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Come to me in the silence of the night; Come in the speaking silence of a dream; Come with soft rounded cheeks and eyes as bright As sunlight on a stream;

Come back in tears,

O memory, hope, love of finished years. O dream how sweet, too sweet, too bitter sweet, Whose wakening should have been in Paradise,

‘Come back’ continues the refrain. The ‘stream’ of the previous line is echoed in the ‘tears’. Water imagery is picked up later in ‘brimful’ in stanza two.

Christina Rossetti

Echo

[Published in part (lines 7-24) by Medwin (under the title, "An Ariette for Music. To a Lady singing to her Accompaniment on the Guitar"), "The Athenaeum", November 17, 1832; reprinted by Mrs. Shelley, "Poetical Works", 1839, 1st edition. Republished in full (under the title, To —.), "Poetical Works", 1839, 2nd edition. The Trelawny manuscript is headed "To Jane". Mr. C.W. Frederickson of Brooklyn possesses a transcript in an unknown hand.] 1. The keen stars were twinkling, And the fair moon was rising among them, Dear Jane!

The guitar was tinkling,

But the notes were not sweet till you sung them Again. 2.

The guitar is fortuitously an instrument that modern young readers relate to. There is something erotic in the way a guitar is held close to the body and the player wraps their arms around it, which may have appealed to Shelley.

Percy Bysshe Shelley

To Jane: The Keen Stars Were Twinkling

Success is counted sweetest By those who ne'er succeed

To comprehend a nectar Requires sorest need

Not one of all the purple Host Who took the Flag to-day Can tell the definition

Although “nectar” goes hand in hand with sweetness, it doesn’t necessarily mean that it is sweet. However, it represents something desirable, and that desire is stimulated by the greatest need. Although Dickinson doesn’t name the bee, the implication is that the bee seeks nectar because it “requires sorest need”. So something abstract is presented through a concrete idea.

Emily Dickinson

Success is counted Sweetest

Yes Glad to get high and see the slow-motion world Just to reach and touch the half notes floating World spinning, orbit quicker than 9/8th Dave Brubeck We come now frantically searching for Thomas More, rainbow villages Upon suddenly Charlie Mingus and Ahmed Abdul-Malik

To add base to a bottomless pit of insecurity

You may be plastic because you never meditate about the bottom of glasses, The third side of your universe Add on Alice Coltrane and her cosmic strains

# DOUBLE ENTENDRE ALERT Relating to the previous line, which references two highly influential jazz double bassists, Gil Scott drops a mind-bending bomb of double the regular entendre. Gil Scott plays with his words like a 5-year old plays with his spaghetti , seeing the opportunity to match the two homophones base and bass , playing out his purple-hazed (probably) fuelled Utopian fantasy, and also creating imagery that makes a statement about the fact that music can add security to a life of insecurity , as many music-heads that have been through depression can testify to. Remember kids, spaghetti is for eating and not playing with.

Gil Scott-Heron

Plastic Pattern People

He sang of life, serenely sweet, With, now and then, a deeper note. From some high peak, nigh yet remote,

He voiced the world's absorbing beat.

He sang of love when earth was young, And Love, itself, was in his lays. But, ah, the world, it turned to praise

He used his words to express the feeling of the world.

Paul Laurence Dunbar

The Poet

I felt a Cleaving in my Mind − As if my Brain had split − I tried to match it − Seam by Seam − But could not make them fit. The thought behind, I strove to join Unto the thought before − But Sequence raveled out of Sound

Like Ball − upon a Floor.

“Like Ball” suggests a metaphor of a ball of yarn. When the yarn is not unraveled, it symbolizes the stability in one’s mind to think and put the thoughts together. When it is unraveled, it signifies the mental instability of the speaker, implying over thinking and a mental breakdown. This connects to the mourning of a lost one in that after losing someone special, one starts to feel a void. After the speaker loses someone close, he/she needs to learn how to live without that person. This is the moment when the speaker looks for transformation, acceptance, and enlightenment, but instead breaks down because there is no way to fill such a gap.

Emily Dickinson

937

Driver drive faster and make a good run Down the Springfield Line under the shining sun. Fly like an aeroplane, don't pull up short Till you brake for Grand Central Station, New York. For there in the middle of the waiting-hall Should be standing the one that I love best of all. If he's not there to meet me when I get to town I'll stand on the side-walk with tears rolling down. For he is the one that I love to look on, The acme of kindness and perfection. He presses my hand and he says he loves me,

Which I find an admirable peculiarity.

The woods are bright green on both sides of the line, The trees have their loves though they're different from mine. But the poor fat old banker in the sun-parlour car

Auden’s English accent probably would have elided a couple syllables here (“pe-kyule-yare-tee”)–but still, this line has a lot of syllables! Auden’s decision to vary syllable count line by line, while keeping up a basic rhythm (approximately four beats per line), contributes to the poem’s loose, funky “calypso” sound.

W. H. Auden

Calypso

Dear March - Come in -

How glad I am - I hoped for you before - Put down your Hat -

As is often true in Dickinson poems, the abstract is personified. Here, March is likened to an old friend coming to visit, and the speaker welcomes her guest warmly.

Emily Dickinson

Dear March - Come in - 1320

Dismembered, to a tod of ivy. So much for the charioteers, the outriders, the Grand Army! A red tatter, Napoleon! The last badge of victory. The swarm is knocked into a cocked straw hat. Elba, Elba, bleb on the sea! The white busts of marshals, admirals, generals Worming themselves into niches. How instructive this is! The dumb, banded bodies Walking the plank draped with Mother France's upholstery Into a new mausoleum,

An ivory palace, a crotch pine.

The man with gray hands smiles-- The smile of a man of business, intensely practical. They are not hands at all

This is obscure, but suggests buildings that are symbolically outdated; impossible to live in. An ‘ivory palace’ is something out of a fairy tale. The crutch or crotch construction is a primitive architectural design, where a split tree is used as the prime means of support for a cottage. This seems to represent the fate of Napoleon and his Grand Army.

Sylvia Plath

The Swarm

As the lavas that restlessly roll Their sulphurous currents down Yaanek In the ultimate climes of the pole— That groan as they roll down Mount Yaanek In the realms of the Boreal Pole. Our talk had been serious and sober But our thoughts they were palsied and sere— Our memories were treacherous and sere; For we knew not the month was October, And we marked not the night of the year— (Ah, night of all nights in the year!) We noted not the dim lake of Auber,

(Though once we had journeyed down here)

Remembered not the dank tarn of Auber, Nor the ghoul-haunted woodland of Weir. And now, as the night was senescent

Here, the speaker first acknowledges (though passively) that he had been in this location before. It is a passive acknowledgment because it is in parentheses, indicating that, at the moment of the walk depicted in the poem, he had not remembered being there before. This acknowledgment is placed in such a stanza as it does away with foreshadowing and states what has already been insinuated through the mention of the “treacherous and sere” memories.

Edgar Allan Poe

Ulalume

"Hope" is the thing with feathers - That perches in the soul - And sings the tune without the words - And never stops - at all -

And sweetest - in the Gale - is heard -

And sore must be the storm - That could abash the little Bird That kept so many warm -

The “Gale” is capitalised, the second abstract idea of the poem, representing the trials and storms that humans have to face. It is at these moments that the bird’s song of Hope is “sweetest”. The implication is that the most turbulant times are alleviated by the metaphorical bird. The use of stormy weather and elements to represent tubulant human lives is known as pathetic fallacy . This device appears again in stanza three. Dickension continues the dashes, mid as well as the end of the lines, building up certainty but with some remaining hesitation.

Emily Dickinson

Hope is the thing with feathers

From morn to night, my friend. But is there for the night a resting-place? A roof for when the slow dark hours begin. May not the darkness hide it from my face? You cannot miss that inn. Shall I meet other wayfarers at night? Those who have gone before. Then must I knock, or call when just in sight? They will not keep you standing at that door. Shall I find comfort, travel-sore and weak? Of labour you shall find the sum. Will there be beds for me and all who seek?

Yea, beds for all who come.

It is a powerful statement. It leaves no doubt that there is a place in heaven for everybody, if they seek it. The implication is that trust and faith are all that matter.

