Readers'

Practical Analysis
Of
Modern English
& American

Poetry
Kian Pishkar (PhD) Behzad Moridi (PhD)

(Associate Professor Of Islamic Azad University Jieroft Branch

Associate Professor Of Linguistics and Foreign languages of Pay am Nour University)

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 In the Name of
Allah

The Compassionate, the Merciful

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 Introduction
There have been many books published this century which have been
devoted to the practical literary criticism. This book based of Dr. A. Rezaie‟s
An Introduction to literature in English (Samt) and Perrine‟s Literature.
Structure Sound and Sense (1974), which were the basic literary textbooks.
The new edition practically analyzed more than 284 new poems which in B. A,
M. A and PH. D course are necessary and caused that this edition became a
great source of analyzing, interpreting and criticism of English, American and
other literary masterpieces. The sources and texts are based on the best ones by
best writers and all of them authentic, so the students can use them without
hesitation about the originality of the sources.

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 Introduction
It‟s not more than a couple of years that I have become familiar with Mr.
Kian Pishkar, but during this short period of time not only I found him as an
industrious and sincere colleague but also as a learned English Literature
instructor who has a great enthusiasm for his work and career.
The present book which is compiled and written by Mr. K. Pishkar, is a
sample of his hard work and his interest in literature. This book is one of the
best commentary works which has been written on “Laurence Perrine‟s
Literature, Structure, Sound and Sense. ”
The author has described the different figurative language and literary
devices which could be found in poetry and as well as in fiction. The book has
been divided into three different sections: (Short stories –Poetry –Drama). The
commentaries which are about short stories and poems are very comprehensive
and precise for all students and fans of literature.
I strongly recommend this instructive book to the students of English
Language without any hesitation.

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Table of Contents
1) Lawrence Ferlinghetti CONSTANTLY RISKING ABSURDITY....11
2) Emily Dickinson A BIRD CAME DOWN THE WALK (P. 518) ...........11
3) John Donne THE TRIPLE FOOL........................................13
4) Robert Frost/MOWING 16
5) George Gascoigne AND IF I DID WHAT THEN?.................................16
6) Edwin Arlington Robinson THE MILL (P. 874) ......................................19
7) Robert Graves THE NAKED AND THE NUDE (P. 589) ......................20
8) Edwin Arlington Robinson RICHARD CORY (P. 592) ............................21
9) Ezra Pound PORTRAIT D‟UNE FEMME (P. 873)..............................23
10) Siegfried Sassoon BASE DETAILS (P. 598)...............................................25
11) Richard Wiblur A LATE AUBADE (P. 602) ......................................26
12) Emily Dickinson A NARROW FELLOW IN THE GRASS ...............27
13) Adrienne Rich LIVING IN SIN .......................................29
14) T. Hardy THE DARKLING THRUSH (P. 851) ................................29
15) George Herbert THE QUIP .......................................................30
16) Edwin Arlington Robinson THE DARK HILLS .........................................32
17) Emily Dickinson A HUMMINGBIRD ......................................34
18) Thomas Campion THERE IS A GRADEN IN HER FACE .......35
19) Robert Frost THE SLIKEN TENT (P. 619)............36
20) John Keats TO SLEEP ........................................37
21) Dorothy Lee Richardson AT CAPE BOJEADOR....................................39
22) Archibald MacLeish YOU, ANDREW MARVELL (P. 632) .........40
23) George Herbert REDMPTION (P. 852) ....................................40
24) Rupert Brook THE DEAD ......................................................42
25) Alan Dugan LOVE SONG: I AND THOU (P. 645)
43
26) Christina Rossetti UPHILL ...........................................43
27) Robert Frost DUST OF SNOW (P. 647) .....................44
28) William Blake SOFT SNOW (P. 647) .....................................44
29) Emily Dickinson MY LIFE CLOSED TWICE...........................45
30) Alexander Pope ON A CERTAIN LADY AT COURT ...........48
31) John Frederick Nims LOVE POEM (P. 871) .....................................48
32) Sir John Harington ON TREASON........................................49
33) Donald W. Baker FORMAL APPLICATION (P. 666) ...........50
34) Robert Frost DEPARTMENTAL ............................51
35) JOHN MILTON ON THE DEATH OF A FAIR INFANT DYING OF A
COUGH 54
36) JOHN MILTON ON THE MORNING OF CHRIST'S NATIVITY.............56
37) John Milton THE PASSION .........................................................59
38) John Milton ON SHAKESPEARE .........................................59

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39) John Milton THREE LYRICS "ON TIME""UPON THE
CIRCUMCISION" 60
40) John Milton ARCADES .....................................................61
41) John Milton THE SONNETS...............................................65
42) John Milton TO THE NIGHTINGALE ..................................67
43) JOHN MILTON SONNET 7: HOW SOON HATH TIME THE
SUBTLE THIEF OF YOUTH ...........................................................................68
44) John Milton SONNETS 8, 9 and 10 .....................................68
45) John Milton SONNET 16: TO THE LORD GENERAL
CROMWELL 69
46) John Milton SONNET 23: METHOUGHT I SAW MY
LATE ESPOUSED SAINT 70
47) John Donne HERO AND LEANDER.........................72
48) Keith Jenison LAST STAND..................................................72
49) T. S. Eliot The HOLLOW MAN (1925) .........73
50) T. S. Eliot ASH WEDNESDAY (1930)................... Error!
Bookmark not defined.
51) T. S. Eliot A SONG FOR SIMEON (1928)Error! Bookmark not
defined.
52) Emily Dickinson BELSHAZZAR HAD A LETTER.................93
53) Anonymous IN THE GARDEN................................94
54) Gerard Manley Hopkins THE CAGED SKYLARK (P. 856) ................95
55) Gerard Manley Hopkins THE LANTERN OUT OF DOORS ...................95
56) Philip Larkin AUBADE........................................................103
57) Archibald Mac Leash ARS POETICA (P. 701) ................................105
58) W. H Davies THE VILLAIN (P. 704) ...............................107
59) Emily Dickinson APPARENTLY WITH NO SURPRISE (P.
704) 107
60) William Butler Yeats THE COMING OF WISDOM WITH TIME
107
61) Michael Drayton SINCE THERE‟S NO HELP (P. 707) .........107
62) Robert Frost THE TELEPHONE.....................................109
63) John Wakeman LOVE IN BROOKLYN ...............................110
64) Emily Dickinson ONE DEGNITY DELAYS FOR ALL ........112
65) Alfred, Lord Tennyson CROSSING THE BAR .................................113
66) Thomas Hardy THE OXEN ...................................................113
67) John Donne THE APPARITION ......................................116
68) Alexander Pope ENGRAVED ON THE COLLAR OF A DOG
121
69) W. H. Auden THAT NIGHT WHEN JOY BEGAN (P. 720)
121
70) A. E. Houseman WITH RUE MY HEART IS LADEN..........122
71) Gwendolyn Brooks WE REAL COOL (P. 725)............................123
72) Emily Dickinson AS IMPRECEPTIBLY AS GRIEF ..............123

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73) Carl Sandburg THE HARBOR ..............................................129
74) John Crowe Ransom PARTING, WITHOUT A SEQUEL (P. 726)
130
75) Ralph Pomeroy ROW ..............................................................131
76) Edna St. Vincent Millay COUNTING-OUT RHYME.........................133
77) William Stafford TRAVELING THROUGH THE DARK ....133
78) Robert Frost NOTHING GOLD CAN STAY ...................135
79) George Herbert VIRTUE (P. 741) ..........................................136
80) William Blake INTRIDUCTION TO SONGS OF INNOCENCE .....138
81) IF EVERYTHING HAPPENS THAT CAN'T BE DONE (P. 743) .............138
82) A. E. Houseman OH WHO IS THAT YOUNG SINNER ......140
83) Walt Whitman HAD I THE CHOICE (P. 751) .....................141
84) Robert Frost THE AIM WAS SONG (P. 752) .................141
85) William Shakespeare SONG: HARK, HARK! (P. 754)..................141
86) Carl Sandburg SPLINTER (P. 755) .......................................142
87) Robert Herrick UPON JULIA‟S VOICE (P. 756) .................142
88) Robert Frost THE SPAN OF LIFE .....................................142
89) Alexander Pope SOUND AND SENSE (P. 763) ....................143
90) Alexander Pope THE RAPE OF THE LOCK ..........................146
91) Emily Dickinson I LIKE TO SEE IT LAP THE MILES (P. 764)
159
92) Ted Hughes WIND (P. 765) .............................162
93) Gerard Manley Hopkins HEAVEN, HEAVEN (P. 766) ......................163
94) Wilfred Owen ANTHEM FOR DOOMED YOUTH ..........163
95) A. E. Houseman EIGHT O‟CLOCK........................................166
96) James Joyce ALL DAY I HEAR (P. 768) ........................167
97) Emily Dickinson I HEARD A FLY BUZZ WHEN I DIED ....168
98) William Carlos Williams THE DANCE (P. 770) ...................................172
99) e. e. cummings THE GREEDY THE PEOPLE (P. 772).......173
100) John Keats ON FIRST LOOKING INTO CHAP
MAN‟S HOMER (P. 775) 174
101) Geoffrey Chaucer Canterbury Tales ...........................................179
102) William Shakespeare THAT TIME OF YEAR (P. 776) .................195
103) By various hands A HANDFUL OF LIMERICKS...................200
104) Dylan Thomas POEM IN OCTOBER (P. 781).........200
105) Matsuo Bash / Moritake TWO JAPANESE HAIKU (P. 788) .............202
106) William Shakespeare FROM ROMEO AND JULIET (P. 784) .....203
107) John Donne DEATH, BE NOT PROUD .........................205
108) Martha Collins THE STORY WE KNOW .....................207
109) Randolph Stow AS HE LAY DYING .....................................208
110) Anonymous EDWARD (P. 786) .........................209
111) Maxine Kumis 400-METER FRESTYLE ..................211
112) William Buford A CHRISTMAS TREE .................................212
113) Anonymous GOD‟S WILL FOR YOU AND ME...........212

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114) Gerard Manley Hopkins PIED BEAUTY..............................................212
115) Robert Francis PITCHER........................................................214
116) George E. Phair THE OLD-FASHIONED PITCHER ...........214
117) Walt Whitman COME UP FROM THE FIELDS FATHER
216
118) J. H. Mc Naughton THE FADED COAT OF BLUE ..................217
119) William Blake A POISON TREE .........................................220
120) Grandfield Kleiser THE MOST VITAL THING IN LIFE ........220
121) Richard Middleton ON A DEAD CHILD ....................................222
122) John Crowe Ransom BELLS FOR JOHN WHITE SIDE‟ S
DAUGHTER (P. 801) 223
123) Emily Dickinson SOME KEEP THE SABBATH GOING TO
CHURCH 225
124) Anonymous MY CHURCH................................................225
125) Malcolm Cowley THE LONG VOYAGE .................................227
126) Sir Walter Scott BREATHES THERE THE MAN (P. 806) ..227
127) Eugene Field LITTLE BOY BLUE ....................................229
128) Coventry Patmore THE TOYS ....................................................229
129) Robert Frost HOME BURIAL ............................................231
130) T. S. Elliot THE LOVE SONG OF J. ALFRED
PRUFROCK (P815) 234
131) Joan Ale shire SLIPPING .......................................................238
132) A. R. Ammons PROVIDENCE ..............................................239
133) Matthew Arnold DOVER BEACH (P. 833) .............................240
134) W. H. Auden MUSEE DES BEAUX ARTS ......................243
135) D. C. Berry ON READING POEMS TO A SENIOR
CLASS AT SOUTH HIGH (P. 834) ...............................................................244
136) Elizabeth Bishop ONE ART ......................................................245
137) William Blake THE GARDEN OF LOVE............................245
138) William Blake THE LAMB (P. 836) .....................................246
139) William Blake THE TIGER (P. 836) .....................................246
140) Lucille Clifton GOOD TIMES ...............................................250
141) Samuel Taylor Coleridge KUBLA KHAN (P. 840) ...............................251
142) Emily Dickinson BECAUSE I COULD NOT STOP FOR
DEATH (P. 844) 253
143) Emily Dickinson I TASTE A LIQUOR NEVER BREWED...254
144) John Donne THE GOOD-MORROW...............................255
145) John Donne SONG: GO AND CATCH A FALLING
STAR (P. 874) 257
146) Keith Douglas VERGISSMEINNICHT (P. 848) .................258
147) Carolyn Force THE COLONEL ............................................259
148) Robert Frost ACQUAINTED WITH THE NIGHT ..........260
149) Robert Frost WEST RUNNING BROOK (P. 812) ...........262
150) Robert Frost MENDING WALL ........................................265

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151) Isabella Gardner GIMBOLING .................................................272
152) Christopher Gilbert PUSHING .......................................................273
153) Thomas Hardy CHANNEL FIRING ......................................274
154) A. E. Housman BREDON HILL .............................................275
155) A. E. Housman TO AN ATHLETE DYING YOUNG (P. 856)
276
156) Randall Jarrell THE DEATH OF THE BALL TURRET GUNNER (P.
858) 279
157) Ellen Kay PATHEDY OF MANNERS .........................280
158) John Keats LA BELLE DAME SANS MERCI..............281
159) John Keats ODE ON A GRECIAN URN (P. 859) .........283
160) John Keats ODE TO A NIGHTINGALE (P. 860) .........286
161) John Keats ODE TO PSYCHS ......................................289
162) John Keats ODE ON MELANCHOLY .................................294
163) John Keats ODE ON INDOLENCE .........................................296
164) Galway Kinnell BLACKBERRY EATING ...........................297
165) Etheridge Knight THE WARDEN SAID TO ME ....................299
166) George Mac Beth BEDTIME STORY.......................................299
167) Naomil Long MADGETT MIDWAY .................................301
168) Andrew Marvell A DIALOGUE BETWEEN THE SOUL AND BODY
302
169) Cleopatra Mathis GETTING OUT ............................................304
170) Marianne Moore NEVERTHELESS ........................................305
171) Howard Nemerov GRACE TO BE SAID AT THE
SUPERMARKET 306
172) Naomi Shihab Nye FAMOUS.......................................................307
173) Emily Dickinson IN WINTER IN MY ROOM ........................308
174) Robert Graves DOWN, WANTON, DOWN ........................308
175) Sharon Olds THE CONNOISSEUSE OF SLUGS ..........308
176) P. K. Page THE LANDLADY .......................................311
177) Linda Pastan ETHICS...........................................................312
178) Dudley Randall BALLAD OF BIRMINGHM .......................313
179) Alberto Rios NANI..............................................................314
180) Edwin Arlington Robinson MR. FLOOD‟S PARTY (P. 875) .................315
181) Theodore Roethke I KNEW A WOMAN (P. 877)......................317
182) Theodore Roethke THE WAKING (P. 878) ................................319
183) William Shakespeare FEAR NO MORE (P. 879)............................320
184) William Shakespeare LET ME NOT TO THE MARRIAGE OF
TRUE MINDS (page 880) 321
185) William Shakespeare MY MISTRESS‟ EYES (Sonnet 130) (P. 880)
324
186) Gary Soto SMALL TOWN WITH ONE ROAD ..........325
187) Wallace Stevens THE DEATH OF A SOLDIER ...................326
188) Wallace Stevens THE SNOW MAN.........................................328

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189) Wallace Stevens A HIGH-TONED OLD CHRISTIAN
WOMAN (P. 884) 329
190) Wallace Stevens PETERQUINCE AT THE CLAVIER (P. 885)
331
191) Wallace Stevens THE EMPEROR OF ICE CREAM...............333
192) Wallace Stevens SUNDAY MORNING ........................335
193) Wallace Stevens ANECDOTE OF THE JAR................................337
194) Wallace Stevens THIRTEEN WAYS OF LOOKING AT A
BLACK BIRD 339
195) May Swenson QUESTION ....................................................341
196) Jonathan Swift A DESCRIPTION OF THE MORNING (P.
605) 342
197) Dylan Thomas DO NOT GO GENTLE (P. 890) ..................344
198) Dylan Thomas FERN HILL ...................................................345
199) Jean Toomer REAPERS......................................................346
200) John Updike EX-BASKETABLL PLAYER .....................347
201) David Wagoner RETURN TO THE SWAMP .......................349
202) Derek Walcott THE VIRGINS ...............................................349
203) Marilyn Nelson Waniek OLD BIBLES ................................................351
204) Robert Penn Warren BOY WANDERING IN SIMMS‟ VALLEY
352
205) Walt Whitman A NOISELESS PATIENT SPIDER (P. 891)
354
206) Walt Whitman THERE WAS A CHILD WENT FORTH ...355
207) Walt Whitman WHEN I HEARD THE LEARN‟D ASTRONOMER
357
208) Richard Wilbur THE MILL......................................................358
209) Nancy Willard A WREATH TO THE FISH ........................359
210) Miller Williams A POEM FOR EMILY .................................360
211) William Wordsworth RESOLUTION AND INDEPENDENCE (P. 896)
361
212) William Wordsworth STRANGE FITS OF PASSION HAVE I
KNOWN (P. 900) 370
213) William Wordsworth THE SOLITARY REAPER (P. 899) ...........370
214) William Wordsworth I WANDERED LOENELY AS A CLOUD
(P. 896) 373
215) William Butler Yeats SAILING TO BYZANTIUM (P. 905) .........376
216) William Butler Yeats THE SECOND COMING .............................378
217) William Butler Yeats THE WILD SWANS AT COOLE ...............380
218) John Milton Paradise Lost ...............................................382
219) Edmund Spenser The Faerie Queene .........................................397

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Lawrence Ferlinghetti
CONSTANTLY RISKING ABSURDITY
The poem compares the poet to a circus performer and entertainer-high-wire
artist, will try to catch the leaping form of Beauty While balanced on the high
wire of truth-an almost impossible feat. The extended simile (which includes
metaphor and personification) emphasizes that the poet must be constantly
entertaining (poetry must give pleasure), but that he is also concerned with such
higher realities as truth and beauty. It also emphasizes that the poet's task
demands the utmost skill and precision and involves constant risk: a false step
by the high-wire artist can cause death; a slip by the poet in published work
involves public exposure of ineptitude. The sublime and the ridiculous are
often narrowly separated, but in their reviews critics are quick to flay the poet
who strives for the first and falls into the second. Ferlinghetti shows his own
agility as a performer whit a constant flow of double meanings and "sleight-of-
foot" tricks (the play upon "sleight-of-foot" is appropriate both for the high-
wire artist who performs magic with his feet and the poet who does it whit
metrical feet). Serious? Yes. Solemn? No.
The arrangement of words on the page mimics the succession of short
hurried steps that the acrobat takes across the wire before pausing to balance
himself.

Emily Dickinson
A BIRD CAME DOWN THE WALK (P. 518)
This is a five-stanza study of a bird in motion. In stanza one, the speaker
watches as a bird find an angleworm and bites it in two In stanza two, the bird
drinks the dew from the grass and steps aside for a beetle. In stanza three, the
speaker draws attention to the bird's frightened eyes, which she compares to
beads. In stanza four, the speaker offers the cautious bird a crumb, but instead
of accepting the gift it flies away. The motion of the bird's wings is compared
to the motion of a boat's oars. In the final stanza, the speaker continues the

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comparison of the bird's wings to oars, but says that the sound of the flying bird
is softer than the sound of oars cutting through the water, and softer in fact than
sound of butterflies swimming through the noonday air.
Dickinson demonstrates her ability to see two aspects of reality at the same
time, its ugliness and its beauty. Beetles and angle-worms are not ordinarily
subjects which lend themselves to poetic treatment. Yes she takes nature at its
ugliest and most primitive, and transforms it through her humor and
imaginative approach. She could have approached the bird's capture of the
angleworm as an object lesson in the survival of the fittest; instead, she treats
the bird as though it were simply someone with bad manners. The bird's beauty
is conveyed through the emphasis she gives to its "velvet head" and its graceful
and soundless motion. She captures the essence of the bird's movement by
carefully attending to its frenetic actions. In quick succession the bird bites the
angleworm in half, drinks the dew, hops sideways, glances from side to side
wary of danger, and then flies away.
Besides its marvelously exact observation of a bird's behavior, the poem
shows the immense distance between the natural world of the bird and the
human world of the speaker, as Charles R. Anderson points out in his excellent
discussion. As long as it is unaware of the human presence, the bird goes
naturally about its affairs. It eats an angle-worm, raw, as a human being would
never do, and hops aside for a beetle, something normally beneath human
notice. Then it drinks "a dew" from "a grass" (from the human perspective,
dew and grass are collective entities: we speak of "the dew" and "the grass" and
must specify "a drop of dew" or "a blade of grass" to see them as the bird
habitually does. Notice how similarity of sound here suggests an unstated
metaphor: the blade of "grass" is the bird's "glass" from which he drinks). In
stanza 3 the bird intuits an alien presence, glances nervously all around, and
stirs his head "like one in danger. " When the human observer tries to bridge
the gap between their two worlds, cautiously offering a friendly crumb' the
bird's instinctive impulses take command, and it files off swiftly, literally
putting a distance between itself and the human observer.

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 In sound the first fourteen lines of the poem are unremarkable. There are a
few mildly harsh words: "walk, " "angle, " "drank, " "hopped, " "beads, "
"crumb"; and there is an appropriately awkward juxtaposition of two stressed
syllables in "hopped sideways. " When the bird takes flight, however, moving
into its natural element (line 15), the language turns magically euphonious:
a succession of long o's, "unrolled, " "rowed, " "home, " "oars, " "ocean") is
combined with liquid r's, l's, m's, and n's, and with soft v's and f's, to create a
beautiful flow of sound. The one slight interruption of this euphony comes in
the last two lines with the alliterating b's of "butterflies" and "banks" and the
repeated p's of "leap" and "plashless. " The metaphorical image suggested is of
a swimming hole in which butterflies leap off the banks of a pool into water;
but since the "banks" and the pools are both really air, they make no splash and
what we hear in the alliterative b's and repeated p's is those imaginary,
nonexistent splashes.

John Donne
THE TRIPLE FOOL
The poet begins with a blunt acknowledgement that he is two fools, for
falling in love and for writing poetry about it. He implies that the hope of
winning his beloved keeps him in love, and declares that he thought to allay his
pains by "fettering " them in verse (on the principle that composition of poetry
is a kind of therapy ). But no sooner has he done, than some musician sets his
words to music and signs them to the delight of many, thus increasing his love
and grief, and making him (through their publication )a third fool, who was
before only two.
This is, of course, a song, and as such is much simpler in conception and
structure, as well as more regular and smooth in verse form and rhythm than
lyrics not intended to be sung.
The speaker is (a) a poet and (b) a rejected lover. The complaint of a spurned
lover was one of the commonest subjects for poetry in Donne‟s time; but, as so
often in his poetry, Donne here takes a thoroughly conventional subject and

13
gives it a thoroughly original treatment. Part of his originality is that instead of
complaining about his lady's coldness, he turns the blame for his unhappiness
upon himself calling himself a triple fool ". Another part of his originality is his
exploitation of the modern idea that writhing about one's suffering in a
structured form has therapeutic value for the poet. But the originality is also
manifest in finer details of the poem; for instance, in the choice of the unusual
epithet "whining " attached to "poetry"(is he characterizing all poetry with this
epithet or just the kind that complains about the cruelty of the poet's beloved?),
and in the use of a "scientific" analogy for explaining the healing effect if
expressing his grief in verse: ocean water (grief), he claims, is Purged of its salt
(bitterness) in its passage through narrow, crooked, underground ways
(“rhyme‟s vexations”) to freshwater lakes and streams (psychological health).
(The word “rhyme” may be read literally here but is more profitably taken as a
metonymy for verse in general; “rhyme‟s vexations” are the difficulty of
finding words which exactly fit the writer‟s meaning and at the same time
fulfill the requirements of both meter and rime. ) But the main power of the
comparison lies in the implicit link between the salt of ocean water and the salt
of tears. In speaking of grief Donne mentions neither tears nor salt. But, having
admired Donne‟s analogy, how do we judge it when we learn that Donne‟s
“science” is false? Although Donne used the standard scientific explanation of
his time for the difference between salt water and fresh water, we now know
that the real explanation is almost the opposite of his: the slat in the ocean is
deposited there by streams which dissolve it from the earth on their way from
the lakes to the seas. How does this knowledge affect the worth of the poem? It
may be too early to take up this discussion now, but at some time the
differences between scientific truth, historical truth, and poetic truth must be
confronted. It will be germane to other poems in our study, such as Donne‟s “A
Valediction: Forbidding Mourning” and Keats‟s “On First Looking into
Chapman‟s Homer”.
It is important in reading this poem to determine with some accuracy how
serious the poet or the speaker (are they the same?) is in calling himself a

14
“triple fool”. A careful reading reveals, that the tone of the poem is relatively
light. The speaker bears his follies lightly, humorously exaggerating each of his
three claims for being a fool. He is not is despair. First, he claims that he is a
fool for loving someone who does not return his love: “she” (the beloved
woman) denies him: consequently, he asserts, he suffers “pains” and “grief. ”
But he reneges on this assertion before he has finished making it, by saying, in
lines4-5:
But where‟s the wise man that would not be I
If she did not deny?
This purely rhetorical question pays extravagant tribute to the beloved,
implying that she has so many desirable qualities that nowhere in the world
could a wise man be found who would not want to trade positions with the
speaker if the woman did not “deny” him. The speaker‟s folly is thus
substantially diminished. He can hardly be thought too great a fool for seeking
the love of so desirable a woman.
Second, he claims that he is a fool for expressing his grief in “whining
poetry”. But nothing he says in the rest of the first stanza support this initial
declaration. He develops the idea of the therapeutic value through a beautifully
apt and ingenious comparison. The poet ends the stanza with a direct statement
of his belief in the power of poetry to alleviate grief:
Grief bought to numbers cannot be so fierce,
For he tames it that fetters it in verse.
Third, he claims he is a fool because some musician may set his poem to
music and sing it in a public concert. This son, while delighting other members
of the audience, starts the poet‟s grief flowing again. But at this point he makes
the most illogical statement in the poem. Love and grief are proper subjects for
poetry, he claims, but not if it is good poetry-not if it places when it is heard;
for then the triumph of love and grief over him are published abroad, and he
becomes a “triple fool”: first, for loving a woman who does not return his love;
second, for expressing his grief in verse which alleviates the pain; third, for

15
thus opening the possibility that his poem may be set to music and sung
publicly. Thereby (a) arousing once more his grief and (b) subjecting him to the
embarrassment of letting the whole know of his “folly. ”
The poem ends with a generalization: The biggest fools are not congenital
idiots, but those who are “a little wise” –wise enough, perhaps, to perceive their
folly. The speaker, basing this generalization on his own experience, has been
wise enough to choose to write a good poem about his grief, but is unlucky
enough to prompt a gifted composer to set these words to music and sing them
in public. We must quarrel, however, even with this last assertion. If he really is
grieved and embarrassed by this third event (no act of his own) why does he
write this poem? (“The Triple Fool”), which can only make his follies even
more widely known? Is he not sucking pleasure out of his grief?

Robert Frost
MOWING
AND IF The effectiveness of line 13 proceeds from the shock of
paradox. Paradox is an apparent contradiction which is nevertheless somehow
true-a self-contradictory truth. The statement in line 13 identifies two things
usually regarded as opposites: fact and dream. It says that act is a dream (“the
sweetest dream, ” in fact, that “labor knows”). The paradox is resolved when
we realize that the word “dream” has two different meanings. In one sense a
dream is an illusion, something insubstantial and untrue (“He woke in the
morning and found it was only a dream”). In this sense “dream” is indeed the
opposite of “fact, ” fact being something irreducibly true or certain. But in
another sense a dream is something we ardently wish for, a desire whose
fulfillment seems out of our reach, unattainable yet not impossible (all that is
meant in that trite phrase “making our dreams come true”). It is in this sense
that the speaker in Frost‟s poem discovers that the “fact” (in this case the labor
of mowing) is the sweetest thing he could wish for. The sheer joy of
performing this task, and performing it well (laying the swale “in rows”),
exceeds any pleasure that might proceed from “idle hours” or “easy gold”-
16
whether as a lucky gift or as the wages of his labor. The work is its own
reward.
The period at the end of line 13 is significant. First, it separates this line from
the rest of the poem (since it follows a period as well as ends with one), thus
giving the line the weight it deserves in summing up the theme of the poem.
More importantly, it raises a question. Who speaks the line? A comma at the
end would have reduced the answer to a single possibility-the scythe. But the
period gives it additional possibilities: it may be spoken (or left unspoken) by
the scythe, the speaker, or the poet. (Or may the speaker here be taken as the
voice of the poet?)
The rachises and the snake? Some readers, whenever a snake appears in a
poem, will automatically identify it as a symbol of evil; and, indeed, the
flowers and the snake here may remind any reader of Eden. But this snake,
“bright green, ” is of a harmless garden variety, hardly the kind whose from
Satan took in the Garden. Indeed, it enhances by its bright coloring the
satisfaction gained by the speaker. The rachises add another element of beauty,
though their “spikes” are “feeble pointed, ” neither dangerous nor spectacularly
beautiful, unlike the flowers in the Garden. We notice also that the man
working “by the sweat of his brow” is not doing so as a punishment; rather, he
finds rewards in his work. If one insists on reading a reference to Eden in the
poem (and indeed we should not be dogmatic here), one can say that the poem
says that the Endemic experience can be duplicated or enjoyed at times in this
life-times when the human being feels in harmony with his surroundings, can
rejoice in the beauty of a snake and of flowers, and finds joy in the work by
which he earns his bread.
Some critics will find in the man‟s work with the scythe (laying the swale
“in rows”) a symbol of the poet‟s work in making a poem (laying out his
material in lines). Indeed, the mower‟s work in this poem is an analogue of any
creative labor where the worker finds his deepest gratification in the work
itself.

