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To be in love Is to touch things with a lighter hand. In yourself you stretch, you are well. You look at things Through his eyes. A Cardinal is red. A sky is blue. Suddenly you know he knows too. He is not there but You know you are tasting together The winter, or light spring weather. His hand to take your hand is overmuch.

Too much to bear.

You cannot look in his eyes Because your pulse must not say What must not be said.

This is ironic considering lovers are supposed to lighten the burden for each other. Yet he is the one who is the burden rather than the person that helps her breathe again by sharing her load.

Gwendolyn Brooks

To be in love

A still—Volcano—Life—

That flickered in the night— When it was dark enough to do Without erasing sight—

A quiet—Earthquake Style— Too subtle to suspect By natures this side Naples—

The magma, or light inside the volcano, flickers in the night, when it is dark enough. “Enough,” here, emphasizes a total blackness and suggests a deeper level of hiddenness to protect from revealing “sight” (or keep hidden what goes unnoticed). Note that Emily Dickinson, as observed by many critics, lived the latter part of her life as a “recluse.” Though in isolation, she remained in close contact with her family and continued to read and write. Despite limiting physical contact with others, she continued to write letters, which she did not see as a distraction, but rather stimulation to help her creative writing. As seen in most of her work, Dickinson’s poems often reference her isolation and solidarity of, not only the body, but also the mind. In general, she seemed to think herself separate from society and, as this poem displays, hidden from the eyes and understanding of the others. For more on the life of Emily Dickinson:

Emily Dickinson

A still—Volcano—Life 601

'Jack fell as he'd have wished,' the mother said, And folded up the letter that she'd read. 'The Colonel writes so nicely.' Something broke In the tired voice that quivered to a choke. She half looked up. 'We mothers are so proud Of our dead soldiers.' Then her face was bowed.

Quietly the Brother Officer went out.

He'd told the poor old dear some gallant lies That she would nourish all her days, no doubt For while he coughed and mumbled, her weak eyes

There is more irony in the capitalised “Brother Officer”; there is an implication of importance, of comradeship and respect which, as will come clear, is far from the reality.

Siegfried Sassoon

The Hero

I said, K-- And nothing more. He said, I'm gonna put it KÐAÐY. I said, If you do, You lie. My mother christened me Alberta K. You leave my name Just that way! He said, Mrs., (With a snort)

Just a K Makes your name too short.

I said, I don't Give a damn! Leave me and my name

Census men collect as much information as they can on each citizen, including your address, your age, and gender. It is likely that the census man was so persistent because he wanted to get all of her information to match the rest of the population.

Langston Hughes

Madam and the Census Man

Of cities of fog and winter fevers, I Send this to remind you of personal islands For which Gauguins sicken, and to explain How I have grown to learn your passionate Talent with its wild love of landscape It is April and already no doubt for you, As the journals report, the prologues of spring Appear behind the rails of city parks, Or the late springtime must be publishing Pink apologies along the wet, black branch To men in overcoats, who will conceal The lines of songs leaping behind their pipes.

And you may find it difficult to imagine This April as a season where the tide burns Black, leaves crack into ashes from the drought, A dull red burning, like heart's desolation.

The roads are white with dust and the leaves Of the trees have a nervous, spinsterish quiet. And walking under the trees today I saw

The author wants Harold Simmons, his former teacher, to recognize that even though he maybe thrilled to finally have warm weather again, his family back home is having a hard time dealing with drought.

Derek Walcott

To a Painter in England for Harold Simmons

UP with the sun, the breeze arose,

Across the talking corn she goes,

And smooth she rustles far and wide Through all the voiceful countryside. Through all the land her tale she tells;

Both the breeze and the corn are personified here. The breeze is referred to as “she”, and the corn is said to be “talking”. Dickinson’s use of personification gives a sense that the breeze had a life of its own and brought that life to everything it encountered. This is evident because the sound of the corn is described not just as a rustle of leaves but as actual voices. This wind comes through and wakes up all of the countryside.

Emily Dickinson

An English Breeze

If I could just get my hands on you, Kierkegaard, or Conor Cruise O'Brien, They seem to say, I would bolt the door and beat some logic into your head. Other comments are more offhand, dismissive - "Nonsense." "Please!" "HA!!" - That kind of thing. I remember once looking up from my reading, My thumb as a bookmark, Trying to imagine what the person must look like Who wrote "Don't be a ninny" Alongside a paragraph in The Life of Emily Dickinson.

Students are more modest Needing to leave only their splayed footprints Along the shore of the page.

One scrawls "Metaphor" next to a stanza of Eliot's. Another notes the presence of "Irony" Fifty times outside the paragraphs of A Modest Proposal.

The next two stanzas cover the marginalia of school children, a familiar image to high school and college English students. This stanza covers less enthusiastic students, who seem to just copy down what their teachers say about certain passages.

Billy Collins

Marginalia

And death shall have no dominion.

Dead men naked they shall be one

With the man in the wind and the west moon; When their bones are picked clean and the clean bones gone, They shall have stars at elbow and foot;

This line describes how in death a man is once again naked as the day he was born and the body is to be reunited with nature .

Dylan Thomas

And Death Shall Have No Dominion

One foot went through. The view was all in lines Straight up and down of tall slim trees Too much alike to mark or name a place by So as to say for certain I was here Or somewhere else: I was just far from home. A small bird flew before me. He was careful To put a tree between us when he lighted, And say no word to tell me who he was Who was so foolish as to think what he thought. He thought that I was after him for a feather— The white one in his tail; like one who takes Everything said as personal to himself.

One flight out sideways would have undeceived him. And then there was a pile of wood for which

I forgot him and let his little fear Carry him off the way I might have gone, Without so much as wishing him good-night.

Counterbalancing the gradual emergence of clarity and shape in the landscape is the gradually emerging personality of the speaker: at every stage of the poem, we know the speaker only to that extent which the speaker himself has come to know and understand the landscape. Frost once remarked that if the style of a poem “is with outer seriousness, it must be with inner humor. If it is with outer humor, it must be with inner seriousness.The cautious sobriety and reserve within the vocal imagination as it initially addressed the outer terror are now cut across by a tone of humorous self-parody as the speaker engages in reflection. Now he can indulge in the quietly extravagant joke of a pathetic fallacy—"like one who takes / Everything said as personal to himself.” Now too, however, the speaker’s enlarged awareness and confidence are juxtaposed to, and measured by, his own self-deception. The speaker is himself deceived in thinking that the way for the bird to become “undeceived” is simply to flee the scene—to go “the way I might have gone.” The bird, given free play, does not flee but, willing to get lost in order, apparently, to find itself, goes behind the woodpile.

Robert Frost

The Wood-pile

We have a poem here, it's called "Whitey On The Moon" It was inspired by some whiteys on the moon

So I wanna give credit where credit is due

A rat done bit my sister Nell With whitey on the moon Her face and arms began to swell

This is a sarcastic comment about white people stealing credit from people of color. He’s pointedly being the bigger person here.

Gil Scott-Heron

Whitey on the Moon

And you would accept the seasons of your heart, even as you have always accepted the seasons that pass over your fields. And you would watch with serenity through the winters of your grief. Much of your pain is self-chosen. It is the bitter potion by which the physician within you heals your sick self. Therefore trust the physician, and drink his remedy in silence and tranquillity: For his hand, though heavy and hard, is guided by the tender hand of the Unseen,

And the cup he brings, though it burn your lips, has been fashioned of the clay which the Potter has moistened with His own sacred tears.

This is the most complex metaphor in the poem. The Potter, who made the cup in which the physician keeps his potion, is a personification of “the Unseen” in the last line. Note that the word “His” is capitalized , a convention from religious texts that strongly suggests identification with the Abrahamic God or a similar figure. If the potion is pain and the physician is your soul (your instinct), what is the cup? Most likely this is an example of metonymy , using one word to refer to something else, and “cup” is synonymous with “potion,” i.e. the pain he brings. The pain (the cup) was fashioned by God Himself. When you use a potter’s wheel, you need to moisten the hard clay in order to make it malleable. The sacredness of the tears seems like a given, but why has God/the Potter used His own tears in the first place? What is being implied here about the nature of God’s crying? I think it likely that Gibran is saying God cries for you , too, that He is concerned for you, that he has shed tears over the necessity of your suffering. But it is just as likely that Gibran’s Unseen suffers as much as you do , for His suffering is the sum total of all of the suffering in the known universe: His tears mirror yours. A sense of camaraderie, then, is perhaps present. I really don’t want to overanalyze here, as it might just do the nebulous quality of the lines a disservice; rather, you might heed St. Augustine’s admonishment in On The Gospel of John : Weigh the words, and get a knowledge of the mystery.

