearing this season’s trends, you must be a size zero, you must have this particular facial bone structure this year); the increasingly pernicious influence of mass media, and the gradual but inevitable appearance and growth of totalitarian traits in our governments as they take ever bolder strides towards the right.
In short, although we in the west consider ourselves enlightened and free, we are subject to the same levels of control as somewhere like East Berlin. These control systems are just as strong (albeit at differing degrees of subtlety depending on our individual levels of intelligence and perceptiveness – but you can be sure that they’re there) and just as effective – if not more so, for many of us are made to be “happy in our servitude”.
So before we go looking to free others, first we must free ourselves, or else we will simply free others into a more elaborate and less visible prison.
|
Leonard Cohen
|
First We Take Manhattan
|
I remember rooms that have had their part
In the steady slowing down of the heart.
The room in Paris, the room at Geneva,
The little damp room with the seaweed smell,
And that ceaseless maddening sound of the tide—
Rooms where for good or for ill—things died.
|
But there is the room where we (two) lie dead,
|
Though every morning we seem to wake and might just as well seem to sleep again
As we shall somewhere in the other quieter, dustier bed
Out there in the sun—in the rain.
|
The poet moves to something more precise and personal, though we still are not told the identities of ‘we two’. It is also not clear why they ‘lie dead’ while at the same time come alive again in the next line. It could be that the poet is now projecting her thoughts forward to the end of life.
The mood, though, is oddly and indefinably peaceful. It doesn’t seem as if the speaker is regretting this future or present death.
|
Charlotte Mew
|
Rooms
|
Now it is almost night, from the bronzey soft sky
jugfull after jugfull of pure white liquid fire, bright white
tipples over and spills down,
and is gone
and gold-bronze flutters bent through the thick upper air
And as the electric liquid pours out, sometimes
a still brighter white snake wriggles among it, spilled
and tumbling wriggling down the sky:
and then the heavens cackle with uncouth sounds.
|
And the rain won't come, the rain refuses to come!
|
This is the electricity that man is supposed to have mastered
chained,subjugated to his use!
supposed to!
|
This single line stanza is separated from the others, for emphasis. The two phrases with the two references to ‘rain’ are repeated and personified. It is stubborn and resists human longing for the storm to break. Lawrence is saying that the storm is more powerful than arrogant humans and chooses to defy us.
|
D. H. Lawrence
|
Storm in the Black Forest
|
Come down, O Christ, and help me! reach thy hand,
For I am drowning in a stormier sea
Than Simon on thy lake of Galilee:
|
The wine of life is spilt upon the sand,
|
My heart is as some famine-murdered land
Whence all good things have perished utterly,
And well I know my soul in Hell must lie
|
A reference to Shakespeare’s Macbeth (Act II scene iii) :
The wine of life is drawn, and the mere lees/ Is left this vault to brag of.
…a very poetic way to express the death of someone.
Far later on, in Wilde’s letter to Robert Ross regarding the first attack the Marquess of Queensberry (Lord Alfred Douglas’s father) laid on him, he would write:
The tower of ivory is assailed by the foul thing. On the sand is my life spilt.
|
Oscar Wilde
|
E. Tenebris
|
In my daydream College for Bards, the curriculum would be as follows:
1) In addition to English, at least one ancient language, probably Greek or Hebrew, and two modern languages would be required.
2) Thousands of lines of poetry in these languages would be learned by heart.
|
3) The library would contain no books of literary criticism, and the only critical exercise required of students would be the writing of parodies.
|
4) Courses in prosody, rhetoric and comparative philology would be required of all students, and every student would have to select three courses out of courses in mathematics, natural history, geology, meteorology, archaeology, mythology, liturgics, cooking.
5) Every student would be required to look after a domestic animal and cultivate a garden plot.
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‘But the tune ISN’T his own invention,’ she said to herself…*
Auden probably also borrowed this rule from Pound, who was strongly against critics of his time. He says in A Retrospect
Pay no attention to the criticism of men who have never themselves written a notable work. Consider the discrepancies between the actual writing of the Greek poets and dramatists, and the theories of the Graeco-Roman grammarians, concocted to explain their metres.