17
George Gascoigne
I DID WHAT THEN?
The first speaker is the mistress, quoted by the lover who goes on to
narrate his reaction and quote his response to her. This little drama begins in
the middle (after she has said and perhaps done-something to make the speaker
suppose she has been unfaithful to him) and concludes before its final outcome,
for we cannot know either her response to his statements nor what actions if
any they provoked. The focus, then, is not on the actions performed either
before or after this exchange, but on her statement, his confusion, and his
statement.
“There are plenty of fish in the sea” is an ancient phrase of consolation for
loss: you‟ve lost this fish, but there are plenty of others for you to catch. This
the mistress says, and adds that anyone who counts on catching and keeping a
particular fish is only causing himself grief. But we shouldn‟t overlook the
conditional “if” with which she begins: he has accused her of infidelity, but she
neither denies nor confesses, only says if she has been unfaithful, any grief he
feels is his fault and not hers: he should never have counted on exclusive
possession of her.
This aggressive behavior of hers completely confuses him, for he was
apparently ready to argue against a denial or to forgive a confession-he was at
least not at all prepared to be asked to defend his attitude. And so, with more
force than the words now have, he is amazed with doubt (good sixteenth-
century meanings would yield the paraphrase “panic-stricken with fear”) when
she pops her casual and insignificant question. After some moments of
perplexity, he manages to pick up on her use of the trite metaphor, and extends
it to the end of the poem, affirming that he will live with his loss, refuse
consolation, and await the day when he can ridicule other men who discover
her infidelities as he has done.
As a noun, “fish” is a metaphor for woman, as a verb it is a metaphor both
for courting and for capturing‟ “the sea” is a metaphor for the social world, the

18
sobriety of a poem about losing (or supposing one has lost) the love of a
mistress is tempered by the speaker‟s wit in extending her cliché at such length:
if the speaker was momentarily nonplussed, he quickly managed to find his
tongue, and to exploit the situation wittily. As the curtain does not fall on this
drama, we cannot know whether such sprightly word-play leads her to a
pleasant rejoinder-but we might notice that all this exchange occurred “once”
(5) in the past, with the potential implication that such an event is now the
material for recollection and amusement. Such an implication would be
consistent with court-poetry of Gascoigne‟s sort.

Edwin Arlington Robinson

THE MILL (P. 874)
“The Mill” was first published in 1920. Its setting is earlier, sometime
during the industrial revolution, probably late in the nineteenth century. The
miller‟s remark (5) means that individual millers are no longer able to make a
living: they are being replaced by industrialization.
This poem furnishes a good opportunity for taking up the issue of clarity and
obscurity. Clarity is a supreme virtue in expository prose: we want our students
to be perfectly lucid in their own writing. In poetry and fiction clarity is still a
virtue, but not a supreme one. It takes second place to power and richness of
meaning. A poem should be as clear at is may be without sacrificing something
more important.
Certainly, Robinson has not been at pains to be perfectly clear about what
happens in this poem. The Miller‟s remark (5) is cryptic. We are not told “what
else there was” (13) in the mill, or “what was hanging from a beam” (15), or
where the Miller‟s wife went (16), or what kind of “way” she is thinking of
(19), or what ruffles the water (23). But surely this story of a double suicide
gains in power exactly because it is not at first perfectly clear. The reader feels
a growing horror as its meaning gradually dawns on him, as bewilderment
shifts to suspicion and suspicion to certainty. If we change “what was hanging
from a beam” to “his body hanging from a beam, ” the poem is made clearer,

19
but its effect is greatly weakened. We no longer experience the terror of the
half-seen.
Obscurity in a poem may arise from various causes, including the poet‟s
ineptitude. It is not always as integral a part of meaning as it is here. But it can
be. The point can be driven home by analogy to the person who spoils a joke
by explaining it. A joke, too, is a small work of art. It must not be made so clear
that its effect is destroyed.

Robert Graves
HE NAKED AND THE NUDE (P. 589)
In “The Naked and the Nude” Graves is concerned with both semantic and
human values. Though seemingly he uses differences in human behavior only
to illustrate differences in the connotations of two words often regarded as
synonyms, actually he is as much concerned with, oral as with lexical values.
This ambiguity begins in the first stanza. If Graves were talking only about
words, his proper beginning would be “For me, naked and nude …” or “For
me, the words „naked‟ and „nude‟ …” By introducing two definite articles and
omitting italicization or quotation marks, Graves forces us to take “the naked
and the nude” as people. At the same time, by having them “construed / As
synonyms, ” he forces us to consider them as words. This duality of interest
persists throughout the poem.
The moral qualities characteristic of the opposed kind of people connoted by
the two words are in part named in the last line of stanza 1 and in part
suggested by the kinds of behavior shown in stanzas 2 and 3. In general, the
naked are natural, honest, unashamed, unselfconscious, undesigning; they are
swayed by some passion (love, truth, or justice) which carries them beyond
mere self-concern. The nude, in contrast, are deceptive, sly, and designing; by
artifice and trickery they seek to attract attention to themselves and arouse
prurient desire for their own pleasure or profit.
But ambiguities and paradoxes abound. In stanza 2 Grave‟s three examples
are lovers, doctors, and a Goddess. The lovers are deeply consumed by
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physical desire, but reciprocally and unashamedly so; their passion is a natural
part of their love. The physicians, on the other hand, in their passion for
diagnostic knowledge, are completely beyond physical desire. Notice however,
that, though the physicians illustrate the moral quality concerned, it is their
patients who are “naked”. Finally, the Goddess, nonhuman and immortal, will
not be among those sent to the underworld by death in the final stanza. The
shifts of category in the second and third examples are explainable by Graves‟s
dual interest in lexical and moral values.
In stanza 3 the nude both boldly flaunt and slyly conceal their charms, like a
dancer with fans or veils, to entice and hold the gaze of onlookers. “Draping by
a showman‟s trick / Their dishabille in rhetoric, ” they are paradoxically both
clothes and unclothed, nude but not naked. Thus arrayed in illusory attire, the
nude assume a holier-than-thou attitude and pretend to be more modest than the
plainly naked, while actually more seductive. The reference to “rhetoric” keeps
the interest focused on semantic as well as moral values; the word “rhetoric”
suggests verbal embellishment of the plain and unvarnished, just as “nude”
suggests embellishment of the “naked. ”
Though, in stanza 4, both the naked and the nude tread the “briary pastures
of the dead, ” It is clear that the nude, who in this world defeat the naked in
terms of material reward, will get their comeuppance in the underworld. At this
point, Graves is clearly talking about people, not about words. But in this
stanza the poet kips his interest in words alive by giving the word “naked” a
brilliant new twist in connotation: in the last line of the poem it means not just
“unclothed, ” but “unprotected” –cruelly exposed to the lashes of the Gorgons‟
whips. Though both the naked and the nude may be pursued by the Gorgons
(whose “long whips” suggest serpents torn from their hair), it is the nude who
will suffer cruelly from their exposure.

Edwin Arlington Robinson

RICHARD CORY (P. 592)

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 Despite the popularity and apparent simplicity of this poem, it is often badly
misread by readers, who reduce it to the platitude that “great wealth does not
guarantee happiness. ” Such a reading ignores nine-tenths of the poem. What
the poem actually says is much more terrifying: that good birth, good looks,
good breeding, good taste, humanity, and wealth do not guarantee happiness.
The poem establishes all these qualities as being Cory‟s, and the “people on the
pavement” though that Cory “was everything” (not “had everything”) to make
them wish that they were in his place. This larger meaning must be insisted on.
“Richard Cory” may not be as great as poem as, say, Robinson‟s “Mr. Flood‟s
Party, ” but it is a genuine poem, neither superficial nor cheap.
The word “gentleman” is used both in its modern sense of one who is well
behaved and considerate of others and its older sense of one who is well born.
The first meaning is established by Cory‟s courteous and uncondescending
“good morning” to the “people on the pavement” and by his being “admirably
schooled in every grace. ” The second meaning is established by a constellation
of words that, by their primary or secondary meanings, suggest aristocratic or
royal privilege: “crown, ” “favored, ” “imperially, ” “arrayed, ” “glittered, ”
“king, ” “grace, ” “fine” (“crow” here means “top of the head, ” but it also is a
symbol of royalty; “clean favored” means a “social nicety, ” but it is also the
term used for addressing a duke; “in fine” means “in sum, ” but “fine” implies
also a quality of character and dress. Notice how the adjective “quietly” before
“arrayed” imbues Cory with good taste: he dresses finely but unostentatiously).
Cory‟s first name has as its first syllable the word rich and is the name of
several English kings, including the gallant Richard Coeur de Lion. His last
name has a sonorous sound and is good English name such as might belong to
the New England landed gentry. It is in addition suggestive of such French
words as cor, hunting horn; Coeur, heart; and court, royal court.
It is not just that “pavement” alliterates with “people. ” A pavement is lower
than a sidewalk: it establishes the commonness of the “people” in contrast with
the higher status of Cory; it ha the “people” looking up at him.

22
 The surprise ending not there for its own sake. By setting up an ironic
contrast, it suggests a number of truths about life: that we cannot tell from
outside appearance what may be going on inside a person; that often the people
we envy have as many troubles as we, or more; that, as has been said above,
birth, wealth, breeding, taste, and humanity do not ensure happy life.

Ezra Pound
PORTRAIT D’UNE FEMME (P. 873)
The “portrait d‟une Femme, ” or Portrait of a Lady, appeared in Pound‟s
volume of poems called Ripostes. Two other famous American expatriate
writers living in London. Henry James and T. S. Eliot, have also chosen that
title for works of their own. James had written a novel earlier, and Eliot
published his poem of that title in his volume of poetry, Prufrock and Other
Observations. Although each work bears the individual stamp of its author, the
themes of all three are similar: the writer, a younger man, admires an older
woman for her beauty, her breeding, and her special knowledge of the world.
Pound‟s techniques in this poem are innovative. He does not divide the
poem into stanza; rather he runs all thirty lines together. Also, he employs verse
libre, or free verse. It was one of the ways he was attempting to charge modern
poetry with a newness that would free it from the rigid conventions of the
previous century. In free verse, the poet does not employ a regular rhyme
scheme, nor does he follow a pre-established metrical pattern. An example of
regular metrical pattern in poetry is iambic pentameter, the pattern most basic
to English poetry and the one employed by Shakespeare. Pound, of course, was
perfectly capable of writing in such patterns when he chose to do so. The two
poems already discussed prove that. He elected to written in free verse because
he felt that from would allow him to create a new, fresh poetry. The great
American poet of the nineteenth century, Walt Whitman, had already
successfully pioneered this technique. Finally, Pound has constructed a subtle
and admirable pattern of images in this poem to which we must give careful
attention.

23
 Pound ends his poem on a note of ambiguity, a deliberate confusion because
the lady herself is a confusing mystery. The achievement of the poem lies in its
skillful use of sea imagery. Through a series of similes and metaphors, pound
has established the mood of the sea, especially in its strange and foreign
aspects. It is fitting that he does so, for the lady herself, for all her good
breeding, her London address, her Englishness, is rare.
In fact the Sargasso see is a large area of relatively still water in the north
Atlantic, bounded by rotating currents, notable for its great abundance of
floating seaweed. In legend it is a place where the ocean floor is littered with
the half-buried hulks of ancient caravels. Spanish galleons, pirate ship, and
men-of-war; a place which, originating nothing, has collected treasures from all
over the earth and from all its centuries.
As such, it is the perfect image for the mind of the woman Pound is
describing. A person of no original thought but of wonderfully quick and
retentive memory, a good talker and listener and a charming companion, she
has collected treasures from the minds of all the great men who have sought her
out-not for a wife, but for a companion or mistress. Living, as it were, no life
strictly her own, having no husband and no children, she has yet participated
richly in the lives of others, and now her mind is full of entertaining anecdotes,
curious suggestion, strange bits of knowledge, “Ideas”, old gossip, oddments of
all things. ” She has thus become an even more entertaining companion, and
her conversation repays richly those who seek her out, though she is “second
always”-has never been the emotional center of any one man‟s life. Her
knowledge, furthermore, serves no practical use, but only makes her delightful
company.
One dominating metaphor makes the poem. Weaving skillfully back and
forth between literal statement and its figurative counterpart, pound paints
beautifully the strange wonder of the underwater world with its shifting half-
lights and collected treasures, and gives at the same time an exact accounting of
the life and mind of his woman in whom nothing, as Shakespeare puts it,

24
 But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.
“You are a person of some interest, ” Pound says to the woman, “one comes
to you / And takes strange gain away. ” The use of word interest both in its
ordinary and in its financial meanings illustrates Pound‟s unerring sense of
diction. His words fit their context exactly, usually in more than one way. Here,
the financial meaning fits into a series of other words suggesting money-fee,
price, pay, gain, riches. The other meaning pertains literally to the attractions of
her mind.

Siegfried Sassoon
BASE DETAILS (P. 598)
The poem expresses the resentment of a front-line soldier in the First World
War, exposed to the constant dangers, discomforts, and deprivations of trench
warfare, toward the frequently casual attitudes and soft lives of officers
assigned to staff duty at the base, safely located miles behind the front.
Although we can‟t know his rank, the speaker is almost certainly an officer and
is perhaps, like the poem‟s author, a captain. Company commanders (captains)
and platoon commanders (subalterns) suffered the highest mortality rate during
World War I because they had to lead their men “over the top” on charges
across “No Man‟s Land” against withering enemy fire. The speaker expresses
his bitterness through irony; he is really strongly averse to being the kind of
person and living the kind of life he describes so deprecatingly.
The title expanded to manifest both its meanings might read “Ignoble
Particulars about Officers Detailed for Duty at the Base. ”
“Fierce” is used ironically (fierce manner, inward timidity). “Scarlet”
suggests the red face of someone who is choleric, acts fiercely, is short of
breath, and drinks too worn by staff officers in the British army. “Puffy” means
both short-winded and fat. “Guzzling and gulping” connotes gluttony; “Scrap”
minimizes the seriousness and horror of battle by reducing it in importance to
street-corner altercations between kids. “Youth stone dead” has ambiguous

25
reference: it may refer either to the utterly vanished youthfulness of the
returning majors or to the young men left literally dead on the battlefields.
“Toddle” suggests second childhood and senility.

Richard Wiblur
A LATE AUBADE (P. 602)
An aubade (form a meaning dawn) is a sunrise love song, a morning
serenade, a lyric addressed at down to one‟s sweetheart. The word is used
whimsically here, for, though the lovers have recently awakened, the time is
almost noon. It is a very late aubade indeed. The woman has apparently made
some gesture toward rising. (“It‟s almost noon, ” she has said. Implication: it‟s
time to get up and go about one‟s business. ) the man is pleading with her to
stay in bed with him a while longer, and then to cap their lovemaking with
some delicious snacks from the icebox.
Are these lovers unmarried? The question is irrelevant to the theme of the
poem; and ought not to be raised. The lovers might be a recently married
couple with no children as yet. They are in a house with two stories, not in a
bachelor apartment, and the woman knows her way to the refrigerator.
The poem is a celebration of the delights of the sense. Both the woman, who
would rather “lie in bed and kiss / Than anything, ” and the man, who orders up
a connoisseur‟s menu from the kitchen, know how to savor these delights. The
images chosen appeal to touch (kisses, chilled wine), to taste (wine, cheese,
crackers, pears and to sight (though white wine and blue cheese refer more to
kinds than to colors they suggest when combined with “ruddy-skinned pears, ”
a visual as well as a gastronomy treat. The arrangement of items indeed suggest
a keen appreciation of such delights by the lovers, not coarse sensuality or
gross over-indulgence.
The poem belongs to the carpe diem tradition, famously exemplified by
Herrick‟s “To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time, ” with its opening line
“Gather ye rosebuds while ye may” (page 529). The theme of such poems is
“Time flies; therefore enjoy to the fullest each moment as it passes. ”
26
 The speaker in the poem is a cultivated person, familiar with “centuries of
verse, ” with Schoenberg‟s music, with the appearance of old books (“liver-
spotted pages”), and with the manner of library research (“sitting … in a
carrel”). It is clear that he is throughly acquainted with the life of the intellect,
but has not allowed intellectual interest to dull or dry up his delight in the
senses. In listing the activities that the life of the intellect, but has not allowed
intellectual interest to dull or dry up his delight in the senses. In listing the
activities that the woman might otherwise be engaged in, he manifests a wry
wit and describes each in a manner that makes it seem unattractive (“liver-
spotted, ” “cage, ” “raucous, ” “screed, ” “unhappy, ” “bleak”) beside the
pleasure proposes. The woman, we may infer, has qualities of mind and
imagination similar to his own. He does not need to explain to her the
“rosebuds-theme of centuries of verse”; he knows she will understand his
references to “Schoenberg‟s serial technique” and to carrels and old books. He
can apparently count on her for an appreciative response to his quite humor.
There is between them a mutuality of mind and taste.

Emily Dickinso
A NARROW FELLOW IN THE GRASS
The subject of the poem is snakes and the (male) speaker‟s fear of them, and
it is vividly rendered through Dickinson‟s effective use of visual, tactile, and
visceral imagery and through her consistently surprising but precise word-
choices.
The word “fellow” (twice used for the snake). When contrasted with nature‟s
“people” (17), suggests someone of inferior class and breeding. The adjective
“narrow” is exactly right for a snake, but who ever used it to describe one
before? “Rides” suggests effortless motion, without legs. But the characteristic
of the snake principally emphasized in the first two stanzas is the suddenness of
its appearance. (The departure from normal word order in line 4 not only
provides an oblique rime for line 2 but gives unusual emphasis to “sudden. ”)
One is not aware of the snake‟s presence until the grass parts unexpectedly at

27
one‟s feet and one catches a fleeting glance of “a spotted shaft”; then the grass
closes again and opens further on, this time without revealing the snake. (The
grass is not that of a mown lawn, but the ankle-or calf-deep grass of a field. )
Stanzas 3-4 indicate how alien to man is the snake‟s habitat and emphasize
the suddenness of the snake‟s disappearance. Though “occasionally” snakes
come out to forage in a field or enjoy the sun, their preferred habitat is the
swamp, land too wet and cool for man to use even for agricultural purposes.
Yet the speaker “more than once” when “a boy, and barefoot” (thus vulnerable
to snakebite) had come across one basking in the sun and, mistaking it for a
discarded whip-lash, had stooped to pick it up, when it suddenly “wrinkled”
and vanished.
The first two pairs of stanzas indirectly suggest the power of the snake to
startle the speaker, whether by sudden appearance or disappearance. The last
two stanzas, partly through effective contrast with each other, reveal he snake‟s
power to inspire deep fear in him. With several of “nature‟s people” (e. g.,
squirrels, birds) he has struck up an acquaintance, and he feels for them
“transport/Of cordiality. ” But he has never met “this fellow” (the snake), either
by himself or in the company of friend, “Without a tighter breathing / And zero
at the bone. ” The images in the final two lines strike home with the shock of
pure terror. “Tighter breathing, ” with its unexpected adjective, is precisely
accurate for that feeling of constriction in the chest which makes it difficult to
breath. And to contrast with “cordiality” (warmth of heart) in stanza 5, we are
given-not just a chill, or cold, or even freezing but “zero” (the lowest point on
the centigrade scale), and not at the heart but at the “bone” (cold piled upon
cold).
Many readers will have difficulty with the image of the “whip-lash /
Unbraiding in the sun, ” the participle suggesting motion to them. But the
basking snake is motionless. A whip-lash of braided leather left out in the sun
too long will begin to dry out and disintegrate, its thongs lessening and
cracking. The snake, with its mottled leather back, has a similar appearance.

28
When the boy stoop to pick up what he thinks is a whip-lash, it suddenly comes
to life and hurries off.

Adrienne Rich
LIVING IN SIN
The central contrast of the poem is between glamorous expectation and
realistic fulfillment. The central emotion is disillusionment. The woman had
thought that “living in sin” with an artist in his studio would be romantic and
picturesque. The phrase “living in sin” suggests (here) the free, unconventional
Bohemian life. The word “studio” connotes something appealing, not just a
top-story room in a walk-up flat. The sentence in lines 4-7 gives the picture that
had arisen in the woman‟s mind when he had urged her to come live with him.
She had not foreseen that the apartment might dirty, creaky, and bug-infested,
with noises in the apartment might dirty, creaky, and bug-infested, with noises
in the plumbing-that furniture would have to be dusted, windows cleaned, beds
made, and dishes washed-and that her lover would not be romantic call the
time. The irony of the situation is that “living in sin” with an artist in his studio
proves not much different from marriage to a workingman in a run-down
apartment.

 T. Hardy
THE DARKLING THRUSH (P. 851)
The primary theme is the despair of the speaker at the end of the century.
Even the “joy illimited” of the thrush‟s song in nullified by the speaker‟s
realization in the last stanza that such optimism is a delusion. The theme is the
transition from despair (Stanzas 1-2) to “blesses hope” (Stanzas 3-4). The
“ecstatic sound” of the thrush‟s song in the face of “growing gloom” is
evidence to the speaker that there is beauty in the universe, even though he
himself is ordinarily “unaware” of it. The theme is hesitant awareness of the
possibility of hope in the midst of despair. The poem ends not with a “moral”

29
but with a delicately poised expression of optimisim and pessimism, skepticism
and belief.
The end of day, the end of the year, and the end of the century symbolically
unite with the bleakness of the imagery in the first two stanzas of this poem to
evoke a mood of utter desolation and hopelessness. The contrast between this
desolation and the apparently unlimited joy of the thrush‟s song is the pivot on
which the poem turns, and the contrast is so striking that it leads many readers
to read into this poem an optimism that is in fact not there. Conditioned by
earlier experience with more cheerful poets and with sentimental cliché, they
see in this poem the dark cloud with a silver lining, the tale of woe with a
happy ending, darkness giving way to light, despair overcome by hope.
What the poem actually presents in subtler and less cheerful. The speaker,
after all, sees no cause for joy or hope “written” on the world around him. In
the last line he flatly states that he is unaware of any hope. The bird sings,
really, out of instinct, not out of knowledge, and at the bottom of his mind the
speaker know this. The poem concludes, then, not with hope, but only with the
wistful wish that there were some reason for hope, and with wonderment at the
mystery of the bird‟s joyous song. The conclusion of “The Oxen” evokes a
similar mood and presents a similar interpretive problem.
Imaged and mood blend perfectly in this poem. The simile of the “tangled
bine-stems” that score the sky like “strings of broken lyres” is marvelously
effective, both visually and emotionally exact, giving a sense of music
destroyed, of something else come to an end-like the day, the year, the century.

George Herbert
THE QUIP
A “quip” is nowadays any play on words-a synonym for “pun. ” But in
Herbert‟s day and easier, it had the connotative suggestion of a sharp or
sarcastic jibe (the Ode even guesses that its -ip ending is a phonetic intensive
liking the word to clip, nip, snip, and whip, and conveying the idea of
something sharp or cutting). In another definition current in the sixteenth
30
century, it meant equivocation or quibbling, the purposeful creation of
ambiguous statement to confuse or evade. In this poem it seems to have the
power of both definitions: it has a sharp, jibing purpose (to “answer home” the
jeers of the world). And it has ambiguous reference.
The ambiguous quip in Herbert‟s poem is in line 3, disclosed by answering
study question 4 regarding the antecedents of the two pronouns: Is the speaker
asking the Lord to say “This man is mine, ” or “I am this man‟s”? Both, and
either, since the quip permits of both interpretations equally. The theological
meaning is embodied in the quip, for a virtuous person dedicates his life to the
Lord, in exchange for which the Lord sacrifies Himself as the salvation of the
virtuous. As the speaker indicates, one need only rest on this mutual
relationship, without arguing “at large” (lengthily) in answer to the temptations
and taunts of the “merry world. ”
This little allegory presents the personified temptations of this world
(“merry, ” because it is trying to play a trick, and because it is devoted to
pleasure-though of course to the speaker “merry” is verbal irony), embodied in
four abstractions each of which has been shunned by the speaker and has
therefore joined in sport to taunt him. The manner of their jeering varies, but
the speaker‟s response in the refrain is steadfast. For example, Beauty presents
herself as a rose who wonders what has robbed the speaker of the power to
command his own hands, discrediting his abstention as implying his weakness.
Money again belittles him by suggesting that the speaker has not really learned
his music if he cannot recongnize the alluring “tune” of chinking gold. And
Glory tries to tempt by superciliously parading his superiority. Herbert uses
more ingenuity on “quick Wit and Conversation, ” ironically undercutting him
in several ways: verbal irony in quick and to be short, since in fact this
character is neither quick nor brief, but makes “an oration, ” and dramatic irony
in presenting a character who supposes himself to be a comfort but who is
rather a bore.
The tactic used by the “merry world” and his mates-to jeer at” the speaker as
a means of luring him into joining them-seems foredoomed. Yet Beauty‟s

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approach probably best represents the purpose of their sport: if the speaker
were to yield to temptation, he might both gain what they have to offer and
avoid their taunting at his refusals.
In any case, Herbert opposes these talkers to the taciturn speaker (we should
probably take the italicized lines to be unspoken thoughts, a rejoinder never
uttered aloud), for the answer is not to be made by man but by the Lord, who
accepts and approves his actions. And rather than draw out any argument to
support this, the speaker produces his quip, for debate and argument are the
modes of the world. (The refrain line may be an allusion to Psalms 38:15 as
translated in the Psalter included in the Anglican Book of Common Prayer [this
differs from that in the King James Version]: “For in thee, O Lord, have I put
my trust: thou shalt answer for me, O Lord my God. ” The context of Psalm 38,
in either translation, is relevant to Herbert‟s allegory. )
The biographical information suggests that if Herbert may be identified as
the speaker, his renunciation of worldly goods and pleasures should be
recognized as temptations truly overcome, rather than as the rejection of things
which he has never experienced. Helen Vendler would even suggests that this
allegorical drama should be read as spiritual autobiography that the temptations
of the world are “self-lacerations” which are not merely recorded as former
obstacles to his piety but which continue in “the roots of his being, ” and thus
the poem (like “Redemption, ” No. 60) must be read as an event situated both
in the past and in a continuing present. It is a repudiation of worldliness which
continues to tempt.

Edwin Arlington Robinson

THE DARK HILLS
One sentence, one poem. Grammatically the sentence curls easily and
without distortion into a pattern in which all lines rime alternately and each line
is measured against a metrical framework of four iambic feet. The grammatical
kernel of the sentence “Dark hills … You fade” (1, 7) – indicates the subject of
the poem: a description of a sunset in the west. The first four lines consist of

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modifiers attached to “hills, ” the last four lines of modifiers attached to “fade.
” The whole poem describes the dark hills, outlined against the lingering sunset
glow, gradually fading as the light disappears, and sky and hills blend into the
darkness of night.
But just as a sunset has many tones, so does this poem. Its life lies in its
metaphors, in the modifiers. In the first four lines we are told that the light of
the sunset seems to hover or linger as do the prolonged tones of trumpets blown
at a military burial. The simile catches up not only the lingering quality of both
sunset light and trumpet tone, but also their richness: the light of the sunset is
golden, the sonorous tones of the trumpet seem golden and are blown from
golden trumpets. (The resonance and sonority of these tones are echoed by the
four long o‟s, the rolling L‟s, the lingering n‟s, the concealed half-rime, and the
final consonant correspondence of the two phrases “golden horns” and “old
bones. ”) In the last four lines we are told that the dark hills are now fading far
from the bright skies of the midday sun. But again a military figure is used: the
bright noonday skies are “the bannered ways, ” the sun‟s rays transversing
them “the legions of the sun. ” “Banners” and “legions, ” “warriors” and
“horns, ” all suggest the colorful pomp of ancient warfare explicitly indicated
by “old”: the effect would have been quite different had the poet used flags and
regiments, soldiers and bugles: words suggesting a more modern warfare and
drab uniforms, inappropriate to the rich colors of the sunset.
All the material imagery prepares us for the final simile. The dark hills fade
into dark night as if daylight were ending forever and history were done. Some
day-ends do give this impression of utter finality. And the poet adds, “as if …
all wars were done. ” Now we see the meaning of the poem complete. Literally,
it describes a sunset behind dark hills. But through the quality of its imagery-
the metaphor and similes contained in the modifiers are added larger overtones
of meaning. War, the poem suggests, is a condition of human life. We have had
wars since the beginning of recorded history (a second reason is now apparent
for the poet‟s using the imagery of ancient warfare). We shall continue to have
wars until the fading of “the last of days”-till history is done.

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 The poem is an extended apostrophe but contains no hint of personification.
The apostrophe helps give the impression of a solitary speaker brooding over
the sunset. A sunset poem is appropriately a somber poem. The darkness of the
hills serves not only as a visual image but as an emotional symbol.

Emily Dickinson
A HUMMINGBIRD
“Route” and “rush” are metonymies, naming the direction and the motion of
the bird as a substitution for the bird itself; “resonance” presents the metonymy
“emerald, ” referring to part of the bird‟s coloration with an aural term;
“revolving wheel” metaphorically represented the rapid motion of the bird‟s
wings, comparing them to the disappearing spokes of a whirling wheel, for the
speed of a hummingbird‟s wing-beats causes the optical illusion that they have
disappeared.
While the first quatrain refers to the motions of the bird, it is itself static, a
collection of nouns and prepositional phrases without predication. These
phrases thus refer to two characteristic of a hummingbird in flight: its ability to
hover motionlessly in the air and its sudden, almost magical disappearance
from sight as it speeds away. These lines name motion, but do not have the
completeness of sentences moving through grammatical correctness.
Lines 3-4 also contain examples of synesthesia, the substitution of one sense
for another. “Resonance” is an auditory phenomenon that is here attributed to
sight or color, while “rush” implies the sensation of motion and is applies to
another visual phenomenon, the color “cochineal. ” These substitutions
intensify the sensations, and create the mystery that is solved in the concluding
four lines, which answer the implied question “what was that?” The poem is in
the form of a riddle (one of the poet‟s regular tactics) presenting first a series of
vivid sense impressions, than a hypothetical solution-but never, in the body of
the poem, identifying the hummingbird by name. The opening quatrain is also
made compact by the four alliterated r‟s and two e‟s.

