Stanza Essays (Examples)

American Literature

"Song of Myself" stanzas 1-21 by Walt Whitman

Pride in the self and one's perseverance at life

"I celebrate myself, and sing myself, and what I assume you shall assume, for every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.

"I am satisfied -- I see, dance, laugh, sing;"

Equality and the view of American lands

"And it means, sprouting alike in broad zones and narrow zones, growing among black folks as among white…I give them the same, I receive them the same"

"Along far in the wilds and mountains I hunt, wandering amazed at my own lightness and glee…"

The Hairy Ape by Eugene O'Neill

A view of what industry does to the future of class and American society in cities

"A procession of gaudy marionettes, yet with something of the relentless horror of Frankensteins in their detached, mechanical awareness."

"Where's all de white-collar stiffs yuh…

Your answer should be at least five sentences long.

The Legend of Arthur

Lesson 1 Journal Entry # 9 of 16

Journal Exercise 1.7A: Honor and Loyalty

1. Consider how Arthur's actions and personality agree with or challenge your definition of honor. Write a few sentences comparing your definition (from Journal 1.6A) with Arthur's actions and personality.

2. Write a brief paragraph explaining the importance or unimportance of loyalty in being honorable.

Lesson 1 Journal Entry # 10 of 16

Journal Exercise 1.7B: Combining Sentences

Complete the Practice Activity on page 202 of your text. After completing this activity, read over your Essay Assessment or another journal activity you've completed.

* Identify three passages that could be improved by combining two or more sentences with coordinating or subordinating conjunctions. Below the practice activity in your journal, write the original passages and the revised sentences you've created.

* Be sure to…

Unfair

Robert Francis was an American poet whose work is reminiscent of Robert Francis, his mentor. Francis' writing has often compared to other writers such as Frost, Emily Dickinson, and Henry David Thoreau. Although Francis's work has frequently been neglected and is "often excluded from major anthologies of American poetry," those that have read his work have praised him and his writing. In "Fair and Unfair," Francis comments on balance in nature and in society. Like Frost, Francis contends nature has the ability to provide guidance if only man is smart enough to observe it. In "Fair and Unfair," Francis is able to find balance through what is written and how it is written.

The poem is told from a first person, omniscient perspective and the narrator appears to be addressing the general public; it appears as though the narrator seeks to bring attention to how nature has become disregarded…

Most individuals fail to appreciate life to the fullest because they concentrate on being remembered as some of the greatest humans who ever lives. This makes it difficult for them to enjoy the simple pleasures in life, considering that they waste most of their time trying to put across ideas that are appealing to the masses. While many did not manage to produce ideas that survived more than them, others succeeded and actually produced thinking that remained in society for a long period of time consequent to their death.

Creativity is generally regarded as one of the most important concepts in society, considering that it generally induces intense feelings in individuals. It is responsible for progress and for the fact that humanity managed to produce a series of ideas that dominated society's thinking through time. In order for someone to create a concept that will live longer than him or…

Apparently Plath wrote the poem during her stay in the hospital, which can be a depressing place notwithstanding all the nurses and orderlies dressed in white. The appendectomy followed a miscarriage that Plath had suffered through, so given those realities in the poet's life -- especially for a woman to lose a child she had been carrying -- one can identify with the bleak nature of the poem. Confronted with the birth that turned out to be death, and then a painful appendectomy, the tulips are used as something of an abstraction and the redness of them gives her pain because it "corresponds" to the wound in her body from the surgery.

The opening stanza's first few lines seem rather peaceful and restful: "The tulips are too excitable, it is winter here / look how white everything is / How quiet, how snowed-in / I am learning peacefulness / lying…

Dickinson "I Felt a Funeral in My Brain"

Filled with words and phrases laden with imagery of death, drowning, and droning drums, Emily Dickinson's haunting poem "I Felt a Funeral in My Brain" provides insight into a fractured mind. The poet employs a plethora of poetic techniques such as alliteration, repetition, rhyme and rhythm to create mood and convey the central themes of emptiness and mental chaos. Alliteration and repetition reflect the motif of drums beating, while rhyming evokes the tonal qualities of the bells that the speaker hears. Therefore, in conjunction with the musical motifs in "I Felt a Funeral in My Brain," the poem is itself highly lyrical and rhythmic. The poet's use of repetition also creates the thematic tension much like the crescendo of a shaman's drums induces a trance. In addition to the poem's overt lyricism and musicality, Dickinson's work also includes powerful subtleties that contribute…

John Keats and Melancholic Delight:

To Autumn

To Autumn by John Keats is a testimonial of the omantic Era. The poem is filled with the importance of individual fulfillment at the behest of societal decline. The stoic nature of Keats's To Autumn is viewed by most as despairingly melancholic. However, when looking for hope one finds an eternal hopefulness amongst his opining. Autumn is used to symbolize the dichotomy in existence of life and death happening at once and forever. Keats sees in autumn the irony of life, and the contrast of humanity to the individual.