And in another essay ( How To Read ?) he lays out what he considers the three most legitimate type of criticisms. The second is criticism via translation (see rule no. 1) and the most effective is criticism via original composition.
|
W. H. Auden
|
College for Bards
|
"Faith" is a fine invention
When Gentlemen can see—
|
But Microscopes are prudent
In an Emergency.
|
These lines show Dickinson’s belief that faith alone will not save a person. We need the tools humans have created when in an emergency. This poem shows how Dickinson did not believe faith would save her in a time of crisis (doubt).
This whole poem shows that Dickinson was conflicted in her beliefs. In other poems she tells of Heaven and God saving her, yet in this poem she says faith is an invention. This poem shows the side of Dickinson that doubted faith and God.
|
Emily Dickinson
|
Faith is a fine invention
|
|
We cannot go there now, my dear, we cannot go there now.
In the village churchyard there grows an old yew,
Every spring it blossoms anew:
Old passports can't do that, my dear, old passports can't do that.
The consul banged the table and said,
"If you've got no passport you're officially dead":
But we are still alive, my dear, but we are still alive.
Went to a committee; they offered me a chair;
Asked me politely to return next year:
But where shall we go to-day, my dear, but where shall we go to-day?
Came to a public meeting; the speaker got up and said;
"If we let them in, they will steal our daily bread":
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He was talking of you and me, my dear, he was talking of you and me.
|
Thought I heard the thunder rumbling in the sky;
It was Hitler over Europe, saying, "They must die":
O we were in his mind, my dear, O we were in his mind.
|
The perception of the potential host — that the incomers will undermine the culture and prosperity of the new country — differs from that of the vulnerable refugees, who are often baffled and dismayed by the hostile reception they encounter.
|
W. H. Auden
|
Refugee Blues
|
My own eyes to bear on her so that I thought
Could I keep them one half-minute fixed, she would fall
Shrivelled; she fell not: yet this does it all!
X
Not that I bid you spare her the pain;
Let death be felt and the proof remain:
Brand, burn up, bite into its grace—
He is sure to remember her dying face!
XI
Is it done? Take my mask off! Nay, be not morose;
It kills her, and this prevents seeing it close:
The delicate droplet, my whole fortune's fee!
|
If it hurts her, beside, can it ever hurt me?
|
XII
Now, take all my jewels, gorge gold to your fill,
You may kiss me, old man, on my mouth if you will!
|
The speaker hesitates for only a moment, and that relates to the possibility of the poison affecting herself. The question relates to the danger to her own life or whether she could be caught. Either way it is a practical rather than a moral hesitation.
|
Robert Browning
|
The Laboratory
|
That strange flower, the sun,
Is just what you say.
|
Have it your way.
|
The world is ugly,
And the people are sad.
That tuft of jungle feathers,
|
The poet is deliberately distancing himself from this view.
|
Wallace Stevens
|
Gubbinal
|
We thought her shy malaise was a shot reaction.
The autopsy disclosed a rupture in her liver.
As we teased her with play, blood was filling her skin
And her heart was learning to lie down forever.
Monday morning, as the children were noisily fed
And sent to school, she crawled beneath the youngest's bed.
We found her twisted and limp but still alive.
In the car to the vet's, on my lap, she tried
To bite my hand and died. I stroked her warm fur
And my wife called in a voice imperious with tears.
Though surrounded by love that would have upheld her,
Nevertheless she sank and, stiffening, disappeared.
|
Back home, we found that in the night her frame,
Drawing near to dissolution, had endured the shame
|
Of diarrhoea and had dragged across the floor
To a newspaper carelessly left there. Good dog.
|
While prose is the literary reflection of the mind, poetry is that which tells what lies deepest in the heart. There is no greater example of this than John Updike’s poem, “Dog’s Death”.