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 These first four lines seem to exist all in a moment of stopped motion, and
give way to the slower motion of the next image. The observer turns to look at
“every blossom, ” and takes note of the time required for them to return to their
normal positions. The “tumbled heads” of the flowers are childlike, and the
speaker in the last two lines seems to offer them an explanation for the
tumbling they have just gone through, an explanation drawn from
Shakespeare‟s play of magic and reconciliation. The bird that has ruffled their
hair is as swift-and as magical-as a postman who travels thousands of miles in a
single morning.

Thomas Campion
THERE IS A GRADEN IN HER FACE
The lady is praised for her beauty and for beauty and for her modesty, honor,
or chastity-it is difficult to find one word which precisely sums up the second
quality; but it is the quality which will let neither “peer nor prince” buy her lips
for any price and which is embodied in the angels with bended bows
threatening to kill anyone who would try to kiss her without her permission.
In stanza 1 the “roses and white lilies” may be taken as the colors of her
complexion, the “pleasant fruits” as matured and appealing features, and the
“cherries” as her lips. In stanza 2 the pearls and the “snow” are her teeth: the
“rosebuds” are her lips. The pearls constitute the one metaphor which does not
fit in with the central metaphor of the garden. In stanza 3 the lady‟s brows are
likened both to “bended bows” and to the bowmen who guard her with these
bows. The arrows are the maiden‟s “piercing frowns. ” The plain sense of the
concluding couplets is that no one may kiss the lady‟s lips until she herself
issues the invitation or at least gives her consent. This plain sense is rendered
through three from 4 metaphors. Kissing is compared to purchasing cherries.
An invitation or consent to a kiss is compared to calling out “Cherry-ripe. ”
And the lips that call out “Cherry-ripe” are not only cherries to be sold but the
cherry-vendor who sells them.

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 The “garden” of the poem could be any garden, but it can also be taken as
the Garden of Eden if the reader wishes. It is called a “heavenly paradise” in
stanza 1 : it is guarded by angles in stanza 3: the cherries within it are referred
to as “sacred” (line 17) : and the maiden who dwells in it is innocent. But this is
a love poem, not a religious poem. Its focus is not on piety but on the beauty of
a woman‟s face. There were no cries of street vendors in the Biblical Eden, not
were there peers or princes there. The Eden overtones are just that-overtones,
not the subject of the subject of the poem.
All four forms of metaphor are found in this poem. The central metaphor
equating a garden and a face belongs to form 1. the comparison of the woman‟s
laughing lips to “rosebuds filled with snow” is a simile, as is the comparison of
her “brows” to “bended bows. ” The likeness of her “piercing frowns” to
arrows is a form 2 metaphor. The “roses and white lilies, ” the “pleasant fruits,
” and the “cherries” are all from 3 metaphors.

Robert Frost
THE SLIKEN TENT (P. 619)
The poem consist of a single simile sustained through fourteen lines
comparing a lovely and loving woman to a silken tent. It also consists of a
single sentence winding easily and gracefully through the strict formal
requirements (meter and rime scheme) of an English sonnet. It thus exemplifies
in it's from the paradox which is central to its content-the idea of freedom
achieved within bondage.
It is a pavilion, a tent made not of coarse canvas, but of silk. (Silk suggests
beauty and fineness. The silken fabric of the tent is supported by a “central
cedar pole. ” Cedar is a durable, aromatic wood, and its Biblical associations
(“cedars of Lebanon”) make it suggest worth and value. This upright pole
(“pointing heavenward”) is itself supported by silken guy-ropes that are staked
to the ground around it. The tent is circularity). When its guy-ropes are slack,
the tent “gently sways at ease, ” and the tent-pole, though not “strictly held” by
any single guy-ropes, is yet “loosely bound” by all of them. It enjoys the

36
freedom of a bondage that becomes apparent only when one of the ropes goes
taut.
What kind of woman is portrayed in this comparison to a tent? The first four
lines suggests outward beauty, delicacy, gentleness, freedom, and composure.
The next three lines suggest strength and sweetness of soul, and a firm
dedication to spiritual values. The second half of the poem develops the
paradox that, though apparently free and independent, the woman is “bound /
By countless silken ties of love and thought / To everything on earth …”
“Countless” and “everything” are overstatements (at least as applied to the
tent): literally she is attached by love and concern to many, many people-
family, friends, neighbors, children, fellow human beings. Some students will
be thrown off by the word “capriciousness, ” associating it with “feminine
caprice. ” The capriciousness, however, is not in the tent (the woman) but in he
“air” (her environment). Some change of circumstance, a sudden gust of wind,
causes a tug or pull on her, to which she responds. In human terms, she is
needed, and responds to the need.

 John Keats
TO SLEEP
The central metaphor is derived from the age-old analogy of sleep to death-
but extended in such detail that it gains a new vitality. The apostrophe begins
by personifying sleep as an “embalmer” whose office it is to shut the eyes of
people who have passed into the divine forgetfulness of death. the first quatrain
is given over to dining the general attributes of this personification-what it does
to all of us. In the second quatrain, the poem switches to the first person
singular as the speaker request that sleep grant him the benefit its acts, either
immediately, in the midst of the hymn he is singing in praise of sleep, or after
he has completed his song and said “Amen” to it. Although “poppy” is a
metonymy for an opiate, and thus figurative (the speaker does not literally wish
for a flowers), it is not possible to determine whether he is literally talking
about a drug or is only comparing the state sedative before retiring.

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 Through the first eight lines the poem implies a question: why does the
speaker wish so to achieve sleep and loss of consciousness? Why does he
identify himself among the “gloom-pleased, ” why does darkness seem to him
a bower protecting him from light, why is “forgetfulness divine, ” why will it
be a charity to him to be illued into unconsciousness? Considering the link that
he draws between sleep and death, is he in fact desiring a final desire through
line 8 makes that seem a reasonable conjecture (although we must be careful
not to take a figurative term literally)- but still, why does he desire it?
Lines 9-10, formally singled out by their unexpected break from the rime
pattern (see below), provide a generalized explanation; daylight, and the
memory of “the passed day, ” breed “many woes. ” The speaker needs to be
saved from what is wakefulness he would remember, and from the
“burrowing” of “curious conscience. ” This last phrase in evocative and
intriguing, for both words posses multiple denotations which point the poem in
various directions. “Curious” may mean strange, odd queer; it may mean
overly scrupulous; it may mean inquisitive and prying denotations that bear
varying connotations, has positive connotations, whether it means the moral
sense of right and wrong, or the inner compulsion to behave morally, or (in an
older but still extant definition) consciousness or self-consciousness. We would
normally suppose that it is better to possess the mental qualities embodied in
the word-moral standards, moral compulsion, and consciousness. Yet clearly,
to the speaker, this phrase is negative in its implications-it is what he wants to
be saved from.
Because Keats takes the speaker no further, it is not possible to determine
any specific cause for the desire for sleep, though of course we cart rule out
some simplistic explanations: he is not insomniac; he is not weary after great
physical labore he does not need to sleep now so as to wake early. For him,
sleep is a salvation from what consciousness, conscience, and daylight
represent, “many woes” of an unspecified sort. (Lines 9-10 contain a metaphor
complementing the central sleep/death comparison: the still and loving
darkness of sleep and death are contrasted to the busy “breeding” of daylight. )

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Readers of Keats will notice, of course, a parallel to the desire for death as an
escape from the miserable conditions of human existence expressed in “Ode on
a Grecian Urn” (page. 783), “Ode to a Nightingale” (page. 784) and elsewhere,
though this sonnet refrains from defining such “woes” as physical disease and
debilitation as reasons for wishing to escape. The open-endedness of the desire,
here, is part of the appeal of this sonnet, which focuses more on the desire than
on the motive.
As an example of a Shakespearean sonnet, this poem represents one of
Keat‟s several experiments with the from. Strikingly, he eliminates the
concluding couplet (which to him and many others has seemed too likely to be
glib and superificial as a resolution), and instead interrupts the orderly
progression of heroic quatrains with anomalous rimes at lines 9-10: abab cdcd
bc efef. As pointed out, lines 9-10 seem to begin a rationale for the speaker‟s
deep desire for sleep, and in their concluding phrase approach the most treating
of the questions in the poem-what are the “woes” which so fret the speaker?

Dorothy Lee Richardson

AT CAPE BOJEADOR
There is no silken tent physically present in Frost‟s sonnet. The speaker
thinking of his lady, is reminded by it of woman-of woman-not physically
present. The next morning she finds the sea urchin again, this time literally
crushed in a foot print and she is reminded again of the vulnerability of fragile
woman, but is reminded of it by the sea urchin, not vice versa. It is principally
the physical presence of the sea urchin that makes it a symbol. Richardson also
compares woman to egg-shells, in a metaphor that emphasize their fragility.
This comparison in the first stanza anticipates the destruction in the second
stanza. The phrase “thin bone mixed with sand” is effective in numerous ways,
not least because it may remind the reader of an hourglass in which the flow of
sand measures time.

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 The fact that the speaker knows and admires the woman of whom th sea
urchin reminds her suggests that the woman has something more than physical
beauty to commend her.

Archibald MacLeish
YOU, ANDREW MARVELL (P. 632)
The implicit metaphor running throughout the poem compares the coming of
darkness to the rising of flood waters. The night comes on steadily, without
interruption or pause; the absence of punctuation and the repetition of “and”
embody that unceasing, uninterrupted movement in the form ot the poem. The
substitution of suspension periods for a single period at the end indicates that
the movement continues beyond the end of the poem.

George Herbert
REDMPTION (P. 852)
The first clue that this sonnet is not merely a dramatic narrative is not a
forceful one: the title ambiguously refers to a business transaction and to a
religious concept. Similarly ambiguous, “Lord” at the end of the first time may
refer to a landlord or to God (the capitalization is retained from the first printing
of the poem, but there was little consistency in the use of capitals in the
seventeenth century). Only in the fifth line does the poem assert the break from
superficial meaning, placing the manor house of the break from superficial
meaning, placing the manor house of the lord “in heaven. ” Even that phrase
could be read as a metaphor (the manor house is so grand that it seems
heavenly to the tenant) until the contrast in line 8 makes it clear that heaven and
earth must be taken literally.
The poem allegorically presents what Herbert and other Puritans of the
period called the “New Covenant, ” or the “Covenant of Grace, ” between God
and man. The old covenant, the “Covenant of Works, ” had come into effect
with the creation of Adam; it left man wholly responsible, and punishable, for
his sins, and at Adam‟s fall it condemned mankind to death. By the Covenant

40
of Grace. God sent his son to offer redemption of sin, a new contract by which
man could be gathered into heaven as an act of God‟s grace rather than by his
own desert.
George Ryley says, “The first lease this great landlord gave to man, his
tenant, was the covenant of works, by which man was bound to yield all the
profits of the land to his landlord‟s use; the condition being, he that doth them
shall live in them, and the soul that sinneth shall dye. Man breaking the articles
of this once, rendered himself for ever incapable of retrieving that loss, or of
keeping them for the future; so by these articles he could never thrive, that is,
never be justified. But what the law (that is, this law of works) could not do,
God sending his own Son, & c. hath wrought for us, that is, our Redemption:
making us free from the law of sin and death, and granting us a new small-
rented lease. This was purchased for us by, and granted to us at, the death of
Christ. These premises will lead us into the plain sense of this poem. ”
The allegorical from permits Herbert to relate the narrative of “history” to
the spiritual reality of every person‟s life. As Summers says, “the speaker is
both one man in the present and all mankind from the Fall to the Crucifixion;
the search is the search of Jews until Calvary ant it is also the search of every
man who wishes to be a Christian the discovery was made by humanity at one
moment in the past, put it is also made by individuals at every moment, present
and future. ”
This explanation helps us to understand the time reference in lines 7-8,
“which he had dearly bought/ Long since on earth. ” The event is obviously the
Crucifixion, when the lord paid “dearly” (both as great expense, and with great
love) to save mankind. As an historical event that occurred in the first century, I
was “long since”; but as a continuing redemption, it occurs over and over in the
lives of individual people. As Herbert would have seen it, the Crucifixion is a
recurring event manifested to the spiritual life of each person, so the concluding
image the poem is both historical and present, and the “ragged noise and mirth”
of the multitude re-enacts the scene of the original Crucifixion.

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 Students who may not have examined the metaphorical texture of Christian
terminology may at first be shocked or affronted by Herbert‟s handling of the
action of redemption in commercial terms; they can be led to see that the
concept of heaven as reward, of Christ‟s payment for the sins of the world, and
many others that they might contribute, rest on similar mercantile phrasing,
justified by the need to express metaphysical truth in physical terms
comprehensible to mankind.

Rupert Brook
THE DEAD
“Hearts” (1) is a metonymy for the lives of those young men killed in war; it
leads to the definition of these men as sensitive, emotional beings whose lives
were characteristically full of mixed contradictions-joy, care, sorrow, mirth,
dawn and sunset, slumber and waking, friended and alone, and so forth-what
might seem the whole compendium of experience of the young. Note,
however, that they are not given some of the less admirable qualities such as
selfishness, lust, spitefulness, and others equally characteristic of young men.
In paying his respects to the fallen, Brook purposely sets out with the word
“hearts, ” a slightly sentimental approach. (Even though we know about
“hardhearted” or “black-hearted” people, the unmodified word seems to point
connotatively toward the “kindness” which Brooke singles out as the gift of the
years: “kind-hearted” would be the modified term in this poem. )
The symbols in the poem are introduced in the sestet with the images of
water, wind, sunlight, and of frost, stillness, darkness. The “laughter” of line 9
is a metaphor for the appearance of sunlit waves on a lake. The literal process
presented in the sestet is the freezing over of a lake that was brilliantly active in
the sunlight, and how is brilliantly still in the moonlight. The sunlit lake is a
symbol for the lives of these young men, and the frozen lake a symbol for their
deaths. They are equally beautiful, though completely opposite.

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Alan Dugan
LOVE SONG: I AND THOU (P. 645)
Dugan‟s “house” is his life, and I classify this poem as allegorical. The
speaker swears “by Christ” because Christ was a carpenter, and he is pointing
up a contrast. Nevertheless, the speaker will be metaphorically “crucified” in
his life (that is, he will suffer), as Christ was literally crucified. He needs
someone who will “help” him suffer. The word “help” (31) works two ways;
the wife will help him to suffer in the sense of causing additional suffering (she
will nail his right hand to the right hand cross-piece); but also, and more
important, she will help him in his suffering by sharing it, she will alleviate it,
she will make his life supportable and she will even, by introducing love, bring
a little heaven into his life. The word “prime” has at least three relevant
meanings: foremost or principal, of best quality (as applied to whiskey), and
primitive or original (tying rage in with original sin).
Martin Buber‟s book has especially influenced the Protestant theologians
classified as Christian existentialists. The movement of the poem supports the
general tenor of this body of thought. Suffering ad imperfection are inescapable
conditions of human life (“God damned it. / This is hell”); nevertheless, life is
made meaningful as man forms “I-Thou” relationships, Shared suffering is
bearable; unshared suffering is not. The speaker in the poem finds that he
cannot build a satisfactory life simply as an “I”; he must enter into an “I-Thou”
relationship. Essentially the poem begins as an account of the speaker‟s attempt
to build a life for himself and by himself; it ends up as a proposal of marriage.

Christina Rossetti
UPHILL
The two speakers are a weary traveler and a comforter, and the central event
is the traditional symbol of life as a difficult journey that will end with rest and
comfort. The identity of the answer is not clear-cut: Is he Christ, promising rest
after a weary life, or only someone who knows the answer posed by the
traveler? And-as the first study question hints-are there really two speaker here,
43
since their question and answer are not placed in quotation marks; or is this to
be regarded as an internal question-and-answer monologue, a symbolic
catechism in which the speaker rehearses the age-old questions and their simple
but slightly riddling answers?
The riddling tone of the poem arises out of the simplicity of he symbols.
Rather than identify the process as living and dying, the destination as heaven,
the journey as a life well and truly lived, the poem‟s naïve tone is childlike in
its questions, for which there is much precedent in the teachings of Jesus.

Robert Frost
DUST OF SNOW (P. 647)

William Blake
SOFT SNOW (P. 647)
This eight line lyric serves as an example of Frost‟s ability to capture the
picture and feelings of a moment. The speaker has felt badly about some
aspects of the way his life was going, but the falling of a few flakes of snow has
shaken him out of himself and helped him overcome his despondency: He
could have been annoyed at the minor inconvenience of the incident, but he has
made the most of it. It is not that nature is beneficent, trying to find ways to
help man, but than man makes for himself the pattern of his life. Thus the
poet‟s attitude, not the external, event is the focus here as if is so much of
Frost‟s poetry.
“Dust of Snow” describes a literal incident, “Soft Snow, ” an allegorical
incident. “Dust of Snow, ” except for the muted metaphor in its title, may be
taken quite literally. The beauty of the scene (powdery white snow, black
crow), the animation provided by the movement of crow and snow, the
suggestions of cheeriness and humor (as if the crow were greeting the speaker
or playing a sly practical joke on him) –all combine to give a lift to the
speaker‟s heart and to change his mood from one of sorrow, resentment,
frustration, or whatever, to one of delight.

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 The last line of Blake‟s poem cannot be interpreted literally, and if forces us
to look for a metaphorical or allegorical interpretation of the whole. (I would
myself classify “Soft Snow” as allegory-one of the shortest in existence. ) The
clues to the allegorical meaning are the personification of the snow as “She”;
the possible sexual connotations of such words as soft, play, melt, and prime;
the fact that the speaker doesn‟t play in the snow but with the snow, or, rather,
the snow play with him, after he has first asked it (“her”) to play with him; the
moral judgment implied by “dreadful crime. ” The snow (in her prime) is a
maiden. The speaker asks her to “play” (amorously) with him. The maiden
consents and “metls” (yields her virginity). Conventional society (“winter”)
calls it “dreadful crime. ”
It is clear that Blake takes an unconventional stance. He regards sexual
desire and fulfillment as natural and innocent. By identifying society with
“winter” he suggests, that its judgment is cold and harsh, and by identifying sex
with “play” and the melting of snow he implies that society‟s judgment is not
only harsh but absurd. Blake expressed similar unconventional judgments in a
number of poems; for example, “the Garden of Love, ” “Ah! Sun-flower, ”
“Abstinence sows sand, ” and “The Lilly. ”

Emily Dickinson
MY LIFE CLOSED TWICE
If we follow the syntax of Emily Dickinson‟s best poetry carefully, it reveals
itself with a direct simplicity. The first stanza of this poem raises a doubt as to
whether a “third event” (the poet‟s own death) could equal the impact of the
double less referred to as “my life closed twice. ” This loss, which remains
unidentified, seems more “huge” and “hopeless” than would her own death.
The last two oft-quoted lines are a deft conclusion illustrating Dickinson‟s
capacity for a swift, intense “summing up”; “Parting is all we know of heaven
/And all we need of hell. ” Parting like remorse, is a kind of hell on earth.
The poem illustrates Dickinson at her poetic best in its fortunate combination
of a simple but meaningful words. She is not given to multisyllabic words

45
although she falls at times into more quaint, archaic-sounding usages than we
find here; in this poem we find the ultra-simplicity of from which is
characteristic of her. She most often employs iambic tetrameter lines (4-foot, 8-
beat) and alternating rhymes, sometimes off0rhyme (unveil-befell, hell). The
first line might be considered awkward in its repetition of close, and that too is
typical of her poems-when used sparingly, such repetition is successful; when
excessive, it can become ineffective. The spirit of anguish is conveyed in the
grand sweep of the “so huge, so hopeless to conceive, ” as well as in the
unalterable pronouncement of the last two lines. The idea of parting as a from
of dying, in a way more terrible than death because the bereft one knows the
other to be alive somewhere but out of reach, is of course a topic of frequent
and earnest treatment among poets. Dickinson, however, uses it more often and
with a more cutting effect than most poets have.
Most readers have little difficulty with the first paradox. The speaker, while
living, suffered two metaphorical deaths through the loss of persons dearly
beloved by her. Many readers, however, go on to interpret the possible “third
event” as another event of the same kind: the loss of another dear friend.
The “third event, ” however, must be an event of a different order, an event
contingent on her own death-for three reasons:
1. The use in line 1 of the past tense (rather than the present perfect)
indicates that the speaker is at or near the point of her death: her life has
come to its literal close now, and she is therefore in a position to make
this definitive statement.
2. The two previous events had been “unveiled” to her by life (losing
friends to death is an inescapable part of life); this third event (if it
occurs) will be unveiled to her by Immortality.
3. An event of a different order is aesthetically required by the necessity
of bringing the poem to a climax; otherwise it could go on forever: “… a
fourth event … a fifth event, etc. ”

46
 Both interpretations suggested in the first study question for line 2-6 are
viable: (a) This speaker is uncertain whether Immortality awaits her and will
unveil a “third event” to her; (b) She does not know whether any “third event”
unveiled to her by Immortality can have an emotional magnitude for her equal
to that of the two losses she suffered during her life. She suggests, in other
words, that the death of her two precious friends were so painful to her that
even the bliss of her own entry into heaven (or the horror of her entry into hell)
may seem trivial by comparison, (or does she perhaps suggest that Immortality,
by separating her from friends newly dead?)
The last two lines, by using “heaven” and “hell” simultaneously in both their
literal and metaphorical senses, sum up the themes both of uncertainty about
the future (we do not know whether life on earth will be followed by a
continued existence to heaven or hell) and of the tremendous emotional impact
of separations suffered during life. Parting is “all we need of hell. ” Loss of a
loved person is so painful that any further suffering for any sins we have
committed in life is entirely unnecessary. “Parting is all we know of heaven. ”
This line is subject to two interpretations:
1. The closest we can come to knowing heaven is when our friends
describe it which is to say, we can know nothing of it as long as we are
still living and our friends have gone there without us
2. Though we do know whether there is an afterlife of bliss after death,
we have a foretaste of what heaven will be like (if it does exist) in the
emotions we feel at parting from loved ones during life. Parting is a
sweet experience as well as a painful one: it is sweet because, at the
moment of parting, one‟s whole heart flows out to the departing friend;
at the moment we feel our love (because we are about to lose its object)
more fully and intensely than ever before. Thus, at parting, deep love and
deep grief commingle, offering a possible foretaste of heaven and
enough of “hell” to be sufficient forever.

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Alexander Pope
ON A CERTAIN LADY AT COURT
Pope‟s poem is ironic, but the very opposite of sarcastic or satiric: it employs
irony to pay a graceful and beautiful compliment to the lady in question; it
employs irony for purposes of praise, not detraction. The ironic line is line 10,
for the one fault that the poet avers against the lady turns out to be her crowing
virtue: modesty, lack of vanity. “Deaf” (line 12) is overstatement: literally the
lady does not listen, or, rather, she makes no egotistic response to praise of
herself. “All the world” (line 11) is also overstatement. “Envy” (lines 2, 9) is
personification.

John Frederick Nims

LOVE POEM (P. 871)
The title may lead us to expect something about moonlight and roses, sighs
and a broken heart. Instead, we are given taxicabs, streetcars, coffee, lipstick,
and bourbon whiskey. But this is a modern love poem. It is appropriately
placed among the realities of modern times and is more real in its passion
because it is so.
Love poems traditionally praise the beloved, and so does this one. But it
does not place her on a pedestal, she is clumsy, careless, unpredictable, never
on time, “A wrench in clocks and the solar system. ” In short, she is also ral-a
human being, not a goddess. We love her the more for it. For her clumsiness
with things is balanced by her deftness with people. The poem pivots of this
contrast. She is hopelessly inept moving in traffic, but she maneuvers expertly
“in traffic of wit. ” She may break cups, rip cloth, upset coffee, smear lipstick,
and spill bourbon, but she knows how to put the nervous at their ease, to make
the homeless feel at home, to steady the unsteady, and to join diverse people in
a circle of good will, good conversation, gaiety, and love. She merits her
lover‟s praise and devotion.

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 We may not expect to find wit in a love poem. But Shakespeare an Donne
proved long ago that with and deep feeling are compatible. The lover here, like
his sweetheart, is able to maneuver expertly in traffic of wit: to speak of “The
drunk clambering on his undulant floor, ” of lipstick “grinning” on a coat, of
the “apoplectic streetcars” (the image is of the streetcar‟s madly jangling its
bell at pedestrians or cars in its path), and of souls floating “on glory of spilt
bourbon. ” Earlier poets loved to write about the soul, but seldom placed it in a
context like this.
Overstatement is the traditional language of love poetry. The overstatements
in this poem are as extravagant as any, but are used in dispraise as well as
praise. The sweetheart is her lover‟s “clumsiest dear”; beneath her hands “all
glasses chip and ring”; yet if her hands dropped “white and empty /All the toys
of the world would break. ”
If his sweetheart died, her lover would be heartbroken. This is what the last line
means. But it says it so as to make us feel it.

Sir John Harington

ON TREASON
The verbal irony is in the first phrase, “treason doth never prosper, ” since
the poem proceeds to explain what happens if it does prosper. One might also
find situational irony in the final phrase, since it indicates on outcome contrary
to truth of fact: that treason must be called by another name if it succeeds, even
though it remains by definition what it is. This final phrase puts irony to the
service of satire, pointing an accusing finger at those who for the sake of
expedience (or out of fear) will avoid stating the truth.
The word “prosper” is the only equivocal term in the epigram, because it
carries with it two relevant meanings-to succeed in an endeavor and to achieve
wealth. One might conceive of a successful act of treason that does not bring
with it wealth that of the Minutemen in the American Revolution, for example,
who were traitors to the British crown not for personal gain but for an idealistic
goal. Harington‟s epigram, because of the ambiguities of “prosper, ” seems

49
clearly to suggest a self-interested treason, perhaps the venality of an ambitious
usurper.
Harington‟s wit thus plays with two aspects of language-the ambiguities that
allow a single word to radiate meanings and connotations, thus enlarging its
application; and the dicta of the powerful, who may suppress the use of a word,
thus diminishing its ability to present truth, so that political success determines
linguistic limits.

Donald W. Baker
FORMAL APPLICATION (P. 666)
Occasion: The poet reads in Time that “poets apparently want to rejoin the
human race. ” Perhaps startled to learn that he does not already belong to it, he
decides to submit a formal application for membership. Examining recent
history (World War II was its central event), he finds that modern man has
devoted his major energies to devising ingenious methods of subjugating and
destroying other men. The chief qualification for membership, the, is to be a
crafty killer. In his application (the poem) he therefore describes the program
he proposes for himself in order to acquire the requisite skills.
The poem divides into three equal sections of three-line stanzas each,
marked off by “I shall begin, ” “Meanwhile, ” and “Finally”. The first section
describes how he will master the skill of knife-throwing; the second, how he
will acquire, the craft of deceit, teaching the birds to trust him; the third, how
will combine these skills to “qualify as Modern Man. ” He brings his
application to a vivid climax in the central stanza of this section through the use
of a bold figure of rhetoric in which he addresses the reader as if the reader
were actually on the spot, and directs his attention to the “splash of blood and
feathers” pinned by his knife to the tree, thus demonstrating that he has already
acquired the requisite skills. To identify this gruesome exhibition more closely
with other modern artifacts and accomplishment of modern man, he gives it a
euphemistic label: “Audubon Crucifix. ”

50
 The poem as a whole is an exercise in verbal irony. The poet‟s petition for
membership in the human race is a mock-petition. His program for qualifying
himself is one that he does not intend to carry out. If he human race is what it
appears to be, and if he indeed has the option of belonging or not belonging, he
chooses not to belong. In addition, the poem is filled with ironic contrast
between appearance and reality-between the “pleasing (even pious)
connotations” of some of its phrases and the brutal realities that he beneath
them. The progress from primitive savagery to civilization implied by the
capitalized term “Modern Man” contrasts with the greatly increased scale of
terror and destruction actually characterizing the modern psychology and
“functional form” from modern aesthetic criticism here disguise the nature of
the skills they actually refer to. The contrasts between connotation and reality
in the terms “Audubon Crucifix, ” “Arbeit Macht Frei, ” “Molotov Cocktail, ”
and “Enola Gay” are obvious.
The title embodies two distinct meanings. It refers not only to the official
petition for membership that the poet pretends to be making, but also to the
disciplined effort he mockingly proposes to undertake in acquiring a precise
coordination of wrist and fingers in throwing the knife: that is, a rigorous
application of himself to the mastery of “form. ”

Robert Frost
DEPARTMENTAL
Those readers who consider Frost only as a poet depicting man in nature do
so by ignoring the large body of humorous, satiric poetry he wrote, much of it
in his later years. “Departmental” is one of the best examples of this kind of
writing. A satire on modern insituationalism and bureaucratic red tape, the
poem is notable for the departure from the typical blank verse speech rhythms
of the earlier works. The short, staccato rhythm of the couplets reminds one of
the satires of the Eighteenth Century. Moreover, its clipped, abrupt tone helps
to capture the cut-and-dried language and attitude of modern institutionalism.
The individual can be curtly and abruptly dismissed. The poem is also a

51
variation of a literary type which has existed since earliest times: the animal
fable. The reader finds himself asking: “If ants can act like people, do people
possibly act like ants?” Thus the ridiculousness of the animal world depicted in
this poem is satirically transferred to the human world.
The opening twelve lines satirize the departmentalization of modern life.
Because the ant was assigned a specific duty, the sight of the unnatural monster
did not surprise him. In an era of specialization, one does not trouble oneself
with unusual occurances because they don‟t fit into the sphere of duty. Only the
ant “whose work is to find out god” would have the right or inclination to
investigate this occurance. In the thirteenth line, the poet makes a
generalization: “Ants are a curious race. ” The statement is so dispassionately
presented that the poet seems to be making a scientific observation about an
unusual fact. But when the reader understands that the remark really refers to
humanity, he suddenly realizes that underneath the tone of calm observation
runs a current of sharp, biting satire. People, like ants, are so institutionalized
that they do not allow their individual sense of wonder to operate in their lives.
After this statement, the satire becomes more specific. The ant‟s attitude to
the death of one of their fellow workers parallels modern men‟s reactions. A
sense of the loss of a beloved individual is no longer present in a
departmentalized society. The official process of communication goes forth in
formic. Notice the realistic touch Frost gives here: ants do secrete formic acid.
In fact, one of the triumphs of the poem is its ability to be simultaneously cure
to human and insect nature. Jerry, the deceased, is coldly, methodically
prepared for burial:
Lay him in state on asepal.
Wrap him forshroud in a petal.
Embalm him with ichor of nettle.
The ant morticians seem as inhuman as the human ones. The concluding line
of the official dispatch-“This is the word of your Queen”-is as coldly
impersonal as the rest of the process.