Christina Rossetti

Up-hill

A being darkly wise, and rudely great: With too much knowledge for the sceptic side, With too much weakness for the stoic's pride, He hangs between; in doubt to act, or rest; In doubt to deem himself a God, or beast; In doubt his mind and body to prefer; Born but to die, and reas'ning but to err; Alike in ignorance, his reason such, Whether he thinks to little, or too much; Chaos of thought and passion, all confus'd; Still by himself, abus'd or disabus'd; Created half to rise and half to fall;

Great lord of all things, yet a prey to all,

Sole judge of truth, in endless error hurl'd; The glory, jest and riddle of the world.

The “Great Lord of all things” is not in reference to God, but to actual men. Man is given the earth to rule over, but yet they die from floods and drought.

Alexander Pope

Riddle of the World

Because I feel that, in the Heavens above, The angels, whispering to one another, Can find, among their burning terms of love, None so devotional as that of "Mother,"

Therefore by that dear name I long have called you—

You who are more than mother unto me, And fill my heart of hearts, where Death installed you In setting my Virginia's spirit free.

More specifically, Poe called her “Muddy.”

Edgar Allan Poe

To My Mother

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 could ca'y off a pig Lak you picks a chicken up,

Er yo' leetles' bit o' pup. An' he had two gread big eyes, Jes' erbout a saucer's size.

The narrator, speaking in vernacular English, begins the tale of a “black bah” or bear with much power over the weasel, signifying who the “young master” is in relation to the bear and the young masters father, who he will take after.

Paul Laurence Dunbar

A Cabin Tale

Victoria Clementina, negress, Took seven white dogs To ride in a cab. Bells of the dog chinked. Harness of the horses shuffled Like brazen shells. Oh-hé-hé! Fragrant puppets By the green lake-pallors, She too is flesh,

And a breech-cloth might wear, Netted of topaz and ruby And savage blooms;

Thridding the squawkiest jungle In a golden sedan, White dogs at bay.

A breech-cloth is a loin-cloth, though this one is embroidered with topaz and ruby. It’s a ridiculous image.

Wallace Stevens

Exposition of the Contents of a Cab

A Wife in London

December 1899

I--The Tragedy She sits in the tawny vapour That the City lanes have uprolled,

The poem was written during the Second Boer War (1899-1902) fought between the British and Boer settlers in South Africa. Though the war is never specified, the reference to the ‘far South Land’ identifies it. Even so, the vagueness may indicate Hardy’s intention that this should be any war in any era.

Thomas Hardy

A Wife in London

Holding its inverted poise – Between the clang and clang a flower, A brazen calyx of no noise: The bell was silent in the air. The camels crossed the miles of sand That stretched around the cups and plates; The desert was their own, they planned To portion out the stars and dates: The camels crossed the miles of sand. Time was away and somewhere else. The waiter did not come, the clock Forgot them and the radio waltz

Came out like water from a rock:

Time was away and somewhere else. Her fingers flicked away the ash That bloomed again in tropic trees:

This transports us back to the desert, but also back thousands of years. It is a reference that appears several times in the Bible, but notably to Moses leading the exodus of the Jews from slavery to the Promised Land. When they were thirsty Moses struck a rock and water gushed out. Why did MacNeice choose this? It could refer to love being like a miracle, feelings that emerge without explanation and uplift those who experience it. It could be that life without love might have seemed like a desert. It could also be another reference to time; the Bible story traditionally dates back five thousand years and reappears metaphorically in the minds of the lovers sitting in the cafe.

Louis MacNeice

Meeting Point

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone, Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone, Silence the pianos and with muffled drum Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come. Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead Scribbling on the sky the message He Is Dead, Put crêpe bows round the white necks of the public doves, Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.

He was my North, my South, my East and West,

My working week and my Sunday rest, My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song; I thought that love would last for ever: I was wrong.

The tone shifts from one of sorrow and mourning to sorrow and love. The reference to the points of the compass indicate the all encompassing nature of his love. It is worth noting that the structure of the poem represents the stages of mourning; firstly the inner feelings of grief, then the activity involved in the practicalities of the funeral broadening to draw in the world, and now a recongition of their love.

W. H. Auden

Funeral Blues Stop all the clocks

The door was shut. I looked between

Its iron bars; and saw it lie, My garden, mine, beneath the sky, Pied with all flowers bedewed and green:

The poem opens abruptly, the first sentence unequivocal in meaning and made up of monosyllables so the reader is drawn in. The full stop creates a break, a caesura , to emphasise the poet’s alienation.

Christina Rossetti

Shut out

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.

This line sonically breaks an otherwise perfectly metered, sing-song sonnet. The iambic pentameter gives way to a far more somber sound when Millay introduces a dactylic foot (“Nobody”) followed by a trochee (“listens”). With this harsh accent and the caesura that follows Millay asserts her message about hypocrisy – and she stops to be sure her reader is listening.

Edna St. Vincent Millay

To Jesus on His Birthday

I.

Two in Campagna

I wonder do you feel to-day As I have felt since, hand in hand, We sat down on the grass, to stray

The “Campagna” refers to the countryside around Rome. Until the middle of the twentieth century it grew fairly wild and unclaimed. Because its swampy areas nurtured mosquitoes carrying malaria, the conventional English tourist largely avoided the Campagna, leaving it to the Italian peasants, who farmed sections of it. However, in nineteenth-century literature the Campagna also symbolized a sort of alternative space, where rules of society did not apply and anything could happen; we see this expressed in Henry James’s Italian-set novels and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Marble Faun. In this poem, the Campagna seems to suggest to the speaker that he can in fact transcend his human limitations to put his subtle ideas into poetry or see the world through his lover’s eyes. However, the wild space merely plays a cruel trick; teased and disappointed, the speaker is left more melancholy than ever.

Robert Browning

Two in Campagna

I embraced a cloud, but when I soared it rained. 3 That's funny! there's blood on my chest oh yes, I've been carrying bricks what a funny place to rupture! and now it is raining on the ailanthus as I step out onto the window ledge the tracks below me are smoky and glistening with a passion for running I leap into the leaves, green like the sea

4

Now I am quietly waiting for the catastrophe of my personality to seem beautiful again,

For the fourth section of the poem, O'Hara seems to be having a dialog with “Past One O'Clock …” by Vladimir Myakovsky So but this poem, “Mayakovsky”, got its title from James Schuyler , who found two two-section poems by O'Hara (that became sections 1 and 2, sections 3 and 4) and decided to combine them into one poem. The poem needed a title, and Schuyler, seeing a collection of Mayakovsky on O'Hara’s desk, decided it should be titled after Mayakovsky. So we can say pretty easily here that O'Hara was aware of this poem by Mayakovsky , which was found in his pocket when he was found dead, and is sometimes referred to as his suicide note. It is not O'Hara’s suicide note. But, tonally at least, shit is pretty striking.

Frank O'Hara

Mayakovsky

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.

[Refrain 2] Poise of my hands reminded me of your… stare deep beauty beauty heart poison poison draught draught Notice how the previous line poisons this line as the similar sounds are echoed–“poison” and “poise of.” The proximity of hands and draught could suggest the poise to be pictured drinking a draft of a poisonous beverage (e.g., alcohol).

William Empson

Villanelle It is the pain...

house, half-acre, square mile, island, country, knowing at last how you got there, and say, I own this, is the same moment when the trees unloose their soft arms from around you, the birds take back their language, the cliffs fissure and collapse, the air moves back from you like a wave and you can't breathe. No, they whisper. You own nothing. You were a visitor, time after time climbing the hill, planting the flag, proclaiming.

We never belonged to you. You never found us. It was always the other way round.

Humans claim power and purport to take charge and control the world in whatever way we deem fit. But we remain at the at the mercy of nature’s phenomena; we are unable to prevent earthquakes, volcanoes, typhoons etc. The allegorical forces speak for themselves, they have sufficient power for their ‘whisper’ to be heard, the voice is self-explanatory. Therefore, we are told that it was “always the other way round”, and we are forced to believe it. The pace of this third stanza differs from the long, stretched-out sentence that precedes it. Here, nature makes sharp, admonishing statements. The lines are end-stopped for emphasis. There is no arguing with nature’s assertion of where true power lies.