Here, in this passage, we see that commonality among humans of transposing otherwise human characteristics, including emotions, upon an animal. “…had endured the shame” gives us pause as we reflect upon that which a dog might actually be capable of feeling.
“…her frame drawing near to dissolution” also gives us a glimpse of stalwart purpose and a binding of spirit within the animal, despite its pain and suffering to drag itself onward, duty-bound, perhaps in one final gesture of loyalty and obedience.
In the end, our sensibilities are shaken and we find ourselves raw with emotion as we feel the pain of all involved, both pet and family…the very essence of poetry’s grand purpose.
|
John Updike
|
Dogs Death
|
But my heart's in the unobtrusive,
The waiting-room roles: driving to hospitals,
Parking at hospitals. Holding hands under
Veteran magazines; making sense
Of consultants' monologues; asking pointed
Questions politely; checking dosages,
Dates; getting on terms with receptionists;
Sustaining the background music of civility.
At home in the street you may see me
Walking fast in case anyone stops:
getting on, getting better my formula
For well-meant intrusiveness.
|
At home,
|
Thinking ahead: Bed? A good idea!
(Bed solves a lot); answer the phone,
Be wary what I say to it, but grateful always;
|
The short line ends with a comma that forms a caesura , a pause, as if the speaker is shedding one scenario and taking breath before describing the next.
|
U. A. Fanthorpe
|
A Minor Role
|
I said to Love,
"It is not now as in old days
When men adored thee and thy ways
All else above;
Named thee the Boy, the Bright, the One
Who spread a heaven beneath the sun,"
|
I said to Love.
|
I said to him,
"We now know more of thee than then;
We were but weak in judgment when,
|
The repetition of ‘I said to Love’ is a device known as anaphora , whereby a line is repeated. It is also a refrain which gives emphasis. This poem is notably rhythmic.
|
Thomas Hardy
|
I Said to Love
|
Created the Nile
I am a beautiful woman
I gazed on the forest and burned
Out the Sahara desert
With a packet of goat's meat
And a change of clothes
I crossed it in two hours
I am a gazelle so swift
So swift you can't catch me
For a birthday present when he was three
I gave my son Hannibal an elephant
He gave me Rome for mother's day
|
My strength flows ever on
|
My son Noah built New/Ark and
I stood proudly at the helm
As we sailed on a soft summer day
|
The speaker signifies on cultural knowledge and historical recollections of the Ancient Roman Empire. She inserts herself into the narrative suggesting her contributions to Roman culture still have influence over the world today.
The Romans are still remembered today, including names such as Julius Caesar, Cicero, Augustus, etc. Ancient Roman society contributed greatly to government, law, politics, engineering, art, literature, architecture, technology, warfare, religion, language, society and more in the Western world.
A civilization highly developed for its time, Rome professionalized and greatly expanded its military and created a system of government called res publica, the inspiration for modern republics such as the United States and France.
It achieved impressive technological and architectural feats, such as the construction of an extensive system of aqueducts and roads, as well as large monuments, palaces, and public facilities.
|
Nikki Giovanni
|
Ego-Tripping there may be a reason
|
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!
|
It is impossible for the mere mortal to decipher the greatness of Shakespeare’s work. Any attempt at criticizing or scrutinizing his work will end in utter failure as his expanse is extremely vast.
|
Matthew Arnold
|
Shakespeare
|
Up on the ridge for weeks -
I said nothing at the time
But I never liked yon bird'
The automatic lock
Clunks shut, the blackbird's panic
Is shortlived, for a second
I've a bird's eye view of myself,
A shadow on raked gravel
In front of my house of life.
Hedge-hop, I am absolute
For you, your ready talkback,
Your each stand-offish comeback,
|
Your picky, nervy goldbeak -
|
On the grass when I arrive,
|
This line has a definite, quick, springy rhythm, with consonant words ‘picky’ and ‘nervy’ describing the bird’s rapid, lively movements to find food. The ‘goldbeak’ suggests value and riches; not surprisingly as it is the beak that swoops and captures the worms and grubs. Note that ‘goldbeak’ is half-rhyming with ‘talkback’ and ‘comeback’.
|
Seamus Heaney
|
The Blackbird of Glanmore
|
Out walking in the frozen swamp one gray day,
I paused and said, 'I will turn back from here.