A general motif of the omantic era became the inevitable decline of humanity. Philosophers and writers alike viewed industrialism as an evil driving innocence further from the reach of the collective. In short, the precipitous pace of history was leaving innocence in its wake. More over, tramping it along the way. "Society embodied forces…

O Captain

Three Themes in "O Captain! My Captain!"

alt hitman wrote "O Captain! My Captain!" In 1865 and it serves as an elegy to the President Lincoln, who had just been assassinated. As a patriotic American and the "poet of America" (as he called himself), hitman was duty-bound to mourn the loss of the 16th U.S. president in verse. That he did so in a way completely opposite from his free verse "Song of Myself" -- the poem dedicated to himself and the spirit of freedom and license -- is telling. Lincoln, the "captain" of America during the critical time of the Civil ar, represented order, structure and unity. These elements serve as the foundation of hitman's "O Captain!" which deals with three themes in its three stanzas: a mission, fatherhood, and death. This paper will analyze these themes and show how they are brought about.

The theme of…

The imagery is very clear and stark; the objects and people she recalls in this stanza are not pleasant or beautiful, much of it is ugly and disgusting, such as a worm that lived in a cat's ear, presumably ringworm, or some other type of disease. Perhaps, she is comparing love to all of these awful, drab things. In the places we could find love, such as in the everyday objects we enjoy, or the people who are supposed to bring us spiritual clarity or advice, such as the preacher, are disgusting, dangerous, and full of death. She certainly does not have a positive view of religion, or the representative of religion, as she describes the preacher with thin lips, who scuffles, and looks for scapegoats. She did not describe him as pious and sweet, as we might think the average preacher is, and for him to be coming by…

hile most of the poem centers around this face, there are a few stanzas where the poet breaks away and discovers what he knows to be himself after this tragedy. The dreadful aspect of life and even his own early demise surface in the emotions revealed in this poem. It is deeply personal and intense. On the other hand, "Don Juan" is less personal. hile the poem may feel less personal, it cannot be denied that we see a little of Byron in this character. However, this is more than a character sketch. Each poem successfully utilizes the literary techniques of voice, mood, and tone to explore meaning. Shelley is remarkably successful in capturing moments of grief. The mood and tone of the poem are nothing to question. The stanzas examine focus primarily on sorrow and how this sorrow affects the poet. There is nothing else to know about this…

Night funeral in Harlem: When the funeral was completely over and the boy's coffin was carried out to the hears, which drove too fast down the street, the streetlight even seemed like it was crying for the boy. He was well-loved by everyone, and their love made the funeral magnificent, even if things looked more poor.

Connotation: The meaning behind the literal sense of the poem seems to be that despite what hardships, disadvantages, and unfairness, human relationships are the really important things that make us rich. The words that Hughes uses juxtaposes symbols of money, greed, and death with love, friendship, and life -- insurance men with satin boxes, flowers and the greedy preacher man, etc. This implies that many people just don't understand what's really important.

Devices: As stated above, the rhyme and meter of the poem enhance the poem's varying meanings. In addition, the use of repetition…

The keys and the house are not in her possession any longer but the "cities, rivers, and caves" do not belong to her as they once did. This kind of loss, too, does not represent what the poet would define a disaster. However, true loss is explored in the last stanza

The poet's real intention emerges in this stanza as she turns to more personal and private matters. The last stanza is the most powerful in that the poet moves from speaking about things to people - more significantly, "you." The poet also attaches noteworthy attributes to the lover by remembering the "the joking voice, the gesture / I love" (16-7), which move her to reinforce the notion that loss is not difficult to master. It is worth noting that the punctuation in this stanza because it strays from what the poet has employed in earlier stanzas. The dash before…

Memory of Elena

A Poem to Explain Grief

Often a poem's meaning is apparent from only the title. This is not the case with "The Memory of Elena," a poem written by Carolyn Forche in 1981. At first, the title suggests a poetic recollection of Elena, but as the poem develops, we see that it is at first a memory of a lunch with Elena and then Elena's own recollection of the tragic events that destroyed her life. The memories of the poet and Elena merge, becoming as one. The poet remembers her meal with Elena even as Elena recalls her last night with her husband years earlier in Buenos Aires. In the poem, Forche uses the simple symbolism of a meal shared together to bring to light how important remembrance is and how important it is to mourn and recognize the sacrifices others make on our behalf.

"The Memory…

Let the unknowable touch the buckle of my spine.

Let the wind turn in the trees, and the mystery hidden in the dirt (Oliver).

Thus, the differences between the two narrators can be seen clearly through these two stanzas. hile Olds' narrator gives the impression of urgency, frustration, sadness, and overwhelming emotion, Oliver's narrator is calm, released, and accepting.

Thus, a comparison of Sharon Olds' "Little Summer Poem Touching The Subject Of Faith" and Mary Oliver's "The Daughter Goes To Camp" reveals that the poems have both similarities and difference. Both poems take place during summer, are narrated by a rather female voice, and discuss the subject of worry. Differences, however, suggest that the poems may, indeed, be antithesis of each other. hile an urgent, worried, narrator who is overcome with emotion narrates Olds' poem, Oliver's poem gives the reader a sense of calmness and acceptance. Thus, while one poem…

The overall effect is like slogging through sucking mud -- there is a depressive inertia in the poem, as if one does not want to go on but must.

2) What does he mean by "blind skyscrapers"? What does this mean symbolically? The line before this one comments on the "neutral air" in New York (this is before they entered WWII), making the blind skyscrapers perhaps "blind" in the sense that they aren't taking sides; blind like Justice is blind. They are also blind to the evils being committed in Europe where war has been going on for awhile. All of this is symbolic; it is also possible that Auden is alluding to tall buildings of a bygone era, where towers and lighthouses -- the tallest building -- were built specifically to see.