Margaret Atwood

The Moment

This was no playhouse but a house in earnest. Your destination and your destiny's A brook that was the water of the house, Cold as a spring as yet so near its source, Too lofty and original to rage. (We know the valley streams that when aroused Will leave their tatters hung on barb and thorn.) I have kept hidden in the instep arch Of an old cedar at the waterside A broken drinking goblet like the Grail Under a spell so the wrong ones can't find it, So can't get saved, as Saint Mark says they mustn't.

(I stole the goblet from the children's playhouse.)

Here are your waters and your watering place. Drink and be whole again beyond confusion.

The goblet was stolen from a children’s playhouse–an imaginary house as opposed to the “house in earnest.” Frost’s “wholeness” (see final line) thereby encompasses the mental as well as the physical. The goblet is a cheap toy; perhaps a fake spiritual journey is as good as a real one. Or perhaps we are being misled: The road there, if you’ll let a guide direct you Who only has at heart your getting lost… Alternatively, perhaps the children’s toy reconnects us with something deeper and purer than a “real” goblet could. To the children, with their imagination, it was the Grail. To drink water, which is the source of all life, from a cup that still represents the Grail to you, is to connect with what was lost and become whole again.

Robert Frost

Directive

‘Good-morning; good-morning!' the General said When we met him last week on our way to the line. Now the soldiers he smiled at are most of 'em dead, And we're cursing his staff for incompetent swine.

‘He's a cheery old card,' grunted Harry to Jack

As they slogged up to Arras with rifle and pack. But he did for them both by his plan of attack.

‘Harry and Jack’, are standard throwaway names, which represent all the men. They grumble to each other about the General’s jovilaity, because he remains “cheery” in this joyless environment; the General clearly doesn’t understand the life a soldier. Or it could be interpreted that, in their naivety, they were impressed with him.

Siegfried Sassoon

The General

The force that through the green fuse drives the flower Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees

Is my destroyer.

And I am dumb to tell the crooked rose My youth is bent by the same wintry fever. The force that drives the water through the rocks

All stanzas (except the last stanza) consist of five lines, with the middle shorter than the rest. Also what makes it different from the rest of the lines is the form: most lines are iambic pentameters, however, the third lines have two metrical feet.

Dylan Thomas

The Force That through the Green Fuse Drives the Flower

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.

They may not mean to, but they do.

They fill you with the faults they had And add some extra, just for you. But they were fucked up in their turn

Parents don’t realize how cruel they are in bringing a child into a broken world. Note: The caesura in these two opening lines lend the poem a simplicity that borders on innocence. Larkin is passing comment on capital L Life, but does so with an honest, open flatness. The repetition of ‘They’ also helps to achieve this nursery-rhyme clarity.

Philip Larkin

This Be The Verse x

These pools that, though in forests, still reflect The total sky almost without defect, And like the flowers beside them, chill and shiver, Will like the flowers beside them soon be gone, And yet not out by any brook or river, But up by roots to bring dark foliage on. The trees that have it in their pent-up buds

To darken nature and be summer woods --

Let them think twice before they use their powers To blot out and drink up and sweep away These flowery waters and these watery flowers

Frost injects a sense of melancholy with this line, as the trees sprout and cover everything else below; but this is not a death of nature–simply a covering of it.

Robert Frost

Spring Pools

O GOAT-FOOT God of Arcady! This modern world is grey and old, And what remains to us of thee? No more the shepherd lads in glee Throw apples at thy wattled fold, O goat-foot God of Arcady! Nor through the laurels can one see Thy soft brown limbs, thy beard of gold, And what remains to us of thee? And dull and dead our Thames would be, For here the winds are chill and cold, O goat-foot God of Arcady!

Then keep the tomb of Helice,

Thine olive-woods, thy vine-clad wold, And what remains to us of thee? Though many an unsung elegy

According to Greek Myth Index , Helice was: A daughter of Lycaon, was beloved by Zeus, but Hera, out of jealousy, metamorphosed her into a she-bear, whereupon Zeus placed her among the stars, under the name of the Great Northern Bear. (Serv. ad Virg. Georg. i. 138, 246.) When Demeter invoked her, asking for information about her lost daughter, Helice referred her to Helios. (Ov. Fast. iv 580.) Hyginus (Poet. Astr. ii. 2, 13) calls her a daughter of Olenus, and says that she brought up Zeus. A daughter of Selinus, and the wife of Ion. The town of Helice, in Achaia, was believed to have derived its name from her. (Paus. vii. 1. § 2 ; Steph. Byz. s. v.) A daughter of Danaus, mentioned by Hyginus. (Fab. 170.)

Oscar Wilde

Pan: A Double Villanelle

Oh who is that young sinner with the handcuffs on his wrists? And what has he been after that they groan and shake their fists? And wherefore is he wearing such a conscience-stricken air? Oh they're taking him to prison for the colour of his hair. 'Tis a shame to human nature, such a head of hair as his;

In the good old time 'twas hanging for the colour that it is;

Though hanging isn't bad enough and flaying would be fair For the nameless and abominable colour of his hair. Oh a deal of pains he's taken and a pretty price he's paid

The whole poem uses hair color as a metaphor for sexuality, and having the “wrong” hair color as a metaphor for being gay. Being convicted of sodomy, then defined as a sex act between two men, carried the death penalty in England from 1533 until 1861. By the time Oscar Wilde was convicted, the sentence was two years of hard labor. This does not mean it was not still a death sentence, however–to any man who was not used to hard labor, any hard labor sentence of more than a few months was expected to degrade their health to the point where they were not expected to survive post-prison for more than a few years–and, indeed, Oscar Wilde only made it for three.

A. E. Housman

Oh Who Is That Young Sinner

The medieval town, with frieze Of boy scouts from Nagoya? The snow

That came when we wanted it to snow?

Beautiful images? Trying to avoid Ideas, as in this poem? But we Go back to them as to a wife, leaving

Is the snow as beautiful as it seems?

John Ashbery

What is Poetry?

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

# Yamabe No Akahito A poet of the Nara period, Akahito lived between 700 and 736 AD. He composed much of his work while traveling extensively with Emperor Shōmu .

Kenneth Rexroth

Poems from the Japanese

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 those who stand by. I am fed.

At night, alone, I marry the bed.

Finger to finger, now she's mine. She's not too far. She's my encounter. I beat her like a bell. I recline

Anne Sexton will repeat this sentence as a refrain at the end of each verse of this poem. It helps us to build a context while reading, and to understand all of her acts are directed toward the final stage of masturbating in her bed. In other words, this is what her love life has come to.

Anne Sexton

The Ballad of the Lonely Masturbator

Go, little book,

To him who, on a lute with horns of pearl, Sang of the white feet of the Golden Girl: And bid him look

Such a simple yet famous line in poetry that could be found in Byron’s Don Juan and famously in Southey’s “L'Envoy” , it actually traces back to Chaucer in Book V of his Troilus and Criseyde : Go, litel book, go litel myn tregedie, Ther god thy maker yet, er that he dye, So sende might to make in som comedie! Overland details the significance of this simple three-word line: Since Chaucer wrote [that line], authors have imagined their published work as offspring being sent into the world, a vulnerable representative of its parent. At the time this poem was scrawled, Wilde’s fairytales were merely just little -known books that aspired to reach far—as were those of McCarthy, whom he wrote this stanza for.

Oscar Wilde

With a Copy of A House of Pomegranates An Inscription

Cave Painting Look there are dark hands in the black rock, Man's hands, woman's hands, child's hands hiding in a cave, Shadows of hands, but with such a living look They seem to waver and beckon, they seem to move In a language of gesture startling and piercing as speech. Up from the green water here we clambered Say the hands and the bodies of the hands, to hold and to touch, And here we camped, and here we shall be remembered. And they are so close and yet so far and wild

They seem to breathe and speak for all humanity

Who made their camp so, man and woman and child, And flowed with the green river down to infinity; And beautifully and terribly they wave

Personification: he says the hands transform into the people of the past, they are living beings that represent the strong feelings of the inhabitants of the cave

Douglas Stewart

Cave Painting

A Route of Evanescence With a revolving Wheel--

A Resonance of Emerald--

A Rush of Cochineal-- And every Blossom on the Bush Adjusts its tumbled Head--

Rather than saying “a blur of green”, Dickinson zooms in on the details, though hummingbirds fly so fast. To use Resonance and Emerald gives the scene a rather royal feeling.