No, I will go on farther—and we shall see.'
The hard snow held me, save where now and then
One foot went through. The view was all in lines
Straight up and down of tall slim trees
Too much alike to mark or name a place by
So as to say for certain I was here
Or somewhere else: I was just far from home.
|
A small bird flew before me. He was careful
To put a tree between us when he lighted,
And say no word to tell me who he was
|
Who was so foolish as to think what he thought.
He thought that I was after him for a feather—
The white one in his tail; like one who takes
|
The small bird now appears, and in a way that seems equally fortuitous and gratuitous. The speaker responds immediately by recognizing it as a dramatic projection of his own fearfulness. In the following lines, the bird’s activity adds a horizontal dimension to the speaker’s growing spatial consciousness; and, giving the scene intersecting lines, if not shape, it permits the speaker to have for the first time a perspective. Again, the process moves by way of the artful opposition between bird and tree and the little joke by which physical laws seem overturned: the bird “puts” a tree—that is, assigns it a specific material place—between itself and the speaker.
|
Robert Frost
|
The Wood-pile
|
I wish I were close
To you as the wet skirt of
A salt girl to her body.
I think of you always.
Akahito
The white chrysanthemum
Is disguised by the first frost.
If I wanted to pick one
I could find it only by chance.
|
Oshikochi No Mitsune
|
The deer on pine mountain,
Where there are no falling leaves,
Knows the coming of autumn
|
# Ōshikōchi no Mitsune
A poet and politician of the Heian period, an era remembered for its thriving art and literature communities. The poem featured in this text was also anthologized in the famous collection Ogura Hyakunin Issha .
William N. Porter translated the poem as such:
IT was a white chrysanthemum I came to take away; But, which are coloured, which are white, I’m half afraid to say, So thick the frost to-day!
|
Kenneth Rexroth
|
Poems from the Japanese
|
For this your mother sweated in the cold,
For this you bled upon the bitter tree:
A yard of tinsel ribbon bought and sold;
A paper wreath; a day at home for me.
The merry bells ring out, the people kneel;
Up goes the man of God before the crowd;
With voice of honey and with eyes of steel
He drones your humble gospel to the proud.
Nobody listens. Less than the wind that blows
Are all your words to us you died to save.
O Prince of Peace! O Sharon's dewy Rose!
How mute you lie within your vaulted grave.
|
The stone the angel rolled away with tears
|
Is back upon your mouth these thousand years.
|
See Matthew 28, in which an angel rolls the stone away from Jesus’s tomb, revealing it to be empty:
Matthew 28:1: In the end of the sabbath, as it began to dawn toward the first day of the week, came Mary Magdalene and the other Mary to see the sepulchre.
Matthew 28:2: And, behold, there was a great earthquake: for the angel of the Lord descended from heaven, and came and rolled back the stone from the door, and sat upon it.
Matthew 28:3: His countenance was like lightning, and his raiment white as snow:
Matthew 28:4: And for fear of him the keepers did shake, and became as dead men.
Matthew 28:5: And the angel answered and said unto the women, Fear not ye: for I know that ye seek Jesus, which was crucified.
Matthew 28:6: He is not here: for he is risen, as he said.
There are variations among the four gospels; only in Matthew is an angel specifically credited with rolling away the stone. In the other gospels the women simply discover that the stone has been rolled away, and the tomb is mysteriously empty.
The angel’s tears appear to be Millay’s invention.
|
Edna St. Vincent Millay
|
To Jesus on His Birthday
|
I empty myself of the names of others. I empty my pockets.
I empty my shoes and leave them beside the road.
|
At night I turn back the clocks;
I open the family album and look at myself as a boy.
|
What good does it do? The hours have done their job.