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 The final burial process is brutal in its matter-of-factness. One is reminded of
E. E. Cummings‟ poem “anyone lived in a pretty how town” as he reads the
lines: “No one stands around to stare. / It is nobody else‟s affair”. Everything is
so cut-and-dried in this society that death is not an occasion for sorrow. Just as
no one had ever considered Jerry as an individual while he lived, so no one
cares about his death. These concluding lines could be compared to the
concluding lined of “Out, out-“. These too, the onlookers returned to heir own
lives. But the difference as a unique individual, and the onlookers reaction had
been their way of preserving their lives in the face of the awful tragedy. Here,
no one even feels a sense of tragedy; everything is approached matter of
faculty. As the poet says in the concluding couplet:
It couldn‟t be called ungentle
But how thoroughly departmental
The poem is a gentle satire not against mankind or human nature, but against
the increasingly departmentalized structure of the modern bureaucratic state, in
which all human functions and need are provided for by the state, with a
resultant depersonalization of human relationship, specialization in human
interests, and loss of individuality.
The satire is gentle because it is comic, and it is comic partly because the
society actually observed is an ant society (we can be amused by behavior in
ants that would be unamusing to us in human beings) and partly because of
Frost‟s comic treatment (playful riming, humorous personification, constant
flow of whimsy. ) but this ant society is symbolic of modern human societies.
“Ants are a curious race” (13) –This generalization coming at the
conclusion of the first example of ant behavior (the discovery by an ant of a
huge dormant moth) and serving as introduction to the second illustration (the
discovery of a dead ant by another member of the colony) is literally true in one
sense of the world curious. But, ironically, what is curious about them is that, in
another sense, they are an extremely incurtious race: they have no curiosity
about matters unrelated to their own assigned duties in the colony. The ant who

53
discovered the moth “showed not the least surprise. / His business wasn‟t with
such. ” The ant who discovers his dead fellow isn‟t “given a moment‟s arrest-/
Seems not even impressed. ” But both ants pass the word along to the proper
authorities, and the second illustration concludes with a “solemn mortician”
heaving the dead ant “high in air” and carrying him away. “No one stands
round to stare. / It is nobody else‟s affair. ” It is not that ants are apathetic or
lazy (each is extremely busy pursuing his own assignment, and the whole
society seems to function fairly efficiently); it is just that they are so extremely
specialized. (No provision is made for grief, or personal relationship in the
efficiently organized bureaucracy. ) Nor is it that ants are selfish or self
centered: the adjective “selfless” (24) implies just the opposite: they devote
their whole energies to serving the welfare of the colony (the “Greater
Community” of Auden‟s poem); but, in doing so, they have become selfless in
another sense: lacking selfhood. To shift metaphors violently, they are cogs in a
machine.

JOHN MILTON
ON THE DEATH OF A FAIR INFANT DYING OF A
COUGH
Milton's earliest poems were written in Latin with the exception of two
psalm paraphrases (see chapter 6) written when he was fifteen, " on the death
of a fair infant Dying of a cough" is Milton's earliest poem in English. judging
by Milton's statement that he was seventeen years old when this poem was
written, and by the reference to the plague (in stanza X), this eleven-stanza
poem probably belongs to the winter of 1625-26. it was first printed in 1673.
The flower addressed in the first line of the poem represents Milton's niece
Anne Phillips, the daughter of Milton's sister Anne. the girl had died when only
two or three years old. the first stanza is a conventional elegiac opening,
primarily because Milton symbolizes his dead niece as a flower. we
immediately notice Milton somewhat obvious reliance on alliteration ("fairest
flower, " "blown but blasted, " "soft silken, " etc).

54
 The poem seems more confusing than it actually is. the first four stanzas
establish the mood of grief. the classical allusions are more experimental or
decorative than they are necessary to the meaning of the poem. it is not until the
fifth stanza that Milton makes a highly emotional and sincere statement about
immortality, a subject which fascinated him most of his writing career, and a
subject treated rather articulately in "Lycidas". here, while thinking of his niece,
Milton writes:
Yet can I not persuade me thou art dead
Or that thy corrupts in earths dark womb,
Or that thy beauties lie in wormy bed,
Hid from the world in a low delved tomb:
Could heavn for pity thee so strictly doom?
Oh no! for something in thy face did shine
Above mortality that showd thou wast divine. (stanza5).
In stanzas V through IX. Milton continues to mourn the Infants death. At the
end of the ninth stanza Milton refers to the division between the "sordid world"
and "heavn. " already Milton is beginning to think in terms of contrasts
between earthly and spiritual matters. A habit of mind which would continue to
the end of his writing career and which is particularly central to the structure of
paradise lost.
In stanza XI Milton inquires as to why the child could not have stayed here
on earth to bless everyone with her purity. but then he realizes that she is better
situated in heaven. As Milton says to her, she can "perform that office". (i. e.,
bless everyone) from where she is. in the final stanza Milton cheers the mother
of the dead infant (that is. Miltons sister) by pointing out what a splendid gift
she made to god. though her daughters death is her loss, it is also heavens gain.
the final line is an echo of Isaiahs promise of an everlasting name to those
unable to have children (Isa. Ivi, 5).

55
 The poem should be viewed chiefly as a testing ground for the young Milton
as a poetic craftsman. it is the first time that Milton formally experimented in
the English language. It is remarkable for its suggestion of various elements
used later in paradise lost. particularly the references to the Elysian field
(stanza VI) and to Olympus (stanza VII), and the development of the contrast
between earth and heaven which underlines the final three stanzas.
The poem consists of eleven seven-line stanzas.
The rhyme scheme of the stanza is a, b, a, b, b, c, c, and is in iambic
pentameter, with an Alexandrine, or six-foot line, at the end. this stanza, which
Milton probably derived from phineas fletcher who used it in his "poetical
miscellanies" and "Eliza, " is the same stanza used in the introduction of the
Nativity ode (see next poem discussed). Using small conceits (fancy images),
alliteration, and a technically precise yet difficult stanza form, he successfully
establishes a mood of sincere grief.

JOHN MILTON
ON THE MORNING OF CHRIST'S NATIVITY
While the preceding poem was Milton's first poem in English, "on the
morning of Christ's nativity" is generally acknowledged to be Milton's first
wholly successful poem in English. It is the first poem in which we are actually
aware of Milton's natural poetic genius. Milton informs us. in the end of his
"elegy VI, " that this nativity ode was written when he was at Cambridge in
1629 and begun on Christmas morning, apparently intended as the first in a
series of religious poems. Milton seems, for the first time, to be turning to the
serious kind of poetry upon which his reputation would ultimately be built.
The subject of the nativity was an extremely common one in both sixteenth
and seventeenth century English poetry. the reader should contrast Milton's
poem whit Henry Vaughans "Christ's nativity, " Thomas Trahernes "on
Christmas Day, " Robert Herrick's "An ode on the birth of our Saviour " and
Crashaws "In the holy Nativity of our lord God, " Among the immediate

56
predecessors of Milton who had written odes on the nativity were Jonson
Drummond, Beaumont, southwell, and Sylvester.
The poem consists of art introduction of four stanzas by a hymn of twenty-
seven stanzas. the introduction establishes the fact that this is to be a
celebration, as announced in the opening line, "This is the Month. and this the
happy morn. " the opening stanza of the hymn establishes the nativity scene in
a striking, baroque (highly elaborate, or ornate) idiom : "It was the winter wild,
/while the Heavn-born child, /All meanly wrapt in the rude manger lies"(11. 1-
3).
The first seven stanzas reiterate continuously the peaceful silence of the
setting. Milton paints a picture of peace descending on the world at the birth of
Christ: winds and water stand still, while war is temporarily halted, in stanza V.
the poem then moves into the pastoral word: shepherds sitting on the lawn
(stanza VIII) are slowly made aware of the arrival of pan (symbolizing Christ).
Music of the spheres ring out louder and louder as angelic harmony counteracts
the silence of the opening. the divine music rings louder, culminates beautifully
in stanza XIII ("Ring out ye crystal spheres"), and then dies out. In stanza XVI,
Milton realizes that heaven on earth can not be a reality until Christ has been
crucified.
His mere arrival on earth is not the same thing as the establishment of his
kingdom on earth: but at least from this day of Christ s birth on, we are moving
toward a divine harmony.
The theme of the nativity ode is the infant Christ s triumph over the gods of
paganism. one way of depicting this triumph is through a description of the
silencing of the pagan oracles, one of the most famous stanzas of the poem
(stanza XIX), and one which keats echoed in his "Ode to psyche " ("The
oracles are dumb …"). The stanza is also quite similar to Tasso's description of
the silencing of the oracles in a Nativity poem in Rime Sacre. In any case, in
Milton, s ode the old order of paganism is being defeated by the new order of
Christianity. Not only are Appollo's oracles silenced, but the local classical gods
depart, as do the feeling pagan gods of ancient Palestine. the central statement
57
of the theme arrives in stanza XXV, when Milton explains the way in which
"the dreaded Infant's hand … can in his swaddling bands control the damned
crew. " the poem then ends with the description in the last two stanzas of Christ
being laid to rest in his stable, guarded by the hierarchy of angels.
The poem's outstanding quality is its tight organization. Because of
delicately conceived architecture. it is considered Milton's first successful
poem. though employing a difficult stanza. Milton writes gracefully. each
stanza independently accomplishes something, while the transition from one
stanza to another are expertly executed. classical mythology has been used
carefully for a Christian discussion. Milton depicts Christ not as a suffering
Saviour but rather as the mighty pan. throughout the poem we again find
foreshadowing of things to come in paradise lost. for example, the review of
the pagan deities here is suggestive of a similar review in paradise lost. I, 392-
540.
The stanzas of the introduction are in the seven-line rhyme of "on the death
of a fair infant". the stanza Milton used in the longer hymn here, however, is
a6, a6, b10, c6, c6, b10, d8, d12 (the numbers standing for the number of
syllables), a highly complex rhyme scheme which its Alexandrine, has its
origin Spenser.
Eighteen century readers did not consider Milton's Nativity ode a very good
poem. critics of the nineteenth century were less hostile to the poem but still
did not rate it too highly. The most frequently voiced objection to the poem has
been its use of metaphysical conceits and elaborate, baroque imagery. On the
other hand, the ode was Dylan Thomas' favorite poem. In any case Milton
never wrote another poem like it. It has an attractive diversity, a rich use of
language, and a tight organization. For a young poet, this would seem enough
to recommend the ode. Also, we must emphasize that Milton apparently felt
sincerely moved by a contemplation of Christ when he came to write this
poem, and much of the criticized extravagance it contains may perhaps be
explained by the intensity of Milton's commitment to the idea of the triumph
Christianity over paganism.

58
John Milton
THE PASSION
For all of the success of "On the morning of Christ's Nativity, " Milton's
next and tonally similar unfinished poem "the passion, " is generally judged a
failure. It was placed immediately after the nativity ode in the 1645 edition of
Milton's poetry, and apparently was written the following Easter, in 1630. it is
related to the nativity ode by its opening allusions and by its use of the same
stanza used in the introduction to former ode.
Milton begins by saying that he must now go on to tell us what happened to
Christ after his splendid birth (described in the nativity ode). After recalling
former music in stanza 1, Milton writes, "Now to sorrow must I tune my song.
" He suggests that he must now discuss the "dangers, and wrongs" that Christ
"for us did freely undergo. " However, the rest of the poem seems to abandon
the subject and leaves the reader swimming in a sea of disconnected allusions.
Where Milton stops writing, he affixes a note pointing out that he had found
the subject of the poem "to above the years he had, where he wrote it. " One
wonders why the subject of the crucifixion for Milton than the subject of the
nativity.
Most critics suspect that Milton failed to complete "the passion" simply
because he did not like thinking about Christ as the suffering Saviour. He
preferred to think of Christ as the ideal, model man. Christ is not simply our
redeemer; he is our guide. Milton's Christ is alive and in this world, leading
men to God's truth. Because of the apparent unpleasantness of the crucifixion,
Milton does little more than introduce the theme before he quits. The poem is
important because it reveals to us the nature of Milton's feelings about Christ.
In "the passion" Milton again uses the seven-line stanza of iambic
pentameter, rhyming a, b, a, b, b, c, c, . unlike the nativity ode, this poem has
the same structure throughout all eight stanzas.

John Milton

59
ON SHAKESPEARE
These famous lines first appeared in the second Folio of Shakespeare's plays
(1632) and were entitled, "An epitaph on the Admirable Dramatic poet, w.
Shakespeare. " Milton dates the poem 1630 in the 1645 edition of his poems.
The lines represent one of Milton's rare attempts at copying the style of his
contemporaries.
Milton praises Shakespeare by suggesting that he does not need an actual
monument, for there is a metaphorical monument formed by all of his readers.
The poem should be compared with Ben Jonson's lines on Shakespeare, in
which Jonson tells Shakespeare that he is "a monument without a tomb. "
The use of a long image which returns upon itself with complexity shows
that Milton was completely aware of the metaphysical kind of poetry being
written in his day. Furthermore, Milton seems sincere in his praise and
admiration of Shakespeare. As Milton wrote these dedicatory lines, in his mind
he was probably consciously comparing his own poetry to that of Shakespeare.
In attempting to copy a popular style of his day, Milton experimented with
the heroic couplets. "on Shakespeare" contains sixteen lines of rhyming pairs of
iambic pentameter. The poem is an extended conceit and thus belongs to the
metaphysical style made fashionable by Donne and Herbert.

John Milton
THREE LYRICS "ON TIME""UPON THE
CIRCUMCISION"
"AT A SOLEMN MUSIC"
The three similar short poems "on time, " "upon the circumcision, " and "At
a solemn music, " represent something new in the youthful Milton's poetry.
They are deliberate experiments on serious themes for the first time since
Milton failed in "the passion. " According to critics, Milton was now making
up for that failure. And he is deliberately trying to achieve sustained music.

60
Although the three poems are quite short, together they form an important step
in Milton's growth as a poet.
In "on time" Milton simply accuses time of preying on mortals; Milton
cautions that once man passes into eternity, he becomes greater than time.
Time, in other words, only has relevance for this "merely mortal" world.
Soon, man will triumph over Death, chance, and time. In "upon the
circumcision, " Milton addresses the "powers" that are part of the hierarchy of
angles that Milton pictured singing at Christ's birth in the nativity ode. Now
Milton commands them to "mourn" for Christ's death. The poem is more or
less only a brief statement of Christ's crucifixion and God's reason behind it. It
is the same topic that Milton failed to treat successfully in "He is probably
more successfully in "the passion. " He is probably more successful here
because he has carefully limited the length of each of the three poems. In 'At a
solemn music, " Milton sustains his rhythm the longest.
In "At a solemn music, " as in "on time, " Milton is again making a contrast
between good and evil. The three lyrics seem to be linked thematically to the
other early poems dealing with Christ's birth and death. Although none of the
three poems is particularly exciting, together they show Milton exploring high
seriousness in poetry while making a stylistic advance.
All three of these lyrics are ode with irregular rhyme and line length. "At a
solemn music" consists of only two sentences, the first one containing twenty-
four lines. The long sentences is only one suggestion of the new way in which
Milton seems capable of sustaining a mood over a larger number of lines
without becoming monotonous. A stylistic improvement that would aid him
greatly when writing Paradise Lost.

John Milton
ARCADES
"Arcades" is a fragment of a masque, or as Milton says, "part of an
entertainment, " presented to the countess Dowager of derby: it thus has an

61
obvious kinship with "Comus". Although presented by Milton as only a
fragment, the poem nevertheless can be viewed as complete in itself.
One must realize that the Arcades are the natives of Arcady, the Greek state
usually adopted by poets of the English renaissance for their pastoral settings.
"Arcades" is as much a description as it a story, but nevertheless there is a
story. Some Arcadian shepherds have been seeking their Arcadian queen. The
first song asserts that they now find her in the person for whom the masque is
being performed. We must picture the countess of Derby sitting facing a group
of actors who turn and sing directly to her as if they had never seen her before
and are now discovering her for the first time. The first song, in other words,
explains how the searching shepherds are overpowered by the beauty of
Milton's patroness. As the shepherds come closer to the countess, the Genius of
the wood enters and announces that he understands that they are arcades and,
knowing of their quest, offers his assistance. But first he pauses to explain the
way in which he watches over the beautiful surrounding landscape. This is
Milton's way of paying a compliment to the beauty of the countess estate. Then
the Genius of the wood describes the music of the spheres (recall the similar
description in the nativity ode), and explains that if he were not so busy, he
would sing in praise of his mistress himself. Then, however, he does indeed to
sing a song. Which many consider the most beautiful part of "Arcades, "
beginning "O'er the smooth enamel'd green. " the Arcadian shepherds, in
complete admiration not only for the countess but for the wood besides, sing
the third and final song, in which they suggest that they should leave Arcadian
for a "better soil" here at the estate of the countess. Thus from the first song,
through the narration and song of the Genius of the wood, to the final chorus
song of the shepherds, "Arcades" forms an extended pastoral description. The
tone and style of "Arcades" are similar to those of a Jonsonian masque. The
masque is important, first, in that Milton for the first time seems capable of
writing "songs, " and second, as a preparation for "Comus. " So much of
Milton's early poetry is experimental that it is gratifying to find an instance of a
direct correlation between an early experiment and a later production. Finally,

62
the poetry of "Arcades" is splendid and captures the flavor of the best
Elizabethan pastoral poetry.
Being only a fragment of a masque, "Arcades" does not conform to masque,
structure. There is no prologue or epilogue. The fragment contains three songs.
The first song of four six-line stanzas, each ending in a couplet of iambic
tetrameter, is followed by a long speech by the Genius of the wood consisting
entirely of heroic couplets. The second song consists of five couplets of
irregular length and is sung by the Genius of the wood. The third and final song
of the fragment is in sonnet form (fourteen lines of rhymed verse).
We have reviewed those early poems usually considered to be the most
important of Milton's early work. There are, however, some excellent Latin
poems and Italian sonnets which show us Milton as a courtly Petrarchan lover,
a face he apparently did not wish to reveal in English. And there are some other
less important poems in English which are interesting only as curiosity pieces:
among them are "song: on may morning, " "At a vacation Exercise in the
college" (in both Latin and English), and the two poems on the death
University carrier (Hobson, the mailman). In these poems, as in the more
important early poems, Milton is constantly experimenting both in versification
and themes. His poems have become exercises, but that does not make them
any less enjoyable.
Milton's second poem is better organized than his first. His ode on the
Nativity contains better transitions between the stanzas than does his poem on
his niece's death. The depiction of the infant Christ's triumphs over the gods of
paganism represents a more serious and dignified theme. In other words,
Milton's second poem is more important simply because of its subject matter.
We generally assign more importance to poems having universal themes. That
Milton's technical skill as a poet improved in his second poem simply makes it
that much more important. In short, both in content and style, his Nativity ode
looks forward to the larger themes he would develop more fully in his last,
great works such as paradise lost and Samson agonists.

63
 Yes. Although "Arcades" of course does not have the fullness and
complexity of Milton's later masque, "Comus, " there is no reason why it
cannot be read as complete in itself. Consider the structure of "Arcades": the
opening song merely explains that the searching shepherds are overpowered by
the lady, Milton's patroness; the Genius of the wood then makes a speech and
follows it with a song. His words are so lovely that the shepherds join together
to sing the third or final song. In all the lines of the masque, we are listening to
descriptions of pastoral beauty; there is no need for Milton to develop a
complicated story. He may have called it a "part" of an entertainment only
because he realized upon completion that there was no need to go further, even
though his masque was not that long. "Arcades" is not a masque in the true
sense of the form because it does not have enough spectacle or even moral
persuasion. If we think of it as a connected set of short pastoral poems,
however, we sense the unity of Milton's incomplete masque. That is, if we can
think of "Arcades" as a group of pastoral songs, rather than as a masque, we are
more aware of its unity.
Milton did not confine his literary endeavor to the composition of long
poems. In addition to writing twenty-four sonnets, he wrote, at three different
time in his life, paraphrases of psalms. These were literary exercises popular
during Milton's contemporaries also tried their hands at psalms translation.
In 1624, when Milton was only fifteen years old, he wrote paraphrases, or
translations, of psalms 114 and 136. His renditions of these psalms are
interesting primarily because they are the earliest surviving poems which
Milton wrote. He included them in the 1645 edition of his poems.
Milton next tried to translate psalms in 1648 when he wrote "Nine of the
psalms done into meter, " announcing further that he had made no changes
from the original text. The nine psalms were those numbered 130 to 138, and
Milton's note about their proximity to the text is certainly accurate.
Milton's third and final experiment at psalms translation was in 1653 when
he translated psalms 1-8 into various metrical and stanzaic forms. We know

64
that he translated all eight of them in the first two weeks of August, 1653. He
wrote almost one each day, and each is different from all of the others.
Milton's treatment of the original Hebrew in which the psalms were written
was no freer than of any of his contemporary translators. The compositions of
all of the psalms, incidentally, was probably inspired by Milton's father, who
enjoyed writing psalms tunes. Although marked by an expected immaturity of
a fifteen-year-old boy, Milton's first two psalms translations nevertheless are
evidence of his literary precocity, originality, and scholarly facility.
Milton's second group of psalms translations, because of their literality, have
a far less poetic quality than his earlier ones and are less enjoyable. Milton
seems to have written them in the common service meter (8 and 6) so that they
could be sung in church. Milton's final translations are much more flexible than
the second group and only loosely follow the original text. Milton was now
once again close to the kind of translations he wrote when he was only fifteen.
Except that he was now combining his own experience with that of the
psalmist more extensively. Each psalm is more complexly rendered than the
last. The first it written in sixteen lines of rhymes which alternate in three-foot
lines. There is no attempt at uniformity. Rather, the diversity suggests that the
psalm translations be considered simply as literary activities of an experimental
nature.

 John Milton
THE SONNETS
Milton wrote his twenty-four sonnets over a period of about forty years. He
never sat down, and wrote several sonnets at the same time. Only occasionally
did he even venture to write a sonnet. The mere fact that he wrote relatively
few suggests that he was not particularly attracted to the sonnet form. This is
one reason that Milton changed, as we shall observe, the direction of the
sonnet's content. Finally, it should be noted that many of Milton's sonnets,
particularly the early ones, have the flavor of self-conscious experimentation

65
being undertaken for the precise purpose of literary self-improvement which
characterized the psalm translation.
The last fourteen of Milton's sonnets, numbers 11 through 25, were written
at various intervals between the years 1645 and 1658, while the earlier sonnets
were all written prior to 1645. Sonnets 11 and 12 are both in defense of
Milton's ideas about divorce (see introductory chapter). Both sonnets present
Milton's bitter, angry reaction to the reception of his divorce tracts, particularly
Tetrachordon, which was published in 1645. There is nothing subtle about
Milton's purposes in the two sonnets. He bluntly beings the first, "A book was
writ of late call'd Tetrachordon, " and the second, "I did but prompt the age to
quit their clogs. " This second angry sonnet was probably written after William
Prynne attacked Milton's divorce pamphlets in September, 1644. Together they
represent Milton's first complaint about the culture of his age.
Sonnets 13 and 14 are both simply personal compliments. Sonnet 13 is in
praise of Henry lawes, the musician who wrote the music for "Comus" and
whom Milton praised in line 86-7. Sonnet 14 is a religious poem contemplating
the virtuous soul of the deceased Mrs. Catharine Thomason, who died in 1646.
We do not know the precise nature of the relationship between the Thomasons
and the Miltons, except for the fact that Milton gave copies of some of his
works to Catharine's husband George. Sonnets 15, 16 and 17 continue the trend
of personal compliment begun earlier; however, Milton's sonnets are now
becoming some-what more eloquent. No longer does he seem only to be
celebrating an occasion or a person. Instead, he uses a particular public event or
personality as a springboard into a discussion with universal relevance. This is
exemplified in sonnet 15 to sir Thomas Fairfax (whose victories at Marston
Moor and Naseby in 1644 and 1645 decided the outcome of the civil War).
Milton makes Fairfax's victory a direct product of his virtues, a theme which
Milton develops more extensively in paradise Lost. The closing five lines lift
the interest of the poem beyond General Fairfax to a consideration of civil War
in general:
For what can war, but endless war still breed

66
 Till truth and right from violence be freed,
And public faith clear'd from the shameful brand
Of public fraud. In vain doth valor bleed
While avarice and rapine share the land. (11. 10-14)
Milton is now thinking in the larger abstract contrasts which are so central to
his last and greatest poetic achievements.
Sonnet 18, "on the late massacre in piedmont, " sonnet 20 on Henry
Lawrence (the lord president of the council under Cromwell's government),
and sonnet 21 on Cyriak skinner (the famous author of the institutes of the law
in England), are all more or less of only limited interest. the sonnet on
piedmont has been praised for its "Miltonic ring, " but that hardly seems
enough to recommend it. It any case, many of Milton's sonnets have remained
popular for the last three hundred years. Selected important sonnets will now
be discussed separately in detail.

John Milton
TO THE NIGHTINGALE
Milton notes how the nightingale fills his young lover's heart whit hope, and
then that its song portends love. He concludes by suggesting that he serves both
muse and love, that is, that he likes romance and he likes to write poetry, the
conventional combination for the Italian (Petrarchan) lover.
The first group of Milton's sonnets were written during his last years as a
student at Cambridge. five of these are in Italian and only one in English.
Milton presents himself in the poem as the typical courtly lover. Furthermore,
as the first sonnet in the group of six. It introduces the reader to the romantic
nature of the following five sonnets in Italian.
The versification of this sonnet is similar to that of the Italian sonnets: an
octave (first eight lines) rhyming a, b, b, a, a, b, b, a. followed by a sestet (last
six lines) rhyming c, d, c, d, c, d. stylistically, "To the Nightingale" is similar to

67
the five Italian sonnets at about the same time. Milton merely sings of love's
champion, the nightingale, in a conventional manner.

JOHN MILTON/ SONNET 7:

HOW SOON HATH TIME THE SUBTLE THIEF OF
YOUTH
Milton says that time, like a thief, has stolen away his youth by having
recently stolen away his twenty-third birthday. Having turned twenty-three, in
other words, Milton imagines that he must now be near to manhood, and
naturally he is somewhat sad at the passing of his childhood. He realizes,
however, that no matter whether time passes slowly or quickly, it all leads on to
the next and final life in Heaven: and this constitutes Milton's major
consolation.
This is one of Milton's most famous sonnets. Presumably written on his
twenty-third birthday, it is an eloquent crystallization of the emotions of a
young boy realizing for the first time that he is at last becoming a man. Sonnet
7 is important because it proves that Milton is now capable of giving utterance
to personal feelings.
We no longer discover the conventional, romanticized speaker that is
common to the first group of poems. Although Milton adheres to the Italian
division of his fourteen lines into octave and sestet (here rhyming a, b, b, a, a,
b, b, a, and c, d, e, d, c, e respectively), he is now writing the kind of
personalized sonnet for which words worth and other late English poets would
have such great admiration.

John Milton
SONNETS 8, 9 and 10
Sonnet 8, "captain or colonel, or knight in Arms, " was written sometime
during 1642. The poem was originally titled "On his door when the city
expected an assault, " but has been known either by its first line or as "when the
Assault was Intended to the city. " It refers simply to a planned Royalist attack

68
on London during the civil War, in 1642, and is no longer considered one of
Milton's most enjoyable poems. Sonnet 9, "lady that in the prime of earliest
youth, " the subject of which is unknown, and sonnet 10, addressed to the lady
Margaret Ley, both written in 1644, are personal compliments but are not
outstanding poems.
This whole group of Milton's first ten sonnets was published in the 1645
edition of his poetry. Sonnets 8, 9 and 10 have become somewhat antiquated.
The only one of the first ten still enjoying a large critical popularity is the
emotionally charged sonnet written on his twenty-third birthday.
These last three sonnets of the first group published are "occasional" in their
background and have only limited modern appeal. Technically, of course,
Milton continues to grow, but the topical nature of the poems places the
advancement in style in the shadows of a clouded content.