Emily Dickinson

A Route of Evanescence

I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead; I lift my lids and all is born again.

(I think I made you up inside my head.)

The stars go waltzing out in blue and red, And arbitrary blackness gallops in: I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.

The parentheses around this line contribute visually by acting as the sides of her head. She made her lover up in her (head), and therefore it exists in the parentheses. E. E. Cummings did similar things with his punctuation.

Sylvia Plath

Mad Girls Love Song

The Combe was ever dark, ancient and dark.

Its mouth is stopped with bramble, thorn, and briar; And no one scrambles over the sliding chalk By beech and yew and perishing juniper

The opening sentence is spare and atmospheric. The repetition of “dark”, together with “ancient”, creates a sinister mood. There is a sense of timelessness. Note that the pace is slow with elongated vowels in “Combe” and “dark”.

Edward Thomas

The Combe

After twenty-four hours of waiting, I'm glad she turned out to be you." Oh where are the winds of morning? Oh where is love at first sight? A man comes out of nowhere. Maybe he's Mr. Right. How does one find the answer, If one has waited so long? A man comes out of nowhere, He's probably Mr. Wrong. Jane imagines the future, And almost loses heart.

She sees herself as Europe And John as Bonaparte.

They walk to the end of the platform. They stumble down to the tracks. They stand among the wrappers

Bonaparte is the last name of French military and political leader Napoleon, who dominated European affairs for nearly two decades, leading France against a series of coalitions in the Revolutionary Wars and the Napoleonic Wars. He won the large majority of his battles and seized control of most of continental Europe. A portrait of Napoleon

Mark Strand

The Couple

Success is counted sweetest By those who ne'er succeed To comprehend a nectar Requires sorest need Not one of all the purple Host Who took the Flag to-day Can tell the definition So clear, of Victory

As he, defeated, dying On whose forbidden ear The distant strains of triumph Break, agonized and clear!

The second and third stanzas are enjambed , so the meaning of both are linked, one flowing from the other. The emphasis is increased by hard, thudding alliterative “d"s. This increases the pace, leading to the emphatic ending of the poem. The stanza describes the defeated in this battle. The first line depicts a man defeated and dying on a battlefield. The defeated man’s ear is “forbidden” because as someone who is lost, he does not deserve to hear the sounds of triumph. The sounds, ringing clearly in his ears despite their physical and figurative distance, torment him from where he lies dying, knowing that he did not succeed. Note that the agony the man suffers can apply to the specific circumstances of the battlefield, but also implies wider human suffering; unrequited love, death of a child, other forms of loss. Though Dickinson is able to keep the metaphor open to nonliteral interpretations, the dying soldier is a wonderfully suggestive figure in his own right. This is the final time he will watch (or hear) victory fall through his fingers. He dies a failure hearing the victorious songs of the enemy. The third stanza helps to prove and complete the paradox Dickinson has set up in the poem.

Emily Dickinson

Success is counted Sweetest

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, But to-night I will bark With the great Overdog

The constellation looks like a dog standing upright. Metaphorically, the speaker is admiring that the Overdog is always enjoying life and never lets the bumps in the road slow him down.

Robert Frost

Canis Major

Go forth at nightfall crying like a cat, Leaving the lofty tower I laboured at For birds to foul and boys and girls to vex With tittering chalk; and you, and the long necks Of neighbours sitting where their mothers sat Are well aware of shadowy this and that In me, that's neither noble nor complex. Such as I am, however, I have brought To what it is, this tower; it is my own; Though it was reared To Beauty, it was wrought From what I had to build with: honest bone Is there, and anguish; pride; and burning thought;

And lust is there, and nights not spent alone.

A clever ending line. She leaves off the “lust” and “sex” parts of what goes into the poetry till the last line, revealing with a suggestive “nights not spent alone” a forthcoming truth: that living a promiscuous, sexual life directly helped make her good poems as good as they are. Other poets might say that God, or hard work, or capital-B Beauty inspire them, but Millay says straight up that her poetry comes from smutty lust and romance. As plenty of people have observed, Millay’s sonnets often deal with romance, sex, sexuality and so forth. Her public image had the same themes to it. This made her tremendously popular with young people in the 1920s, when Millay was something of a sex symbol. It’s also to blame for her waning popularity in the decades after her death, as people started to look for more serious, intellectual and restrained female poets like Plath and Bishop. What do you think? Overrated sex symbol, or brilliant poet? As you can tell by the perfectly exquisite structure of this sonnet, Millay wasn’t an idiot. She was a good, some might say extraordinary poet. Like many women who rose to fame in that half of the century, Millay’s name will always contend with gender stereotypes about intelligence and ineradicable associations with sex and “un-seriousness”. So be it. This poem, and others, will stand to tell otherwise. Note: J.D. McClatchy goes into this stuff in much more detail in his review.

Edna St. Vincent Millay

I Too Beneath Your Moon Almighty Sex

943 A Coffin — is a small Domain Yet able to contain A Citizen of Paradise In it diminished Plane A Grave — is a restricted Breadth

Yet ampler than the Sun

And all the Seas He populates And Lands He looks upon To Him who on its small Repose

The grave site may be ampler than the sun in the mere fact that it serves as much more and has more meaning. The grave serves as the enternal resting place of a honorable human.

Emily Dickinson

A Coffin — is a small Domain

An imitation of a Light That has so little Oil – I wonder if when Years have piled – Some Thousands – on the Harm – That hurt them early – such a lapse Could give them any Balm – Or would they go on aching still Through Centuries of Nerve – Enlightened to a larger Pain – In Contrast with the Love – The Grieved – are many – I am told – There is the various Cause –

Death – is but one – and comes but once –

And only nails the eyes – There's Grief of Want – and grief of Cold – A sort they call "Despair" –

You can be abandoned, wounded, and heartbroken over and over, but you can only die once. Grief accumulates and weighs you down, whereas Death just comes and never returns.

Emily Dickinson

I measure every Grief I meet 561

There is no Frigate like a Book To take us Lands away, Nor any Coursers like a Page Of prancing Poetry – This Traverse may the poorest take Without oppress of Toll – How frugal is the Chariot

That bears a Human soul.

Emily Dickinson is writing that the soul is carried by literature. Literature picks up the frail soul of a human being, and makes it stronger.

Emily Dickinson

There is no frigate like a book 1263

As a young man I could not believe that people could give their lives over to those conditions. As an old man, I still can't believe it. What do they do it for? Sex? TV? An automobile on monthly payments? Or children? Children who are just going to do the same things that they did? Early on, when I was quite young and going from job to job I was foolish enough to sometimes speak to my fellow workers: "Hey, the boss can come in here at any moment and lay all of us off, just like that, don't you realize that?" They would just look at me. I was posing something that they didn't want to enter their minds. Now in industry, there are vast layoffs (steel mills dead, technical changes in other factors of the work place). They are layed off by the hundreds of thousands and their faces are stunned: "I put in 35 years..." "It ain't right..." "I don't know what to do..." They never pay the slaves enough so they can get free, just enough so they can stay alive and come back to work. I could see all this. Why couldn't they? I figured the park bench was just as good or being a barfly was just as good. Why not get there first before they put me there? Why wait? I just wrote in disgust against it all, it was a relief to get the shit out of my system. And now that I'm here, a so-called professional writer, after giving the first 50 years away, I've found out that there are other disgusts beyond the system. I remember once, working as a packer in this lighting fixture company, one of the packers suddenly said: "I'll never be free!" One of the bosses was walking by (his name was Morrie) and he let out this delicious cackle of a laugh, enjoying the fact that this fellow was trapped for life. So, the luck I finally had in getting out of those places, no matter how long it took, has given me a kind of joy, the jolly joy of the miracle. I now write from an old mind and an old body, long beyond the time when most men would ever think of continuing such a thing, but since I started so late I owe it to myself to continue, and when the words begin to falter and I must be helped up stairways and I can no longer tell a bluebird from a paperclip, I still feel that something in me is going to remember (no matter how far I'm gone) how I've come through the murder and the mess and the moil, to at least a generous way to die.