I say my own name. I say goodbye.
The words follow each other downwind.
|
Night is the time of day where the earth seems to stand still, it’s the only time quiet enough to reminisce on our past. It’s the time of day to “open the family album” and concentrate on the blissful immaturities of our youth. However, when Mark says he is turning back his clock , he is trying to relive parts of his life.
|
Mark Strand
|
The Remains
|
Pickled in alcohol because
Those things can't live his eyes
Are open but you can't stand to look
I heard from somebody who ...
But this is now almost all
Gone. The boys have taken
Their own true wives in the city,
The sheep are safe in the west hill
Pasture but we who were born there
Still are not sure. Are we,
Because we remember, remembered
In the terrible dust of museums?
|
Merely with his eyes, the sheep-child may
Be saying saying
|
I am here, in my father's house.
I who am half of your world, came deeply
To my mother in the long grass
|
Introducing a startling change in point of view, the speaker prepares to transition into the voice of the sheep child itself. Surprisingly, this shift will actually elevate the subject matter even more beyond simple obscenity to a profound reflection on the relationship between man and beast.
|
James Dickey
|
The Sheep Child
|
Believe that even in my deliberateness I was not deliberate.
Though why should I whine,
Whine that the crime was other than mine?—
Since anyhow you are dead.
Or rather, or instead,
You were never made.
But that too, I am afraid,
Is faulty: oh, what shall I say, how is the truth to be said?
You were born, you had body, you died.
It is just that you never giggled or planned or cried.
Believe me, I loved you all.
Believe me, I knew you, though faintly, and I loved, I loved you
|
All.
| null |
The poem ends will the word “All” which stands alone. The speaker has put all of the pieces back together in order to created a whole; the speakers has allowed her children to live on through the act of remembering them. The title of the poem is “the mother” which can raise confusion since the speaker has no children that she is raising but by the end of the poem the reader recognizes that despite the abortion the speaker still identifies as a mother and remembers her aborted children as whole and real possibilities. Through the act of remembering the mother keeps her children alive.
|
Gwendolyn Brooks
|
The Mother
|
And heavenly forms lead to devilish woes
And this is hell nor we are out of it
Oh, those devilish woes
I don't want to end up like Kolly Kibber
From a ghost train into the
Beautiful briny
Beautiful briny sea
One way, the only way
Oh Liebling
Liebling, die Form zerbrach
Noch in der ersten Nacht
Die Nacht des ersten Lichts
|
Danach kommt nichts, oder?
|
Heavenly moulds to the heavenly forms
And heavenly forms lead to devilish woes
Outward shows be least themselves
|
“Danach kommt nichts, oder?” (German) means: After that comes nothing, right?
|
Pete Doherty
|
Kolly Kibber
|
null |
Carried her unprotesting out the door.
|
Kicked back the casket-stand. But it can't hold her,
That stuff and satin aiming to enfold her,
The lid's contrition nor the bolts before.
|
This is a bizarre line which becomes less bizarre if we suppose that there were times when she was carried out “protesting.” If someone is carried out of a door protesting, it’s reasonable to assume they were “kicked out.” So, this could refer to a home she was kicked out of, or a bar or club. Either way, this isn’t the first time she was “carried out the door,” but it is remarkable as she is not fighting or protesting the decision. She was a vibrant, feisty spirit whose quietness in death the speaker seems to find outrageous, impossible.
|
Gwendolyn Brooks
|
The rites for Cousin Vit
|
I dwelt alone
In a world of moan,
|
And my soul was a stagnant tide,
|
Till the fair and gentle Eulalie became my blushing bride—
Till the yellow-haired young Eulalie became my smiling bride.