3) in the seventh stanza... what is the "ethical life" of which he speaks in the first…

The fly is a gruesome image because flies gather around decaying corpses. However, while this image is startling, it is still shocking that the poet is not more in shock of dying, of being dead, or witnessing just a fly upon her death.

The poem consists of four stanzas, which include slant rhymes on the second and fourth lines. The lines alternate between six and eight syllables. Dashes in the poem force the reader to slow down and take time to read each phrase. The tone of the poem is lyrical but the message of it is somber. Dickinson uses a simile in the poem In the line, "The Stillness in the Room / as like the Stillness in the Air" (2-3). This image is important because it reveals the poet's notion that there is nothing special that awaits us after death. The still air is a stark contrast to…

For example, the word "ring" connotes a wedding ring and it also refers more directly to the "ring of boots" at her feet. The word "lifted" also has a double meaning, one literal and one metaphorical. The mother remembers literally lifting her baby boy in the bathtub, but she contemplates how he is being "lifted" or stolen by his fiance. Her baby boy is leaving her. The word "bedded" also connotes two different things, suggesting both sex but also finality as she describes the feeling wedding ring being permanently em-bedded on a person's finger.

6. The first stanza of Agha Shahid Ali's poem "Postcard from Kashmir" is filled with hope and optimism, delivered mainly by the word "neat." Written from a youthful perspective, the word "neat" is often used as slang like the word "cool" is. Moreover, the word "neat" is used to described his humble yet poor home. The…

Rather than Klein's more stagnant relationship with his father, a man locked, in the past, the subject of the poem "Keine Lazarovitch" is almost as complex as the ebb and flux of Jewish life as a whole, rather than one segment of it, and her hold upon Layton is likewise more stormy, cyclical, and complex than the relationship of old to young detailed in Klein's poem about his father.

In Klein's poem the physicality of the father's books function the touchstone with which the poet accesses his father's memory, rather than his physical, father -- the father in death, much like the father in life is of the book, rather than a loving and guiding force, or even a force to be clashed with, as in Layton's poem. Klein's poem makes reference to the father's pamphlets, prayers, and tomes, as if these are the subjects of the man's life entirely,…

Killing Shot to the Heart of the Rhetoric of the Pro-ar Movement:

The Man He Killed" by Thomas Hardy

Often, 'poetry' is narrowly though popularly defined as the use of heightened or self-consciously poetic language to deal with a particular theme that exists outside of the realm of everyday life. Poetry is seen as impractical, as opposed to an essay, for instance, a written medium that directly engages on an intellectual level with issues of importance. However, Thomas Hardy's poem "The Man He Killed" powerfully punctures such notions of poetry being removed from the language and the issues of real life. The poem, through the use of colloquial rather than metaphorical language, captures the voice of a soldier who has just killed a member of the opposing army. The soldier expresses an inner humanity that exists beyond the empty rhetoric of national propaganda. However, Hardy also makes use of irony…

Gray's Elegy

Sound of Sense in Gray's Elegy

Thomas Gray's "Elegy Written in a Country Church-Yard" is a powerful poem that brings to light some very compelling ideas. One cannot read this poem but once and acquire a true understanding of its significance. Rather, one must read it twice, three times, even four times before grasping the various meanings hidden throughout the poem. To take this a step further, one should read the poem aloud, for Gray uses certain musical devices (i.e., tone and sound of sense) to further thrust his feelings upon his readers.

A poem written with tone and sound of sense is much more than mere words on paper; its meaning lies in how those words are spoken, and how the tone of one's voice implicates different emotions. Gray understood this idea. It was not only his brilliant words that conveyed his notion of death, but it…

The title of Hayden's poem creates a mood, tone, and setting. inter is a time of retreat and frigid weather, and imagery of cold permeates the poem. Coldness is also the core emotion that the speaker conveys. The cold is "blueblack," which also signals a possible bruise, as if the father was indeed abusive. The father had "cracked hands that ached," which were not from the cold, though, but from his hard work, his labor in the "weekday weather."

Imagery of "splintering and breaking" is contrasted with the powerful last line of "Those inter Sundays," which refers to "love's austere and lonely offices." Love is neither austere nor lonely in Simon Ortiz's "My Father's Song." In "My Father's Song," the imagery is far more summery. Like the speaker in "Those inter Sundays," the speaker in "My Father's Song" refers to his dad's manual labor in the fields. Yet labor did…

Throughout the poem, the narrator discusses the geese's journey, and her envy for that journey. She wishes for something that could make her pulse pound in the same way that the geese are compelled to complete their journey. However, the meaning goes beyond the journey. The narrator conveys an intense feeling of loneliness. The narrator is solitary and makes it clear that she has no place to call her home. When one considers the fact that she points out that the geese are coupled in pairs, her loneliness becomes even more apparent.

Devices

Throughout the poem, the narrator employs the technique of repeating words. The geese call "each to each, each" and later she seeks a heartland that will "call me, call me." She repeats the idea of a group repetitively calling to one another with the idea of the heartland calling to her. She repeats other words in the…

The Spenserian sonnet combines elements of both Italian and the Shakespearean forms. It has three quatrains and a couplet but differ in that it has linking rhymes between the quatrains.

In the 17th Century the sonnet was adapted and used by John Donne in his religious poetry and by Milton who adapted to political themes. It was later revived by Wordsworth in the 19th Century, after being relatively neglected in the 18th Century. (aldick C.) have chosen Shakespeare Sonnet CXVI - Let me not to the marriage of true minds, to discuss.