To not to have entirely wasted one's life seems to be a worthy accomplishment, if only for myself.

yr boy, Hank

Alternatively: “I don’t think we’re here for anything, we’re just products of evolution. You can say ‘Gee, your life must be pretty bleak if you don’t think there’s a purpose’ but I’m anticipating a good lunch.” - Dr. James Watson

Charles Bukowski

Letter to John Martin 1986

I am—yet what I am none cares or knows; My friends forsake me like a memory lost: I am the self-consumer of my woes— They rise and vanish in oblivious host, Like shadows in love's frenzied stifled throes

And yet I am, and live—like vapours tossed

Into the nothingness of scorn and noise, Into the living sea of waking dreams, Where there is neither sense of life or joys,

Taken literally, this line says that despite all of the previous woes (“I am the self-consumer of my woes”) what the poet shall cling to is the very fact that he lives even though this life is like “vapours tossed / Into the nothingness of scorn and noise.” What the poet claims is the proto-existentialist claim: that to live and to continue living is more significant than any earthly (ergo temporary) woe. Though the torment is real, to be and to live is more significant. This line could also claim that the torment felt is real; the use of the word ‘yet’ solidifies its (the torments') effects despite it not being recognized by others. The thinness of its existence further emphasised by the use of the word ‘vapour’ – here one moment, gone the next. This could be an allusion to James 4:14: “…you do not know what will happen tomorrow. For what is your life? It is even a vapour that appears for a little time and then vanishes away.”

John Clare

I Am

I've stayed in the front yard all my life. I want a peek at the back Where it's rough and untended and hungry weed grows. A girl gets sick of a rose. I want to go in the back yard now And maybe down the alley, To where the charity children play. I want a good time today.

They do some wonderful things. They have some wonderful fun. My mother sneers, but I say it's fine

How they don't have to go in at quarter to nine. My mother, she tells me that Johnnie Mae Will grow up to be a bad woman.

The kids with whom she has never played (only watched or heard about), and whom her mother views as lower-class, a bad influence, etc.

Gwendolyn Brooks

A Song in the Front Yard

Maybe the source of noble such may come Clearer to dazzled Henry. It may come I'd say it will come with pain In mystery. I'd rather leave it alone I do leave it alone And down with the listener Now he has become, abrupt, an industry Professional-Friends-Of-Robert-Frost all over Gap wide their mouths While the quirky medium of so many truths Is quiet. Let's be quiet. Let us listen: —What for, Mr Bones?

—while he begins to have it out with Horace

See Carpe Diem . Though others before had surely longed long for a diurnal embrace, Horace was first to put it in those words

John Berryman

Dream Song 38

She strikes and strikes the shrilly circling boy till the stick breaks in her hand. His tears are rainy weather to woundlike memories: My head gripped in bony vise of knees, the writhing struggle to wrench free, the blows, the fear worse than blows that hateful Words could bring, the face that I no longer knew or loved . . . Well, it is over now, it is over, and the boy sobs in his room,

And the woman leans muttering against a tree, exhausted, purged— avenged in part for lifelong hidings she has had to bear.

Earlier in the poem, the speaker shows only hate for the woman beating the child, but towards this ending, he seems to mature and identifies with the woman a little bit better. He realizes that the woman may not be beating the kid for no reason, and instead may be perpetuating a cycle of abuse begun when she was a child (or even before).

Robert Hayden

The Whipping

Science! true daughter of Old Time thou art!

Who alterest all things with thy peering eyes. Why preyest thou thus upon the poet's heart, Vulture, whose wings are dull realities?

The poetic voice expresses here a certain dissatisfaction with the deromanticization of nature that the emergence of natural sciences in the early 19th century has brought with it. Science and its significance for the arts is something that would concern Poe throughout his life and work, for example in “Mesmeric Revelation” (1844) “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar” (1845), “A Tale of the Ragged Mountains” (1845), and his magnum opus, Eureka (1848). The second line may have been influenced by a line in William Blake’s “The Mental Traveller”: For the eye altering alters all…

Edgar Allan Poe

Sonnet—To Science

"Morning"—means "Milking"—to the Farmer— Dawn—to the Teneriffe— Dice—to the Maid— Morning means just Risk—to the Lover— Just revelation—to the Beloved—

Epicures—date a Breakfast—by it—

Brides—an Apocalypse— Worlds—a Flood— Faint-going Lives—Their Lapse from Sighing—

Epicure : A person who cultivates a discriminating palate for good food and drink. A person devoted to sensual pleasure.“ (Collins Concise Dictionary) It is interesting that Dickinson uses this term because she lived a seemingly frugal lifestyle. She is clearly distancing herself from this particular group of people to suggest that morning does not necessarily mean breakfast for her.

Emily Dickinson

Morning—means Milking—to the Farmer 300

And eat well, And grow strong. Tomorrow, I'll be at the table When company comes. Nobody'll dare Say to me, "Eat in the kitchen," Then. Besides, They'll see how beautiful I am And be ashamed--

I, too, am America.

Hughes repeats that crucial “too” again in the last line of the poem. Now the speaker, previously cast aside, not only sings of America but claims it as an identity. Over the course of the poem, the speaker articulates how he has been treated and how he feels about it, and sings of a different future. Through his song, the speaker moves from recognition to hope and in that process is able to stake his claim.

Langston Hughes

I Too sing America

'Allo, I'm-a Giuseppe

I got-a something special-a for you, ready? Uno, duo, tre, quatro! When I was a boy just about the eighth-a grade

In 1978, Dolce moved to Australia and came up with a mixed cabaret act with his then-wife that included an Italian character named Giuseppe, who became the inspiration behind this song.

Joe Dolce

Shaddap You Face

Not every man knows what he shall sing at the end, Watching the pier as the ship sails away, or what it will seem like When he's held by the sea's roar, motionless, there at the end, Or what he shall hope for once it is clear that he'll never go back. When the time has passed to prune the rose or caress the cat, When the sunset torching the lawn and the full moon icing it down No longer appear, not every man knows what he'll discover instead. When the weight of the past leans against nothing, and the sky Is no more than remembered light, and the stories of cirrus And cumulus come to a close, and all the birds are suspended in flight,

Not every man knows what is waiting for him, or what he shall sing When the ship he is on slips into darkness, there at the end.

No one knows what is going to happen to us after death. No one knows what we are going to be thinking, or doing, or singing before death envelops our being.

Mark Strand

The End

A rowan like a lipsticked girl.

Between the by-road and the main road Alder trees at a wet and dripping distance Stand off among the rushes.

The poem starts with a vivid simile , the red berries on the rowan tree likened to a “lipsticked girl”. Immediately, Heaney’s imagination and inventiveness draws the reader in. Note that the rowan tree is native of Europe and the Uniked Kingdom.

Seamus Heaney

Song

Two virtues ride, by stallion, by nag, To grind our knives and scissors: Lantern-jawed Reason, squat Common Sense, One courting doctors of all sorts, One, housewives and shopkeepers. The trees are lopped, the poodles trim, The laborer's nails pared level Since those two civil servants set Their whetstone to the blunted edge And minced the muddling devil

Whose owl-eyes in the scraggly wood

Scared mothers to miscarry, Drove the dogs to cringe and whine And turned the farmboy's temper wolfish,

Source: Pan Prstenu This is conveying the stereotypical scary scene of eyes watching you in the forest. This idea is terrifying and this is how the devil/fantasy makes the reader feel, fear of being lost in the story and what awaits once it ends.

Sylvia Plath

The Death of Myth-Making

Was it a dreame, or did I see it playne,

a goodly table of pure yvory: all spred with juncats, fit to entertayne the greatest Prince with pompous roialty.

The confusion of dream and real sight is important for… everything poetic? Compare the famous ending of Keats' Ode to a Nightingale : Fled is that music:—Do I wake or sleep? ― John Keats – Ode to a Nightingale

Edmund Spenser

Amoretti: Sonnet 77

And could not hope for help and no help came: What their foes like to do was done, their shame Was all the worst could wish; they lost their pride And died as men before their bodies died. She looked over his shoulder For athletes at their games, Men and women in a dance Moving their sweet limbs Quick, quick, to music, But there on the shining shield His hands had set no dancing-floor But a weed-choked field.