Ah, less, less bright
|
This is an oxymoron; “stagnant” is used to describe very still water with no flow, or a dull and lazy human. In other words, a tide cannot be described as stagnant, unless your soul is really at the point of defeat Poe’s is: confused and uncertain.
|
Edgar Allan Poe
|
Eulalie
|
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.
|
The word “It” is ambiguous. “It” may refer to nature because “jar” is used in the following line and how nature has a hand in every part of this world. “It” may also refer to the jar and how man-kind was spreading its dominance everywhere. In addition, “It” might also refer to the connection or port between man and nature and how this connection takes precedence everywhere in the world.
|
Wallace Stevens
|
Anecdote of the Jar
|
The two executioners stalk along over the knolls,
Bearing two axes with heavy heads shining and wide,
And a long limp two-handled saw toothed for cutting great boles,
|
And so they approach the proud tree that bears the death-mark on its side.
|
Jackets doffed they swing axes and chop away just above ground,
And the chips fly about and lie white on the moss and fallen leaves;
Till a broad deep gash in the bark is hewn all the way round,
|
The tree has been marked, so as to know what tree to cut down in the vast forest.
|
Thomas Hardy
|
Throwing a Tree
|
null |
For John Callahan
|
Those four black girls blown up
in that Alabama church
remind me of five hundred
|
(John F. Callahan on the left and Ralph Ellison on the right)
This poems dedication is to John F. Callahan, a close friend of Michael S. Harper and the literary executor for Ralph Ellison.
Callahan wrote an article on Michael S. Harper (“‘Close Roads’: The Friendship Songs of Michael S. Harper”) and mentions they met the Sunday after Martin Luther King Jr. was killed – the day before the funeral.
The two have apparently been close friends ever since.
|
Michael S. Harper
|
American History
|
And did those feet in ancient time
Walk upon England's mountains green?
And was the holy Lamb of God
On England's pleasant pastures seen?
And did the Countenance Divine
Shine forth upon our clouded hills?
And was Jerusalem builded here
Among these dark satanic mills?
Bring me my bow of burning gold!
Bring me my arrows of desire!
|
Bring me my spear! O clouds, unfold!
|
Bring me my chariot of fire!
I will not cease from mental fight,
Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand
|
This is a reference to the Greek god Zeus whose spears would be lightning bolts and who commanded the heavens and the clouds. Note the exclamatory ‘O’, to build up drama.
|
William Blake
|
And Did Those Feet In Ancient Time
|
null |
To Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love,
|
All pray in their distress,
And to these virtues of delight
Return their thankfulness.
|
‘Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love’ are capitalized because they represent qualities inherent in God and an important element of human aspiration. In Blake’s era religious belief was an important aspect of life, but often distorted by a powerful and punitive religious establishment.
The capitalisation of these virtues represents their significance. They also are repeated in the poem several times as Blake develops his argument.
|
William Blake
|
The Divine Image Songs of Innocence
|
CLXXVIII.
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.
CLXXIX.
Roll on, thou deep and dark blue Ocean — roll!
|
Ten thousand fleets sweep over thee in vain;
|
Man marks the earth with ruin — his control
Stops with the shore; — upon the watery plain
The wrecks are all thy deed, nor doth remain
|
Byron, in this line, is referring to the many voyages and expeditions across the ocean by men attempting to explore new parts of the world that failed and who were never heard from again.
|
Lord Byron
|
Childe Harolds Pilgrimage Canto 4 Stanzas 178-186
|
Looking up at the stars, I know quite well
That, for all they care, I can go to hell,
But on earth indifference is the least
We have to dread from man or beast.
|
How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
|
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.
Admirer as I think I am
|
Directly, Auden is making a rather wry point that we’d be dead if stars “burned” as strongly as we care for the stars.