The central aspect that appeals to me in this poem is its condensed and logical structure. The central point that is made is carried through the poem in a clear and concise way. This central theme is to emphasize that love, if it is true love, is enduring and permanent. True love cannot be subject to change or…

Beginning with the major arch of the Stanze that frames the entire piece, there recedes a series of concentric circles that focus down to the archway that frames the two central figures. This can be seen as a nearly literal rippling effect of the wisdom of these two great thinkers off into space, and into the mind of the viewer. Working from largest to smallest, we can see that the pattern is ultimately infinite since it ends with the focal point discussed in the previous paragraph. This seems to reflect the philosophy that the more focused a philosophy comes, and the finite the topics, the closer it gets to circling back again into the infinite.

The integration of a dialectic of ideas is achieved through an intricate working of visual lines. The strong diagonals of the heads of the two statues and the heads of the two major figures creates…

Mary Oliver's Seven White Butterflies And West Wind

This is a poetry analysis of Mary Oliver's Seven White Butterflies and West Wind 2. It uses the poems as the main source.

Mary Oliver, a Pulitzer Prize winner poet of modern literature is not only keen on nature but she uses it to inspire readers as well. She neither admonishes nor does she discriminate against those who do not share her view. Like most romantic poets she creates a boundary between nature and man, and attempts to explain through examples by which one can live by. In her poems Seven White Butterflies and West Wind 2 the poet demonstrates that man needs to learn from nature a life free from struggle for materialism or dejection. She further suggests that man is part of nature and struggling against the stream of life would not resolve the dilemmas that he's in. These ideas…

The second aspect is that the subtlety of the sickness keeps it under the surface of an apparently healthy whole. The indication appears to be that the casual observer would not detect the illness. However, a person who moves closer to the rose will begin to see the signs of the illness that is in the process of consuming the life of the rose from within.

The words "bed" and "crimson joy" appear to refer to love that has been consummated by sex. This provides further possibilities for interpretation. It could be that the romance of young love was corrupted by sex -- "crimson" could refer to the loss of virginity. From a modern point-of-view, however, the disease could be the deception of one of the partners while the other is faithful. This deception then destroys the relationship from within. This interpretation can be substantiated by the phrase "dark secret…

He also loses his robe in the process; this increases his pathetic quality and allows for a mantle to be passed on to someone with twice the art.

Swift's Gulliver's Travels

5) Based on what you've read, is this really a work for children? What is going on here that might fly right over the heads of most young children? This book satirizes almost every institution of Swift's day, from the government to the Church. The fact the Lilliputians and Blefuscuans are fighting over which end of the egg to eat first is funy to children, but has deeper and somewhat sadder implications for adults.

6) Describe the narrator. What kind of character is he? What observational details does he choose to focus on? What, if anything, do these observations tell us about his own preoccupations or obsessions? Te things Gulliver notices seem to shift with each new country and…

Auden

The Amazing Moderns W.H. Auden (adio Script)

"Jumpstart" radio show theme song playing.

ADIO ANNOUNCE:

Good afternoon girls and boys, guys and gals! This is Boom Bill Bass, a.k.a. Three B, ready to jumpstart your afternoon with my "unofficial" DJ mix and musings about prose and poetry, music and lyrics, and anything in between these things!

Listen up! We will be doing a great series in Jumpstart this month, called the "Amazing Moderns." This is a poetry series -- yes dear listeners, a poetry series this time -- showcasing the works of great poets in American literature in the 20th century. If you're wondering what 20th century means, guys and gals, it's that period when you're not yet born, oh yeah I'm kidding -- NOT! This period is between the 1900s and well before the Millennium, before the futuristic years of "2Ks" -- that's 2000 and up -- started.…

Frost's Sounds -- Shaping The Feeling Of The Poem's Reader

Unlike the measured procession of syllables and the soft vowel sounds that characterizes the feelings conveyed in "Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening," the poet Robert Frost uses sharp, cracklings consonants to denote the dangerous and active life of the birches of his poem "Birches." The poem about "Birches," particularly in the first lines that set the scene and the stage for the active engagement of the poet with nature, are rife with crackling sharp 'b' plosive sounds that seem to create a sense of brittleness and breaking and exploding upon the reader's ear, as opposed to the softer vs. And ws of the more leisurely and measured progression of verbiage in "Stopping by the Woods."

"When I see birches bend to left and right," "Birches" begins, immediately locating the reader in a state of action, activating the…

Fern Hill (Dylan Thomas)

The "Poetry Explications" handout from UNC states that a poetry explication is a "relatively short analysis which describes the possible meanings and relationship of the words, images, and other small units that make up a poem."

The speaker in "Fern Hill" dramatically embraces memories from his childhood days at his uncle's farm, when the world was innocent; the second part brings out the speaker's loss of innocence and transition into manhood. This explication will identify and critique Thomas' tone, imagery (including metaphors) and expressive language (as it contributes to the power of the poem). ("Fern Hill" uses 6 verse paragraphs; there are 9 lines in each paragraph.)

"Now as I was young and easy under the apple boughs / About the lilting house and happy as the grass was green / the night above the dingle starry / time let me hail and climb / golden…

Night the Crystals Broke

Write where you got inspiration from?