Kahlil Gibran

On Pain

501 This World is not Conclusion A Species stands beyond - Invisible, as Music - But positive, as Sound - It beckons, and it baffles - Philosophy—don't know And through a Riddle, at the last - Sagacity, must go -

To guess it, puzzles scholars -

To gain it, Men have borne Contempt of Generations And Crucifixion, shown

The choppy interspersed comments continue, keeping the reader fixed on the poet’s thoughts and doubts. The “Riddle” is linked to the verb “puzzles”. Not even scholars can solve them.

Emily Dickinson

This World is not Conclusion

When we as strangers sought

Their catering care, Veiled smiles bespoke their thought Of what we were.

Hardy begins in the first person plural ‘we’, indicating that they are a unit of two people, probably the poet and Florence. Their relationship was fraught, despite the initial implication that they were in harmony. The description “strangers” suggests they were strangers to the inn-keepers, but ironically they were also strangers to each other in terms of their failing relationship.

Thomas Hardy

At An Inn

The word of a snail on the plate of a leaf? It is not mine. Do not accept it. Acetic acid in a sealed tin? Do not accept it. It is not genuine. A ring of gold with the sun in it? Lies. Lies and a grief. Frost on a leaf, the immaculate Cauldron, talking and crackling All to itself on top of each Of nine black Alps. A disturbance in mirrors, The sea shattering its grey one--

Love, love, my season.

Love usually has many seasons, good and bad, but in her failed relationship, there is only one. There is a circularity to the poem. Love begins in the sun, its failure is associated with frost and winter. But her season, in respect of love, is just a single one. Love is an abstract noun here. Or is it the ‘love’ the person who has betrayed her? Does he represent her season or is she the season? All apply.

Sylvia Plath

The Couriers

Ah, Douglass, we have fall'n on evil days,

Such days as thou, not even thou didst know, When thee, the eyes of that harsh long ago Saw, salient, at the cross of devious ways,

A call to Frederick Douglass, who had recently passed, Dunbar informs him that we are now facing troubling circumstances.

Paul Laurence Dunbar

Douglass

This Consciousness that is aware Of Neighbors and the Sun Will be the one aware of Death And that itself alone Is traversing the interval Experience between And most profound experiment Appointed unto Men --

How adequate unto itself

Its properties shall be Itself unto itself and none Shall make discovery.

“Adequate” is one of Dickinson’s signature words. She uses it not in the sense of “just okay” but in the sense of “equal to the task, up for the job.” She associates it with images of strength and willpower. Compare these other uses in her poems: The Props assist the House Until the House is built And then the Props withdraw And adequate, erect, The House support itself (“The Props assist the House”) My second Rank—too small the first— Crowned—Crowing—on my Father’s breast— A half unconscious Queen— But this time—Adequate—Erect, With Will to choose, or to reject, And I choose, just a Crown— (“I’m ceded—I’ve stopped being Theirs—”)

Emily Dickinson

This Consciousness that is aware 822

You shall be free indeed when your days are not without a care nor your nights without a want and a grief, But rather when these things girdle your life and yet you rise above them naked and unbound. And how shall you rise beyond your days and nights unless you break the chains which you at the dawn of your understanding have fastened around your noon hour? In truth that which you call freedom is the strongest of these chains, though its links glitter in the sun and dazzle your eyes. And what is it but fragments of your own self you would discard that you may become free? If it is an unjust law you would abolish, that law was written with your own hand upon your own forehead. You cannot erase it by burning your law books nor by washing the foreheads of your judges, though you pour the sea upon them. And if it is a despot you would dethrone, see first that his throne erected within you is destroyed. For how can a tyrant rule the free and the proud, but for a tyranny in their own freedom and a shame in their own pride? And if it is a care you would cast off, that care has been chosen by you rather than imposed upon you. And if it is a fear you would dispel, the seat of that fear is in your heart and not in the hand of the feared. Verily all things move within your being in constant half embrace, the desired and the dreaded, the repugnant and the cherished, the pursued and that which you would escape.

These things move within you as lights and shadows in pairs that cling.

And when the shadow fades and is no more, the light that lingers becomes a shadow to another light. And thus your freedom when it loses its fetters becomes itself the fetter of a greater freedom.

Our feelings, ethics and emotions are moving inside us as shadows and lights. We are part of the shadow or part of the light, but do not observe at enough distance to see the whole scene.

Kahlil Gibran

On Freedom

Thy various works, imperial queen, we see, How bright their forms! how deck'd with pomp by thee! Thy wond'rous acts in beauteous order stand, And all attest how potent is thine hand. From Helicon's refulgent heights attend, Ye sacred choir, and my attempts befriend: To tell her glories with a faithful tongue, Ye blooming graces, triumph in my song. Now here, now there, the roving Fancy flies,

Till some lov'd object strikes her wand'ring eyes, Whose silken fetters all the senses bind, And soft captivity involves the mind.

Imagination! who can sing thy force? Or who describe the swiftness of thy course? Soaring through air to find the bright abode,

Wheatley’s metaphor of bondage is terribly poignant and quietly defiant. The process through which the mind becomes spellbound by objects that appeal to the senses and the imagination–this is the kind of “captivity” she was born for, not the dehumanizing kind to which white people have consigned her. She defines herself as a poet, not a slave.

Phillis Wheatley

On Imagination

What were those caryadits bearing?

It was the first poem of yours I had seen. It was the only poem you ever write That I disliked through the eyes of a stranger.

Hughes begins with a rhetorical question , in which he establishes the metaphor of the caryatids. As he will later explain, they are the female stutues that are the pillars that support a classical building. These represent the present-day women from whom the poet seeks reassurance. In his need for praise and approval he distorts what he hears and “So missed everything”. The statues were clearly bearing his uneasy psychological state of mind.

Ted Hughes

Caryatids 1

Earth,—the heaven, we looked above for, gone! Why, with beauty, needs there money be, Love with liking? Crush the fly-king In his gauze, because no honey-bee? May not liking be so simple-sweet, If love grew there 'Twould undo there All that breaks the cheek to dimples sweet? Is the creature too imperfect, say? Would you mend it And so end it?

Since not all addition perfects aye!

Or is it of its kind, perhaps, Just perfection— Whence, rejection

A Kazimir Malevich unblemished by unnecessary addition: “Per fects ” here is a transitive verb. “Aye” is an empty affirmative used to complete the triplet-rhyme.

Robert Browning

A Pretty Woman

Tell me lies about Vietnam. Heard the alarm clock screaming with pain, Couldn't find myself so I went back to sleep again So fill my ears with silver Stick my legs in plaster Tell me lies about Vietnam. Every time I shut my eyes all I see is flames. Made a marble phone book and I carved out all the names So coat my eyes with butter Fill my ears with silver Stick my legs in plaster Tell me lies about Vietnam.

I smell something burning, hope it's just my brains.

They're only dropping peppermints and daisy-chains So stuff my nose with garlic Coat my eyes with butter

The burning could refer to burning flesh and burning villages. But the speaker would rather his ‘brains’ be destroyed, than to accept the horrific reality.

Adrian Mitchell

To Whom It May Concern

On a thousand small town New England greens the old white churches hold their air of sparse, sincere rebellion; frayed flags quilt the graveyards of the Grand Army of the Republic The stone statues of the abstract Union Soldier grow slimmer and younger each year- wasp-waisted, they doze over muskets and muse through their sideburns… Shaw's father wanted no monument except the ditch, where his son's body was thrown and lost with his 'niggers.'

The ditch is nearer.

There are no statues for the last war here; on Boylston Street, a commercial photograph shows Hiroshima boiling

Nearer to what? Nearer to the hearts of those who knew what happened? Nearer to us, and how we react to war? Does the ditch from the construction earlier in the poem make the ditch which Shaw was put in more accessible? Images of entombment (whether Shaw in the ditch or modern people in an underground parking garage) run through this poem.

Robert Lowell

For the Union Dead

The hills are verdured pasture-wise; The angel hosts with freshness go, And seek with laughter what to brave;— And binding all is the hushed snow Of the far-distant breaking wave. And from a cliff-top is proclaimed The gathering of the souls for birth, The trial by existence named, The obscuration upon earth. And the slant spirits trooping by In streams and cross- and counter-streams Can but give ear to that sweet cry

For its suggestion of what dreams!

And the more loitering are turned To view once more the sacrifice Of those who for some good discerned

Another sly allusion, this time to Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” speech, which soberly contemplates life after death: ….To die, to sleep; To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there’s the rub; For in that sleep of death what dreams may come When we have shuffled off this mortal coil, Must give us pause. Frost flips this trope on its head by having the souls in paradise joyfully imagine “what dreams” may come once they return to life from the afterlife.