Of course, this isn’t really a poem about stars but rather about relationships. Auden is describing an unrequited love here – and he does it in a sad, rationalizing way.
|
W. H. Auden
|
The More Loving One
|
This is my letter to the World
That never wrote to Me
The simple News that Nature told,
With tender Majesty
Her Message is committed
To Hands I cannot see
|
For love of Her — Sweet — countrymen
|
Judge tenderly — of Me
|
Dickinson’s rhyme and meter are the only ways that would actually indicate that this is a poem and not what she says it is, a letter. Regardless, Dickinson is still trying to get across to her readers a simple point: do not judge me based off my poems. She is writing to an invisible audience and had no idea who would come across her work. Just as we are invisible to her, she is equally as invisible to us; we have never met or truly understood Dickinson other than her shallow biography and her poetry that was found and published. Because of this, she begs her readers not to base her off of her poems; she simply wrote what “nature told” her.
|
Emily Dickinson
|
This is My Letter to the World
|
Rolling 'round the playground
“Saucy” you'd say and we all fell about
Rolling 'round the playground
In the ‘94
We all sang
Skipping and dancing hand in hand
Yeah with all the boys together
And all the girls together
[Chorus]
She's the last of the English roses
She's the last of the English roses
(She hardly spoke a word of the language)
|
She knows her Rodneys from her Stanleys
|
And her Kappas from her Reeboks
And her tit from her tat
And Winstons from her Enochs
|
A nod to 2 Legends of Doherty’s favourite football team, Queens Park Rangers.
|
Pete Doherty
|
The Last of the English Roses
|
I shall hate you
|
Like a dart of singing steel
Shot through still air
|
At even-tide.
Or solemnly
As pines are sober
|
While this simile could be referring to the darts commonly used in dart games, the image of “singing steel” being “shot through still air” implies a much stronger weapon used in an outdoor setting. The speaker is a hunter; her weapon is a steel-headed arrow.
|
Gwendolyn B. Bennett
|
Hatred
|
Lament for my cock
Sore and crucified
I seek to know you
Acquiring soulful wisdom
You can open walls of mystery
Strip show
How to acquire death in the morning show
TV death which the child absorbs
|
Deathwell mystery which makes me write
|
Slow train, the death of my cock gives life
Forgive the poor old people who gave us entry
Taught us God in the child's prayer in the night
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Jim Morrison was always fascinated by death and the uncertainty of what comes after it, it was a major source of inspiration for his art.
“People fear death even more than pain. It’s strange that they fear death. Life hurts a lot more than death. At the point of death, the pain is over. Yeah, I guess it is a friend.
-Jim Morrison"
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Jim Morrison
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Lament
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Not a cage but an organ:
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if he thought about it, he'd go insane.
Yes, if he thought about it
philosophically,
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Instead of viewing himself as trapped in a cage (elevator), the operator compares himself to an organist to express the amount of control he has over the elevator’s activity – and, briefly, the lives of the passengers in his elevator. Actual organists have this same kind of control over their instruments.
There’s something insistent about the comparison, as though the operator is willing himself not to think of his elevator as a cage. As the poem progresses, we see that he’s been effectively trapped there by a society too prejudiced to allow him into occupations worthy of his talents.
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Rita Dove
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Elevator Man 1949
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Day and night, thy voice goes out from land to land,
calling the Hindus, Buddhists, Sikhs and Jains round thy throne and the Parsees, Mussalmans and Christians.
Offerings are brought to thy shrine by the East and the West
To be woven in a garland of love.
Thou bringest the hearts of all peoples into the harmony of one life, Thou Dispenser of India's destiny,
Victory, Victory, Victory to thee."
The procession of pilgrims passes over the endless road, rugged with the rise and fall of nations;
and it resounds with the thunder of thy wheel. Eternal Charioteer!
Through the dire days of doom thy trumpet sounds, and men are led by thee across death.
Thy finger points the path to all people.
Oh dispenser of India's destiny!
Victory, victory, victory to thee.
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The darkness was dense and deep was the night; my country lay in a deathlike silence of swoon.
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But thy mother arms were round her and thine eyes gazed upon her troubled face
in sleepless love through her hours of ghastly dreams.
Thou art the companion and the saviour of the people in their sorrows,
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This could be a reference to the state of India under British rule. India was hit by several famines and acute poverty under British rule.
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Rabindranath Tagore
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The morning song of India
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