A ragged urchin, aimless and alone,

Loitered about that vacancy; a bird Flew up to safety from his well-aimed stone: That girls are raped, that two boys knife a third,

The figure of the ‘ragged urchin’ is introduced, ‘aimless and alone’. It suggests poverty and child abandonment, the outcome of brutality and war.

W. H. Auden

The Shield of Achilles

286 That after Horror—that 'twas us That passed the mouldering Pier Just as the Granite Crumb let go Our Savior, by a Hair A second more, had dropped too deep

For Fisherman to plumb

The very profile of the Thought Puts Recollection numb The possibility—to pass

Even Christ’s mettle was tested: “And he said unto them, Follow me, and I will make you fishers of men.” (Matthew 4:19)

Emily Dickinson

That after Horror—that twas us

I am not de problem If yu give I a chance I can teach yu of Timbuktu I can do more dan dance I am not de problem I greet yu wid a smile Yu put me in a pigeon hole But i am versatile These conditions may affect me As I get older, An I am positively sure I have no chips on my shoulders,

Black is not de problem

Mother country get it right An juss fe de record, Sum of me best friends are white.

The speaker asserts the idea, but this time openly and unequivocally. The frank use of the word ‘black’ is like a dramatic climax. This is a poem about racism.

Benjamin Zephaniah

No problem

The frighted women take the boys away, The blackguard laughs and hurries on the fray He tries to reach the woods, and awkward race But sticks and cudgels quickly stop the chase He turns again and drives the noisy crowd And beats the many dogs in noises loud He drives away and beats them every one And then they loose them all and set them on He falls as dead and kicked by boys and men Then starts and grins and drives the crowd again Till kicked and torn and beaten out he lies And leaves his hold and crackles, groans, and dies

Some keep a baited badger tame as hog

And tame him till he follows like the dog. They urge him on like dogs and show fair play. He beats and scarcely wounded goes away.

The last stanza shifts in mood, instead of the wild badger captured and forced to fight, it portrays those badgers that have been domesticated. It is interesting how Clare neither condemns nor pities the badger at any point in the poem. The poem has a noticeable lack of emotional commentary.

John Clare

Badger

Calliope; As ye may see, Regent is she Of poets all, Which gave to me The high degree Laureate to be Of fame royal;

Whose name enrolled With silk and gold I dare be bold Thus for to wear.

Of her I hold And her household; Though I wax old

Skelton himself created a character named Colin Cloute to mock typical and popular complaints against his poetry. The character describes his own Skeltonic verse as “ragged, tattered and jagged, rain-beaten, rusty and moth eaten.” So as you can see, it’s quite bold for the developer of Skeltonic verse, a form of poetry that uses less than six words per line and was often looked down upon as “simple” or less than elegant, to wear the name of the muse who inspired monumental works by Homer and other classical Greek poets.

John Skelton

Why were ye Calliope embrawdered with letters of golde ?

But I would rather be horizontal. I am not a tree with my root in the soil Sucking up minerals and motherly love 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.

The speaker wishes they had the stamina of the tree and the bold beauty of the flower. Implicitly, the human condition is suggested to be a fleeting, cowardly one by contrast.

Sylvia Plath

I Am Vertical

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. Lo! to the vault Of paved heaven, With sorrow fraught My notes are driven:

They strike the ear of night,

Make weep the eyes of day; They make mad the roaring winds, And with tempests play.

His cries of sorrow are so loud that the night hears them. The use of the word strike implies a ferocity and violence. Watch from 3:27-4:12 This clip, rather then being of anguish, is of laughter. They are both, however, are evoked by madness and weather.

William Blake

Mad Song

After great pain, a formal feeling comes – The Nerves sit ceremonious, like Tombs – The stiff Heart questions ‘was it He, that bore,' And ‘Yesterday, or Centuries before'? The Feet, mechanical, go round – A Wooden way Of Ground, or Air, or Ought – Regardless grown, A Quartz contentment, like a stone –

This is the Hour of Lead –

Remembered, if outlived, As Freezing persons, recollect the Snow – First – Chill – then Stupor – then the letting go –

The “Hour of Lead” is a succinct metaphor that sums up the journey to numbness. It is a reference to time; the gradual movement to hardness, darkness and heaviness. So the paradox is revealed, that great pain leads to an absence of pain, an abs pre-empted.

Emily Dickinson

After great pain a formal feeling comes J341 F372

The crowd was famished by degrees; but two Of an enormous city did survive, And they were enemies: they met beside The dying embers of an altar-place Where had been heaped a mass of holy things For an unholy usage; they raked up, And shivering scraped with their cold skeleton hands The feeble ashes, and their feeble breath Blew for a little life, and made a flame Which was a mockery; then they lifted up Their eyes as it grew lighter, and beheld Each other's aspects—saw, and shrieked, and died—

Even of their mutual hideousness they died, Unknowing who he was upon whose brow

Famine had written Fiend. The World was void, The populous and the powerful was a lump, Seasonless, herbless, treeless, manless, lifeless—

Beholding how ugly man has become, they keeled over in shame. They have lost their sense of oneness and identity. This was the final blow to mankind when they realized what they have turned into.

Lord Byron

Darkness

From my mother's sleep I fell into the State, And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze. Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life, I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters.

When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.

Here is the shift in agency in the poem. The “I” in the poem becomes a “me” when “they washed [him] out of the turret with a hose.” “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner” also addresses the senseless death of young people who haven’t had a chance to live yet. The poem is so short because the gunner’s life was so short. The speaker is given no name, which creates a sense that he didn’t even live long enough to have a sense of identity beyond “the Ball Turret Gunner.” He “fell into the State” in the first line – the actions depicted in the middle lines of this poem effectively constitute everything he ever did. Throughout the poem Jarrell uses brevity to powerful effect. “When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose” is meiosis.

Randall Jarrell

The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner

There, Robert, you have kill'd that fly — , And should you thousand ages try The life you've taken to supply, You could not do it.

You surely must have been devoid Of thought and sense, to have destroy'd A thing which no way you annoy'd — You'll one day rue it.

Twas but a fly perhaps you'll say, That's born in April, dies in May; That does but just learn to display

Robert must have been mentally imbalanced for destroying the fly because the fly did nothing to annoy him. He also says that one day he will regret it. Is killing a fly such a big, regretful mistake as Charles Lamb portray’s it to be?

Charles Lamb

Thoughtless Cruelty

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

The speaker is in a restaurant during a cold weather. The speaker is waiting for long time since the waiter took his order, so the service is poor or slow.

Charles Simic

The Partial Explanation

Who died on the wires, and hung there, one of two –

Who for his hours of life had chattered through Infinite lovely chatter of Bucks accent; Yet faced unbroken wires; stepped over, and went,

The poem begins ungrammatically, so that the reader has to fill in the beginning of the sentence. This could read “… it was the officer who died on the wires, and hung there, one of two”. The reader may feel they are entering in the midst of a conversation, an example of in medias res , literally in Latin “in the middle of things” That the dead man was “one of two” sets up alternatives; what is the wisest course of action? To go forward with foolhardy bravery and be killed, or to preserve oneself? The poet doesn’t judge either or provide an answer.

Ivor Gurney

The Silent One

A deep, deep wound Adonis… A deeper Venus bears upon her heart. See, his beloved dogs are gathering round— The Oread nymphs are weeping—Aphrodite With hair unbound is wandering through the woods, 'Wildered, ungirt, unsandalled—the thorns pierce Her hastening feet and drink her sacred blood. Bitterly screaming out, she is driven on Through the long vales; and her Assyrian boy, Her love, her husband, calls—the purple blood From his struck thigh stains her white navel now, Her bosom, and her neck before like snow.

Alas for Cytherea—the Loves mourn—

The lovely, the beloved is gone!—and now Her sacred beauty vanishes away. For Venus whilst Adonis lived was fair—

“Cytherea” is an alternative name for Aphrodite.