The inspiration from this poem comes from my grandmother and her family, who lived through the pogroms and just before the Nazis took over Hungary. The title refers to the Kristallnacht, the event in which the Nazis burned synagogues and their religious items, and broke the windows. They also broke the windows of the local businesses. This poem also refers to the journey that was scary and arduous, over the Atlantic in the ship to Ellis Island. The statue at the end of the poem is the Statue of Liberty, which welcomed the "poor" and "hungry" masses, like my grandmother's people.

(2) Which author and poem did you refer to when writing this poem?

There is no one author or poem I referred to here. This is a completely original work. However, it is written in the form of a…

T.S. Eliot, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, & Ezra Pound

"Preludes" by T.S. Eliot adopts a slant rhyme pattern to convey the state of his thoughts as he writes the poem. The poem basically illustrates the Voice/Poet's thoughts about the seemingly busy, yet tiresome and uninteresting lives of the people in the urban areas (cities). Eliot paints this tiresome and uninteresting picture of human life in the city by slant rhymes, reflecting the continuous stream of unorganized thoughts of the poet. For example, slant rhyming occurs in lines 2 and 4, where "passageways" and "smoky days" are used. However, towards the end of the poem, slant rhyming is instead replaced with end-rhymes (lines 12 and 13, with rhymes used "stamps" and "lamps"), proving once again the presence of 'unstable' and changing thoughts of the poet.

"The pennycandystore beyond the El" by Lawrence Ferlinghetti utilizes symbolism to effectively depict his thoughts about the fleeting…

remark when passing a magazine on the stand called Teenage Glamour with a girl who barely had anything extra blossoming on her bosom area on the cover. And people wonder why children, especially girls, want to grow up so quickly? Is it any wonder? Next week, a new magazine is coming out called Baby Girl Glamour.

"Wit's end," by Daisy Fried is about a father pained by the fact that his "baby" spends countless hours in the bathroom doing inane things like shaving her legs and applying tons of makeup. The poem clearly demonstrates both the success the cosmetic companies are having with their target audiences and how girls use makeup as a means to cut themselves off from their fathers and show who is boss.

The "beauty" (pun intended) of the poem "Wit's end" are the images that can be quickly visualized by anyone having lived with a female…

message of the poem. This narrative poem follows one, dynamic event - the death of a boy using a saw to cut wood. The poem does not have rhyming lines; it is simply a block of text that narrates one single and very important event. It begins very quietly, and seems to be one of Frost's poems that celebrate nature and American life, but the end is far more disturbing and tragic. Frost may have written the poem to show how life is fleeting, and everything can change in a split second.

The content of this poem is quintessential obert Frost. It opens with fine imagery of the New England natural world that immediately gives the setting and tone of the poem. It reads somewhat like a Normal ockwell painting, with a perfect setting, close-knit family, and chores consuming their daily lives. The unsuspecting reader expects a perfect family farm…

representation of Death and the impermanence in the short story "A Father's Story" by Andre Dubus, and the poem "Because I could not stop for Death" by Emily Dickinson. These two works were chosen because both speak of Death and impermanence, yet these authors employ different literary forms, characters, settings and plots. "A Father's Story" follows the format of a short story, being prose written in concise paragraphs with a main point or moral and portraying its characters by the way they speak. "Because I could not stop for Death" follows the form of poetry, being structured in shifted lines and using language to evoke imagination or emotion in the reader. In addition, the two writers substantively approach Death very differently. Comparison of these distinct forms shows how writers can make very different styles and statements about Death and impermanence through different devices, including but not limited to the short…

John Ciardi was born in Boston in 1916. The child if immigrant parents, he attended college in an era when college education was still considered a privilege rather than an expected part of American life. College was the path to a better career, and a path toward making something of the person so that they could give back to society. For Ciardi, he was able to use his college education received from Bates College, Tufts College, and then a master's degree from the University of Michigan in 1939 to do both.

The Midwest has a particular flavor to life that is somewhat lost in the high society of the East coast. Life is about life, not the social trappings that are used to fill our lives with entertainment and intrigue. Some poets of Ciardi's time, such William Carlos Williams, took the impressionism of the time to abstract extreme. The words…

Thou shalt keep them, 0 Lod, thou shalt peseve them fom this geneation foeve."

Conceptually, the poem has fou sepaate stanzas, each with the hyme scheme of ababcdc. It is stuctued in the fom of the Shakespeaean o Elizabethan sonnet. Vebal intoductions (e.g. Help, left, standeth, seeks, etc.) seve to move the poem in a melodious way. In fact, eading this poem one is almost caught with it as a semon o oation. Many of the wods have a hashe, o staccato-like timbe, a shap contast to the love sonnets of the ea (bitte, wicked, piece, fea, etc.). This shapness, combined with the oatoical style seves Bacon's pupose of slightly aguing, slightly full of angst, and slightly aogant -- towads God. This, too, echoes much of the Biblical Job.

The poem does not ead as if it was contived, testament to Bacon's clea genius with language as well as his…

Sweetness refers to the universal and direct flavor of a poem, not to a mandatory tone. The narrator reminds the reader that verses should speak both "the bites and kisses of love," (line 15). The extended metaphor of sweetness also symbolizes the nourishing aspect of poetry, as the narrator longs for "eatable sonnets," (line 16).

In the fourth stanza, the narrator reminds the reader of the corruption of poetry. The fourth stanza therefore alludes to the first. "Vanity," notes the narrator, leads to "deep and useless" endeavors (lines 18; 20). In attempting vainglorious works of art, a poet forgets "the joyous / love-needs of our bodies," (lines 22, 23). The body's love-needs refers to all the visceral desires felt by the everyday person. Furthermore, the poet who relies on the "harsh machinery" mentioned in the first stanza is also "not feeding the world," (line 25). Here, the narrator reiterates the…

The words "Out "and Over" both convey a sense of loss and leaving, which enhances the meaning and intention of the poem as an exploration of grief.