Robert Frost

The Trial by Existence

You never liked to get The letters that I sent But now you've got the gist Of what my letters meant You're reading them again The ones you didn't burn You press them to your lips My pages of concern

I said there'd been a flood

I said there's nothing left I hoped that you would come I gave you my address

One of numerous references in Cohen’s oeuvre to the Biblical flood. Here the flood is not a global catastrophe but a private disaster the man needs help in – but the woman did either not read his letters or discarded them quickly.

Leonard Cohen

The Letters

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. That George'll be taken to Jail soon or late (On account of last winter he sold our back gate).

But I say it's fine. Honest, I do. And I'd like to be a bad woman, too,

And wear the brave stockings of night-black lace And strut down the streets with paint on my face.

She thinks she knows better than her mom, and wants to be just like Johnnie Mae.

Gwendolyn Brooks

A Song in the Front Yard

Law 34. Be Royal In Your Own Fashion: Act Like A King To Be Treated like One Law 35. Master The Art Of Timing Law 36. Disdain Things You Cannot Have: Ignoring Them Is The Best Revenge Law 37. Create Compelling Spectacles Law 38. Disdain Things You Cannot Have: Ignoring Them Is The Best Revenge Law 39. Stir Up Waters To Catch Fish Law 40. Despise The Free Lunch Law 41. Avoid Stepping Into A Great Man's Shoes Law 42. Strike The Shepherd And The Sheep Will Scatter Law 43. Work On The Hearts And Minds Of Others Law 44. Disarm And Infuriate With The Mirror Effect Law 45. Preach The Need For Change, But Never Reform Too Much At Once

Law 46. Never Appear Too Perfect

Law 47. Do Not Go Past The Mark You Aimed For; In Victory, Learn When To Stop Law 48. Assume Formlessness

“Appearing better than others is always dangerous, but most dangerous of all is to appear to have no faults or weaknesses. Envy creates silent enemies. It is smart to occasionally display defects, and admit to harmless vices, in order to deflect envy and appear more human and approachable. Only gods and the dead can seem perfect with impunity.” – Robert Greene

Robert Greene

48 Laws of Power

And there, a new partner, a new parting, a new unfusing into twain, A new gasp of further isolation, A new intoxication of loneliness, among decaying, frost-cold leaves. Going down the strange lanes of hell, more and more intensely alone, The fibres of the heart parting one after the other And yet the soul continuing, naked-footed, ever more vividly embodied Like a flame blown whiter and whiter In a deeper and deeper darkness, Ever more exquisite, distilled in separation. So, in the strange retorts of medlars and sorb-apples The distilled essence of hell. The exquisite odour of leave-taking.

Jamque vale!

Orpheus, and the winding, leaf-clogged, silent lanes of hell. Each soul departing with its own isolation. Strangest of all strange companions,

Latin: and now, goodbye! This line is possibly an allusion to the Orpheus story in Ovid’s Metamorphoses . After Orpheus looks back on Eurydice and loses her again, Ovid writes: Iamque iterum moriens non est de coniuge quicquam questa suo: quid enim nisi se quereretur amatam? Supremumque “vale,” quod iam vix auribus ille acciperet, dixit revolutaque rursus eodem est. And then dying a second time, she had no complaint against her husband. For what could she blame him for, except loving her? She said her final word, “Goodbye” which barely reached his ears. And then she was flung back into Hades.

D. H. Lawrence

Medlars and Sorb-Apples

There is no money in his work, He'd rather marry. One dark night, My Tudor Ford climbed the hill's skull; I watched for love-cars. Lights turned down, They lay together, hull to hull, Where the graveyard shelves on the town. . . . My mind's not right. A car radio bleats, “Love, O careless Love. . . . I hear My ill-spirit sob in each blood cell, As if my hand were at its throat. . . .

I myself am hell;

Nobody's here— Only skunks, that search In the moonlight for a bite to eat.

An allusion to Satan in Milton’s Paradise Lost : Which way I fly is Hell, myself am Hell… Also perhaps to The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam as translated by Edward FitzGerald, who was likely also influenced by Milton: I sent my Soul through the Invisible, Some letter of that After-life to spell: And by and by my Soul return’d to me, And answer’d “I Myself am Heav'n and Hell: Heav'n but the Vision of fulfill’d Desire, And Hell the Shadow from a Soul on fire, Cast on the Darkness into which Ourselves, So late emerged from, shall so soon expire.

Robert Lowell

Skunk Hour

Swerving east, from rich industrial shadows And traffic all night north; swerving through fields Too thin and thistled to be called meadows, And now and then a harsh-named halt, that shields Workmen at dawn; swerving to solitude Of skies and scarecrows, haystacks, hares and pheasants, And the widening river's slow presence, The piled gold clouds, the shining gull-marked mud,

Gathers to the surprise of a large town:

Here domes and statues, spires and cranes cluster Beside grain-scattered streets, barge-crowded water, And residents from raw estates, brought down

With smooth enjambment the first stanza leads into the second, and the traveller is alongside the poet approaching the “surprise” of the town.

Philip Larkin

Here - 589672

All's the same, whate'er the chance, you know. And in turn we make you ours, we say— You and youth too, Eyes and mouth too, All the face composed of flowers, we say. All's our own, to make the most of, Sweet— Sing and say for, Watch and pray for, Keep a secret or go boast of, Sweet! But for loving, why, you would not, Sweet, Tho' we prayed you, Paid you, brayed you

In a mortar—for you could not, Sweet!

So, we leave the sweet face fondly there, Be its beauty Its sole duty!

Mortar: “a cup-shaped receptacle made of hard material, in which ingredients are crushed or ground, used esp. in cooking or pharmacy.” Some people still use them. Only foodies know why.

Robert Browning

A Pretty Woman

O my Luve is like a red, red rose That's newly sprung in June; O my Luve is like the melody That's sweetly played in tune. So fair art thou, my bonnie lass, So deep in luve am I; And I will luve thee still, my dear, Till a' the seas gang dry.

Till a' the seas gang dry, my dear,

And the rocks melt wi' the sun; I will love thee still, my dear, While the sands o' life shall run.

As the previous annotation stated the speaker emphasizes his love lasting a long time but earlier in the poem the speaker said that his beloved is like a red rose newly sprung in June which can only be found for a short time meaning that the love will not last long. This is a paradoxical claim made by the speaker.

Robert Burns

A Red Red Rose 1794

Let not young souls be smothered out before They do quaint deeds and fully flaunt their pride.

It is the world's one crime its babes grow dull, Its poor are ox-like, limp and leaden-eyed.

Not that they starve; but starve so dreamlessly, Not that they sow, but that they seldom reap, Not that they serve, but have no gods to serve,

The world has many hard realities: Sickness, injury, loss, death. But these are just part of living, and are acceptable to the author, except for one aspect of living that he considers an actual crime: That people born unto the world can lose their sense of wonder, their sense of newness, the ability to perceive their unique place in the world. For many, that fades into the routine of simple routine, of working until both body and mind are worn down and dull. The author’s use of the word ‘poor’ here is two-fold in meaning: Literally, it refers to people who are economically poor and forced to live lives filled with hard work, hunger, and limited possibilities. He’s also using it in a sympathetic sense, meaning the unfortunate people who aren’t in conditions that allow them to flourish. He compares the ‘poor’ to ox – working farm animals who stare flatly ahead with no life in their gaze.

Vachel Lindsay

The Leaden Eyed

Show me the place where you want your slave to go Show me the place I've forgotten I don't know Show me the place where my head is bendin' low Show me the place where you want your slave to go Show me the place, help me roll away the stone Show me the place, I can't move this thing alone Show me the place where the word became a man Show me the place where the suffering began The troubles came I saved what I could save A thread of light, a particle, a wave But there were chains, so I hastened to behave

There were chains, so I loved you like a slave

Show me the place where you want your slave to go Show me the place I've forgotten I don't know Show me the place where my head is bendin' low

Stockholm syndrome is a psychological condition that make hostages develop friendly and even erotic emotions towards their captors.

Leonard Cohen

Show Me the Place

Our Mothers, lovely women pitiful; Our Sisters, gracious in their life and death;

To us each unforgotten memory saith:

"Learn as we learned in life's sufficient school, Work as we worked in patience of our rule, Walk as we walked, much less by sight than faith,

The ‘unforgotten memory’ is significant, suggesting ongoing comradeship and love, even if separated — a reference to female loyalty.

Christina Rossetti

Our Mothers lovely women pitiful

We must suffer them all again. Into this neutral air Where blind skyscrapers use Their full height to proclaim The strength of Collective Man, Each language pours its vain Competitive excuse: But who can live for long In an euphoric dream; Out of the mirror they stare, Imperialism's face And the international wrong.