John Milton/ SONNET 16:

TO THE LORD GENERAL CROMWELL
Milton's address to Cromwell celebrated the glory of the English ruler and is
thus a public utterance; however, Milton's depiction of Cromwell's assets is
also a depiction of Milton's own assets. Cromwell, for example, is guided "by
faith and matchless fortitude" (1. 3) and he has "rear'd God's Trophies" (1. 5)
on the neck of crowned Fortune. Milton thus freely blends Cromwell's military
genius with his own religious genius.
Sonnet 16 on Oliver Cromwell, "our chief of men" (1. 1), is another of
Milton's deservedly popular sonnets. It has always enjoyed a favorable
reputation, partially because it suggests the way Milton felt about the puritan
leader Cromwell (see introduction) and partly because of the very
expressiveness of the sonnet's language.
Both this sonnet on Cromwell, and sonnet 17 on sir Henry Vane, as
celebrations of two great anti-royalists, are similar to the "heroic sonnets"
written by Tasso about some of the great figures of his contemporary Italy.

69
John Milton/SONNET 23:
METHOUGHT I SAW MY LATE ESPOUSED SAINT
This is the last of Milton's sonnets, and most biographers can not decide
whether it is addressed to Milton's first or second wife. It is probably the record
of a real dream. Milton skillfully contrasts his vision while dreaming, with his
lack of vision while awake, an ironic inversion of nature: to a certain extent the
poem contains a Bitterness about blindness. For in this sonnet, as distinct from
the previous two on blindness, Milton closes the poem by referring to his
blindness. Explaining that "day brought back my night" (1. 14).
There is no note of happiness in the sonnet. There is no affirmation of faith.
Only the unreal, the illusory is attractive. The loveliness of the poem, in other
words, is discovered of the dream. Milton sees his wife "vested all in white,
pure as her mind" (1. 9).
The sonnet moves, in short. From a holy bright vision to sad, enveloping
darkness.
It is possible, although not probable, that this sonnet has nothing to do with
Milton's blindness. Milton may have been simply following the Petrarchan
convention of having the poet awaken from a vision of his beloved to find her
gone. This, for example, is typical of many of sir Phillip Sidney's sonnets to
Stella in his sonnet sequence. "Astrophel and Stella. " The style of the sonnet is
written in such a way that Milton may or may not, have had certain
conventions such as this in mind.
No, there is a difference between the three sets of psalms which Milton
translated. His first two psalms, written when he was only fifteen, have more
flexibility and charm because Milton did not follow the Hebrew as close as he
might have. In the second group of sonnets which he wrote, for example,
Milton's style is based on his attempt to duplicate the precise style of the
original. unfortunately the result is a set of psalms which read in a cut and dry,
uninteresting way. In his last set of psalms, however, he returned to the
freedom he exercised in his early translations, and they are, consequently, more

70
enjoyable. Milton's style varies with each of the three groups of psalms. But
within each group his style is consistent, primarily because he decided before
he began whether he was going to follow the original text closely or not.
It is not really possible to consider Milton's sonnets as a group. They were
written during some forty years and they were not planned as part of an organic
whole. Beginning with the English sonnet written on his twenty-third birthday,
Milton primarily used the sonnet as a form for expressing his ideas about bout
public events and private emotions. Every sonnet is different. Some flatter
friends some celebrate public happenings; and some are merely utterances of
private conflict and turmoil. One minute Milton is castigating the entire nation
for its illiteracy and ignorant reception of his divorce tracts. The next minute he
is discussing his blindness or his deceased wife. In short, there is no singular
theme which can be said to unite all twenty-four sonnets. Each has a distinct
mood and is related to a particular moment in Milton's career as a poet. Perhaps
we can note the general predominance of kindness and sympathy which is
marred only by occasional bitter-ness or vexation. Furthermore, there is a note
of optimism which runs like a stream of inspiration beneath the surface of most
of the sonnets. We can feel certain that the sonnets do not form a "group, "
merely because there are some sonnets which have universal appeal and have
endured in their popularity. While there are other sonnets which have grown
stale and uninteresting except as historical footnotes. How can we possibly
connect the sonnets on Milton's blindness with some of his other sonnets like
those on Cromwell and Fairfax?
It is an interesting fact of literary history that Milton only began to write
sonnets after they had lost most of their vogue in England. The Elizabethans, it
was thought, had exhausted the sonnet form. The truth was, however, that they
had only attempted to use the Italian or Petrarchan sonnet for the conventional
expression of love. But Milton knew of Tasso's heroic sonnets which
celebrated public events and personalities, and thus Milton put the sonnet to
new work in English literature. He, and not the Elizabethans armed with the
sonnets of Sidney, Spenser, and Shakespeare gave the sonnet its revival and

71
popularity toward the end of the eighteenth century. Milton's sonnets alone
were Wordsworth's chief source of inspiration. And for the first time in English
literature, the sonnet had now been put to use by Milton as a vehicle for non-
romantic statement. Because he was willing to use the sonnet form for
something other than blind statement of courtly love, Milton's sonnets stand
alone in the history of English literature.

John Donne
HERO AND LEANDER
Greek philosophers believed that the universe is composed of four basic
elements: air, earth, fire, and water. Donne uses this scientific concept as a
basis for celebrating the legendary love of Hero and Leander, who, separated
from each other by the wide waters of the Hellespont and by the opposition of
Hero‟s parents to their union, nevertheless managed to meet secretly every
night by Leander‟s feat of swimming the Hellespont guided by Hero‟s signal
light. On one stormy night, however, Hero‟s light was blown out by the fierce
winds and Leander was drowned by the fierce waves. When Hero saw
Leander‟s body wash ashore, she threw herself too into the water and later was
buried by his side.
Of the four elements uniting the lovers in the poem, “air, ” “ground, ” and
“water” are all literal, but “air, ” is part pf a form 2 metaphors which compares
it to commodity or possession of which one can be “robbed. ” “Fire, ” on the
other hand, is the figurative term in a form 3 metaphor, whose literal term is
passion.

Keith Jenison
LAST STAND
The title makes us think of Custer; the last line, of Don Quixote. Both
allusions are ironic, for the courage of Custer and Quixote, however foolish or
“quixotic, ” is in contrast to the timidity of the poem‟s subject. Quixotic

72
charged the windmills; this man waits, trembling, for the windmills to charge
him. Like Quixote, he is foolish; but, unlike Quixote, he is a coward.
Triteness is the point of the poem, for this man has a trite mind; he thinks in
clichés: “sound the alarm, ” “saddle up your steed, ” “take the bit in your teeth,
” “put your ear to the ground. ” Line 2 mixes a metaphor. In line 6, the image
of someone sitting on a fence with his ear to the ground is visually absurd, but
poetically valid, for it expresses the triteness and the confusion of the subject‟s
mind. People who think in slogans are seldom logically consistent, or even
logical.
A good poem can be made out of trite language when the trite language is
used consciously for ironic effect.

T. S. Eliot
The HOLLOW MAN (1925)
This work was built from a number of separate poems; the first four sections
appeared separately and in different combinations until the addition of the last
section (in Poems 1909-1925) gave us the poem as we now have it. Its manner
of composition is found also in the next poem, Ash-Wednesday, and may
account for some of the apparent discrepancies between the sections of both
poems that cause local difficulties of interpretations, but the shared metrical
and emotional characteristics of the sequences weld each into a coherent poetic
unity-and it is grasping that overall effect, rather than puzzling over isolated
uncertainties, at which the newcomer to such poems should aim.
Though Eliot said he got the title by combining „The Hollow Land‟, a
romance by William Morris (1834-96), with „The Broken Men, ‟ a poem by
Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936), it may be more helpful to remember that
Shakespeare gives the phrase „hollow men‟ to Brutus (Julius Caesar IV. 2), as
he is pondering the deceitful weakness of his fellow assassin, Cassius. This
would link up with the treachery associated with the second epigraph and the
recollection of another speech by Brutus in Part V of the poem. Further

73
associations with „hollow‟ men are provided by the first epigraph. The poem
has two epigraphs, on consecutive pages in Selected Poems.
„Mistah Kurtz- he dead‟ is the uneducated announcement of an insolent
servant in Heart of Darkness (1899), a great story by Joseph Conrad (1857-
1924) that has a deep effect on Eliot, who though it an outstanding literary
treatment of evil. Set mainly in the darkness of the African jungle, the story
explores the darkness at the heart of the so called civilized men who were sent
out there by the European nations during the nineteenth-century “Scramble for
Africa‟. Kurtz is such a man, a „universal genius‟ who is all more surely taken
over by the darkness, and just before his death is announced he has a vision of
this: „The horror! The horror!‟ he cries, in words that Eliot planned to use as an
epigraph to The Waste Land, from discarded bits of which parts of this poem
were developed. Even Kurtz, in a story full of hollow men, is described as
„hollow at the core‟, a „hollow sham‟.
The second epigraph is a version of a chant still used by children begging
money for fireworks as they cart about their „guy‟, an effigy of Guy Fawkes
wearing old clothes and stuffed with straw or paper. This is set alight (as are the
fireworks) on the night of Guy Fawkes Day (5 November), the anniversary of
the „Gunpowder Plot‟ of Roman Catholics to blow up King James and his
ministers at the Houses of Parliament on 5 November 1605: on the night
before, Guy Fawkes was arrested in the cellar of the House of Lords, guarding
nearly two tons of gunpowder.
SUMMARY: The hopeless state of these empty, passive lives.
COMENTARY: Notice how the short lines and the repetitions, varied by
rhymes and partial rhymes (men … men … when; together … together …
cellar; Alas … less … grass … glass), emphasis the feebleness and limitedness
and pointlessness being presented. The verse structure, different from that of
any of the earlier poems, helps to set the tone of the poem as much as the
images that will be developed.
Stuffed men … straw: image from the stuffed guy

74
Dray cellar: part of the hopeless and sordid imagery, primarily, but
also
setting up possible associations with the cellar where
Guy
Fawkes kept his powder dry
Shape without form motion: four images of things that have lost their essential
meaning, like everything about these people: a shape
without
form is shapeless, and so on
death‟s other Kingdom: the first of several kingdoms in the poem, this
capitalized
Kingdom suggests the one to which the souls of the
blessed
pass after death. It is „other‟ than the kingdom here on
earth of
the living dead, the hollow men, who will in turn join
the
hopeless band of not very good, not very bad souls
that in Dante (Hell III) are not accepted for Heaven,
nor for purging in Purgatory, nor even for Hell (which
wants the decisively bad-the „lost/Violent souls‟)
because they have been tepid and
indecisive in their lives. While the damned cross the
River
Acheron to Hell, these tepid souls are condemned to
stay
eternally by the river, a ghastly Limbo. (Eliot thought
it was
actually better for humans „to do evil than to do
nothing: at
least, we exist‟)

75
violent souls: perhaps such as Guy Fawkes or „Kurtz or Caesar‟s
assassins,
decisively „lost‟ or damned, unlike the tepidly
undecided „we‟
SUMMARY: The timidity of one, afraid of righteous reproach after death,
who wishes to be left with his fragmentary, distant vision-a scarecrow flapping
in the wind.
COMENTARY: In this section a personalized „I‟ takes up a number of
images used by the „we‟ in the first section and develops them. The „direct
eyes‟ here cannot be faced even in dreams (sleep imitates death), and do not
appear in the waking nightmare of living death, where one has only partial
glimpses of another life; nor does the „I‟ wish to come nearer those reproachful
eyes, as he must do in death. The „other Kingdom‟ of Part I is contrasted with
this “dream kingdom of living death and the intermediate „twilight kingdom‟
where one‟s appointed destination (Heaven, Purgatory, Hell, Limbo) is
decided. Other developments include the „hollow‟, „stuffed‟ dummy image (in
the cellar with rats) that is developed into a scarecrow image (in a field with a
dead rat).
Eyes: Significant in both Dante and Heart of Darkness
death‟s dream kingdom (twice): this kingdom seems to be closest to the „real‟
world of
the hollow men
There (twice): ambiguous, but seems to refer to the partial vision that
sees,
not the eyes of the blessed (as in Beatrice‟s eyes, which
Dante
at first shame-Facedly avoids in Purgatory, especially
cantos
XXX and XXXI), but fragments of that life on the
other side
of death

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 twilight kingdom: evidently some transitional state (such states are
prominent in
Eliot: intermediate colours such as violet, intermediate
times
of day such as twilight and dawn, and so forth)
between this
life and the next, particularly, perhaps, the time of
dying itself
Rat‟s coat, crowskin: refers to the farmer‟s custom of hanging up corpses of
pests to
frighten off others
crossed staves: of a scarecrow, moved about by the wind
SUMMARY: The desert waste, where useless idols receive the attention of
the loveless.
COMMENTARY: Notice the development of the images of decay and
meaninglessness from the „broken glass‟ (which has lost its usefulness) in Part
I, through the „broken column‟ glimpsed in Part II, to the „broken stone‟ here of
a useless stone idol: the man who prays to such an image is already doomed to
death. For the first time, a hint of suppressed sexual love is clearly given
(„Waking alone … kiss‟), throwing further light on the dried-up condition of
the hollow men.
dead land … cactus land: wasteland images of this living death on earth
stone images … broken stone: as in „your images shall be broken … your
idols may be broken‟, in the Bible, Ezekiel 6:4, 6
death‟s other kingdom: it is hard to know whether the lower-case „k‟ is
intended to
distinguish this other kingdom of death from that in
Part I;
perhaps this kingdom is where all the damned dead go
Lips that would kiss/From prayers … : evidently as a second-best activity, as in
a line by

77
 James Thomson (1834-82) from his poem „Art‟, „Lips
only
sing when they cannot kiss‟; there is also Juliet‟s „lips
that they
[the holy] must use in prayer [not kissing]‟ (Romeo
and Juliet,
I. 5)
SUMMARY: The end of these lost lives, for whom there is no blessed
vision.
COMMENTARY: The culmination of the eyes and star and death and
hollow men imagery is found here, with the clearest indications of both the
damned waiting by the river of Hell and the blessed with their star and rose.
broken jaw: image of desolation and lack of ability to
communicate; and a
possible contrast with the unbroken „jawbone of an
ass‟ with
which Samson slew a thousand Philistines. See the
Bible, Judges 15:15
Our lost kingdoms: not of death this time, but of men, and their illusions
tumid river: corresponds with Dante‟s presentation (Hell III) of the
River
Acheron that flows round Hell: on the bank („beach‟),
their last
Meeting place, the souls of dead wait to be ferried
across
the perpetual star: a contrast with the „fading‟ and „dying‟ stars earlier in
the
poem, this description recalls both the „living star‟ of
Dante‟s
vision of the Virgin Mary (Heaven XXIII, 92) and the
„single

78
 star‟ (XXXI, 28) of the Light of God
Multifoliate rose: recalls Dante‟s vision of the highest Heaven as a rose,
with the
Virgin and other saints forming the many petals (foglia
is
„petal‟ in Italian) in Heaven XXX and the following
Cantos,
but Mary herself is described as a rose in Canto XXIII,
73-just
before she is called a „living star‟ (see previous note)
death‟s twilight kingdom: a transitional region (see note on „twilight kingdom‟
in Part II
above) where (only) the hollow men have still the
(vain) hope
of seeing the beatific vision
only: perhaps deliberately ambiguous, this could mean the
vision is
only the hope (not the actual fate) of the empty men
or/and only such men would have such a hope; it
would be hard to make it mean the blessed vision is
their „only hope‟, especially as all they can expect
(hope for) is a hopeless existence as in Dante‟s Limbo
SUMMARY: The final vision of the meaningless round of unfulfilled lives,
broken speaking of the highest Kingdom, and the pathetic end of this world.
COMMENTARY: In this final section the most notable feature is one of
tone change, both in the change from the previous sections and the changes
within the conclusion itself. The critic F. R. Leaves (1895-1978) finely
observed the „nightmare poise over the grotesque‟ here, which applies to the
whole balancing that can move from the bizarre opening chant to the somber
truth of the intervening Shadow, and on through the meditative fragments to
the final chant‟s „whimper‟. The last Kingdom is the highest, the Kingdom of

79
God: the poet, barely able to approach even the thought of it, stammers out
broken phrases. The broken lives presented throughout the poem fade away in
a conclusion combining a feeble trailing off with a memorable inevitability.
It is Eliot‟s bleakest poetic vision, a vision of dry lives lacking the clear
element of hope (the promise of rain) which even „Gerontion‟ and The Waste
Land have. From now on, however, the way can only be upwards.
Here we go round … morning: a parody of a children‟s chant, imitating „Here
we go
round the mulberry bush‟ and „Here we go gathering nuts
in May‟, both originating in fertility dances
prickly pear: this cactus, flourishing in desert soil, gives a pointed twist
to
the expected fertility symbol
five o‟clock … the traditional hour of Christ‟s resurrection; dawn dances
are
common in Mayday and other rituals of the cycles of
renewal after death
Between the idea… the Shadow: the Shadow is whatever in men‟s lives, after
something
Is proposed, prevents its realization, coming between
what might be and what actually is: between a desire and
its fulfillment, and so on
motion… act: recalls the words of Brutus (in Shakespeare „s Julius
Caesar
II. 1): „Between the acting of a dreadful thing/And the
first motion, all the interim is/Like a phantasmal, or a
hideous dream‟
Falls the Shadow: Eliot agreed that he derived this phrase from the best –
known
poem by Ernest Dowson (1867-1900); „Non sum quails
eram bonae sub regno Cybarae‟ (Horace: „I am not as I

80
 was beneath the regin of good Cynara‟), in which we find
„There fell thy shadow‟ and „Then falls thy shadow‟.
Other relevant associations of shadow may be found in
many places elsewhere, from the tormenting shadow of
Heart of Darkness back to „the valley of the shadow of
death‟ in Psalm 23
For Thine is the Kingdom: from the Lord‟s Prayer („Our Father‟); the ultimate
Capitalized Kingdom of God
Life is very long: this phrase appears in Conrad‟s novel The Outcast of the
Island (1896), where a broken man is to be punished by
being
kept alive rather than killed; it reads in the poem as an
exhausted reversal of the usual idea-that life is short but
art is long. For „conception‟ and „creation‟, „emotion‟ and
„response‟ apply as much to art as to life; indeed, at one
level the poem is a commentary on artistic as well as
spiritual and sexual sterility
essence… descent: according to the Greek philosopher Plato (c. 428-c.
348BC), the
essence or ideal, spiritual form descends to a lower
material
reality to take physical form
This is the way…: the parodied children‟s song returns, as in „This is the way
we
(clap our hands‟)
Not with a bang: as hoped for by Guy Fawkes, or those with visions of a
grand
violence at earth‟s end, or those who idiomatically wish to
go out (from life, a job, etcetera) „with a bang‟, that is,
impressively; the phrase also recalls the account by George
Santayana (1863-1952), who taught Eliot at Harvard, of

81
 the Divine Comedy’s ending „not with a bang, not with
some casual incident, but in sustained reflection‟
whimper: this feeble sound contrasts appropriately with a bang. In
Rudyard Kipling‟s poem „Danny Deever‟, the soul of a
soldier executed for cowardice „whimpers‟ was „exactly
right‟

T. S. Eliot
ASH WEDNESDAY (1930)
Part I
SUMMARY: The convert renounces everything in his past in order to learn
the passive way to God.
COMMENTARY: The simple words and repetitions immediately effect an
impression of the „small and dry‟ voice of a man struggling to make clear what
is complex, as in the simple language used to utter deep thoughts in Dante and
the Bible and Roman Catholic and Anglican liturgy, the three underlying
sources of the entire poem.
Because I do not hope to turn again: a translation of Perch „io non spero di
tornar
giammai‟, the opening line of a poem by the Italian Guido
Cavalcanti (1255-1300) lamenting his exile and expecting
never to see his lady again. When Part I was first
published, as a separate poem, it was entitled „Perch „io
Non Spero‟
Desiring… scope: a version („gift‟ instead of „art‟) of a line from
Shakespeare‟s
Sonnet 29, where the poet‟s is content with his lot turns to
joy when he thinks of his beloved. A renunciation of poetry
seems to be implied in this section-or at least of the former
type of poetry

82
Aged eagle: reputed to be able to renew its youth and vigour (as in
Psalm 103)
infirm glory: a phrase used in Night and Day (1919), a novel by Virginia
Woolf (1882-1941), to refer to the once famous, now old
time … place: implied contrasts with eternity and infinity
blessed face: in rejecting even this (which recalls especially the face of
Dante‟s Beatrice), the convert rejects both an earlier love
and a beatific vision as a way of turning to God
the voice: including his own former poetic voice?
vans: not only an archaic word for „wings‟, this is also means the
„fans‟ which are used in winnowing chaff from grain
to care: about godly things
not to care: about worldly things that need to be renounced
to sit still: the passive way for the soul to prepare for God, as described
by the Spanish mystic, St John of the Cross (1542-91); in
his
Pen sees, the French philosopher and physicist Blaise Pascal
(1623-62) thinks „all the troubles of man come from his not
knowing how to sit still‟
pray for us …death: conclusion of a prayer to the Virgin Mary, asking her to
plead
With God for sinners
Part II
SUMMARY: Addressing the Lady, the convert, dead to his former life,
rejoices in his dry bones.
COMMENTARY: When first published separately, Part II was entitled
„Sal … tation‟. This underlines the links with both Beatrice (who salutes Dante
in The New Life, III, dressed in pure white) and the Virgin (saluted by the
Angel Gabriel as well as the devout): as in Dante, a parallel between these two
Ladies is established in the poem, and they are basic to its total imagery. But
the imagery is not necessarily limited by such specific references: the Rose also

83
recalls the whole courtly love tradition implied by the medieval Romance of
the Rose, the Garden also recalls the Garden of Eden, and so forth.
Lady: recalls Beatrice, agent of Dante‟s salvation, and devoted
Attendant on the Virgin Mary in Paradise
white: colour of purity used for these descriptions in this section:
leopards, Lady bones
leopards: here seeming to destroy on God‟s orders, as in the Bible (for
example, Jeremiah 5:6)
juniper-tree: this symbol of cleansing and rebirth appears in „The Juniper –
Tree‟, a fairy tale retold by the German (178^-1859), in which
a murdered child‟s bones, put beneath a juniper, are
miraculously restored to life; another miracle appears in the
biblical story of Elijah, who prayed for death under a juniper in
the wilderness and was sent food by God instead (1 Kings
19:1-8)
my legs… skull: organs representing activity, emotion, sensuality and thought
shall these bones: in the vision of Ezekiel in the valley of dry bones, God asks
„can these bones live?‟ before restoring them to life. See the
Bible, Ezekiel 37:3
dissembled: a pun on disguised and disassembled; in pieces
fruit of the gourd: of which the inside is taken out so that the rind can be dried
and made useful
Prophesy to the wind: the words of God in Ezekiel 37:9, to put breath back into
the
bodies made from the restored bones
bones sang: appears twice, as does „chirping‟ to stress the happiness, as in
Psalm 51 (often sung on Ash-Wednesday in addition to the
„Proper‟ Psalms): „Make me to hear joy and gladness; that the
bones which thou hast broken may rejoice‟
burden: (a) plague; (b) tune: a punning allusion to „the grasshopper
shall be a burden‟; see the Bible, Ecclesiastes 12:5

84
lady of silences…all love ends: an imitation of the Litany of the Blessed Virgin
Mary,
where she is addressed as „Rose‟, „Mother‟, and so on; Eliot‟s
idea of the paradoxical combination of opposites („Calm and
distressed‟ etcetera) is presumably developed from her
essential paradox as Virgin and Mother
in the cool of the day: description of God‟s walk in the Garden of Eden. See the
Bible, Genesis 3:8
This is the land…lot: God‟s words in Ezekiel 48:29
Part III
SUMMARY: The turnings of the convert‟s spiritual progress are here
imaged in the climbing of a staircase.
COMMENTARY: At its first, separate publication, Part III was entitled
„Som de L‟Escalina‟ („The top of the staircase‟). These words are from a
speech addressed to Dante, as he ascends the third section of the stairway
through Purgatory (XXVI, 146), by the Provencal poet Arnaut Daniel (fl. C.
1200) sent there for lustfulness. This section develops both the staircase image
and the idea that sensual distractions hinder spiritual progress. These memories,
lovingly recalled, contrast vividly with the „old man‟ and „aged shark‟ of the
spiritual struggle.
Same shape: as himself, in an earlier struggle
devil … despair: Eliot thought the „demon of doubt‟ is „inseparable
from the
spirit of belief‟
fig‟s fruit: begins a series of distracting recollections of the
sensuous
world
figure …flute: a medievalised pagan figure, perhaps to be associated
with
Pan, the amorous and pipe-playing god of pastoral life
in Greek mythology

85
Lilac: as the context shows, the flower is associated with a
memory
of past love
Lord, I am not worthy…only: the words of humility spoken in the Mass, from
Matthew
8:8: „Lord, I am not worthy that thou shouldst come
under my roof: but speak the word only and my
servant shall be healed‟ (in liturgical use, „soul‟ can be
substituted for „servant‟)
Part IV
SUMMARY: In the peace of the garden, a nun-like figure wordlessly signals a
message of redemption.
COMMENTARY: The chief problem of interpretation has always been the
relationship of the veiled sister and the Lady of Part II: all we can say, looking
ahead to the rest of the poem, is that both are associated with Mary and
Beatrice; more specific identification is probably restricting, though tempting.
For it may be that the very obscurity and impersonality of this section reveals a
too personal association that Eliot is covering up, as he did when removing the
original dedication of the poem, „To My Wife‟. But there are only hints, and
perhaps the reader should concentrate on the public „meaning‟ of the poem,
throughout.
violet: (a) the colour is associated with both transition and
repentance;
(b) the flower is associated with both resurrection and
purity.
Mary‟s colour: blue; but sometimes also white
trivial: may include a pun on the origin of this word: where
three
roads meet, the basic experience of learning and life
(see the

86
ignorance …knowledge: not knowing such suffering in herself, perhaps, yet
knowing of
the suffering of others
larkspur: blue flower (delphinium)
Sovegna vos: „Be mindful‟, the plea of Arnaut Daniel (Purgatory
XXVI, 147)
that the punishment for lust should be kept in mind b
Dante
Redeem/The time: by, as St Paul advised in his Epistles, using one‟s time
wisely
the higher dream: in his „Dante‟ essay, Eliot associates the Divine
Pageant in
Purgatory XXIX, in which Beatrice‟s chariot is drawn
by a
griffon, with „the world of what I call the high dream,
and the modern world seems capable only of the low
dream‟. The hearse in the next line seems to mourn the
passing of the higher dream
garden god…flute: suggests Pan once more And after this our exile: from
the Salve Regina („Hail, Queen‟), a prayer of the Virgin
continuing „show unto us the blessed fruit of thy womb,
Jesus‟
Part V
SUMMARY: A lamentation for those who do not hear and surrender to the
Word of God.
COMMENTARY: The word-play in Part V is often criticized as excessive,
not so much in the opening Andrewes-style turning round and round of
particular phrases to be examined as in the elaborate internal rhymes („found
…Resound‟, „mainland…rain land‟, etcetera) of the central passages.
The Word without a word: part of a development based on the opening of St
John‟s

87
 Gospel and the Christmas 1618 sermon of Lancelot
Andrewes:
see notes on the similar usage in „Gerontion‟
And the light…: as in the Bible, John 1:5
world…whirled: a pun found in Orchestra, a poem by John Davies
(1565-1618):
„Behold the world, how it is whirled round!‟
unstilled: because ever-turning, as well as ever-disobedient to the
Word
O my people…thee: from the Bible, Micah 6:3, used in Christ‟s Reproaches
from
the Cross in the Good Friday liturgy
affirm: the faith
deny: the old life
desert in the garden: the death of the old life of sensuous delights but
spiritual
emptiness
garden in the desert: the spiritual rebirth brought about by desolation and
suffering
Part VI
SUMMARY: The convert acknowledges the pull of his past life, but prays
for help to find peace with God.
COMMENTARY: The opening „Although‟ takes us back to the „Because‟
of Part I and adds its qualification: although he hopes his conversion is final,
the convert clearly recognizes the pull of old desires, movingly presented in the
memories of the sea and the love he has lost. As the time of conversion (the
dying of the old man and the birth of the new) is difficult, the help of the
blessed teachers in needed. Here the poet brings together all the previous
female presences in the poem to aid his final prayer.
Much may have been unclear or laboured, much may have seemed to
depend on biblical, liturgical and Dante-esque catch phrases that can do the
88
poet‟s work for him, much may have been hard to swallow for those who do
not share Eliot‟s denunciatory attitude-but as an enacted vision of the convert,
with its cumulative power of imagery and incantation, Ash-Wednesday can
also be deeply moving.
dream crossed twilight…dying: as in the „twilight kingdom‟ in „The Hollow
Men‟
Bless me father [for I have sinned]: opening words of the penitent to the priest
at
confession
lost lilac: once again a memory of lost love
golden-rod: long-stemmed plant with yellow flowers
ivory gates: through which false dreams pass from the underworld
to earth;
such delusions are created by the eye that is blind to
the true Word
three dreams: perhaps three such hopes of fulfillment as the artistic,
the
sexual and the spiritual; perhaps three such states of
desire as consciousness, memory and dream, etcetera
the other yew: this tree is a symbol of immortality as well as death
sit still: see note on this phrase in Part I
Our peace in his will: the words of the nun Piccarda (see „A Cooking Egg‟)
in
Paradiso III, 85
Suffer me…separated [from Thee]: from the ancient hymn Anima Christi
(„Soul of Christ‟)
And let my cry…Thee: liturgical response to the priest‟s words, „Hear my
prayer, O
Lord‟ (from Psalm 102)
One of the Magi, recalling their hard journey, unexpectedly describes not the
joyful but the saddening and hard-to-bear results.