Percy Bysshe Shelley

Fragment of The Elegy On The Death Of Adonis

I started Early - Took my Dog And visited the Sea The Mermaids in the Basement Came out to look at me And Frigates - in the Upper Floor Extended Hempen Hands

Presuming Me to be a Mouse

Aground - upon the Sands But no Man moved Me - till the Tide Went past my simple Shoe

On a literal level a mouse may travel on a frigate and escape when in port. Hence the poet represents this abandoned — aground — creature. However, there is another interpretation, a very subtle yet strongly feminist sentiment expressed in this one line. “Presuming” implies that the persons forming this judgement were doing so without any information to back them up, and thus probably made the judgement in error. They are presuming that she is a mouse – that she is small, weak, and at the bottom of the food chain. This is pretty much the view society had of women at the time. They were seen to be the weaker sex, with no real strength of their own. However, what Dickinson is clearly stating here is that just because others may assume this of women, does not make it so.

Emily Dickinson

I Started Early - Took my Dog

Love her he doesn't but the thought he puts into that young woman would launch a national product complete with TV spots and skywriting outlets in Bonn & Tokyo I mean it Let it be known that nine words have not passed between herself and Henry; looks, smiles.

God help Henry, who deserves it all

every least part of that infernal and unconscious woman, and the pain. I feel as if, unique, she...Biddable?

Henry is, at points, a fairly pathetic character. The narrator implores God to help poor Henry, as he obviously needs and deserves divine intervention. How much irony should we read into this plea? Is Henry an actual believer in God, sin, etc.? A lapsed believer with a residual impulse toward belief?

John Berryman

Dream Song 69

A gown made of the finest wool Which from our pretty lambs we pull; Fair linèd slippers for the cold, With buckles of the purest gold; A belt of straw and ivy buds, With coral clasps and amber studs; And if these pleasures may thee move, Come live with me, and be my love. Thy silver dishes for thy meat As precious as the gods do eat, Shall on an ivory table be Prepared each day for thee and me.

The shepherd swains shall dance and sing For thy delight each May-morning:

If these delights thy mind may move, Then live with me and be my love.

‘Swain’ is an old, Norse-derived word meaning servant. This is a good example of meter influencing word choice– obviously there are different and more common words for servant, but Marlowe needed a monosyllable. This is good time to think about meter and meaning– if the word you want is precluded my your rhythm, what should you do? Choose another, less precise one, or interrupt your flow? Which means more? Or are you a real poet, able to combine flow and meaning smoothly?

Christopher Marlowe

The Passionate Shepherd to His Love

I loved you in the morning, our kisses deep and warm

Your hair upon the pillow like a sleepy golden storm

Yes, many loved before us, I know that we are not new In city and in forest they smiled like me and you But now it's come to distances and both of us must try

Her hair is all wild after sleeping and probably, after sleeping after the sex.

Leonard Cohen

Hey Thats No Way to Say Goodbye

Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone, Silence the pianos and with muffled drum Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come. Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead Scribbling on the sky the message He Is Dead, Put crêpe bows round the white necks of the public doves, Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves. He was my North, my South, my East and West, My working week and my Sunday rest, My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song; I thought that love would last for ever: I was wrong. The stars are not wanted now: put out every one;

Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun;

Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood. For nothing now can ever come to any good.

As well as conveying a lover’s loss these lines can be interpreted as a rejection of the Christian religion. or the ‘utter annihilation of creation’ (J.M. Pressley). The speaker therefore questions God’s existence. Note also that stars, moon and sun are sources of light and their destruction signifies the end of the world and the end of hope. This, in Pressley’s view in “Auden, Across the Decades”, is appropriate given the imminent outbreak of the Second World War. Pressley, J.M. “Auden Across the Decades.

W. H. Auden

Funeral Blues Stop all the clocks

I kept my love for her locked deep inside And I don't know what to do To get it through to you Get out of my life tonight Get out of my life Out of my life, out of my hair Out of my mind, cause no lovin' fair I move on, move on She had nothing but time on her hands Silver rings, turquoise stones and purple nails I rub my thumb across her palm A featherbed where slept a psalm

Yay though I walked, I used to fly, and now we dance

I watch my toenails blacken and walk a deadened trance 'til she woke me with the knife edge of her glance I have the scars to prove the clock strikes with her hands

Referring to the line before – “Yea though I walk” is a line from the well-known biblical Psalm 23 , and Saul modifies the line to indicate his independence in being able to fly, as he only walked before he got caught up with this woman.

Saul Williams

Fearless

I met a traveller from an antique land Who said—"Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desert . . .Near them, on the sand, Half sunk a shatter'd visage lies, whose frown, And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command, Tell that its sculptor well those passions read Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things, The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed;

And on the pedestal these words appear:

My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings; Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair! Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

The remains of the statue were propped on a pedestal, a large slab of rock that usually bears an inscription about the origin and purpose of the statue. “pedestal” also suggests the Pharaoh’s elevated vision of himself. As one commentator neatly says ‘Ozy. is on his high horse …’

Percy Bysshe Shelley

Ozymandias

But he turned first, and led my eye to look At a tall tuft of flowers beside a brook, A leaping tongue of bloom the scythe had spared Beside a reedy brook the scythe had bared. 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,

The mower is associated with Death and the image of the reaper. His “long scythe whispering the ground" symbolically alludes to both his communion with nature, and recalls the battlefield of the “levelled scene”. Death never takes all life at once, and so he is a force of life as well as destruction. Frost explores a relationship between life and death based on collaboration and understanding. The tuft of flowers symbolise the spared few from Death’s grasp. Frost suggest hope in the song of “the wakening birds around”, showing how life is still with us. The narrator is aware of the rest of nature and no longer so introspective.

Robert Frost

The Tuft of Flowers

I LOOK into my glass, And view my wasting skin, And say, "Would God it came to pass My heart had shrunk as thin!" For then, I, undistrest By hearts grown cold to me, Could lonely wait my endless rest With equanimity. But Time, to make me grieve, Part steals, lets part abide;

And shakes this fragile frame at eve With throbbings of noontide.

The slow pace continues with the elongated vowels in line three — ‘shakes’, ‘frame’ and ‘eve’. The alliterative ‘fr’s in 'fragile frame’ also slow the pace. If spoken aloud this line is diffult to say, something of a tongue-twister. The references to ‘noontide’ and ‘eve’ to represent the prime of life and the end of life respectively, are common tropes in literature and music. However, the choice of ‘throbbings’ to signify vibrancy and youthfulness provides a contrasting note of originality. The resolution, though, is sad and hopeless. The speaker has the spirit and yearnings of youth in the failing body of an aging man.

Thomas Hardy

I Look Into My Glass

Perfection, of a kind, was what he was after, And the poetry he invented was easy to understand; He knew human folly like the back of his hand, And was greatly interested in armies and fleets; When he laughed, respectable senators burst with laughter,

And when he cried the little children died in the streets.

Here’s the poem’s tone shift. Every other line is (at least on the surface) a compliment of the tyrant. Here is the very harsh reality of who he really is and what he’s capable of. Like line 4, the final line seems to depict the tyrant as a child himself, throwing the mother of all temper tantrums. The final line is also an allusion to J.H. Motley’s The Rise of the Dutch Republic (1855), inverting its final line about William the Silent: “and when he died the little children cried in the streets.”

W. H. Auden

Epitaph on a Tyrant

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!

The juxtaposition of this line between “divine countenance” and the “satanic mills” signifies Jerusalem’s history as a human construction, an ideological battle field (he later calls it a “mental fight”). It was fought over between empires for centuries and still is today. This is linked to the Book Of Revelation (3:12 and 21:2) describing a Second Coming, wherein Jesus establishes a New Jerusalem. The Christian church in general, and the English Church in particular, has long used Jerusalem as a metaphor for Heaven, a place of universal love and peace.

William Blake

And Did Those Feet In Ancient Time

And looked down one as far as I could To where it bent in the undergrowth. Then took the other, as just as fair, And having perhaps the better claim Because it was grassy and wanted wear; Though as for that the passing there Had worn them really about the same, And both that morning equally lay In leaves no step had trodden black. Oh, I kept the first for another day! Yet knowing how way leads on to way, I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh Somewhere ages and ages hence:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I-- I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference.