Faces along the bar

Cling to their average day: The lights must never go out, The music must always play,

An example of synecdoche; the faces represent the people, the humans with their desires and insecurities. Auden may be implying that these people in the bar have limitations; they may present an outward face but perhaps shallow inner lives.

W. H. Auden

September 1 1939

Round the cape of a sudden came the sea, And the sun looked over the mountain's rim:

And straight was a path of gold for him,

And the need of a world of men for me.

The “him” isn’t elaborated; we only know that this mystery person is clear in his aims; to make money. The “gold” is, ironically, an echo of the beauty of sunrise; one is prosaic, one romantic.

Robert Browning

Parting at Morning

Why do you stand by the window Abandoned to beauty and pride The thorn of the night in your bosom The spear of the age in your side Lost in the rages of fragrance Lost in the rags of remorse Lost in the waves of a sickness

That loosens the high silver nerves

Oh chosen love, Oh frozen love Oh tangle of matter and ghost Oh darling of angels, demons and saints

Nerves actually look silver . Metaphorically the silver could refer to strings for musical instrument: loosening as well as tightening is instrumental for tuning a string instrument.

Leonard Cohen

The Window

I heard a Fly buzz – when I died – The Stillness in the Room Was like the Stillness in the Air – Between the Heaves of Storm – The Eyes around – had wrung them dry – And Breaths were gathering firm For that last Onset – when the King Be witnessed – in the Room – I willed my Keepsakes – Signed away What portions of me be Assignable – and then it was There interposed a Fly –

With Blue – uncertain stumbling Buzz – Between the light – and me –

And then the Windows failed – and then I could not see to see –

The noun “Blue” is difficult to interpret. Flies are often coloured blue-black, but this is too literal. Furthermore, “blue” to mean sadness wasn’t in use in the nineteenth century. So, this “Blue” is what the fly is blocking; the blueness of the sky through the window which the spirit will reach towards on the journey to the afterlife. That the fly is “stumbling,” zigzagging back and forth “uncertain,” represents the speaker’s faith and her uncertainty. The blending together of blue and buzz — colour and sound — is an example of synaesthesia .

Emily Dickinson

I heard a Fly buzz 465

Maud went to College. Sadie stayed at home. Sadie scraped life With a fine-tooth comb. She didn't leave a tangle in. Her comb found every strand. Sadie was one of the livingest chits In all the land. Sadie bore two babies Under her maiden name.

Maud and Ma and Papa Nearly died of shame.

Everyone but Sadie Nearly died of shame. When Sadie said her last so-long

This reflects the pervading attitude about having children out of wedlock. However, it creates a link between Maud and Sadie that we did not have before. By grouping Maud with Sadie’s parents, we can assume that Maud is Sadie’s sister (or at least extremely close friend), which further parallels the “two babies”

Gwendolyn Brooks

Sadie and Maud

It was the goat which lightened the people praying. The goat went out with sin on its sunken head. On the sleeper's midnight and the smaller after hours From above below elsewhere there shone the animals Through the circular dark; the cock appeared in light Crying three times, for tears for tears for tears. High in the frozen tree the sparrow sat. At three o'clock The luminous thunder of its fall fractured the earth. The somber serpent looped its coils to write In scales the slow snake-music of the red ripe globe. To the sleeper, alone, the animals came and shone, The darkness whirled but silent shone the animals.

Just before dawn the dove flew out of the dark Flying with green in her beak; the dove also had come.

Genesis 8:11 “And the dove came back to him in the evening, and behold, in her mouth was a freshly plucked olive leaf. So Noah knew that the waters had subsided from the earth.” The dove is often symbolized as the Holy Spirit.

Josephine Jacobsen

The Animals

I'm Nobody! Who are you?

Are you—Nobody—Too?

Then there's a pair of us? Don't tell! they'd advertise—you know! How dreary—to be—Somebody!

Dickinson’s poetry is iconic for its use of “em-dashes” (i.e., —). If we were to look at the Dickinson archives, we would find that publishers have take some liberties with how the poems are presented on the page, but the em-dashes are still present. One interpretation of her use of em-dashes is that she tries to create a “palpable urgency” for the reader. However, we could also read the dashes as a Dickensonian hermeneutics: she is giving the reader a method for reading the poem, a halting, uncertain, emphatic voice that helps to make her poetry so accessible and delightful.

Emily Dickinson

Im Nobody Who Are You?

O SINGER of Persephone! In the dim meadows desolate Dost thou remember Sicily? Still through the ivy flits the bee

Where Amaryllis lies in state

O Singer of Persephone! Simætha calls on Hecate And hears the wild dogs at the gate;

Amaryllis is a genus of flowering bulbs, named after the Greek Mythological shepherdess. Wilde here could be referring to both. The Greek Figure : One day, whilst picking flowers, Amaryllis' eyes met the young shepherd Alteo, whom she fell in love with instantly. Alteo, not interested in the attention received from girls, declared that he will love whoever brings a new and beautiful type of flower for him. Amaryllis consulted the Oracle at Delphi, who told her to pierce her heart with an arrow and declare her love for Alteo in front of his home everyday. After many days and nights of pain and rejection from Alteo, her heart was almost bleeding out. Finally, her blood sprouted a large red flower from the ground, which she brought to the shepherd boy. Seeing the dedication of Amaryllis, as well as the gorgeous flower, Alteo wept and Amaryllis was healed. But Wilde made a dramatic alteration to this tale: Alteo’s love for Amaryllis does not arrive on time, and she passes away. The Flower (which is named after the Greek Figure): Connecting to the theme of Persephone , the Amaryllis flower is known to blossom and thrive even through winter, when Persephone’s agricultural powers are dormant. In this situation, even this flower (which may be a symbol for optimism in this poem) is dead. This stanza implies the same question to Theocritus as the previous : even when optimism is dead, will you still be optimistic and remember happiness?

Oscar Wilde

Theocritus

There is a place where the sidewalk ends And before the street begins, And there the grass grows soft and white, And there the sun burns crimson bright, And there the moon-bird rests from his flight To cool in the peppermint wind. Let us leave this place where the smoke blows black

And the dark street winds and bends,

Past the pits where the asphalt flowers grow We shall walk with a walk that is measured and slow, And watch where the chalk-white arrows go

Although it’s “just a kids' poem,” “Where the Sidewalk Ends” echoes a classic scenario from Romantic poetry, in which the poet/speaker retreats from the busy, noisy, worldly city into the quiet, innocent, spiritually renewing countryside. Here’s Wordsworth (a poet obsessed with childhood innocence) in “Tintern Abbey”: If this Be but a vain belief, yet, oh! how oft– In darkness and amid the many shapes Of joyless daylight; when the fretful stir Unprofitable, and the fever of the world, Have hung upon the beatings of my heart– How oft, in spirit, have I turned to thee, O sylvan Wye! thou wanderer thro' the woods, How often has my spirit turned to thee! Here’s W. B. Yeats in “The Lake Isle of Innisfree”: I will arise and go now, for always night and day I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore; While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements gray, I hear it in the deep heart’s core. You could argue that Silverstein’s speaker is retreating more to the ‘burbs than to the countryside per se, but the “place where the sidewalk ends” is nonetheless full of natural beauty: grass, sun, birds.

Shel Silverstein

Where the Sidewalk Ends

SILENT, the Lord of the world Eyes from the heavenly height, Girt by his far-shining train, Us, who with banners unfurl'd Fight life's many-chanc'd fight Madly below, in the plain.

Then saith the Lord to his own:—

"See ye the battle below? Turmoil of death and of birth! Too long let we them groan.

Who these “own” of the Lord are is never clarified: they are certainly angelic figures who can move freely between the realms of Heaven and Earth, and impact the latter, but no specifics are disclosed. The reason for this may be purely functional: it is not who these characters are that matters, but what happens to them in the following lines.

Matthew Arnold

Men of Genius

The room was suddenly rich and the great bay-window was Spawning snow and pink roses against it

Soundlessly collateral and incompatible:

World is suddener than we fancy it. World is crazier and more of it than we think, Incorrigibly plural. I peel and portion

The blooming flowers and the sudden snow on either side of the window are somehow both mismatched and perfectly matched (“collateral”), in an “opposites attract” sort of way.

Louis MacNeice

Snow

Sleep baby sleep The day's on the run The wind in the trees

Is talking in tongues

If your heart is torn I don't wonder why If the night is long

The biblical phrase “talking in tongues” is used in Acts 2:4: “And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and began to talk in tongues”. It means to talk in different languages which were unknown to the speaker before. In the context of Cohen’s songs it means that the wind in the trees can talk to people now or animals or other plants but later the mouse and the cat resp. the wind and the tree both speak in tongues and thus can’t understand each other.