89
 As in „Gerontion‟, this is the monologue of an old man reviewing the past; as
in Ash –Wednesday, he and his companions have to struggle against the old
life: not only when the tough journey made them long for summer, silken girls,
sherbet (a refreshing drink); not only the difficult acceptance of the Word; but
even the suffering caused by alienation from their own people, still holding to
their heathen gods. The journey is not over yet.
The imagery of the middle section is particularly unusual, both for the
prophetic suggestions of future events of the Crucifixion (a literary technique
called prolepsis) and for the significance of the choice of the other images. Of
such apparently random but emotion-charged images Eliot has written
illuminatingly:
Six ruffians seen through an open window playing cards at night at a
small French
railway junction where there was a watermill: such memories may have
symbolic value, but of what we cannot tell, for they come to represent the
depths of feeling into which we cannot peer.
Magi: the three wise men who came from the East with gifts
for the
Newly-born Jesus. See the Bible, Matthew 2:1-12
„A cold…of winter‟: the quoted words are adapted from the 1622 Christmas
Day
Sermon by Bishop Andrews: „A cold coming they had
of it at this time of the year, just the worst time of the
year to take a journey, and specially a long journey in.
the ways deep, the weather sharp…”the very dead of
winter”‟
three trees: there were to be three crosses at the Crucifixion, for
Christ and
the two thieves
white horse: in the Bible, Revelation 19:11, Christ rides a white horse
in

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 glory
dicing…silver: the Roman soldiers diced for the clothes of the crucified
Christ, who was betrayed for thirty pieces of silver
Set down /This: a phrase used by Andrrewes in the same sermon (and
elsewhere); here the old Magus is addressing his implied
listener (s), anxious that no aspect of his story should be
missed
Birth or Death: because one must „die‟ to the old life before being „born‟
to the
new life in Christ
these Kingdoms: traditionally the Magi were also kings
the old dispensation: that is, pre-Christ
another death: into eternal life this time (as promised by Christ)?

T. S. Eliot
A SONG FOR SIMEON (1928)
SUMMARY: A development of the biblical Song of Simeon.
COMMENTARY: This is another monologue of a tired old man, waiting for
death, but he is much more peaceful and accepting than Gerontion, and the
movement of the verse is even more simple and gentle than that of the old
Magus in the previous poem. Notice how this effect is assisted by repeating
rhymes more than once: „and‟, „stand‟, „hand‟, „land‟ and so on. However, the
simplicity does not preclude the possibility of sophisticated metrics, notably in
the placing of the biblical extracts, and complex imagery, notably in the
opening verse paragraph.
Simeon: in the Bible story this „just and devout‟ Jew promised
by the Holy Ghost that he shall not die before he has
seen Christ, takes the baby in his arms in the temple
and can die happy. His Song is sung at Evening Prayer
(Nunc dimities): „Lord, now lettest thou thy servant
depart in peace, according to thy word: for mine eyes

91
 have seen thy salvation, which thou hast prepared
before the face of all people; a light to lighten the
Gentiles, and the glory of thy people Israel‟; see the
Bible, Luck 2:29-32. The poem repeats phrases from
this canticle, and develops other ideas in Simeon‟s
story
Lord: as in the Bible Song, Simeon‟s first word
Roman: Judea was then under Roman rule
hyacinths: spring flowers of death and rebirth, but here artificially
grown
indoors in the winter: an image of Simeon‟s amazing
„spring‟ in the winter of his old age
Grant…peace: a liturgical echo of Simeon‟s prayer
time of sorrow: Simeon begins looking ahead to the persecution of the
Christian: in the Bible, Luke 2:34-5, he prophesies the
suffering to come
Cords and scourges: as used when Christ was whipped by the Romans
Stations: hints at the Stations of the Cross (events of the
Crucifixion)
mountain of desolation: the hill of Calvary, but, as in all these images, capable
of
extension to the later sufferings of Christ‟s followers
maternal sorrow: Mary witnessed the Crucifixion
birth season of decease: a typical play on the idea of dying into life, especially
appropriate to this very old man
Infant…Word: more verbal play derived from the Verbum Infants
sermon
(1618) of Andrewes: see notes to „Gerontion‟
Saints‟ stair: see Ash-Wednesday III
Not for me…: he will not himself experience the suffering and the
ecstatic
vision of the Christian saints and martyrs
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(And a sword. . also): in Luke 2:35, Simeon warns Mary in just such a
parenthesis:
„(Yea, a sword shall pierce through thy own soul
also)‟; once
more, of course, Eliot‟s usage is capable of extension,
even to the reader

Emily Dickinson
ABRAHAM TO KILL HIM
BELSHAZZAR HAD A LETTER
These two poem illustrate a use of allusion n contrast to Milton‟s in “On His
Blindness”, for while Milton‟s sonnet applies the meaning of his allusive
source to the reality of a modern man‟s spiritual condition, taking the Biblical
story “straight, ” Dickinson re-examines the scriptural stories and finds certain
ironic meaning which may be applied to modern life in non-religious ways. In
brief, she does not expect or require faith in the original meanings of the
stories, but revises their significance for a less credulous age.
In the first of these two poems, Dickinson ironically presents the sovereignty
of a testy “mastiff” of a God over a totally complaint servant and his “urchin”
son. Abraham was unthinkingly, unhesitatingly obedient to God‟s pointless
command; the heavenly tyrant was flattered, and so withdrew the command,
allowing the urchin to grow into maturity and fatherhood. The “moral, ” tacked
on as if the poet were paraphrasing Aesop rather than Moses, alliteratively
jokes about the way God‟s creatures can learn how to placate Him to their own
best interests. One might notice, thought, that the speaker keeps her fingers
crossed: she refrains from naming God or the Lord, whose orders are cast into
the passive voice, and whose metonymies label (“Tyranny”) and metaphoric
incarnation (“mastiff”) carefully sidestep direct delineation. And there is more
fun in the poem arising from the elliptical way in which the events are narrated:
you really do have to know (or consult) the events in order to understand what
events are being alluded to-and when you do, you see that the detachment

93
achieved by the cool Latinisms of the second stanza (contrasted to the
earthiness of lines 3-4 and the cliché of line 10) wryly deletes the incident.
Does the poem have a “moral?” Probably “don‟t take old Thundered so
seriously-His growl is worse than His bite. ”
The lesson originally taught by the story of Abraham and Isaac is not
particularly appealing to the poet: unhesitating obedience to a tyrant‟s whimsy
will placate a god of vengeance. But the moral of Daniel‟s story of Belshazzar
(and his father Nebuchadnezzar) seems to have been more to the poet likes.
Belshazzar had not learned the lesson taught to his father, that the sacred
vessels should not have been stolen from the holy kitchenware, and was
informed by the finger of fire that his wickedness had been judged, and that he
and his kingdom were to be destroyed-a prophecy fulfilled that very night. The
tale presents the punishment of arrogance, willful refusal to learn, and
luxurious sinfulness; from this the poet draws a moral for us all: conscience is a
reliable guide to conduct. Yet the poem is not without ironic detachment in the
understand metaphor of a “letter” from a “correspondent”; the point of the
poem is that a person of conscience can dispense with such an interpreter as
Daniel. We “can read without … glasses” and perhaps without recourse to
Holy Scripture as well.

Anonymous
IN THE GARDEN
If the answer to the question is not immediately forthcoming, it should be
possible to elicit from any class by means of a leading question or two. For
example, the reader may ask: Why does the poet say “the garden” instead of “a
garden”? Is any garden so famous that one may refer to it as “the garden” and
count on being understood?
It is also useful to ask why (besides for rime) the poet compares the maid to
“flowers of the morn” instead of to flowers at noon or flowers at evening, for
this question points up the difference between ordinary logic and poetic logic.
Morning, noon, and evening flowers are equally fair, but there is a symbolic

94
connection between the morning of a day and the morning of human life.
Poetic logic calls for as tight a coherence of all details in the poem as possible.
Emotional connections are more important than strictly logical ones.

Gerard Manley Hopkins

THE CAGED SKYLARK (P. 856)
“The Caged Skylark” is an Italian sonnet. The octave concerns the
relationship of the spirit and the body in life, the sestet, the relationship of the
spirit and the resurrected body in eternity. The basic analogies may be
expressed thus:
1. spirit-in-life; body = caged skylark: cage
2. Immortal spirit: resurrected body = wild skylark: nest =
meadow-down: rainbow.
Both a rainbow and a shadow are perfect images for weight lessens, but a
shadow suggests evil, fear, darkness, death, where as a rainbow suggests hope,
joy, beauty, God‟s compact with man in the Bible. Hopkins‟s rainbow
beautifully demonstrates how a poet gets extra dimensions of meaning out of
his words and images.

Gerard Manley Hopkins

THE LANTERN OUT OF DOORS
This poem is a companion piece to “The candle indoors. ” May it was
written in the same month as “Spring” and “the Windhover, ” May 1877. As
such it fits into the category of Hopkins‟ more easily intelligible poems, but
Hopkins is always demanding of the reader, and the effect is always worth the
effort.
Hopkins uses the image of the light from a lantern being carried along by
someone in the dark, as the image of human life: appearing, passing, and fading
into the distance –birth, life, and death. He wonders about the origin and final
destination, man‟s “first, fast, last friend. ”

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 The lantern here is a symbol of human life, and in-dividual lives in
particular. Since lantern is borne through the night, the carrier is invisible, and
the image of an unknown bearer of men‟s lives implies god: “who goes there?”
night becomes the world through which the lantern passes. Hopkins speculates
on the origin and destination of the lantern‟s passage: “where from and bound,
I wonder. ”
Hopkins meditates on those “whom either beauty bright. ” Yet, he says, even
the exceptional individual only passes through and dies:
They rain against our much-thick and marsh air
Rich beams, till death or distance busy them quite.
“Death or distance soon consumes” our friends like “wind they blow away /
what most I may eye after, ” (those whom the poet most loves or admires. But
“out of sight is out of mind, ” because he cannot apprehend the destination of
their “lantern”.
The cliché is one of the few used in Hopkins‟ work, but he used it for a
purpose. But the artistry of the poet comes through in the way that he picks up
the cliché: “Christ minds. ” Even though we do not know what lies beyond life,
Christ does. Christ‟s interest “eyes them. ” His “heart want‟s care haunts”
them. Christ follows after mankind: “foot follows kind, ” He is “Their ransom,
their rescue, their first, fast, last friend. ”
Looking back upon the beginning of the poem, it is impressive in its
continuity. The unseen bearer of the passing lantern of the first stanza becomes
mysterious as the lantern becomes identified with man‟s transient life in stanza
2. He is then identified in stanza 4.
FROM AND STYLE. Although this was written at the same time as
“Spring” it is a much more involved poem structurally. It is a sonnet again, but
there virtually all of the similarities disappear.
INSCAPE. From the outset of the poem, inscape is vividly employed in the
lantern in the night, man‟s transient light in this world‟s darkness.

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 INSTRESS. “Interests” in line 2 is the first example of in stress here, and it
is a good one. Actually Hopkins might have used “attracts” to convey the
impression of the lantern moving in the dark, but this word is casual, where
“interests” is intense. Two lines later Hopkins uses a phrase, “all down
darkness wide, ” to develop his in stress. The picture is of night falling and
stretching out over the entire land, stressing the magnitude of the darkness.
There are other examples of in stress in the poem (“rain, ” line 7; “eye”, line
10), but the most memorable example is in the words which Hopkins must
cram to gather to create “foot follows kind. ” The image stresses how closely
Christ follows man: Christ is always at man‟s shoulder, never a step away. It is
also possible to consider that the German word for child, Kind (as in
kindergarten), is implied, and that the idea of a child or children: that we are all
children of Christ, is also intended here.
RHYME SCHEME. This is a sonnet and it is regularly constructed by the
poet. He avoids off-rhymes entirely and only uses internal rhyme twice, once at
a very important place. At the end of the poem Hopkins speaks of Christ as
man‟s “fast, last, friend. ” Here the rhymes are used to re-enforce the idea of
Christ being steadfast; He will be there when all other friends have gone.
Rhythm. The poem bristles with Sprung Rhythm. A good example is line 13
and 14.
There, eyes them, heart wants, care haunts, foot follow skind,
Their ransom, their rescue, and first, fast, last friend.
The markings are Hopkins‟ own to designate the rhythm of the poem and
they differ from what would be normal scansion. The stressed syllables
emphasize the words Hopkins thought were important to the meaning of the
poem, not the words which fell into the usual metrical pattern.
Line 13 offers a good example of Hopkins‟ extending the length of a line.
The word “There” at the start of the line is an example of his “outrides. ” More
important however is the poet‟s carryover of important words from one line to
the next. Normally one expects to find an emphasized thought at the end of the

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line, but Hopkins alters this idea occasionally. “Rich beams” at the start of line
8 is a continuation of the thought in line 7, and Hopkins makes his idea more
memorable by its novel position. The position of “wind” in line 9 is pertinent
here too (related to the word, turn, as well as to the wind).
The poet uses two clichés effectively. In line 6 he is referring to what makes
men “rare. ” It is their “mould or mind or what not else. ” The “what not else”
effectively implies the infinite number of ways in which men are unique.
Similarly “out of sight is out of mind” in line 11is a cliché, but as used, it
becomes an extremely effective and poetic expression. In this sequence,
Hopkins plays with the word “mind, ” first as a noun and then as a verb. There
is also an interesting concept of how men die in line 8: “Death or distance busy
them quite. ” “Busy” is important because it is related to “ransom” in line 14.
Death “busy” all men, but those with faith are “ransomed” (bought back) by
Christ.
There is only one hyphenated word used here, “much-tick” in line 7. But far
more important is the word which is jammed together at the end of line 13.
This has been covered under In stress, but structurally it is important in the way
Hopkins takes three words which function as subject, verb, and object, and ties
them all together without losing a shred of their individual identity. In fact,
their identity is emphasized rather than destroyed.
Hopkins leaves out two words in the clause “I wonder, where, [he goes] with
… his wading light. ” Also at the end of the poem, the subject of “eyes” –
Christ-is omitted, but Hopkins would argue quite logically that the movement
of the thought obviates the need for the reference.
Hopkins was fond of interrupting his poetic sequence when what he had to
say was more important than the way it was said. The prepositional phrase
“with … his wading light” is interrupted by the idea of night covering the earth
like a blanket, and the interference is an asset to the effect of the line. A more
difficult example is in line 8 and 9, in which he refers to “wind/What most I
may eye after. ” The explanation is that wind is both the wind and wind in the

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sense of winding. As the latter, it is the second verb predicate, of “Death or
distance. ”
There is repetition of similar ideas and identical words in this poem. “I think
… I wonder” are similar points in line 3. “Death or distance” is repeated twice
for effect. The word, “interest” is also used twice, with two different but similar
meanings.
The alliteration is particularly evident in the last six lines (sestet) of the
poem, as exemplified by the “r” and “f” sounds in “Their ransom, their rescue,
and first, fast, last friend. ” Hopkins not only plays with similar sounds but also
supports his sequence with internal rhyme. Actually the first line is the only one
in which the alliteration seems weak.
Typically Hopkins uses questions to interrupt the flow of narrative, and then
he even refers to himself as rapt in thought. He makes his references most
personal with his interest and his admission of failure. These are devices which
make the poem more poignant, and they are balanced against the complexity of
some of his images.

Gearard Manley Hopkins

THE WINDHOVER
The date completion of this poem has been authenticated as May 30, 1877.
In a latter of June 22 of that year the poet wrote to his poet-friend Robert
Bridges:
I shall send you an amended copy of the Windhover:
the amendment only touches a single line, I think, but as that
is the best thing I ever wrote I she. Like you to have it in its
best from.
It is also interesting to note that the dedication of the poem “To Christ our
Lord” was not added until some time later. Yet the poem stands with or without
the dedication.

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 Here the poet assumes the narrative tone again, as he tells of viewing
“morning‟s minion, ” that is-morning‟s favorite or loved one-a falcon, as it
swoops through the air. As such, the bird is both Christ (God‟s favorite) and
Christ‟s (as an animal unself-consciously fulfilling God‟s purpose). The bird
counters a strong wind with a beautiful maneuver that leaves the poet
overwhelmed by its “mastery. ” The poet declares that before such beauty-
before the beauty of God‟s purpose fulfilled-all the temporal values of the
falcon‟s “Brute beauty … pride, plume, here/Buckle. ” But most beautiful of all
was the moment that the power of temporal values was overcome, as the bird
“Rebuffed the big wind. ” Hopkins‟ last lines, however, remind us that the fiery
beauty of the acceptance of Christ can also be struck from the “blue-bleak
embers of self discipline.
The falcon mentioned here is actually the kestrel hawk, which is found in
Europe but not in America. He is “dappled dawn drawn” –drawn (painted and
pulled) through the dappled (spotted with clouds) dawn. A noble creature,
“daylight‟s dauphin, ” the bird rides the wind, “striding/High there, -rung upon
the rein [as a horse circles on a long rein about its trainer] of a wimpling
[curved, pleated, fluttering] wing. ” His movement is as incisive as the mark of
an “[ice] skate‟s heel, ” and in his movement the bird battles with and
“Rebuffed” the big wind that would hold him back. Then in line 7 Hopkins
begins to note the effect of the bird‟s actions on him, the viewer. His “heart in
hiding” (dedicated to Christ) is moved by the wonder of the bird doing the
thing that it was created to do and “the achieve of, the mastery of the thing!”
Before this expression of God‟s will, all the bird‟s temporal values: “Brute
beauty and valor and act, oh air, pride, plume here/Buckle, ” that is, here bend,
crumple together. At such a moment (of realization God‟s creature is most
beautiful. “And the fire that breaks from the then, a billion/Times told lovelier.
” He addresses God, or Christ, affectionately as his “chevalier, ” a knight.
But then he reminds himself “No wonder of it” –God‟s presence is not a
miracle, but a daily occurrence. For “sheer plod makes plough down
sillion/Shine, ” that is, simple, constant dedication (“Sheer plod”) to the takes

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that life presents (as ploughing one‟s own furrow (“sillion”) makes one‟s life
shine, even as blue-bleak embers” in falling “gash gold-vermilion. ” The fire
within the outwardly bleak embers, like Christ in a quietly dedicated man, will
become evident when the embers are stirred as when man is tested by stress.
Hopkins has all but hidden the fact that this poem is a sonnet. He has
interjected so many stylistic devices that reader is never aware of its structure,
and appropriately these add to the grace of the poem in a subtle way.
There are numerous pictures which develop inscape here, probably none
more incisive than the movement of the bird through the air, which reminds”
the poet of “a skate‟s heel [that] sweeps smooth on a bow-bend. ” The poet
compares the arc in the sky of the bird to the curve an ice skater might make on
the frozen lake.
“Buckle” in line 10 and shin in line 13 offer excellent examples of instress,
in at least two dictions of the poet‟s usage. “Buckle” is used in the sense of
demonstrating how the various aspects of an action both blend (tie together)
and fold (crumple) and from their merger there is the uniqueness of inscape.
Thus instress is a tool to create inscape. “Shine” is used in a different sense.
The instress in shine is affected by its contrast to the bleakness of the preceding
image –the plow running along a furrow by “sheer plod. ”
More classically oriented readers might be shocked at Hopkins‟ use of
rhyme here. For example, in the first line he divides “kingdom” and only uses
the first syllable to rhyme later with “wings”. There is internal rhyme as well,
in “stirred for a bird” in line 8: “lovelier” and “chevalier” in line ll. Again the
rhyme scheme identifies the poem as a Petrarchan sonnet.
This was the earliest sonnet to demonstrate the success of Hopkins‟
experiments with rhythmic flexibility. Every line is super-charged with
rhythmic vitality, often in the overextension of the normal rhythmic accents.
Line 3 offers a fine example of how hop-kinds extend iambic pentameter with
five stresses into some from of his own device which has seven accents at least.
Yet they also demonstrate how orderly the poet could be in the continuity of his

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accents. There is a particularly vital instance of sprung rhythm in line 9, where
all of the last six syllables are accented.
By this time the reader can recognize Hopkins‟ device of continuing his
important thought from the end of one line into the beginning of the net. Here
he does it four times. (“Stirred, ” 1. 8; “Buckle, ” 1. 10; “Shine, ” 1. 13; “Fall, ”
1. 14), and it is obviously by careful design. Similarly, notice how certain lines
are broken by exclamation points at the end of dramatic phrases. Note too the
word “AND” in line 10, which is obviously placed and capitalized for
emphasis.
Hopkins wrote of this as his best work, so he must have considered it a good
example of the style that he was trying to master and present to his limited
audience. (At that time, there must have been fewer than ten people reading his
works. )
There are more words of a Latin root here than in most of the author‟s
works. Yet there is just as much surprise in their position and association. Thus
it takes nine words to describe the falcon, and there is an entire participial
phrase used later to describe the air. Also there are numerous instances in
which a word is used in a unusual context.
The linking of “dapple-dawn-drawn” in line 2 not only supplies another
example of internal rhyme, but also demonstrates the poet‟s habit of
associating ideas. The first and second part of the group are linked as well as
the second and the third. Also “bow-bend” in line 6 emphasizes an arching
movement as the bird swings though the air. “Blue-bleak” in line 13 captures
the outward appearance of embers which, are nevertheless still live. “Gold-
vermilion” at the end of the poem makes a vivid picture in both the color it
describes and the musical sound of the word.
There is one obvious reference to repetition here with “morning” in line 1.
Moreover there is relationship demonstrated in the continuity of ideas. Thus the
bird is “riding” and “striding” but both images evoke the same image of the
bird in its movement.

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 Seldom has a poet offered more obvious examples of alliteration in a poem.
Thus in line 1 “m” is used three times and line 2 doubles that with the use of
“d” six times. The poet uses alliteration in every line. The final six words in
line 12 demonstrate the interrelation (concatenation) which makes Hopkins‟s
words, lines, and thoughts so memorable: “sheer plod makes plough down
sillion /Shine”, offers the alliteration of “s” and “p” and “d” within six words.
Again Hopkins starts the poem with a casual personal reference, “I caught
this morning, ” which relates the poet to the poem, However that is the end of
the use of conversational structure in this poem.
Poetry by its very nature is subtle in the way it expresses its message because
it conveys its message through images that can be emotionally as well as
intellectually perceived, rather than by intellectual exposition. In this poem
Hopkins suggests his theme rather than stating it, and if the reader can
understand the pictures which he creates for the mind to see then the student
can understand the basis for the entire poem. As an example there is the
language used in description of the bird, for it is at once a “minion, ” a
“nobility, ” and a “Falcon. ” As such it becomes a “favorite, ” it has “nobility, ”
and it is distinct for its “bird ness. ” With all of these meanings in mind the
reader then pursues the thought of the rest of the poem, and he finds that in its
movements the bird has grace in his action which suggests royalty; it darts as
quickly as the eye can follow. The picture of the bird stirs the heart of the poet
and he compares it then in its movements to the incision which as ice skate
makes in the ice. In summary then, a poet has the right to challenge the reader‟s
intellect, but there must be order and logic-a key-to his statement. If it becomes
so personal that the poet only knows what he means then it is not and never can
be art. Art by its nature must be universal, and it will not allow subjective
distortion and emotional nearsightedness.

Philip Larkin
AUBADE

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 While the irony in Richard Wilbur‟s title “A Late Aubade” merely overturns
a reader‟s expectation of a poignant dawn parting of lovers, Larkin‟s irony
reaches deeper: his dawn song is not wistful about separating from a mistress,
but terror stricken at the prospect of the inevitable parting from life itself.
Larkin does not make that life attractive, but tedious and mundane. It is a life
of work, offices, and telephones, with only drink and “people” to relieve the
boredom or the lurking fears of death. The emphasis is not on beauty or
pleasure or love, all to be lost in the obliteration of death, but on the fear of
nothingness. The images associates with life provide the only dense against the
thoughts of death, and they are images of social connection, culminating in the
last line: “Postmen like doctors go from house to house. ” All of us, that is,
share in the disease of fearing death, and the cure comes in links with other
people. But communication is a temporary cure, an alleviation of the fear, but
certainly no defense against death itself or the knowledge of its inevitability.
The time of the poem, four o‟clock in the predawn morning, is a time of total
darkness and silence. Staring into “soundless dark” is like staring at death, for
the two primary senses of hearing and sight have been lost. Deprived of
physical sense, the speaker must see what his mind knows, “the total emptiness
for ever. ”
And “courage is no good” at such times, because it cannot alter the fact the
speaker is staring at. Since he defines life in its social connections, “to love or
link, ” courage seems only a matter of social behavior that has value in the
impressions one live to other people. “It means not scaring others” with the
horrifying truth hat the speaker understands and faces. He does display another
kind of courage, though the courage to acknowledge to himself his fears and to
look into the darkness with honesty.
The final stanza, in which the dawn slowly comes, restores the speaker‟s
physical senses, and leads him to project the resumption of daylight activities.
The terror subsides and the fact of “what we know, ” though it is as plain and
as familiarly unremarkable as a piece of furniture, may be ignored in the
workday world. The knowledge that he has faced when alone can be put aside;
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the dilemma of knowing that “we can‟t escape” death and “yet can‟t accept it”
can be postponed another day.
The poem carries the additional richness of its verbal echoes of two well-
known passages from Shakespeare, Hamlet‟s soliloquy beginning “To be, or
not to be” (3. 1, 55-89) and the conclusion of Jacques‟s speech on the seven
ages of man (As You Like it 2. 7, 162-65). The allusions to Hamlet‟s speech
occur in lines 8, 17, 18-19, and 30, and to Jacque‟s in line 27-28. These
allusions in effect re-open the questions raised in Hamlet‟s meditation, and in
several other themes in that play courage, friendship, even drink as if Larkin‟s
speaker were being forced to reexamine Hamlet‟s condition for himself. What
he finds, in his modern (and more squalid) experience is a similar dilemma:
although being alive is fraught with pain and misery, chiefly because of fear
and loneliness, the alternative “not to be” is worse, and so like Hamlet he will
have to live with his “indecision. ”
Because these allusions are only faintly signaled, by little more than a single
word or phrase, Larkin is relying on a reader‟s through recall of the Hamlet
soliloquy and of the whole play. And most students are not likely to make the
connection for themselves. If the instructor wishes to use the poem for a further
lesson in allusion, the class should probably be supplied in advance with copies
of the Shakespeare passage, and asked to find the verbal echoes.

Archibald Mac Leash

ARS POETICA (P. 701)
The poet‟s philosophy of his art is stemmed up in the opening and closing
lines of poem‟s third section. A poem is concerned with experience, not with
propositional statements. When it is successful, it is “equal” to the experience it
creates; the reader properly responds to it by imaginatively “living” that
experience, not by judging the content of the poem as right or wrong, true or
false. To create experience, the rest of the poem tells us (and illustrates in its
telling), the poet must rely upon images and symbols.

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 “Ars Poetica” has three sections, each of which starts with what seems a
paradox or a violation of common sense. Section one declares that a poem
should be “pal[able” and “wordless. ” Yet if we run our fingers over this poem
as printed on the page, the only palpable thing is the page; our fingers make no
distinction between recipe, advertisement, poem, or blank sheet of paper. And
does not MacLeish‟s statement that a poem should be “wordless” run directly
counter to Wallace Steven‟s (in “The Noble Rifer and the Sound of Words, ”
The Necessary Angle) that “poetry is a revelation in words by means of the
words”? No, I think not. What MacLeish means is that the “experience” or
“revelation” created is wordless. When we read a poem, we must be acutely
sensitive to the words used, but with the final result that we are drawn into an
imaginative experience in which we see “globed” peach or pear, or draw our
thumb over an old medallion, or feel the soft moss and worn stone of an ancient
casement ledge, or watch a flight of birds crossing the sky.
Section two assert that a poem “should be motionless in time, / As the moon
climbs, ” which seems contradictory in itself, for how can something be
“motionless‟ and yet climb? Yet the moon “climbs” so slowly that its motion is
imperceptible except when it can be related to some earthly object, such as the
horizon or a “night-entangled tree, ” and watched for some time. What is this
section saying about a poem then? That when we read it, we are so caught up in
the experience created that we are unconscious of the passage of time? Or that
the experience it creates lingers in the mind and fades from memory slowly and
almost imperceptibly?
And so we come to the summary third section which says that a poem
should be “equal to: / Not true, ” and “should not mean, / But he. ” Does this
mean that a poem should be meaningless? No, only that its “meaning” (what I
have called in this chapter its “total meaning”) is an experience, not an idea or
propositional statement, and is expressed through images and symbols. The
symbolic image of an “empty doorway and a maple leaf” (suggesting absence,
loneliness, and the transitory quality of life) creates “all the history of grief, ”
and the images of “leaning grasses and two lights above the sea” (suggesting

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perhaps a summer field where two lovers might lie overlooking the ocean
create the experience of love.

W. H Davies
THE VILLAIN (P. 704)

Emily Dickinson
APPARENTLY WITH NO SURPRISE (P. 704)
The title and the image in the last two lines of Davies‟s poem both suggest
stage melodrama, and therefore a kind of theatricality exaggerated or remote
from reality.
Dickinson‟s poem may profitably be compared with Frost‟s “Design”, for
both poems raise similar issues, and both (like Melville in Moby-Dick) make
the color white, usually associated with purity and innocence, take on
exceedingly sinister connotations.

William Butler Yeats

THE COMING OF WISDOM WITH TIME
Yeats associates youth with “leaves, ” “flower, ” and “sun, ” which are
agreeable, and with “lying, ” which is disagreeable. He associates age with
“truth, ” “wisdom, ” and “oneness, ” which are agreeable, and with “wither, ”
which is disagreeable. Thus he carefully balances youth and ages as to
favorable and unfavorable qualities. Yeats is neither exulting over a gain nor
lamenting a loss; but he is lamenting the fact that one can‟t have everything at
once-beauty, vigor, and enthusiasm, and wisdom. Life is never complete: one
gains some desirable qualities at the expense of losing others.

Michael Drayton
SINCE THERE’S NO HELP (P. 707)
From the first eight lines of this sonnet is seems apparent that the speaker
(the male, as we shall see) and his beloved are breaking off their relationship.