The final lines of the first stanza are very short and concise. They are almost brutal in their finality and in the way that they suggest the inescapability of death through their analogy to winter. The direct simplicity of these lines and the way that they are positioned after the other longer lines, adds weight to the meaning of the poem and we feel the sense of loss and grief. Note as well the use of alliteration in the second last line of the stanza: "Silent, and soft, and slow."

This also adds to the sense of inevitability and the finality of death.

The use of alliteration, combined with the shorter and longer lines in the stanza is an example of the way…

Henry eed is a free-versed and metaphorical poem; because of the word "we," I can say that the speaker in the person uses the first person point-of-view.

"Naming of Parts" talks about an issue termed as "the problem of war" by military historians and philosophers. In simpler language, the problem is determining whether 'war is war' is a continually recurring part of the life of human beings or a totally unexpected occurrence, a deviation from the norm. A partial answer to this question has been provided by eed's poem. In eeds opinion, militarism and war are not natural. For instance, in the first stanza, eed uses a significant choice of the red-flowered Japonica. Like its name suggests, "Japanese quince" or japonica refers to something that is related to Japan- a member of the Axis powers that were allied against the U.S. and England in the Second World War. (Being an…

This indicates that the friendship he refers to never truly existed in the first place. Indeed, in Stanza XIII, he has the audacity to make a claim for the "truth."

This, as the reader has come to expect at this stage, is only very brief. The only claim to truth is that the woman was indeed light. However, because of this very lightness, she claims not to have done any wrong. She disregards the feelings of the friend in favor of her own desires for life with the speaker. Her exclamation to "Never mind that youth" appears to echo the feelings of the speaker. The woman has done the speaker no harm, and he has not harmed her. Instead, together they have harmed the innocent friend and broken what friendship there might have been left for him and the speaker. "Never mind" here can therefore also be interpreted as "I…

Robert Frost, "Acquainted with the Night"

Robert Frost's "Acquainted with the Night" is not a traditional sonnet. Although it has the traditional fourteen lines and tightly rhymed stanzas associated with both Petrarchan and Shakespearean sonnets, Frost's rhyme scheme here is unusual: he uses the interlinking rhymes structured around successive tercets that is known as terza rima, whose greatest proponent was probably Dante in The Divine Comedy. But Frost takes the radical solitude of Dante, who bereft of Beatrice is then led by the ghost of Virgil into a sort of dream-vision of eternity, and offers no otherworldly way out. It is my hope to show that Frost pursues a strategy in "Acquainted with the Night" of using the mundane and realistic details suitable for a poem about observed life, and to make them feel less familiar -- through the formality of the verse -- until it seems that Frost has…

Autumn

John Keats, Ode to Autumn 1819 (222)

To Autumn has sparingly figured in criticisms of Keats's poetry, because when compared with other odes of 1819, Ode to Autumn appears not to provide a strong basis for exposition or discussion purposes. Ode to Autumn's three stanzas mark out the seasons' progress. In stanza one, Autumn's role as the harbinger of the fruits for the season is distinguished. In stanza two, Autumn is personified specifically as a figure taking her rest after the harvest toil. Stanza three monitors the last part of the season as seen in the countryside receding and making way for the early part of the winter season. The seasonal change processes as typified in these three stages is carried out with a delicate movement that almost escapes notice.

The parts of Autumn showcased in the first stanza and the third stanza -richness and fruitfulness, which is in…

A central element that is fostered throughout the poem is the sense of emotional intensity and passion which is suggested by images and metaphors of burning and fire. For example, who had the lure of love in my breast, what wonder if I suddenly caught fire?

The second stanza continues the theme of lost love. The woman is depicted in a golden light and idealized form, which is supported by the emotional intensity of the protagonists love for her. This stanza also follows the same pattern of increase and decrease in intensity and the shift between adoration and loss of love. This pattern continues throughout the stanzas and culminates in the final lines of the poem. It is as if the recollection and memory of the loved one intensifies the feeling of love and passion to mythical proportions.

Her way of moving was no mortal thing, but of angelic form:…

Black Girl by Patricia Smith and Aurora Levin's Morales' Child of the Americas

Comparison between What it's Like to Be a Black Girl by Patricia Smith and Aurora Levin's Morales' Child of the Americas

Issues of race and racism coupled with those of culture and multiculturalism, in the society constitute one of the problem areas in which different groups of people have had to deal with, some of them having to face the issues on a day-to-day basis. In light of this, various literary works have been produced with the view of expressing the existence of such problems and finding ways in which these issues can be handled (Gale Group, 2003). Such literary works come in the form of poems which include the likes of "Child of the Americas" written by Aurora Morales and "What it is like to be a Black Girl" by Patricia Smith, works which form the…

SYMBOLIC THEMES OF MYSTERY AND THE SUPERNATURAL IN SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDE'S

RIME OF THE ANCIENT MARINER

In Samuel Taylor Coleridge's "Rime of the Ancient Mariner," considered by many scholars as the quintessential masterpiece of English Romantic poetry, the symbolic themes of mystery and the supernatural play a very crucial role in the poem's overall effect which John Hill Spencer sees as Coleridge's "attempt to understand the mystery surrounding the human soul in a universe moved by forces and powers... immanent and transcendent" (157). Yet the Mariner himself appears to be trapped in this supernatural world as a result of ghostly manifestations which emanate from the realms of the unknown.