Leonard Cohen

Lullaby

They shut me up in Prose

As when a little Girl They put me in the Closet Because they liked me "still"

The “they” mentioned is that of parental or authoritative power that is keeping Dickinson from speaking or writing her mind since she is a woman in the 19th century. It could also be that the they are so simple that they can only think in prose.

Emily Dickinson

They Shut Me Up in Prose

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. My mother—my own mother, who died early,

Ode to An Aunt Lines 5 and 6 work together to present two different ideas; the first is that Poe loved Francis very much and that he truly lamented the fact that he was not with her in her final moments. The sonnet is not just in loving memory of his beloved aunt; it’s also a subtle apology for not being there when she was dying. Poe believed that she was a pivotal point in his life and he not being there at her end was a disgrace to her memory. Backstory is important to really understand the impact that this woman had on Poe growing up. After his father had abandoned the family and his mother passed away, he was adopted by his wealthy tobacco farmer uncle and aunt, John and Francis Allan in Richmond, Virginia. Due to this forced reallocation, Poe looked to Francis Allen as the new mother figure in his life. After leaving Virginia to go to college, failing college, accumulating a mountain of debt, returning to Virginia, having a falling-out with his adoptive father, and joining the Army, Poe learns that his adoptive mother Francis was dying of tuberculosis. By the time Poe had wrapped up his affairs and returned to the farm, she had already been buried. Necessary Citations: “Poe’s Life.” Poemusuem.org. Poe Musuem, 2014. Web.

Edgar Allan Poe

To My Mother

As One Put Drunk Into the Packet-Boat

I tried each thing, only some were immortal and free. Elsewhere we are as sitting in a place where sunlight Filters down, a little at a time,

The poem, the first in the award-winning collection Self-Portrait In A Convex Mirror , takes its title from the first line of Andrew Marvell ’s poem Tom May’s Death .

John Ashbery

As One Put Drunk Into the Packet-Boat

The wet dawn inks are doing their blue dissolve. On their blotter of fog the trees Seem a botanical drawing -- Memories growing, ring on ring, A series of weddings.

Knowing neither abortions nor bitchery,

Truer than women, They seed so effortlessly! Tasting the winds, that are footless,

Plath’s shift in tone – from something elegant in Stanza 1 to something more human (arguably) in Stanza 2 – highlights this transfer from a loveliness of these trees to a pain and annoyance at how these trees know “neither abortions nor bitchery”.

Sylvia Plath

Winter Trees

GRAND-DAD , they say you're old and frail, Your stiffened legs begin to fail: Your staff, no more my pony now, Supports your body bending low, While back to wall you lean so sad,

I'm vex'd to see you, Dad.

You used to smile and stroke my head, And tell me how good children did; But now, I wot not how it be,

The shorter last line with its refrain or anaphora ‘Dad’, gives emphasis to the important subject of the poem.

Joanna Baillie

A Child To His Sick Grandfather

Across the lines of straighter darker trees, I like to think some boy's been swinging them. But swinging doesn't bend them down to stay As ice-storms do. Often you must have seen them Loaded with ice a sunny winter morning After a rain. They click upon themselves As the breeze rises, and turn many-colored As the stir cracks and crazes their enamel. Soon the sun's warmth makes them shed crystal shells Shattering and avalanching on the snow-crust-- Such heaps of broken glass to sweep away You'd think the inner dome of heaven had fallen.

They are dragged to the withered bracken by the load

And they seem not to break; though once they are bowed So low for long, they never right themselves: You may see their trunks arching in the woods

bracken (n.) A widespread, often weedy fern (Pteridium aquilinum) having large, triangular, pinnately compound fronds and often forming dense thickets. An area overgrown with this fern. (American Heritage Dictionary) The speaker means the birches are bent (“dragged” down) by the weight of the ice, so low as to touch the surrounding underbrush, which has been “withered” by winter.

Robert Frost

Birches

Crimson, with cheeks and bosom in a glow, Flushed to the yellow hair and finger-tips; And one there sang who soft and smooth as snow Bloomed like a tinted hyacinth at a show; And one was blue with famine after love, Who like a harpstring snapped rare harsh and low The burden of what those were singing of. One shamed herself in love; one temperately Grew gross in soulless love, a sluggish wife; One famished died for love. Thus two of three Took death for love and won him after strife; One droned in sweetness like a fattened bee:

All on the threshold, yet all short of life.

The realisation of their dreams are tantalisingly close yet all three fail to find love, and therefore meaningful life. This closeness to achieving their aspirations leaves the reader with a sense of tragedy at the sad existance of many women.

Christina Rossetti

A Triad

I am a beautiful woman I gazed on the forest and burned Out the Sahara desert With a packet of goat's meat And a change of clothes I crossed it in two hours I am a gazelle so swift So swift you can't catch me For a birthday present when he was three I gave my son Hannibal an elephant He gave me Rome for mother's day My strength flows ever on

My son Noah built New/Ark and I stood proudly at the helm As we sailed on a soft summer day

I turned myself into myself and was Jesus Men intone my loving name

The speaker references the Genesis flood narrative which features Noah and his ark. These direct connections to biblical personalities symbolize the divine mission of Africa and black people’s identity as descendents (motehrs, fathers, sons, daughters) of Africa. The emphasis on New/Ark is a nod to Newark, NJ. Newark has significance in several ways. After the 1967 Newark Riots , as industry fled the city, so did the white middle class, leaving behind a poor population. During this same time, the population of many suburban communities in northern New Jersey expanded rapidly. In addition, Newark is Amiri Baraka’s birthplace. Giovonni admired Baraka greatly for his leadership during the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and 1970s.

Nikki Giovanni

Ego-Tripping there may be a reason

With a lantern that wouldn't burn In too frail a buggy we drove Behind too heavy a horse Through a pitch-dark limitless grove. And a man came out of the trees And took our horse by the head And reaching back to his ribs Deliberately stabbed him dead.

The ponderous beast went down With a crack of a broken shaft. And the night drew through the trees In one long invidious draft. The most unquestioning pair That ever accepted fate

And the least disposed to ascribe Any more than we had to to hate, We assumed that the man himself

As they have got older, their own weapons against darkness have been gradually fading to “a lantern that wouldn’t burn” and the buggy has become “too frail”. Likewise, the horse is described as a “too heavy” draft horse because it is good for no other purpose and cannot help them to escape from any emergency that may arise; indeed, it is an easy victim when a life-changing event occurs. The death that is portrayed is therefore that of comfort and security, which can come suddenly to anyone and leave them with no option other than to rely entirely on their own ability to “walk the rest of the way”. The symbol works just as well for a breakdown in health or a loss of fortune, social standing, or the means to earn a living. Any disaster can arrive without warning and leave one’s “buggy” without the means to draw it forward. The man who kills the horse is Fate, intervening without warning to leave one exposed to the “long invidious draft” represented by the dark wood through which the couple are travelling. It should be noted that the couple accept what has happened as being normal and natural and not to be fought against or even objected to. They are: “The most unquestioning pair / That ever accepted fate”, and would appear to take a very different line to that of, say, Dylan Thomas who would have urged them to “rage against the dying of the light”. Frost was himself an old man when he wrote this poem (it appeared in his final collection “In the Clearing”, published in 1962 when Frost would have been 87 or 88 and had less than a year left to live).

Robert Frost

The Draft Horse

I've known rivers: Ancient, dusky rivers. My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young. I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep. I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it.

Hughes, black people, as well as the collective conciousness of mankind have known many rivers saturated and seeped in history, all with their own flow and stories to tell, stories with knowledge, wisdom and learning which have contributed to the creation, deepness of the soul

Langston Hughes

The Negro Speaks of Rivers

And my heart bled within me; for you can only be free when even the desire of seeking freedom becomes a harness to you, and when you cease to speak of freedom as a goal and a fulfillment. You shall be free indeed when your days are not without a care nor your nights without a want and a grief, But rather when these things girdle your life and yet you rise above them naked and unbound. And how shall you rise beyond your days and nights unless you break the chains which you at the dawn of your understanding have fastened around your noon hour? In truth that which you call freedom is the strongest of these chains, though its links glitter in the sun and dazzle your eyes. And what is it but fragments of your own self you would discard that you may become free? If it is an unjust law you would abolish, that law was written with your own hand upon your own forehead. You cannot erase it by burning your law books nor by washing the foreheads of your judges, though you pour the sea upon them. And if it is a despot you would dethrone, see first that his throne erected within you is destroyed. For how can a tyrant rule the free and the proud, but for a tyranny in their own freedom and a shame in their own pride? And if it is a care you would cast off, that care has been chosen by you rather than imposed upon you. And if it is a fear you would dispel, the seat of that fear is in your heart and not in the hand of the feared.

Verily all things move within your being in constant half embrace, the desired and the dreaded, the repugnant and the cherished, the pursued and that which you would escape.