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Does the speaker want to break it off? He asserts quite positively, perhaps too
positively, that he does (3-4), but even in these first eight lines his assertion is
undercut by the implication that he is acting under constraint (“Since there‟s
no help”) and by the suggestion hat at any future meetings they may have
difficulty disguising their still-existent feelings for each other. If any doubt
remains that he does not really want to break off, it should be dissolved by the
sestet, especially the last two lines, where he declares that she could still bring
their love back to life, if she only would. He obviously hopes that she will. The
rich allegorical and poetic language of the sestet, as opposed to the clipped,
prosaic language of the octave, indicates that his true feelings come out here,
feelings that he deliberately falsified in the octave.
Does she, then, want to break off the relationship? Although she is given no
words in the poem (he is the speaker throughout), the “Nay” beginning in line 2
is a clear single that this line is spoken in response to some gesture or word of
protest made by her against his pronouncement in line 1. She not ant to “kiss
and part. ” A further clue to her feelings is provided by his including her along
with himself in his forecast of the difficulty both will have in concealing their
feelings at future meetings.
But if neither of them wants to break off the relationship, why are they
breaking it off? To answer this question, we must examine the allegorical death
scene depicted in the sestet. When asked how many figures are involved in this
scene, students initially answer four. Both do we then have two dying figures,
two deathbed scenes? Or are not “Love” and “Passion” two different names for
one dying figure? Clearly they are one person, most fittingly called “Love-
Passion. ” There is only one deathbed (11), and the dying figure is referred to
by a singular pronoun in each of the last four lines (“his, ” “his, ” “him, ”
“him”). The masculinity of the pronoun suggests that the dying Love-Passion is
his (the speaker‟s). The logic of the situation suggests that the two attendants at
the bedside. Faith kneeling in prayer, Innocence pulling down the eyelids of the
presumably dead figure, are hers. By a subtle associative logic these two
attendants, ostensibly presents to ease the death, are made to appear the cause

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of the death. Her innocence is closing up the eyes of his passion; her faith
(religious scruple) is assisting at the beside. Yet, he assets, if she would, she
might at the very moment of death- “Now, ” in an instant bring his love-
passion quite suddenly back to life. Surely, the situation is clear. Though the
woman wishes to retain his love, she also values and wishes to preserve her
innocence (her purity; her faith tells her that fornication is a sin. He claims that,
by refusing to satisfy his passion, she is causing both it and his love (they are
one and the same) to die.

Robert Frost
THE TELEPHONE
The poem is a dialogue between two lovers at the close of day upon his
return from an all-day walk set out on in the morning. Whether the lovers are a
married couple or are still in the courtship stage of their relationship is
uncertain, but he has returned to the “here” (2)-home, summer hotel, village, or
whatever-where both are living. At the farthest point of this walk, there had
been an hour “all still” (probably about noon) during which he had felt a strong
urge to be with his beloved and had felt intuitively that she was feeling a
simultaneous wish to have him with her; now he is back and is trying to
confirm the truth of that intuitively that she was feeling a simultaneous wish to
have him with her; now he is back and is trying to confirm the truth of that
intuition. He goes about it playfully but delicately, inventing a fanciful story of
her calling him on her telephone the flower on the windowsill-and his receiving
the call on a telephone-a field where he was resting. (Early telephones were
comparable in shape with daffodils and the two flowers may, though need not,
be taken as daffodils. ) But of course he has made up this fantasy, and, as soon
s he says “I heard you talk, ” interrupting himself to say “Don‟t say I didn‟t, ”
in order to keep her from denying it before he has well begun. Then, because
he does not want to embarrass her or himself by putting words in her mouth
that she might be forced to deny, and because he really wants to hear from her
lips the confirmation that he was wanted, he breaks off from telling her what he

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heard her say, to ask, “Do you remember what has you said?” But she is
cautious too, unwilling to commit herself to the role until she knows more fully
the part he has imagined for her. “First tell me what it was you thought you
heard, ” he says. So the lover elaborates on his story, completing the metaphor
of the telephone call; but again, when he gets to the crucial point, he hesitates to
put words in her mouth and still wants her to say them, so he turns again to
questions “what was it? Did you call me by name? Or did you sat” And then he
sees how to handle the problem-by saying what he wants her to admit having
felt, but without himself putting the words in her mouth: “Someone said Come.
” It works. “I may have thought as much, ” she confesses, “but not aloud. ”
Then joyously and triumphantly (though quietly) he affirms the truth of his
fiction: “Well, so I came. ”
“The Telephone” is a poem of subtle dramatic interplay, delicate fancy,
shared feeling, and deep tenderness. The two lovers are dramatically
differentiated-the male ardent, fanciful, playful, but also diffident; the female
more down to earth but open and responsive. Whether a telepathic message has
actually been communicated between the two lovers-as he wants to believe,
and as the title perhaps implies-is left open for the reader to decide. It is, in any
case, not unusual for two lovers simultaneously to wish to be together.

John Wakeman
LOVE IN BROOKLYN
The man middle-aged, fat, lonely, employed by a large Brooklyn business
firm desk job which requires him to write correspondence. The woman-
younger, physically attractive, sent up from the Payroll Department within the
year to be the man‟s secretary typist.
The man, smitten, inexperienced with women, vulnerable, has after several
times summoned up courage to invite the woman out for a drink and to declare
his feeling for her. He does so ineptly, blurting out the words, addressing her by
last name blowing his nose. The woman, though neither insensitive nor
uninterested and experienced, has undoubtedly been propositioned many times,

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has developed defensive tactics. Her immediate response, splashing her drink,
is “The hell you say. ” But then she senses there is something different about
this case, she lights a cigarette, thinks hard, and explains a difference she has
probably not had occasion to put in words before: there is a difference between
loving a woman as a person and mere sexual desire combined with gratitude
for good typing.
But she has underestimated his feeling. “You manna bet? You manna bet?”
he blurts out in protest her suggestion that he has just “drunk” his drink “too
fast. ” Then, trying to articulate his feelings, he makes an almost grotesque
comparison. Seeing her swing round on her typing chair made him “shake” like
he did in World War II when he first saw a tank slide through some trees “like
it was god. ” Somehow the very grotesqueness of the double comparison
testifies to its sincerity. He means it.
Her response, conditioned by past behavior, is jocular, fending the
propositioned off in a kind of ritualized game which she must not take
seriously. Playfully she swings full circle on her bar stool, mimicking the
motion of her typing chair which had “shaken” him so. “You think I‟m like a
tank, you mean? She says, deliberately misinterpreting his meaning; “Some
fellers tell me nicer things than that. ” But then she sees his face and realizes
that this is no time to kid. The man is not only earnest, he is highly vulnerable.
The last four lines express the depth and hopelessness of the man‟s emotion,
and the pity she is capable of beneath her hard outer shell. Though there is little
prospect that she can return this man‟s feeling, she recognizes its extent and
helplessness, and she presses his trembling hand hard to express her pity.
This, according to the poet, is love “in Brooklyn. ” In contrast to Frost‟s
poem, Wake man‟s is deliberately unromantic, even anti romantic. The bar
setting, the crude colloquial language, the grotesqueness of the man, the hard
outer shell of the woman-all remove it from the delicate pastoral world of “The
Telephone;” even the girl‟s name, Horowitz, is chosen for its unromantic
connotations. Though probably common in Brooklyn, it in decidedly
uncommon is poems about love. The man‟s feeling for the girl is not one based
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on a mutuality of mind and spirit, as in “The Telephone”; yet it is a powerful
and sincere gut feeling which is a good deal more than an itch. The poem
portrays genuine feelings: the hopeless if grotesque yearning and vulnerability
of the fat man have pierced the woman‟s defensive armor and moved her, if
hardly to a reciprocated, at least to profound pity.

Emily Dickinson
ONE DEGNITY DELAYS FOR ALL
 ‘TWAS WARM AT FIRST LIKE US
The theme of “One dignity delays for all” is that all of us, no matter how
humble, will one day be honored and treated like nobility-namely, on the day
of our burial. In the second stanza the funeral procession through the streets of
the village is compared to the progress of a king, duke, or bishop through his
domain. The hearse is a carriage, the casket is the royal chamber, the
undertaker and his assistants are footmen, bells toll in the church towers,
crowds' towers, crowds stop to watch on the sidewalks or follow behind the
hearse. In the third stanza the procession stops at the graveside, the officiating
clergy (“dignified attendants”) conduct a funeral ceremony (like a coronation
ceremony or an official welcome to a visiting prince), and everyone takes off
his hat as prayers are read and the casket is lowered into the grave. (The above
account may be over specific in its point-to-point comparison, but the general
meaning is valid. )
“Meek escutcheon” combines oxymoron and metaphor. Metaphorically it
represents our humanity. Just as a coat of arms entitles its bearer to ceremonial
treatment on all occasions, so our common humanity entitles us to ceremonial
treatment at death. We may all look forward to this moment of grandeur. It
“delays” (waits) for all.
“Twas warm at first like us” describes the changes that take place in a body
between death and burial. The poem begins its description at a point a split-
second after the instant of death. Though still warm, the body has already
become an “It, ” is no longer he or she. Then, in almost clinical detail, are
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shown the loss of body warmth, the vanishing of expression from face and
eyes, the stiffening of rigor mortis, the increasing and finally utter separation
between the worlds of the dead and the living. In the final stanza, as it is
lowered into the grave, the corpse is a mere thing, a weight, unable by any sign
to assent or demur to what is happening. The final word “adamant” underscores
its stoniness.
Written in Dickinson‟s characteristic elliptical style, the poem demands for
grammatical completeness that we supply an it at the end of line 2, an if after
“as” in line 12, and a completing verb (show? Manifest? Manage?) at the end
of line 12. But the meaning is clear without these additions. Dickinson‟s
omissions simply compact her meaning.
There many be a latent irony in the fact that the “dignity” that “delays for
all” does not occur till we can no longer be conscious of it, but in the poem this
irony is mutes. The tone of the poem is generally one of excited anticipation,
marked by the exclamatory elation of the last two stanzas, and by words like
“dignity, ” “mitered, ” “purple, ” “crown, ” “state, ” “grand, ” “pomp, ”
“surpassing, ” “ermine, ” and “escutcheon. ” Death in this poem is not the great
democratize, leveling all ranks, but the great “aristocracies, ” elevating all to
the status of nobility.
The tone of “„Twas warm at first like us, ” on the contrary, is one of
unrelieved and increasing horror. Concentrating not on the funeral ceremonials
but on the physical facts of death, it projects not an elevation in status but a
reduction in status, from human being to thing. Its tone is determined by words
like “chill, ” “frost, ” “stone, ” “cold, ” “congealed, ” “weight, ” and “dropped
like adamant. ” Instead of “pomp surpassing ermine, ” it presents us with a dad
body crowding “cold to cold. ”

Alfred, Lord Tennyson

CROSSING THE BAR

Thomas Hardy

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THE OXEN
Despite the fame and popularity of “Crossing the Bar, ” it is well to make
sure that they understand it. The two complementary sets of figures used to
express approaching death are the coming of night and setting out on an ocean
voyage. The moment of death in the first set is the disappearance of the last
light of day: the arrival of “the dark. ” In the second set it is the moment of
“crossing the bar”: leaving the harbor, which belongs to the land, and setting
out on the ocean. As the land represents temporal life, the ocean-“the boundless
deep”-represents eternity. “That which drew from out the boundless deep” is
the soul: in Tennyson‟s thought the soul comes from eternity, takes fleshly
embodiment during life, and returns to eternity upon death. Tennyson wants no
“moaning of the bar”-no lamentation over his death-for his soul in returning
“home, ” is passing on to eternal life, and will see its “Pilot” (God) “face to
face” after death. The occasion should therefore be one for joy rather for
sadness.
The whole poem expresses Tennyson‟s faith in immortality. Despite its
popularity, which stems largely form its message, the poem is a good one.
“The Oxen” divides exactly in the middle, the first two stanzas presenting a
scene from the speaker‟s childhood, the second two, one from his adult life. If
we take the speaker as Hardy himself, or as a contemporary of Hardy, the two
scenes are divided by Darwin‟s Origin of Species (1859) and by the dramatic
decline of religious faith that it accelerated. In the poem the superstition of the
kneeling animals is symbolic of the whole system of Christian belied that
Hardy was taught as a boy and that he gave up as a man, but that, like Matthew
Arnold, he never ceased to regret. Though he can no longer subscribe to
Christian doctrine or to its world view, he regrets the loss of the emotional
security and comfort provided by that world view.
In emotional tone the two halves of the poem differ sharply. In the first two
stanzas, there is a sense of warmth, of comfort, and of community. Young and
old sit “in a flock / By embers in hearthside ease, ” and the speaker uses the

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plural pronoun “we. ” In the last two stanzas, there is isolation and darkness.
The speaker uses the singular pronoun; refers to the Barton as “lonely, ” and
with the word “gloom” refers not only to the darkness of the night but also to
the spirit the times-the desolation caused by the loss of religious faith. The
superstition of the kneeling oxen-and with the divine birth and the resurrection-
is dismissed as a “fancy, ” that few people any longer accept, but that was
nevertheless “fair” (attractive). The word “hope” in Tennyson‟s poem and in
Hardy‟s has apposite meaning relative to the expectations involved. Tennyson‟s
hope expresses expectation real doubt. Harry‟s expresses a wish without real
expectation. Tennyson‟s poem expresses confident faith that it will be so.
Hardy‟s expresses a wistful yearning that it might be so. Hardy does not say
that he would go out to the Barton to see the oxen kneel. He says (in effect). “I
feel I would go if someone asked me. ” But no one will ask him, and it doesn‟t
occur to him go alone. Moreover, if someone did ask him, he wouldn‟t really
go. The feeling is an ephemeral one that would not survive the invitation.
Hardy (or the speaker) is an intellectually sophisticated twentieth-century man
who would feel himself a goose to go on such a fool‟s errand. To put this point
across to a class, it might be useful to ask: Would Hardy go if someone asked
him? Would you go? Today Charlie Brown may wait in the pumpkin patch on
Halloween to see the Great Pumpkin, but he won‟t when he is five years older,
and no one of high school or collage age in America today would be caught
dead waiting for Santa Claus to come down the chimney. Hardy‟s “hope” is a
wistful yearning, not a hope. Reading Tennyson‟s poem aloud, one should read
the word hope very quietly; without emphasis, for to emphasize it is to express
doubt, and the serenity and beauty of the preceding imagery indicate absence of
doubt. One need not, in reading Hardy‟s poem, put artificial emphasis on
“hoping”: the inversion of accent (a trochee instead of an iamb) forces an
emphasis on it. Hardy‟s poem, in its own way, is as quite and as beautiful as
Tennyson‟s, but the quietness comes from resignation rather than from faith.
(For further comment, see the discussion of “The Darkling Thrush, ” page 108
of this manual. )

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John Donne
THE APPARITION
THE FLEA
“The Apparition” has frequently been misread as an expression of hate and
revulsion in which the motive of the speaker, a rejected lover, is revenge. It is,
in reality, a poem of thwarted love and unspent desire in which the speaker is
making a last desperate effort to obtain his lady‟s favors. In doing so, he adopts
a new strategy. In the past, he has presumably tried and failed with all the usual
methods-praising the lady‟s beauty. Chattering her in various ways, declaring
the strength and depth of his love for her and so on. This time he attempts to
frighten her into his arms. He works various anxieties he hopes she may have.
Instated of telling her how much he love her, he tells her that his love “is spent.
” (By portraying himself, he may make himself seem more valuable in her eyes
than when she was assured of his devotion). He predicts that, if she rejects him,
she will to frighten her with the prospect of his ghost appearing at her beside,
scaring her to death. But, most of all, he tries to terrify her by threatening that
his ghost will utter some unspecified but awful pronouncement or curse upon
her, possibly capable of damning her soul for eternity, but the nature and
contact of which he will not reveal to her now, because (he says) he wants
revenge-and if he told her now, she would do anything necessary to avoid it.
But the speaker‟s assertion that his love (desire would be a more accurate
term) “is spent” is undermined by the whole tone and intensity of the poem. If
he no longer cares about her, why should her “scorn” e killing him? Would it
not be more logical for him to say he was “cured”? And why should he send
his ghost to her bedside? Obviously he has intense feelings concerning her still.
Most misreading of the poem misinterprets “feigned vestal” as meaning
“feigned virgin. ” But why should Donne use the fancier term if a simpler one
means the same? The speaker, having unsuccessfully solicited the woman
many times, has no personal grounds for doubting her virginity. What he
accuses her of is not that she has falsely claimed to be a virgin, but that she

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falsely thinks herself capable of sustaining the state of virginity as the vestal
virgins did. Inferentially she has rejected his advances in the past by claiming
that she wants to preserve her virginity or that she is by nature virginal. (The
word feigned, spelled fain‟d in the manuscripts of Donne‟s poems, is a pun
blending the meanings of feigned [“pretended”] and fainted [“wished for”]. )
The speaker in effect is telling her, “Don‟t deceive yourself. You have the same
strong carnal desires as I have, and if you do not take me, you will eventually
settle or someone much less capable than I of satisfying your sexual needs. ”
This “someone, ” tired out from their earlier love-making, will think, when she
tries to wake him to protect her from the ghost, that she wants more love-
making, and he will pretend to be asleep. Thus she will have to face the scary
ghost alone. Trembling like an aspen tree and bathed in cold sweat, she will be
“scared to death. ” Her “sick candle” will blink out; she will become
hyperbolically a “verger ghost” than her visitant. The “sick taper” is
metaphorically her life. It could be taken literally as well if we assume that a
couple would go to bed leaving a candle burning by the bedside. It was
commonly believed that a candle would dim in the presence of a ghost.
The speaker will not tell her what his ghost would say because, he says, he
wants her to painfully repent” her mistreatment of him, and if she knew now
what it would say, that knowledge would “preserve” her and keep her
“innocent. ” Innocent of what? Innocent of the one crime that has been alleged
against her in the poem-that of being a murderess-of “killing” the speaker by
her scorn. She can remain innocent of this crime only be ceasing to “kill” him-
that is, by granting him her favors. What could the ghost say that would be
terrible enough to accomplish this end? We do not know-nor does the speaker
know. If he did, he would say it now. But he is more gambling on the
psychological principle that an unknown threat is more frightening than a
known one. It is the darkness at the top of the stairs which daunts us. It is more
frightening to hear a strange cry in the dark than to face five armed men by
daylight. Thus the speaker does not reveal what the ghost will say, first because
he does know, and second because not telling will be more frightening than

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telling. In short, he wants her to remain “innocent” of the crime of “killing”
him. He wants her to fulfill his unspent desires.
Donne here uses the cliché of Renaissance poetry which makes a woman
“kill” a man by refusing to satisfy his desire, but he here gives it an original
twist by taking the metaphor literally and developing the whole poem on its
literalness. It is important that the speaker accuses the lady of “killing” him, not
having “killed” him. He is not yet “dead”; therefore there is still time for her to
revive him and remain innocent of “murder. ”
In “The Flea” a young man attempts to seduce a young woman by the use of
highly ingenious but highly sophistical reasoning. Basically, his argument is
that losing her virginity will be no more damaging to her than a flea bite.
Before the first stanza, a flea has bitten the young man and then has jumped
to the young woman and begun to bite her. The young man sees an opportunity
and seizes it. He points to the flea and remarks but it has innocently mingled
their bloods within itself, which is no more than sexual intercourse does
(according to a traditional belief), and yet is more than she will allow to him.
(When he says “more than we would do, ” he means, of course, more than she
would do, for he is eager enough himself. ) His remark that the flea‟s action
cannot be called a “sin” or “shame” or “loss of maidenhead” indicates that she
is a virgin and wishes to preserve her virginity until she can surrender it without
sin.
Between the first and second stanzas the young lady raises her finger to
squash the flea. The young man protests, urging her to spare the flea in which,
because of their commingled bloods, they “almost, yea more than married are.
” With dazzling sleight-of-wit he has parlayed his claim that the mingling of
their bloods within the flea is tantamount to marriage. The flea is their
“marriage-temple. ” If she kills it, he claims, she will be destroying three lives-
his, hers, and its-and committing three sins-murder, suicide, and sacrilege. (The
line “Though use [habit] makes you apt [habitually disposed] to kill me”
indicates that the speaker has already attempted many times to seduce the
young woman and has failed. He is metaphorically playing with the poetic
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lover‟s traditional complaint that he is “dying” of his unrequited love and
therefore that the lady is “killing” him by withholding her favors. )
But the young lady pays no attention to the speaker‟s protests. Between the
second and third stanzas she has cruelty (according to the young man) killed
the flea-has “purpled [crimsoned]” her nail with “blood of innocence. ” The
flea‟s only guilt, the speaker claims, was contained in the drop of blood it
sucked from its murderess, and now she declares triumphantly to the young
man that neither he nor she has been injured (let alone “killed”) by the flea‟s
death. With one quick stroke of her finger she has indeed thoroughly
discredited the young man‟s “logic. ”
But the young man is not for a moment discountenanced. Nimbly, he turns
his defeat into a further argument for his original design. Because his fears
proved false, he contends, all fears are false, including hers that she will lose
honor in yielding to him. She will lose on more honor in submitting to his
desires, he claims, than she lost life in killing the flea. This argument (a
generalization from a single instance) is, of course, as specious as those that has
gone before, yet we have to admire the young man‟s mental in turning the
tables and putting the young woman on the defensive once again.
Though one cannot make a dogmatic statement about what action follows
the conclusion of the poem, evidence favors the inference that this attempt on
the young lady‟s virginity is as unsuccessful as those that have presided it. We
know from lines 2, 9, 14, and 16 (we are given the information four times) that
the young lady has previously this young man has also tried with no success the
ordinary tactics of seduction-protestations of adoration, lavish compliments to
the lady‟s charm and beauty, and pleas for pity-so he now turns to witty
casuistry. We also know on what grounds the young lady has turned him down.
She would consider the loss of her chastity a “sin” and a disgrace (line 6); she
is concerned for her “honor” (line 26). In addition we see that the young lady is
not taken in for a moment by the young man‟s preposterous “logic” in stanza 2.
She calls his bluff, kills the insect, and laughs in his face. True, the young man
in undismayed by this refutation and turns it immediately to his advantage. But

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are we to believe that the girl suddenly turns gullible or loses concern for her
honor just because the young man has made a clever answer? If we extrapolate
from the evidence given in the poem as to her past behavior, her intelligence,
and her morality, we must conclude that she is a sensible young lady, not at all
deceived by the young man‟s sophistry, and that she is holding out for
honorable marriage, whether with this young man or another. The young man
may have “won” this skirmish between the sexes, but only at the verbal level.
In a previous manual 1 wrote that this poem is “not to be taken too seriously
as a reflection of human life, but to be enjoyed for what it is-a virtuoso display
of ingenuity and wit. ” It may be truer to life than at first appears. We are given
a situation where a young man has attempted many times to obtain the
woman‟s favor but has always been refused. Yet the woman by all indications
enjoy his company. She has never told him. “Begone, vile seducer, never
darken my doorway of such a witty and clever young man? It is not quite
possible that the “seduction attempt” has become a little game they play? That
after the first rejection or so, the young man has realized that her virtue is
unshakable, yet keeps on inventing more and more preposterous reasons why
she should yield to him, not expecting her to do so, but for the “fun” of the
thing? If we see the seduction attempt as a “game” which neither of its two
players takes very seriously, it becomes quite believable.
Both “The Apparition” and “The Flea” present an often rejected lover taking
a new and “far-out” approach to winning a woman‟s favors. But in tone the two
poems are radically different. In tone “The Apparition” is dark and menacing;
“The Flea” is light and playful. The speaker in “The Apparition” attempts to
win his lady‟s favors by maximizing her fears of what will happen to her if she
refuses. The speaker in “The Flea” attempts to win they by minimizing his
lady‟s fears of what will happen if she consents. Fear is the weapon of a rapist.
The methods used by the speaker in “The Apparition” are ingenious and
sinister. The methods used by the speaker in “The Flea” are ingenious and
witty.

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Alexander Pope
ENGRAVED ON THE COLLAR OF A DOG
WHICH GAVE TO THIS ROYAL HIGHNESS
The speaker‟s tone is plain enough: it is one of supreme hauteur. The poet‟s
tone is more complex. Is there a bit of pride expressed in the title at being on
such close terms with the King? A bit of flattery for the King in the implication
that no higher honor could befall a dog than to belong to him? But surely some
irony too in having dogs take pride in the station and birth of their owners.
How much more snobbish can a creature get! Yes, a sly dig at snobbery in any
station of life.

W. H. Auden
THAT NIGHT WHEN JOY BEGAN (P. 720)
The two people in the poem have been disillusioned by their experiences
with love. They have found that it is not lasting and that it ends in
disappointment. They have been “burnt” by it. Thus they are deeply skeptical
about their present affair. It begins, as have past affairs, in the joy of sexual
excitement; they are prepared to find in the morning they are still in love; days
pass, then weeks; they begin to realized that they have found a true human
relationship, one rooted in something deeper than sexual attraction.
The basic metaphor two foot travelers cutting across fields that they hope are
the public fields of love where all may travel but that they fear may be private
lands where they will be shot or apprehended for trespassing. The metaphor in
lines 3-4 beautifully combines the visual image of the sun‟s horizontal rays
awakening them from their dream and the metaphorical idea of the
landowner‟s shooting them for trespassing-that is, destroying their temporary
illusion of love. But as they hike for additional miles (days), they outgrow their
nervousness and begin to believe in spiritual peace, for they are not reproached
for trespassing and they can see in the future (through love‟s field glasses)
nothing that is not genuine and lasting love.

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 The rime pattern:
Line 1 and 4 (of each stanza): alliteration and consonance
Line 2 and 3 (of each stanza): alliteration and consonance
Line 1 and 3 (of each stanza): assonance
Line 2 and 4 (of each stanza): assonance

In line 10 the last syllable must be thought of as beginning with r rather than
with p to preserve the integrity of this pattern, and in line 12 the final syllable
must be though o as including the final s (really a z) of his. The whole so
ingeniously worked out, along with the extended metaphor; and the poet‟s
pleasure (and ours) lies partly in the working out of this design.

A. E. Houseman
WITH RUE MY HEART IS LADEN
The poem is an expression of grief for all good friends the poet had who died
in their youth. Though neither the word died nor death is used in the poem, the
fact is conveyed through “had, ” “are laid, ” “and” “are sleeping”. The brevity
and apparent simplicity of the poem make its poignancy seem almost magical.
The magic results from an exquisite choice of diction and a classical perfection
of from. The compound adjectives “rose-lipt” and “light fool” are both
particularized and universal in their application to the blooming beauty and
athletic vitality of the maidens and youths they modify. Their reversed
repetition in the second stanza, attached to different nouns, balances the two
stanzas against each other and binds them together in a pattern of parallelism
and opposition. The word “rue, ” meaning sorrow, is also the name of an herb
with bitter leaves, which readers of Hamlet may remembers as one of the
flowers distributed by the young Ophelia in her naiad scene (4. 5) shortly
before her death. The connotations of “golden”-Precious bright, shining, pure,
true, young-are enriched and deepened for the reader who recalls the dirge
from Cymbeline, addressed another youth who has died young.

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 The landscape of the second stanza is not literally that churchyard cemeteries
where these lads and girls are buried; the point is that after death all brooks are
too broad for leaping and that in the grave all beauty fades.
The car picks up much of the rich alliteration in the poem on a first reading
Analysis discloses that every stressed word or important syllable (I include the
unstressed halves of the two compound adjectives) in the poem except one
alliterates with another:
rue (1), rose-(3), rose-(7), roses(8);
heart (1), had(2);
laden (1), -lipt (3), light-, lad (4), leaping (5), light-, laid (6), -lipt (7);
golden (2), girls (7);
friends (2), foot (4), -foot (6), field, fade (8);
many, maiden (3), many (4);
brooks, broad (5), boys (6).
The only expectation is “sleepings” and it, of course is a rime word.

Gwendolyn Brooks
WE REAL COOL (P. 725)
The placement of the pronouns in this poem gives its rhythm a syncopated
effect appropriate to the jazz culture of the speakers.
The critic who called the poem immoral was oblivious to its dramatic irony
(its tone). The poet does not share the opinion of the speakers that they are “real
cool, ” nor does any moderately good reader, which obviously the critic was
not.