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" was first published in Lyrical Ballads in 1798, a collection of poetry written and published jointly by Coleridge and his good friend William Wordsworth. Yet the text of the poem generally in use today appeared…

Introduction

Beginning a My Papa’s Waltz analysis essay can appear like a formidable task, as the poem is so simple, yet so enigmatic. Luckily, writing such an analysis essay can help you build a higher level of appreciation for the poem, as it can show you the layers of meaning embedded throughout each line. Close scrutiny of this poem can demonstrate the power that a precise word choice can wield in communicating feelings and visuals. In this piece, the words work together to create a picture of tension, uncertainty and danger. Written over fifty years ago, My Papa’s Waltz is still an example of writing that can comment upon the intricacies between parent and child.



Summary

My Papa’s Waltz is one of Theodore Roethke’s most famous poems, written in 1948 and included in the seminal volume The Lost Son and Other Poems. This is a collection of poems that documents…

Song -- Go and catch a falling star" by John Donne

It was said that Donne's poem was likely written when he was in a drunken mood and possibly, too, when he was rejected by his lover or disappointed in his love. Describing the difficulty of finding virtuous women in the world, Donne uses the similes of catching falling stars, pregnancies with mandrake roots and teaching mermaids to sing. "ide ten thousand days and nights" says he, "till age snow white hairs on thee / Thou, when thou returns't, will tell me / all strange wonders that befell the / and swear / no where / lives a woman true and fair" (lines 12-18). A true Schopenhauer! In his final stanza, Donne concludes that even were this woman to live next door, by the time he would manage to meet her she would have succeeded in being unfaithful.

Donne's historical…

Like the first stanza, in keeping with the villanelle structure of repeated refrains, it ends in the word "disaster." However, the references to loss in this stanza have become more specific, such as lost keys. Only in the fourth and fifth stanzas does the poet's personal emotion break into the form of the poem, and the tone become more personalized and confessional: "I lost my mother's watch. And look! my last, or next-to-last, of three loved houses went. The art of losing isn't hard to master." Against the generic repeated line of the first stanza, the first-person narration sounds as if the poet is trying to convince herself, rather than instruct the reader.

Structurally, this sense of the pain of losing is intensified, as more irreplaceable thing are lost by the poet than a hour or keys, like watches and houses as the poem unfolds. The fifth stanza further personalizes…

Senior Class at South High

In his work On Reading Poems to a Senior Class at South High D.C. Berry characterizes a class of high school students as a school of fish. This characterization is an obvious pun, but may also be viewed as a negative portrayal of a system of education that packs students into classrooms like fish in an aquarium and diminishes the value of independent thought for the convenience of the conformity that facilitates the smooth functioning of the institution.

The poem begins with the word "Before" (line 1) sitting alone atop the first stanza signaling a transformation to come. The first stanza conveys the initial impression that the students in the classroom are like frozen fish in a package, orderly and inanimate. The narrator begins reading poetry to the class and his words change the environment, "Slowly water began to fill the room" (line 6), water…

Indeed, this is also clear in his occupation with both scientific, philosophical, and literary things. Being human in a well-rounded and complete way, despite the conflict he experiences regarding this, is the poet's triumph.

The conflict indicated in the poem is one that Lord Tennyson has experienced throughout his life, according to authors such as Andrew Lang. Indeed, as a boy he was continually investigating even early theories of evolution, long before it became socially fashionable to consider such issues. The poem is therefore the culmination of long years, not only of writing the poem itself, but also of deeply philosophical thought about scientific and biological issues.

Viewed in connection with the rest of the poem, Lyric CXX can then be seen as representing Tennyson's philosophical thought about death as representing hope within despair, loss, and sorrow. The loss of faith does not necessarily need to mean loss as a…

In the end of the poem she has tied together her themes to show that her words do not divide her from her father. The very fact that she, the daughter and the author has in English expressed her emotion and care towards her father indicates that language has not divided him from her. His fear is thus unjustified, and in spite of his fear that his daughter will learn a language different than his own and grow farther from him, he loves his daughter and the words she creates in English. Just because she is proficient and talented in English she is still a Spanish speaker and still a daughter.

Language is not a divisive element in Bilingual/Bilingue, as although a Spanish speaking father fears his daughter's learning of English, it does not change her heart. Utilizing English with Spanish synonyms until the end in which she describes her…

Thomas Wyatt's "They Flee from Me" is an enigmatic poem, written in the sixteenth century. The central metaphor is that of wild birds, which have occasionally fed from the speaker's hands. Now, the birds have flown. Because the metaphor of wild birds to describe the human spirit is a common one, it is relatively easy to understand that the narrator recounts an unrequited love with a woman who has a flighty heart. The overall tone of the poem is bitter, an emotion that grows progressively strong throughout the 21-line poem. The speaker recollects the brief relationship with a mixed sense of longing, confusion, and loneliness. However, "They Flee From Me" is not about one relationship, but many. The speaker describes a string of sexual encounters, which is why the titular pronoun is "they," and not "it" or "she." Because the poem progresses from dreamy reflection through sentimental longing, onto bitter…

Angels of Bread," Martin Espada champions the rights of immigrants, and especially the poor, downtrodden, and disenfranchised. The narrative style booms with conviction, as the poem reads almost like a preacher's sermon. The overall tone of "Imagine the Angels of Bread" remains pessimistic, in spite of the clear message of social justice. Literary devices such as rhythm, repetition, diction, and metaphor are critical for conveying the central theme of liberation from oppression.