These things move within you as lights and shadows in pairs that cling. And when the shadow fades and is no more, the light that lingers becomes a shadow to another light. And thus your freedom when it loses its fetters becomes itself the fetter of a greater freedom.

People live in a constant contradiction. We desire something, then dread to obtain it. In the name of morality, we are ready to condemn a person for a gesture or a word before asking ourselves if we do not share such reactions and are not liable to act in a similar way.

Kahlil Gibran

On Freedom

There's something that I'm watching Means a lot to me (something that I'm watching) There's something that I'm watching Means a lot to me (something that I'm watching)

It's a broken banjo bobbing

On the dark infested sea (something that I'm watching) It's a broken banjo bobbing On the dark infested sea

In early jazz, mostly coming from New Orleans, the banjo was more often used than the guitar. ( Source )

Leonard Cohen

Banjo

Farewell, thou child of my right hand, and joy;

My sin was too much hope of thee, lov'd boy. Seven years thou wert lent to me, and I thee pay, Exacted by thy fate, on the just day.

the fact that he used right hand could also show a bit of favoritism because the right means good often times where left indicates bad. This line is also written in iambic pentameter. Johnson had a great love and joy for his son.

Ben Jonson

On My First Son

Panoramas are not what they used to be. Claude has been dead a long time And apostrophes are forbidden on the funicular.

Marx has ruined Nature, For the moment.

For myself, I live by leaves, So that corridors of clouds, Corridors of cloudy thoughts,

Using a term like “dialectical materialism” to discuss the natural world, how could a panorama be more than a whole mess of processes?

Wallace Stevens

Botanist on Alp No. 1

Even the sun-clouds this morning cannot manage such skirts. Nor the woman in the ambulance Whose red heart blooms through her coat so astoundingly – A gift, a love gift Utterly unasked for

By a sky

Palely and flamily Igniting its carbon monoxides, by eyes Dulled to a halt under bowlers.

This is obscure. Why should a ‘sky’ — oddly personified — ask or not ask for a gift? There may be something cosmic, outside the poet, that suggests the source of love is non-human.

Sylvia Plath

Poppies in October

Sonnet LXXV from Amoretti One day I wrote her name upon the strand, But came the waves and washed it away: Again I wrote it with a second hand, But came the tide and made my pains his prey.

Vain man (said she) that dost in vain assay A mortal thing so to immortalize; For I myself shall like to this decay, And eke my name be wiped out likewise.

Not so, quoth I; let baser things devise To die in dust, but you shall live by fame; My verse your virtues rare shall eternize,

The girl whose name Spenser’s trying to sketch in the sand dismisses his actions as foolish, not believing anything will ever live forever. She says that she’ll soon one day be erased from the world (die) just like the sand when the tide washes up. “Vain man” is a double entendre. She’s saying that he’s making his bid for immortality out of vanity and self-satisfaction, but also that this his efforts are in vain as he will never be able to make something immortal.

Edmund Spenser

One Day I Wrote Her Name upon the Strand

a girl yourself and can understand why she is shocked. When she is about to walk away, you tell her you have no penis, that you don't know what got into you. You get on your knees. She suddenly bends down to kiss your shoulder and you know you're on the right track. You tell her you want to bear children and that is why you seem confused. You wrinkle your brow and curse the day you were born. She tries to calm you, but you lose control. You reach for her panties and beg forgiveness as you do. She squirms and you howl like a wolf. Your craving seems monumental. You know you will have her.

Taken by storm, she is the girl you will marry.

This monumental craving is important either because the marriage factor of this line references to the act of making love (the connection that he feels to the girl). Or the marriage factor of this line could refer to the way he could have fallen in love with the girl as he fulfilled his animalistic craving.

Mark Strand

Courtship

Poetry should treat Of lofty things Soaring thoughts And birds with wings.

The Muse of Poetry Should not care That earthly pain Is everywhere.

Poetry! Treats of lofty things Soaring thoughts

Hughes wrote this poem in an ironic response to his criticizers who believed he was being too negative in his poetry. Hughes doesn’t mean what he says in this poem, he’s just responding to his criticizers with a short and ridiculous poem to prove that poetry isn’t all about the pretty things in life. From the OED, a definition of muse is the inspiration for a poem or song. Hughes believes that the inspiration for his works are the pains he feels and the things that anger/upset him in the world. By saying “earthly pain is everywhere,” he’s alluding the fact that pain can’t be ignored, especially not in poetry. Poetry comes from the heart and its best works represent the feelings of the author, not simple things like birds. “Muse.” Home : Oxford English Dictionary. Web. 04 Dec. 2014.

Langston Hughes

Formula

With its very own breath of brandy and death Dragging its tail in the sea And I'll dance with you in Vienna I'll be wearing a river's disguise The hyacinth wild on my shoulder My mouth on the dew of your thighs And I'll bury my soul in a scrapbook With the photographs there, and the moss And I'll yield to the flood of your beauty My cheap violin and my cross And you'll carry me down on your dancing To the pools that you lift on your wrist

Oh my love, Oh my love

Take this waltz, take this waltz It's yours now. It's all that there is {Instrumental}

Lorca, followed closely by Cohen, has switched from the previous “Ay, Ay, Ay, Ay!” , a somehow desperate exclamation to “O my love, O my love” for the ending, as if passing the baton to the lover (in the next lines), possibly anticipating the (narrator’s) imminent death.

Leonard Cohen

Take This Waltz

Of Lords, and Earls, and Dukes, and gartered Knights; While the spread fan o'ershades your closing eyes; Then give one flirt, and all the vision flies. Thus vanish scepters, coronets, and balls, And leave you in lone woods, or empty walls. So when your slave, at some dear, idle time, (Not plagued with headaches, or the want of rhyme) Stands in the streets, abstracted from the crew, And while he seems to study, thinks of you: Just when his fancy points your sprightly eyes, Or sees the blush of soft Parthenia rise, Gay pats my shoulder, and you vanish quite;

Streets, chairs, and coxcombs rush upon my sight;

Vexed to be still in town, I knit my brow, Look sour, and hum a tune – as you may now.

Coxcombs : dandies, men about town. Chairs : Sedan chairs.

Alexander Pope

Epistle to Miss Blount

There are no handles upon a language

Whereby men take hold of it And mark it with signs for its remembrance. It is a river, this language,

no one has the say so on how to say it

Carl Sandburg

Languages

My mother bore me in the southern wild, And I am black, but O! my soul is white; White as an angel is the English child: But I am black as if bereav'd of light. My mother taught me underneath a tree And sitting down before the heat of day, She took me on her lap and kissed me, And pointing to the east began to say. Look on the rising sun: there God does live And gives his light, and gives his heat away.

And flowers and trees and beasts and men receive

Comfort in morning joy in the noonday. And we are put on earth a little space, That we may learn to bear the beams of love,

The order of “flowers and trees and beasts and men” is interesting—"men" are last on this list. This implies that whatever light we receive, we are either less aware and grateful than “flowers and trees and beasts” or that we use God’s “light” in a fundamentally different manner than those creations.

William Blake

The Little Black Boy Songs of Innocence

I, being born a woman and distressed

By all the needs and notions of my kind,

Am urged by your propinquity to find Your person fair, and feel a certain zest To bear your body's weight upon my breast:

Playing on the stereotype of women as flighty, emotional creatures, a trace of irony enters the poem.

Edna St. Vincent Millay

I being born a woman and distressed Sonnet XLI

Fat back boiled to submission, Tender evening poignancies of Magnolia and the great green Smell of fresh sweat. In Southern fields, The sound of distant Feet running, or dancing, And the liquid notes of Sorrow songs, Waltzes, screams and French quadrilles float over The loam of Georgia.

Sing me to sleep, Savannah.

Clocks run down in Tara's halls and dusty Flags droops their unbearable Sadness.

The city of Savannah has been known to be one of the most recognized cities in the state of Georgia. It is also known to produce great musicians and provide great soulful music, and Maya asks for it to serenade her to sleep in the city.

Maya Angelou

A Georgia Song

Slowly I smoke and hug my knee, The while a witless masquerade Of things that only children see Floats in a mist of light and shade: They pass, a flimsy cavalcade, And with a weak, remindful glow, The falling embers break and fade, As one by one the phantoms go.

Then, with a melancholy glee

To think where once my fancy strayed, I muse on what the years may be Whose coming tales are all unsaid,

The juxtaposition of melancholy and glee, one being an senseless feeling of pensive sadness and the other being pure delight, is representative of the way that circumstances can drastically change. Time changes perception and can make things that were once bad good and vice versa.

Edwin Arlington Robinson

Ballade by the Fire

to shimmer dances on the floor. A clang og lock and keys and heels and blood-dried guns. Even sunshine dares It's jail and bail then rails to run.