As he accepts that this choice may ultimately define his life, he expects to feel a little melancholy about his decision. He is not completely confident and expects to feel some regrets that he didn’t go the other way. The tone here is gently comic or mock-melodramatic, but there’s a serious wistfulness behind it . The sigh can be one of regret or satisfaction. Similarly, the difference that he talks about can be one that is welcome, or otherwise.

Robert Frost

The Road Not Taken

The Brain – is wider than the Sky –

For – put them side by side – The one the other will contain With ease – and You – beside –

Dickinson suggests that the human mind is more capacious than the world it observes because it can perceive, and thereby “contain,” both an interior and exterior reality. She rejoices in creative possibility and freedom, not only for humans in general but for herself as a poet.

Emily Dickinson

The Brain – is wider than the Sky –

All I know is a door into the dark.

Outside, old axles and iron hoops rusting;

Inside, the hammered anvil's short-pitched ring, The unpredictable fantail of sparks Or hiss when a new shoe toughens in water.

The old and rusting implements imply progress; with these objects unwanted and left behind. Though no longer practical, even for a traditional dying profession, they stand as a reminder of work done in the past that continues to build on today. As the ongoing sonnet will show, what he used to create and still does is of importance.

Seamus Heaney

The Forge

Some say the world will end in fire, Some say in ice. From what I've tasted of desire I hold with those who favor fire. But if it had to perish twice, I think I know enough of hate To say that for destruction ice Is also great

And would suffice.

Frost’s ironic understatement reminds us that it doesn’t really matter how the world is brought down. “Hot” passion and “cold” hatred can be equally destructive, and once they’ve done their work, there’s no turning back. Older ideas here prevail–more medieval associations: The idea of destructive punishments that fit the crime: Hellfire or Hel as ice? The world’s destruction is figured as a result of human impulses taken to an extreme. Anthropocentric! And more, that it would be “great” to go in this way–such a wonderfully flat word, suggesting (along with “From what I’ve tasted of desire” that the form of the world’s end we get ought to be the one that involves us revelling in our hot lusts or cold antagonism. The implication is that we WANT the end to come in one way or the other. We wouldn’t want to turn back–the end would “suffice” us.

Robert Frost

Fire and Ice

To thee my way in epigrams seems new, When both it is the old way and the true. Thou sayst that cannot be, for thou hast seen Davies and Weever, and the best have been, And mine come nothing like. I hope so; yet As theirs did with thee, mine might credit get, If thou'dst but use thy faith, as thou didst then When thou wert wont t' admire, not censure men.

Prithee believe still, and not judge so fast;

Thy faith is all the knowledge that thou hast.

“Prithee” is an archaic English interjection formed from a corruption of the phrase “pray thee.” This means, “Don’t judge too fast!”

Ben Jonson

Epigram XVIII. To My Mere English Censurer

Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so.

After all, the sky flashes, the great sea yearns, we ourselves flash and yearn, and moreover my mother told me as a boy

Thus begins one of Berryman’s best drunken dream song ramblings. And the perfect irony of Berryman “saying so” before telling us “We must not say so.”

John Berryman

Dream Song 14

No crime is vulgar, but all vulgarity is crime. Vulgarity is the conduct of others. Only the shallow know themselves. Time is a waste of money. One should always be a little improbable. There is a fatality about all good resolutions. They are invariably made too soon. The only way to atone for being occasionally a little over-dressed is by being always absolutely over-educated. To be premature is to be perfect. Any preoccupation with ideas of what is right and wrong in conduct shows an arrested intellectual development. Ambition is the last refuge of the failure. A truth ceases to be true when more than one person believes in it. In examinations the foolish ask questions that the wise cannot answer. Greek dress was in its essence inartistic. Nothing should reveal the body but the body.

One should either be a work of art, or wear a work of art.

It is only the superficial qualities that last. Man's deeper nature is soon found out. Industry is the root of all ugliness. The ages live in history through their anachronisms.

Being a Belle Époque dandy , Wilde took great pride in his fashion sense; even creating lectures based around it . In fact, his over-flowery clothes and refined manners is why he is often misconceptioned as an aristocrat . His clothing is still relevant today – notably the green carnations he wore as art now being a symbol of gay pride.

Oscar Wilde

Phrases and Philosophies For the Use of the Young

Your Momma took to shouting Your Poppa's gone to war,

Your sister's in the streets

Your brother's in the bar. The thirteens. Right On. Your cousin's taking smack

This could be a very sly and lowkey reference to the sister being a stripper or prostitute and on the street looking to make money off of her body and for sex.

Maya Angelou

The Thirteens Black

To fling my arms wide In some place of the sun, To whirl and to dance Till the white day is done. Then rest at cool evening Beneath a tall tree While night comes on gently, Dark like me-- That is my dream! To fling my arms wide In the face of the sun,

Dance! Whirl! Whirl!

Till the quick day is done. Rest at pale evening . . . A tall, slim tree . . .

Like a whirling dervish in an attempt to reach ecstasy, before the “day is done”

Langston Hughes

Dream Variations

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 Through dark eyes in a dark face— And this is what I know:

That all these walls oppression builds Will have to go!

I look at my own body With eyes no longer blind— And I see that my own hands can make

Hughes is giving the readers a call to action about the changes the “world” must make. Oppression is what has made the buildings and segregation that infests the world, and to overcome this the separate theaters, bathrooms, classrooms, etc. must vanish, and equality must reign. Literally these walls between two races must go!

Langston Hughes

I Look At The World

What's smelling, Leontyne? Lieder, lovely Lieder And a leaf of collard green, Lovely Lieder Leontyne. In the shadow of the negroes Nkrumah In the shadow of the negroes Nasser Nasser In the shadow of the negroes Zik Azikiwe Cuba Castro Guinea touré For need or propaganda

Kenyatta

And the Tom dogs of the cabin The cocoa and the cane brake The chain gang and the slave block

Jomo Kenyatta (1892 – 1978) is considered the founding father of the independent Kenyan state, serving first as the prime minister, then as the president of the African nation. Worked with Kwame Nkrumah to form the Pan-African Federation.

Langston Hughes

Cultural Exchange

Wire. One flies Off. Then Another. One is left, Then It too Is gone. My typewriter is Tombstone Still.

And I am Reduced to bird Watching.

Just thought I'd Let you Know,

Again, with no one around and nothing to keep him company, when he wasn’t writing he would simply watch the birds outside his window.

Charles Bukowski

8 Count

I did but prompt the age to quit their clogs

By the known rules of ancient liberty, When straight a barbarous noise environs me Of owls and cuckoos, asses, apes and dogs:

The age here refers to the popularly held ideology of the time. A clog is a heavy block or piece of wood attached (like a ball and chain) to the leg or neck of a man or beast, to impede motion or prevent escape. From this meaning, the word came to mean an object that obstructs the motion or flow of something, like a clogged sink.

John Milton

Sonnet 12: I did but prompt the age to quit their clogs

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. The children rush before us.

As in a dream of snow we track through crystal fields to the green horizon

‘Men new-born’ is subtly rearranges the natural word order for a feeling of strangeness– newness, even. ‘Radiant’ is a prelude to the intense brightness that will be developed in the final lines. It normally applies to the look of something, but air is invisible. For the speaker, the New Year illuminates even things which you can’t see.

Frances Horovitz

New Year Snow

To wield it;—they, too, who, of gentle mood, Had watched all gentle motions, and to these Had fitted their own thoughts, schemers more wild, And in the region of their peaceful selves;— Now was it that both found, the meek and lofty Did both find, helpers to their heart's desire, And stuff at hand, plastic as they could wish; Were called upon to exercise their skill, Not in Utopia, subterranean fields, Or some secreted island, Heaven knows where! But in the very world, which is the world Of all of us,—the place where in the end

We find our happiness, or not at all!

Shows the divide that was created within French society: some people were very satisfied with the French Revolution while others were very dissatisfied. This is most evident with the French political groups at the time, the Jacobins and the Girondins who had opposing political philosophies.

William Wordsworth

The French Revolution as It Appeared to Enthusiasts at Its Commencement