The pacing and rhythm of "Imagine the Angels of Bread" pulsates with anger and emotional intensity, which helps to convey the central theme of liberation. The poem is divided into four stanzas, but these stanzas are not equal in size. Rather, the first two stanzas are long and intense. The third stanza is shorter by about half, signaling to the reader the culmination or climax of the poem. Finally, Espada concludes the poem with a three-line stanza that…

1. Samuel Taylor Coleridge relies on rich multisensory imagery to achieve poetic goals in “Kubla Khan.” The sensory imagery Coleridge uses anchors the poem within the genre of Romanticism, as the poet evokes an idealized past based on the descriptions of the mythic Xanadu. Phrases like “stately pleasure-dome” (Stanza 1, line 2) also add evocative sexual imagery that coincides well with the imagery of the splendor of the natural world, with lines like “deep romantic chasm,” (Stanza 2, line 1). In “Kubla Khan,” Coleridge uses multisensory imagery to juxtapose light and darkness, femininity and masculinity, civilization and savagery, to induce a dreamlike effect.

In keeping with the Romantic era tropes, Coleridge relies heavily on nature imagery. Each stanza is filled with references to nature, such as the “incense-bearing tree,” and the “sunless sea,” in Stanza 1. Stanza 2 continues to evolve the imagery of the natural world, only now Coleridge…

Desire has been a key catalyst awakening love from its passive state. "Till love, at last, out of its dreaming starts." The yearning and desire that struck strongly at the heart has caused the rebirth of desire, and the awakening of true love. Moreover, the power of the desire can be so great as to become a permanent fixture of the heart: "...and often, rooting there with longing, stays." The word "rooting" closely mirrors the earlier imagery of nature; the word "stays" is a direct repetition of the last word in line six: "stay." Rossetti portrays the heart as a fertile ground for the flourishing of love and passion.

Therefore, in "Love and the gentle heart," Rossetti refers to the type of love shared between the spouses in an old married couple. The married couple relies on the staying power of a gentle heart, a heart subject to nature's innate…

Earl of Rochester / Aphra Behn

Masks and Masculinities:

Gender and Performance in the Earl of Rochester's "Imperfect Enjoyment"

and Aphra Behn's "The Disappointment"

Literature of the English Restoration offers the example of a number of writers who wrote for a courtly audience: literary production, particularly in learned imitation of classical models, was part of the court culture of King Charles II. The fact of a shared model explains the remarkable similarities between "The Imperfect Enjoyment" by the Earl of Rochester and "The Disappointment" by Aphra Behn -- remarkable only because readers are surprised to read one poem about male sexual impotence from the late seventeenth century, let alone two examples of this genre by well-known courtly writers. In fact, Richard Quaintance presents ten more examples by lesser-known poets as he defines the literary sub-genre of the neo-Classical "imperfect enjoyment poem," written in imitation of Roman poems on the same…

Song of Myself

Section 24 of Walt Whitman's "Song of Myself" is so strong, yet so subtle. As forceful as the words are, Whitman also takes a passive tone in revealing himself through the verses. Section 24 starts out by describing the poet by name:

Walt Whitman, a kosmos...Turbulent, fleshy, sensual, eating, drinking and breeding....Through me forbidden voices....I believe in the flesh and the appetites, Seeing, hearing, feeling, are miracles....Divine am I inside and out, and I make holy whatever I touch or am touch'd from, The scent of these arm-pits aroma finer than prayer....If I worship one thing more than another it shall be the spread of my own body, or any part of it....I dote on myself, there is that lot of me and all so luscious, Each moment and whatever happens thrills me with joy."

Whitman describes his own personal relationship with everything else in the world.…

A deep and horrifying malaise hangs over
the images described here. To be sure, it seems that there is something
more than just the changing of the seasons which affects the speaker and
which afflicts his perspective so dramatically. He tells that "Then one
hot day when fields were rank / ith cowdung in the grass the angry frogs /
Invaded the flax-dam; I ducked through hedges / To a coarse croaking that I
had not heard / Before." (Heaney, 1)
This is a moment of ominous dread. The optimistic cycle where death
had given way to life in the first stanza-a decidedly naturalist embrace of
the wonder that is life-is now described as a threatening and mysterious
force somewhat beyond the comprehension or experience of the young speaker.
The language becomes decidedly more aggressive and far bleaker, describing
'gross-bellied frogs,' with a 'slap and plop' like 'obscene threats.' He…

In this stanza, mainline and dragon are used as metaphors for his drug of preference, although these drugs can be seen as metaphors for the other addictive substances and behaviors that people can become dependent on regardless of if these substances are legal or illegal. The last two lines of this stanza insinuate that Nikki has come to an impasse and does not know what to next with his life, which is possibly why he turned to drugs. The last two lines state, "No regrets, you've got no goals/Nothing more to learn" (Queensryche). These concluding lines indicate that Nikki is waiting for some sort of direction, regardless of whether it is good or bad, simply to not be a slave to the drug.

The third stanza offers Nikki a solution for his dilemma and proposes that the doctor will give his life purpose, which ironically, is the price Nikki will…