Guard grey men serve plates of rattle noise and concrete death and beans.

Then pale sun stumbles through the poles of iron to warm the horror

These lines describe the guards serving a jailsman food through the tiny slot of their cell door. They don’t like jail, and the guard isn’t friendly or happy. The food quality isn’t good, and viewed as deathly.

Maya Angelou

Prisoner

Of the pine-trees crusted with snow; And have been cold a long time To behold the junipers shagged with ice, The spruces rough in the distant glitter Of the January sun; and not to think Of any misery in the sound of the wind, In the sound of a few leaves, Which is the sound of the land Full of the same wind That is blowing in the same bare place For the listener, who listens in the snow, And, nothing himself, beholds

Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

Sounds a bit like Eastern meditation or a Zen koan. Stevens was no stranger to Eastern thinking (he studied philosophy at Harvard), and in fact the whole poem echoes an idea out of Buddhism: that the emptying of the self leads to a higher state. The listener’s utterly objective, realistic, emptied-out consciousness (“nothing himself”) projects no imaginative fictions (“nothing that is not there”) onto the emptiness of the snow scene around him. After a string of negations (the listener is nothing, and his mind is empty of anything that’s not right in front of him) Stevens upends all the negativity, closing the poem with a note of affirmation. The man sees “the nothing that IS.” Nothing, including himself, has an intrinsic existence, but the man is still beholding something.

Wallace Stevens

The Snow Man

XIV There pass the careless people That call their souls their own:

Here by the road I loiter, How idle and alone.

Ah, past the plunge of plummet, In seas I cannot sound,

The speaker does what has become something of a dirty word in the 21st century– they “loiter”, having no business, but instead considering the nature of loneliness.

A. E. Housman

There pass the careless people

Some thoughts traveled from distant places Are not born within our borders And must pass through heightened security fortified by age old tradition The norms of societal culture The misgivings of prejudice and misplaced judgement In order to arrive peacefully in our minds Our minds are high-walled fortresses Where Security Councils gather to preserve comfort Enforce what we have been taught to value And discern and determine what is real

We depend on our minds to guide and aid us from one day to the next

Some of us see our minds like muscles That we exercise with theorems, riddles, thoughts, and thought processes We gather and store information

This line begins a section that plays with the dichotomy of the mind: powerfully liberating yet incredibly easy to chisel away at until independence is no longer within it’s scope.

Saul Williams

FCK THE BELIEFS

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood And sorry I could not travel both And be one traveler, long I stood 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

The speaker went the other way, which looked as promising as the first. He didn’t know which would turn out better. “Just as fair” suggests that this path is effectively equal to the first. Based on the evidence the speaker has presented thus far, we can only conclude that his decision to take this road was pure caprice. Misreading this line may cause a misreading of the ending: the fact that one road was slightly “less traveled by” doesn’t mean it was dramatically different, much less superior or inferior.

Robert Frost

The Road Not Taken

You are the town and we are the clock.

We are the guardians of the gate in the rock. The Two. On your left and on your right

Compare these lines from Auden’s “As I Walked Out One Evening”: But all the clocks in the city Began to whirr and chime: ‘O let not Time deceive you, You cannot conquer Time.’ “The Two” in this poem seem to speak similarly on behalf of Time, Fate, etc., warning us that they have ultimate power and we don’t.

W. H. Auden

The Two

Do not go gentle into that good night. Old age should burn and rave at close of day;

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right, Because their words had forked no lightning they Do not go gentle into that good night.

The word “grave” echoes, through assonant rhyme the repeated “rage” at the beginning of line three of the first stanza and in line three of this stanza. It unites anger, power, madness, and frustration in a whirlwind of emotion.

Dylan Thomas

Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night

Only a man harrowing clods In a slow silent walk With an old horse that stumbles and nods Half asleep as they stalk. Only thin smoke without flame From the heaps of couch-grass;

Yet this will go onward the same Though Dynasties pass.

Yonder a maid and her wight Come whispering by: War's annals will cloud into night

The moral is stated clearly. The grass is eternal, though power changes hands again and again, and control of the peasants' land goes from one government to the next. Even though Hardy is writing of “Dynasties” with a capital “D,” he shows that their power can be broken by the forces of change. In the first stanza, the word “Only” is coupled two lines later with “With” – only a man with his old horse. In this second stanza, “Only” is coupled with “Yet,” so we see that the stanza takes a turn at its middle. Smouldering weeds will burn longer than political control.

Thomas Hardy

In Time of The Breaking of Nations

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;

Traffic policemen used to wear white cotton gloves for visibility, but for the speaker these should now be black. The speaker now wants to draw in those who do mundane jobs, as well has the more adventurous aeroplane pilots..

W. H. Auden

Funeral Blues Stop all the clocks

Workmen at dawn; swerving to solitude Of skies and scarecrows, haystacks, hares and pheasants, And the widening river's slow presence, The piled gold clouds, the shining gull-marked mud, Gathers to the surprise of a large town: Here domes and statues, spires and cranes cluster Beside grain-scattered streets, barge-crowded water, And residents from raw estates, brought down The dead straight miles by stealing flat-faced trolleys, Push through plate-glass swing doors to their desires - Cheap suits, red kitchen-ware, sharp shoes, iced lollies, Electric mixers, toasters, washers, driers –

A cut-price crowd, urban yet simple, dwelling

Where only salesmen and relations come Within a terminate and fishy-smelling Pastoral of ships up streets, the slave museum,

It is in the first line of the third stanza that Larkin’s snobbery emerges. The people are a “cut-price crowd”, implying cheap taste, limited funds and materialism. The collective noun “crowd” denies their individuality. The description “urban yet simple” suggests that Larkin would have preferred “urban yet sophisticated. The adjective "simple” is somewhat insulting, implying the population was child-like and lacked finer perception.

Philip Larkin

Here - 589672

I'm "wife"—I've finished that— That other state— I'm Czar—I'm "Woman" now— It's safer so— How odd the Girl's life looks Behind this soft Eclipse— I think that Earth feels so To folks in Heaven—now— This being comfort—then That other kind—was pain—

But why compare?

I'm "Wife"! Stop there!

The brief rhetorical question encapsulates the essence of the poem. The speaker has gained the security — or “safety” — of marriage, according to society’s unspoken rules. Having achieved her status, the reader may perceive that she is battling her yearning for freedom, for single life, for independence. But the pointlessness of comparison is expressed in the question. The tone may be interpreted as either hopeless or, alternatively, sarcastic. The rigidity of society’s rules renders questionning purposeless.

Emily Dickinson

Im wife—Ive finished that 199

VERONICA, ELVIRA and other female attendants. Veron. Come then, a song; a winding, gentle song, To lead me into sleep.Let it be low As zephyr, telling secrets to his rose, For I would hear the murmuring of my thoughts; And more of voice than of that other music

That grows around the strings of quivering lutes; But most of thought; for with my mind I listen,

And when the leaves of sound are shed upon it, If there's no seed remembrance grows not there. So life, so death; a song, and then a dream!

Contrast between sensual and immediate pure music and more concrete ideas that are expressed in language. Beddoes' rhythmically enchanting and intelligent verses, of course, encapsulate some of both aspects.

Thomas Lovell Beddoes

From Torrismond Garden Scene

One is a creeper who's sleepy in his shell Two is a hopper and he hops very well Three is a flopper and his flippers flap Four is a jumper with a jump-in lap Five is a drinker with a dip-in nose Six is a flapper with flippers on his toes Seven is a tapper with a tripper in his beak

Eight is a nutter with a nut sack in his cheek

Nine is a hanger with a banger in his head Ten is the stopper who stepped in and said It's time for the guessing; here in a line

A chipmunk. Chipmunks have food storage pouches in their cheeks which can expand to up to three times the size of their heads! They use these pouches to carry food to store in their dwellings.

John Ciardi

Guess

Seems like a long time Since the waiter took my order. Grimy little luncheonette, The snow falling outside. Seems like it has grown darker Since I last heard the kitchen door Behind my back Since I last noticed Anyone pass on the street. A glass of ice-water Keeps me company

At this table I chose myself Upon entering.

And a longing, Incredible longing To eavesdrop

The I-person could choose a table himself when entering, so it probably wasn’t very crowded, nor did he have to make a reservation first. Also: the waiter didn’t lead him to a table, which is normal at restaurants, so one may wonder if this is a shabby place.

Charles Simic

The Partial Explanation

Over the barbed and shooting sea assumed an army And swept into our wounds and houses, I climb to greet the war in which I have no heart but only That one dark I owe my light, Call for confessor and wiser mirror but there is none To glow after the god stoning night And I am struck as lonely as a holy marker by the sun No Praise that the spring time is all Gabriel and radiant shrubbery as the morning grows joyful Out of the woebegone pyre And the multitude's sultry tear turns cool on the weeping wall,

My arising prodgidal Sun the father his quiver full of the infants of pure fire,

But blessed be hail and upheaval That uncalm still it is sure alone to stand and sing Alone in the husk of man's home

Punning on the biblical – Prodigal Son a parable about a young man who squanders his inheritance only to be forgiven by his father. War affected his son, who has a “quiver full of the infants of pure fire.” Maybe his son is motivated to kill because of the war. Driven by the passion of youth and a cause to stand for.

Dylan Thomas

Holy Spring

Alas! and am I born for this,

To wear this slavish chain?

Deprived of all created bliss, Through hardship, toil and pain! How long have I in bondage lain,

This is clearly a metaphor to the restrictions that slave life has on slaves. Horton was not really chained up to a fence post or anything, in fact, he was delivering items to the university of North Carolina and one can not be chained and free at the same time. Info on his life as a slave:

George Moses Horton

On Liberty and Slavery

Out of us all That make rhymes Will you choose Sometimes - As the winds use A crack in a wall Or a drain, Their joy or their pain To whistle through - Choose me, You English words?

I know you:

You are light as dreams, Tough as oak, Precious as gold,

The mood of matiness continues. The poet and the words he uses are friends.

Edward Thomas

Words

Who'll pay reparations on my soul? Many fine speeches (oh yeah) From the White House desk (uh huh) Written on the cue cards That were never really there Yes, but the heat and the summer were there And the freezing winter's cold Now tell me, Who'll pay reparations on my soul? Call my brother a junkie cause he ain't got no job (no job, no job) Told my old man to leave me when times got hard (so hard) Told my mother she got to carry me all by herself

And now that I want to be a man (be a man) who can depend on no one else (oh yeah)

What about the red man Who met you at the coast? You never dig sharing,

This often leaves Black youth in America struggling for a sense of identity in a world dominated by a racial system that they are taught does not exist, but can see the effects of everyday.

Gil Scott-Heron

Wholl Pay Reparations on My Soul?

ARGVMENT.

IN this fyrst Æglogue Colin Clout a shepheardes boy complaineth him of his vnfortunate loue, being but newly (as semeth) enamoured of a countrie lasse called Rosalinde: with which strong affection being very sore traueled, he compareth his carefull case to the sadde season of the yeare, to the frostie ground, to the frosen trees, and to his owne winterbeaten flocke. And lastlye, fynding himselfe robbed of all former pleasaunce and delights, hee breaketh his Pipe in peeces, and casteth him selfe to the ground. COLIN Cloute. A Shepeheards boye (no better doe him call)

The “Argument” is a short summary that Spenser puts at the beginning of each section of his Shepherd’s Calendar. It basically ruins the story by telling you what’s going to happen, and makes my job easier. Not this sort of argument:

Edmund Spenser

The Shepheardes Calender Pt. 1 - Ianuarye

The name—of it—is "Autumn"— The hue—of it—is Blood— An Artery—upon the Hill— A Vein—along the Road—

Great Globules—in the Alleys—

And Oh, the Shower of Stain— When Winds—upset the Basin— And spill the Scarlet Rain—

“Globules” here not only extends the blood metaphor but displays Dickinson’s startlingly precise, even technical vocabulary. A “globule” is a round particle or drop. The composition of blood-globules was still a matter of scientific uncertainty and debate in the 19th century. Here is a Belgian scientist’s paper “On the Globules of Blood” from about 20 years before Dickinson’s poem. The “Alleys” here may be alleyways in a town, but could also refer to tree-lined lanes in the countryside.

Emily Dickinson

The name—of it—is Autumn 656

And said: It is still unripe, Better wait awhile; Wait while the skylarks pipe, Till the corn grows brown. As you set it down it broke,-- Broke, but I did not wince; I smiled at the speech you spoke, At your judgment that I heard: But I have not often smiled Since then, nor questioned since, Nor cared for corn-flowers wild, Nor sung with the singing bird.

I take my heart in my hand,

O my God, O my God, My broken heart in my hand: Thou hast seen, judge Thou.

The speaker now exerts her own control in a variation on the refrain at the beginning of each ot the stanzas.

Christina Rossetti

Twice

My mother groaned, my father wept Into the dangerous world I leapt Helpless, naked, piping loud

Like a fiend hid in a cloud

Struggling in my father's hands Striving against my swaddling bands Bound and weary, I thought best

For Blake, a fiend was not to be regarded as evil but an embodiment of energy and instinct. So here the baby comes into the world not as a peaceful, meek being but as one filled with positive energy and potential instinctual life.

William Blake

Infant Sorrow

When the green woods laugh with the voice of joy And the dimpling stream runs laughing by When the air does laugh with our merry wit And the green hill laughs with the noise of it When the meadows laugh with lively green

And the grasshopper laughs in the merry scene

When Mary and Susan and Emily With their sweet round mouths sing "Ha, ha he!" When the painted birds laugh in the shade

Grasshoppers have multiple symbolic associations, including longevity, happiness, peacefulness, and good health. In this context it is most likely that Blake chose it because of its characteristic leaping movement, suggesting joy and energy and good health.

William Blake

Laughing Song

One Sister have I in our house -

And one a hedge away

There's only one recorded But both belong to me One came the way that I came -

This refers to Susan being her childhood friend; her neighbour. Dickinson is essentially contrasting these two relationships.

Emily Dickinson

One Sister have I in our house 14

Trees will die All vegetation will die Radiated men will eat the flesh of radiated men The sea will be poisoned The lakes and rivers will vanish Rain will be the new gold The rotting bodies of men and animals will stink in the dark wind The last few survivors will be overtaken by new and hideous diseases And the space platforms will be destroyed by attrition The petering out of supplies The natural effect of general decay And there will be the most beautiful silence never heard

Born out of that.

The sun still hidden there Awaiting the next chapter.

In the end, humanity’s only legacy was the beautiful silence it brought to the earth by destroying every living thing on it.

Charles Bukowski

Dinosauria We

Over the river, and through the wood, To grandfather's house we go; The horse knows the way To carry the sleigh Through the white and drifted snow. Over the river, and through the wood— Oh, how the wind does blow!

It stings the toes And bites the nose As over the ground we go.

Over the river, and through the wood, To have a first-rate play. Hear the bells ring

The wind sends chills through the toes and the nose as the sleigh continues to accelerate.

Lydia Maria Child

A Boys Thanksgiving Day Over the river and through the wood

To reverence the opening of buds? 3) Were they inclined to quiet laughter? 4) Did they use bone and ivory Jade and silver, for ornament? 5) Had they an epic poem? 6) Did they distinguish between speech and singing? 1) Sir, their light hearts turned to stone It is not remembered whether in gardens Stone gardens illumined pleasant ways 2) Perhaps they gathered once to delight in blossom But after their children were killed There were no more buds

3) Sir, laughter is bitter to the burned mouth

4) A dream ago, perhaps. Ornament is for joy All the bones were charred 5) It is not remembered. Remember

The ‘burned mouth’ may be a reference to the chemical sprayed over North Vietnamese crops and forests to defoliate the countryside, known as Agent Orange . It was corrosive and resulted in skin conditions, cancers and birth defects. It badly affected the local population as well as American troops. In these circumstances laughter is silenced. Levertov’s reference is in keeping with the worldwide condemnation of America for targeting civilian populations. The use of the plosive ‘b’ sound in ‘bitter’ and ‘burned’ emphasises the anger of the speaker towards the horrifying image the poet has created.

Denise Levertov

What Were They Like

The bird but seeks his proper food — And Providence, whose power endu'd That fly with life, when it thinks good, May justly take it. But you have no excuses for't — A life by Nature made so short, Less reason is that you for sport Should shorter make it. A fly a little thing you rate — But, Robert do not estimate A creature's pain by small or great; The greatest being

Can have but fibres, nerves, and flesh, And these the smallest ones possess, Although their frame and structure less Escape our seeing.

Even the smallest of all creatures have fibres, nerves, and flesh just like humans. Just because the fly is small and hard to see does not mean that it is different from any other creature.

Charles Lamb

Thoughtless Cruelty

I worked for a woman, She wasn't mean-- But she had a twelve-room House to clean. Had to get breakfast, Dinner, and supper, too-- Then take care of her children When I got through. Wash, iron, and scrub, Walk the dog around-- It was too much, Nearly broke me down.

I said, Madam, Can it be

You trying to make a Pack-horse out of me? She opened her mouth.

The narrator, Alberta, questions the intentions of the woman she works for. Although she was not necessarily cruel to Alberta, the amount of chores assigned to her was simply unreasonable.

Langston Hughes

Madam and Her Madam