Emily Dickinson
AS IMPRECEPTIBLY AS GRIEF
The excellence of this poem competes with “There‟s a certain slant of light,
” and, like that poem, it represents Emily Dickinson at her best on the subject
of nature. Sometimes she can be trite, trivial or childishly simplified with
nature subjects but here she is not. Perhaps the key to the greatness of both

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poems is in the additional thematic overtones they offer, for life and death-tine-
are their topics, as well as nature. To say that the first stanza states how
“imperceptibly” the summer passed-which is does-is proof of how ridiculous it
sometimes seems to paraphrase Emily Dickinson‟s poetry; for when she is not
being purposely obscure or confusing-and sometimes incomprehensible or
even meaningless-her subjects are directly and immediately revealed. It is the
manner in which she thinks and the technique which she selects to express her
thought that invariably require analysis. This poem elaborates on the growing
sensation that summer is ending. In stanza two, there is a “quietness, ” growing
partly out of the earlier twilight as the days are shorter; stanza three says in
effect that the morning now comes later too; the last stanza simply observes
that the summer has slipped away.
While there is no metaphor for death in this poem (as in “There‟s a certain
slant of light”), there is the pervasive theme of change and the passage of time;
and, if there is a note of pathos, it is that this slipping away of time is so
imperceptible. Loosely speaking, the summer symbolizes the fullness of life;
this makes more understandable the simile using “grief” in the first stanza:
As imperceptibly as grief
The summer lapsed away,
Too imperceptible, at last,
To seem like perfidy.
Grief is a useful comparison anyway, of course, since any reader‟s human
experience would verify that grief, however painful at first, does slip away
gradually in almost unnoticed departure. But to juxtapose grief with summer is
to encourage the association with sadness; hence a note of pathos in the first
stanza. If we carry the metaphor of summer as “life” into the third and fourth
lines, the sadness pervades there, too. Perfidy is the choice and meaningful
word-that is, one would like to lament how the summer-life-slips say, but it
happens so gradually that it cannot be accounted a betrayal.
The thematic progress of the second stanza is enriched by two words,
especially: distilled and sequestered. “Slow change” and “silence” emerge from

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this second stanza, for distillation is of course a time-consuming process, and
quietness is here distilled. We not also Dickinson‟s typical injection of the
everyday word distilled into the discussion of something natural yet mysterious
and sad. Pathos is increased in this second stanza by a rather graceful
personification of Nature, seen as “spending with herself/Sequestered
afternoon” (a circumstance so familiar to the poet herself). The inverted
sentence structure of the first two lines of stanza three is also effective:
The dusk drew earlier in,
The morning foreign shone, -
As courteous, yet harrowing grace,
As guest who would bygone.
While it is the conventional practice of all poets so to distort and compact
their sentences, it is particularly lovely here, combined as it is with fortunate, it
is particularly lovely here, combined as it is with fortunate sound effect (d‟s,
n‟s, r‟s). harrowing is perhaps the most original touch in this stanza, much
more vivid for example than “hurrying” would be, since it implies both
disarray and restlessness on the part of the “guest, ” and this pressured mood
passed on to the “host. ” Harrowing, after all, usually is taken to mean
distressing, vexing, uncomfortable-hence a mutual distress is conveyed. Again,
a personification of morning as “guest” further illustrates Emily Dickinson‟s
habitual and soundly poetic impulse to make “abstracts” (morning, nature;
elsewhere, death) concrete and humanized. Or, as we put it previously, this is
another example of her ability to actualize experience. There is a question, or at
least on ambiguity of punctuation, in this stanza:
The morning foreign shone, -
A courteous, yet harrowing grace,
As guest who would bygone.
On might read “the morning foreign shone” with a pause or a period, since
the idea is that the mornings come later and later as autumn sets in. on the other
hand, the lines could easily read, “the morning foreign shone a courteous, yet
harrowing grace, as guest who would be gone” in other words, the morning is

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also showing, politely, the wish to be on its way, to shorten more and more its
duration. As long as we are playing with punctuation and it is all too necessary,
given the manuscripts of Emily Dickinson‟s poetry-we could also suggest, with
the second punctuation: “The morning, foreign, shone a courteous …”
Like the “light escape” it comments on, the last stanza is the lightest and the
weakest, because of the descent to the prosaic in the last line, “Into the
beautiful. ” The lines, “And thus, without a wing, / Or service of a keel, ”. Are
vivid enough, suggesting again the imperceptible, invisible transport from
summer into autumn. There is no visible transport from summer into autumn.
There is no visible means of transport here, no keel (the main center frame of a
ship, or the ship itself). For some reason-perhaps a wish to subjectively the
summer-the poet chooses to say “our summer” instead of “the summer. ”
Notice too that in the second and fourth lines of each stanza the end words are
more carefully and effectively off-rhymed than usual: away, perfidy; begun,
afternoon; shone, gone; keel, beautiful. The fact remains, though, that the
closing line is weak and falls a little flat.
Yours Winters‟ summary comment on this poem, along with the “There‟s a
certain slant of light, ” and “A light exists in spring, ” is appropriate. He
commends their “directness, dignity, and power … the quality of the phrasing,
at once clairvoyant and absolute, ” which raises them “to the highest level of
English lyric poetry. ”
The subject of the poem is ambivalence about seasonal change. The initial
simile sets the tone: summer lapsed away imperceptibly, as grief lapses
imperceptibly; were the diminution of grief consciously perceived, its passing
would seem to be a perfidious betrayal of the person for whom we grieve. So,
the simile says, the passing of summer evokes an emotion which includes one‟s
love and loyalty, the sadness of loss, and the consciousness of separation. But
how can these emotions be identified with summer, the season o richness and
growth, the apogee of the year to which spring chimps and from which autumn
(in the distinctly, American term) falls? If summer is like grief, what are we
grieving for? “Spring” might be one logical answer-the loss in summertime of

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the excitement of that early time-yet the terms of the poem do not invite such a
comparison.
The grief, is associated with summer‟s relationship to us; it is summer that
passes so imperceptibly that its betrayal of us is almost overlooked. This
personification (overtly revealed in the feminine pronouns) and the constant
tone of regret imply the imaginative act of the speaker: we long for the
personal, permanent love for us of what we love. Why doe the summer betray
us by leaving us? The two middle stanzas present a series of appositive for the
diminution of the season, presenting it in terms of its voluntary withdrawal and
increasing alienation yet without showing any ill will toward those it leaves
behind. These two stanzas also present a series of attempts to pinpoint or define
the precise feelings excited by the imminent departure of summer: is it like an
intensification of quietness? Has nature withdrawn from us as a person might
shut herself up for night, at dusk and daybreak, seem strangely changed, an
earlier darkness and a foreign sunrise. The process resembles the ambivalence
of a dear guest “who would be gone, ” whose gracious behavior is both full
courtesy and deeply distressing.
These attempts at definition reveal the ambiguities of feeling already noted
in the simile of grief in line 1: the increased beauty of “quietness distilled, ” the
sense of being excluded mixed with an understanding approval of nature‟s
sequestration and most of all (placed in the climactic position), the paradoxical
combination of “a courteous, yet harrowing grace, ” But this is a poem about
the “imperceptible, ” and it is to that quality that the poem returns for its
conclusion. Without any of the “perceptible” (and humanly comprehensible)
means of transportation, neither the wing of the bird nor the keel of the boat,
two silent means of departing, “summer made her light escape / Into the
beautiful. ” The guest, though gracious, does not live with us, but elsewhere,
and finally manages to escape. The final line, “Into the beautiful, ” has been
criticized for its abstract vagueness, but the sense of an ideal, abstract realm of
beauty as the proper “home” for this sojourning visitor, this sequestered

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captive, may be appropriate in its vagueness. If the process of its departure is
“imperceptible, ” so too may be its destination.
The music of this poem is muted, as befits its subject. Approximate rimes,
subtle consonant links, delicately unobtrusive alliteration, and the poet‟s
marvelous ear for related vowel sounds all reinforce the elegiac tone. For
example, in the last stanza, the phrase “without a wing” alliterates the initial w
followed by the assonance of short i-but the effect is softened by the fact that
the syllable with-is metrically unstressed, while wing is stressed. The
preponderant consonant sounds in the stanza are the sibilants s of “thus, ”
“service, ” “summer, ” and “escape, ” the crisp t of “without, ” “light, ” „into, ‟
and “beautiful, ” and the k of “keel” and “escape”-consonants that with the W‟s
and I‟s underscore the quickness and lightness of the action being described.
But perhaps the most interesting example of the use of musically is to be
heard in the key term, “imperceptibly, ” a word so proper to its purpose that the
poet reiterates a form of it two lines later. The word has the flickering of its
consonant sounds mp, sibilant c, pt, and bt, all rapidly unobtrusive-and the light
swiftness of its collection of short vowels. It also has an intrinsic rhythm that
finds echoes throughout the poem in words with an elegiac “falling” rhythm:
IM-per-CEP-it-BLY and IM-per-CEP-ti-BLE both alternate stressed and
unstressed syllables, and both occur in perfectly regular iambic lines. The
stresses within the words, however, are not equal: in both, the syllable cep-is
more heavily stressed than the initial im-, and both of those syllable cep-is more
heavily stressed than the initial im-, and both of those syllables receive greater
stress than the final stressed –bly or –ble. Both words, that is, are rapid in
pronunciation (owing to their vowel and consonant combinations) and rise to a
central stress before falling off in a final, very lightly stressed syllable. This
falling effect in a final light stress can be heard as well in such key words as
PER-fi-DY and BEAU-ti-FUL; the elegiac tone is also reinforced by the high
incidence of words that are individually trochaic in rhythm (though they
usually function in regular iambic foot patterns): summer, twilight, nature,
spending earlier, morning, foreign, and so forth.

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Carl Sandburg
THE HARBOR
This poem presents two contrasting scenes: a city slum (in the first five lines)
and its harbor (in the last seven). The pivotal line (6) presents the speaker, who
is out walking passing from the first scene to the second. The city, is large (to
have such extensive slums), and so is the lake (to have a harbor where long
waves break and fling spray on the shoe). The contrast between the two scenes
is one of closeness vs. openness, subjection vs. freedom, ugliness vs. beauty,
the man-made vs. the natural.
It should be clear to any reader, upon examination, that these contrasts are
created not only by the denotations and connotations of the poet‟s words, but
also by their sounds. The first five lines are dominated by the repetition of short
u vowel sounds huddled, ugly, hunger, hunger-huddled, ugly. The prevailing
consonant sounds are h, d, and g. of the words just, cited, huddled has an initial
h and two d sounds (medial and terminal), hunger has an initial h and g, ugly
has a g. This repetition of unappealing sounds, in addition to their unappealing
sense account‟s for the poet‟s using each of the three words twice, and
augmenting them with words like haggard and haunted.
In the last seven lines of the poem, though we still encounter the short u‟s
(under, sun, -flung, fluttering, gulls), they seem less dominant; we are struck
instead by the rich assonance of long vowels-long a as in lake waves breaking,
spray-, great gray: long I as in flying white; and long e as in peering, wheeling
free in the culminating line of the poem. We are also pleased by the
alliterations (blue burst, Long lake, flung … fluttering, great gray), and by the
internal rime (lake, break-).
In summary, the first five lines are harsh in meaning and harsh in sound; the
last six lines are pleasing in meaning and pleasing in sound. Line 6 is
transitional.

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John Crowe Ransom
PARTING, WITHOUT A SEQUEL (P. 726)
The disappointment of first love bears a slightly comic aspect when viewed
from the outside or when looked back on over a perspective of years, but to
those who are actually suffering it, it is undiluted tragedy. We may try to talk
“wisdom” to the disappointed youngster, but how can she understand? Or how
can we understand? “She just doesn‟t realize, ” the oldsters say; “this will be
nothing to her in a few months or years. ” “They just don‟t know, ” the
youngster thinks; “how can they know what I feel?”
John Crowe Ransom catches both the comedy and the tragedy in this wryly
poignant little poem. Observing the termination of a first attachment from a
point of view partly inside and partly outside the heartbroken girl, he is able
both to feel the tumultuous suffering of the girl and to note its theatrical
exaggerations and its humorous ambivalences. The comic aspect are reflected
in the double and triple rimes, many of them slant; in the melodramatic
triteness of the phrase describing the girl‟s attitude toward her letter “which he
so richly has deserved”; in her gloating satisfaction with the letter‟s crushing
language (“And nothing could be better”); Stagy hauteur other command as she
delivers it to the messenger boy- “Into hands” in the solemn pretentious- ness
of the epithet for the messenger boy “The blue capped functioned of doom” in
her mixed feelings as she watches the messenger boy off chopping at once that
he will deliver the letter promptly, which will put her errant lover in his place,
and that it will get lost, allowing one more chance for reconciliation); and in
her exaggeration of the episode‟s significance “the run of her younger years. ”
It is also reflected in the title, where the phrase “without- a Sequel” suggests the
theatrical component of the affair (“Final Parting would have been more
straightforward).
But if we allow ourselves amusement at the girl‟s expense; we must also
bleed with her. The parting hurts. We are moved to pity as the blood drains
from her face and she goes to seek comfort from her father. The fourth and fifth
stanzas are ambiguous. Is it her father or a tree she goes to? Either reading is
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possible. The “oak” may be a metaphor for her father, chosen to connote his
strength and pride. Or it may be literally an oak, one perhaps that her father has
planted by the front door (“lintel”) of the house, a tree which embodies his
strength and through which his spirit seems to speak. At any rate the father, or
the father‟s presence in the oak, tries to calm the daughter gently reproaching
her for the foolishness of her despair. In vain, of course his talk is like the
sound of leaves as it ceases and begins again. There are several double meaning
here. The word sere means old and dry, but also suggests wise (seer). Is there
something dry and meaningless in the wisdom of the father? The word
vaunting applied to a tree would mean large and spreading; applied to a man,
proud. Combined with sere-seer it suggests a gently wry ironic comment on the
father‟s “wisdom. ” Wisdom comes easily to an old man who is himself past
the storms of youth.
The use figurative language is imperative if we are to be faithful to the full
truth and complexity of human feeling. The bitterness of the girl‟s feeling is
summed up in the marvelous metaphor of the last stanza comparing the tread
marks of the bicycle tire to the track of a snake (and to the pattern on the back
of the snake). Both visually and emotionally the metaphor is exact. The girl has
been venomously bitten by her disappointment and hopes that her letter, whose
characters are also snakelike, will bite the offending young man. The physical
effects of the bite (i. e., of her emotion are accurately conveyed through the
paradox of the last two lines: “She stood there hot as fever / And cold as any
icicle. ” Logically the statement is contradictory and impossible, but in the
epistemology of human feeling it is not only true but could be conveyed in no
other way.

Ralph Pomeroy
ROW
The speaker is rowing a flat-bottomed boat on a shallow lake surrounded by
pines. The lake is swampy, with water lilies, croaking frogs, and turtles so
fearless that they seem tame. The day is sunny with a slight breeze that makes

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the water surface seem dappled with “shingles, ” a “roof” over the “murky
floors” of the lake.
The preponderance of imagery in the poem is visual; the only auditory
images are in the onomatopoeia of line 1 (“Slap. Clap”) and lines 4 and 6 (the
repeated “croak”), and in the metaphorical “singing” in the final line. But
because the poem to abounds in internal rime, alliteration, assonance, and
consonance-that is, in imagery predominates. The only line without internal or
connecting sound repetitions is line 19, “roof of the water, ” an important line
conceptually because it imaginatively reinforces the distinction between the
speaker‟s position atop the water and rich activity of the water and its denizens.
So much of the punctuation occurs within rather than at the ends of lines (this is
particularly true of the periods) hat the poem may seem to imitate the action of
rowing, the bisecting activity of dipping the boat.
The metaphor comparing the shining appearance of the pines to the singing
of “green creed” presents the theme of the poem: to the human observer,
interposing himself and his actions into the self-contained natural world, the
harmonies of that world seem like a faith or religion shared only by nature.
Nature in its self-preserving defense metaphorically marshals its forces: they
slap, they send out flotillas, they flare (and-punning-they have “moats”), they
flame, they have dreadnoughts, and no amounts of human digging really
destroy the roof that protects the water world. The only two repeated words are
“croak” (4 and 6) and “water, ” (8 and 19), key terms since they link the
warning sound and the well-defended liquid environment. The title pun
reinforces the impression of noise and motion as representation of a struggle
between the speaker and this world: he can “row” his boat across its surface,
but in so doing he provokes a hubbub of activity, he raises a “row” (rimes with
cow) directed against his intrusion.
But it is probably too sober-sided to insist on major themes in this poem, for
its greatest pleasures derive from the multiple, playful manipulations of sound.

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Edna St. Vincent Millay
COUNTING-OUT RHYME
A counting-out rhyme, as its name implies, is a verse (usually for children)
that involves counting things, often using numbers (“1, 2 Buckle my shoe / 3,
4, Knock at the door …), but just as often not (“Eeny, meeny, miny, mo, /
Catch a Dutchman by the toe …”). They are usually passed down from obscure
origins by oral tradition through generations of children, and they are usually
nonsensical in content.
Millay, however, gives the form artistic treatment. First, she gives it unity of
content. She counts the parts (bark, leaf, wood, stem, twig), usually
distinguished by their color (silver, sallow, yellow, green, pale), of different
species of trees (beech, birch, willow, maple, apple, people, oak, hornbeam,
elder). Second, she gives her verse a subtler and more sophisticated form than
the usual clunking iambic or trochaic rimed couplets. She invents a three-line
stanza with a strict pattern of feminine half-rimes, using trochaic trimester in
the first two lines and diameter in the third, varying this with a high percentage
of run-on lines. Third, obviously enchanted by the sounds of words, Millay
enchants the reader with a dense variety of sound-correspondences (alliteration,
assonance, consonance, internal rime, feminine half-rime), made more striking
by their skillful juxtaposition of euphony (silver, yellow, willow) and
cacophony (Oak for yoke and barn beam).
This poem, all said, may not “say” much, but what it does say, is says
enchantingly. It delights by its sheer love of language and sound.

William Stafford
TRAVELING THROUGH THE DARK
Line 3 makes clear that it is not unusual for dead deer to be found on the
Wilson River road. The only inference to be drawn is that they are hit by autos
as they cross the road on their way to the river, but that most drivers, after the
impact, leave the carcass where it falls and drive on. That the speaker stops-

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even though he was not the one who hit the deer-shows him to be an unusually
responsible person. He has carefully driven around in front of the animal, has
turned down his head-lights-another responsible action-but ahs left the motor
running, hoping to make quick work of pushing the carcass over the edge, nor
stopping too long on the dangerous until road.
That he recognizes an ethical dilemma when he discovers the unborn fawn
still living inside the dead doc particularly marks him out as a thoughtful
person concerned with the preciousness of all life; and that he hesitates-
thinking hard “for us all”-again reveals his deep sense of involvement. Who are
the “us all” for whom the speaker thinks? Himself surely, the unborn fawn
surely, other motorists traveling the Wilson River road, and, beyond that, all
humanity, perhaps all life, which need relationship with other forms of life in
order to exist.
But what are his options? There is no way he can deliver the unborn fawn:
he is hardly equipped to perform a Caesarean in the middle of the road. Nor
could he mother the fawn, were it born. He must either take responsibility for
killing the fawn by pushing its dead mother over the edge, or walk away and
leave the dead doe there, endangering other lives-motorists who might be killed
while swerving to miss the body. There is no choice really. The second
alternative would be equivalent to washing his hands of moral responsibility-
like Pontius Pilate in the Bible. The fact that he hesitates, however-considering
the options-makes us like him. That one “swerving” from what should and
must be expeditiously.
Many of the images have symbolic implications, though perhaps not of the
kind that benefit from being pinned with a label and spelled with a capital “S. ”
the image of “Traveling through the dark” (how different in effect from
“Driving at night”!) suggests the difficulties of living life and having to make
moral decisions with only limited knowledge and with no certain moral
guidance. The cold of the doe‟s body and the warm spot in its side are signs,
not symbols, of death and life. The car, its steady engine purring, its parking
lights “aimed ahead, ” suggests a kind of automated life which never hesitates,

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does not make decisions, and is always ready for action. Its purring engine
contrasts with the stillness of the wilderness (and of the unborn fawn), which
has its own claims on the speaker, and which seems to “listen” (16), as if for his
decision. The red tail-light of the car is a conventional symbol of danger, and
“the glare of the warm exhaust turning red” in which the speaker stands (15)
almost symbolizes his dilemma. He must choose between spilling the warm
blood of the unborn fawn over the edge of the canyon or endangering the lives
of other human beings.
“Canyon” (3) is the only line-end in the poem without any correspondence in
sound to another line-end in its stanza, and even it alliterates with the first line-
end in the following stanza, just two lines away.

Robert Frost
NOTHING GOLD CAN STAY
Another of Frost‟s well-known short lyrics, “Nothing Gold Can Stay” uses
nature as a symbol. Nature‟s first green is gold in two senses: first, the yellow
green color of new growth has a gold-like tint: and second, the new growth is a
metaphorical gold, it is precious because it is the beginning of new growth. But
it lasts only briefly and cannot be made permanent. The delicate patterns and
color of spring soon change. In the last three lines the implications of the
images of the spring changes are expanded upon. The disappearance of spring
parallels the departure of the freshness of the dawn and more importantly, the
fall of mankind from Eden and from the innocence of childhood.
But, even though there is a feeling of melancholy behind the idea of change,
the tone is not pessimistic. Change is in the order of things and nature is
cyclical. The subtle introduction of the human reference to man‟s fall from
Eden is not dwelt upon but is placed in the pattern of change. We are reminded
that man fell from Eden, but that, in Christian terms, he received he promise of
a fuller life to come. Similarly, the departure of spring leads to the fullness of
harvest. Nature‟s first green may be gold, but the harvest with its rich colors is
also gold.

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 The paradox in line 1 is to be explained by the fact that, when leaves first
bud in the spring, they have a golden tint, more gold than green, which they
lose as the leaves grow larger.
The paradox in line 3 has been explained by Alfred R. Ferguson as referring
to much the same thing: “The earliest leaf unfolds its beauty like a flower, “but
I believe it refers to something different. Some trees and shrubs blossom in the
spring before they bear leaves (the plum, for example; also the redbud and
some species of peach and cherry) In botanical language, however, the term
leaf, in its broadest sense, includes all foliar structures of the higher plants,
including the sepals, petals, pistil, and stamens of a flower: all parts of the
blossom, technically are modified leaves. For trees like the plum, therefore, it is
literally true that the “early leaf‟s a flower. “That it remains so only “an hour”
is an overstatement, but the blossoming period of these trees is brief at best;
then the flowers drop off and the ordinary leaves begin.
Frost‟s poem, then, lists four things that have an early but brief period of
perfect beauty (or happiness): the foliage of trees; the plants which blossom
before they bear leaves; the course of human history (as storied in the Eden
myth-or other myths of a “golden age”); and a day (which begins with the fresh
gold-tinted air of sunrise). It ends with a generalization; “Nothing gold can
stay. ” But by this time frost‟s examples have assumed the force of symbols;
they remind us as well of the year (which begins with spring), of the individual
human life (which blooms in youth), and perhaps of love (most blissful in its
early stages). Frost‟s “gold” is a symbol of perfection and his theme is that
most things reach their moment of perfection quickly and return it briefly. His
poem is about the transience of beauty, bliss, youth, spring, and the transport of
early love.

George Herbert
VIRTUE (P. 741)
Three stanzas presenting sweet things that die are contrasted with a fourth
presenting the one thing that does not die. The first three stanzas parallel each

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other: each is an apostrophe beginning with the word “Sweet” and ending with
the words “must die. ” The fourth stanza, which is not an apostrophe, reserves
“sweet” for the third position in the opening line, and ends with the word
“lives. ” The first three stanzas are interconnected because the “day” of the first
stanza may be though of as containing the “rose” of the second, while the
“spring” of the third stanza contains them both. The ordering is also marked by
the opening words of the fourth lines: “For thou …” “And thou …, ” “And all
…”
In stanza 1, the day is presented in an apt metaphor as the “bridal” (wedding)
of the earth and sky, uniting them in light; the metaphor connotes a beginning,
brightness, and hope. The dew is fittingly chosen to mourn the death of the day,
for dew is associated with evening. The dew is both a personification and a
metaphor, both the weeper and the tears that ate wept. The words “to night”
function both as adverb and, because the hyphen has been omitted, as
prepositional phrase in which the noun is a traditional symbol for death.
In stanza 2, through a bold metaphor, the crimson rose is compared in color
to the face of an angry man, and, in an even bolder overstatement, is described
as so bright that it cause tears in an observer who rashly gazes at it without
shielding his eyes (like looking directly at the sun. ) Yet, despised this dazzling
brilliance, it too is doomed to die. Its “root” is ever in its “grave” (a metonymy
for earth). The rose‟s death is a condition of its birth: it dies back into the very
soil from which it sprang; its root is “ever” there.
In stanza 3, the spring is compared metaphorically to a box where “sweets”
lie compacted. (For the seventeenth-century reader the connotations would
suggest, not a box of candy, but a box of perfumes, rose petals, lavender, cedar
sprays, etc. ) But the poet‟s “music” shows that the spring also has its “closes”
and must die like the rest. The “music” may be read literally as well
metaphorically (Herbert was a musician aw well as a poet). The word “closes”
has three relevant meanings: the spring ends or terminates, the metaphorical
box shuts, and a “closes” in music is a cadence or concluding strain.

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 Stanza 4 presents a contrast. A “sweet and virtuous soul, ” it declares, is
immortal. Like “seasoned timber” it never “gives” (buckles or snaps). Even
should the whole “turn to coal, ” it would survive. Spiritual in its origin, and
having preserved its purity and strength through virtuous discipline, it will live
even more intensely after the destruction of every thing physical.

William Blake
INTRIDUCTION TO SONGS OF INNOCENCE
The child upon the cloud substitutes for the traditional Muse. The Lamb
symbolizes innocence. The poet is first inspired by an emotion or idea (stanzas
1-2) then finds words to express that experience (stanza 3), then writes down or
polishes his poems for all to read (stanza 4-5). (In the poem he fashions a pen
from hollow reed and dyes water to make ink. ) In this “Introduction” Blake
indicates the source of inspiration for his poems childhood; their subject
matter-innocence; their intended audience-both children and adults (the last line
indicates that “Every child” may joy to hear them; but line 14 indicates that the
book is for “all” to read); and their tone-pleasant (2), merry (6), cheerful (6),
happy (1), joyous (20). (Actually they are all these and more. )
Lines 1-2 and 9-10 establishes a regular tetrameter pattern with accents on
both the first and last syllables of the line. In scansion the pressure of the
pattern for us to promote the initial prepositions (On, In) and the conjunctions
(And, While) to accented status. Every (20) is pronounced essentially as two
syllables. Dividing the feet after the stressed syllables produces one
monosyllabic foot and three iambs in each line. Dividing the feet before the
stressed syllables produces three trochees and one monosyllabic foot in each
line. It is obviously duple meter but whether one calls it iambic or trochaic is a
purely arbitrary decision.

e. e. cummings
IF EVERYTHING HAPPENS THAT CAN'T BE DONE (P.
743)

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 The subject is love. The season is spring. The tone is ecstatic. Cummings is a
romantic poet for whom, if there is anything more wonderful than being a live
individual with a heart and feelings of one‟s own (a ONE; not a cipher, a blank,
a nothing, an emotionally dead person), it is being one of two such individuals
(two ONES) who achieve identity through love. But being a ONE is
prerequisite, and the poet devotes the first two stanza to establishing that
“there‟s nothing as something [so important] as one. ” Being a ONE, for
Cummings, is a function of feeling, not of intellect. The analytic reason
(symbolized throughout the poem by “books” and in stanza 2 by analytic terms
such as “why, ” “because, ” and “although”) for Cummings deadens and kills,
whereas feeling (symbolized by “buds” and “birds” and “trees”) enlivens and
vitalizes (“buds know better than books” and “boos don‟t grow, ” to expand
Cumming‟s telescoped phrase). The consummation of natural feeling comes
with the mutually realized love of two individuals; and the love theme
(introduced in the third stanza with “so your is a my”) is explicitly stated in the
fourth stanza (“now I love you and you love me”) and received its triumphant
expression in the fifth (where all the pronouns have changed to “we‟s”),
especially in the poem‟s final line, which incorporates, with a neat bit of word
play, the mathematical equation for this identity (“we‟re wonderful One times
ONE”). When such miracles happen (when “everything happens that can‟t be
done”), as they regularly do in the spring, then even “the stupidest teacher”
(representing the intellect again) will dimly guess the miraculous ness of
individuality, feeling, spring, life, and love.
Cummings has constructed his poem on an intricate pattern. Each stanza is
linked to the one that follows (like persons holding hands) by the repetition of
its last word as the first word in the next. Lines 2-4 of each stanza contain a
parenthesis in which life and feelings are contrasted with intellect. Lines 6-8 of
each stanza contain a second parenthesis showing the participants in the poem
to be engaged in a spontaneous joyous dance. Each stanza is additionally
organized by pattern of approximate and perfect times in which lines 1, 4, 9
rime together, and lines 5, 8. the prevailing meter is anapestic (freely mixed

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with iambic and monosyllabic feet, which give if spontaneity and variety), in
which the nine lines of each stanza have four, tow, one, four, one, one, two, and
three feet respectively.
Had Cummings printed the two parentheses of each stanza as one-line stanza
with all lines riming (anapestic aabb4a3). But by breaking up the parentheses, he
introduces in to them two additional rhetorical (line-end) pauses which, without
altering the meter or slowing it down, give it additional spontaneity, variety of
movement, a bit of swirl, reinforcing the dance-like quality of these lines.
Indeed the joyous tone of this poem is as much the resell of the meter as of the
words. Notice, moreover, that line 28, which states the subject of the poem, the
cause of its joyousness, consists of four regular iambic feet, had the poem been
printed, as proposed above, in five-Line stanza with the parentheses compacted
in to one line each, line 28 would be the only one in the poem without a single
anapestic foot. This slowing down of line 28, through the use of exclusively
duple feet, gives it an emphasis appropriate to its thematic importance in the
content of the poem.

A. E. Houseman
OH WHO IS THAT YOUNG SINNER
The poem is satire against the prejudices that cause men to hate and
persecute each other for superficial and accidental differences between them.
The color of one‟s hair, having nothing to do with intrinsic human ability or
worth, symbolizes any such difference. When I first read the poem I identified
it in my own mind because of my American experience with racial conflict
with skin color. I have since learned that the poem was occasioned by the
conviction and imprisonment of Oscar Wilde for homosexuality. Either reading
of the poem is legitimate, and so probably would be such religious or racial
differences as presently divide Protestant and Roman Catholic in Northern
Ireland and Moslem and Jew in the Middle East.
I would call the irony verbal, for the poem gives me no sense of a dramatic
speaker different from the author.

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Walt Whitman
HAD I THE CHOICE (P. 751)

Robert Frost
THE AIM WAS SONG (P. 752)
Walt Whitman defends free verse (in unprimed free verse); Robert Frost
defends metrical verse- “measure” (in rimed iambic tetrameter). The verse
form, in each case, is perfectly chosen for the subject matter. This may seem
elementary, but what would have been the effect if Whitman had defended free
verse in meter, and Frost, meter in free verse?
In Whitman‟s poem even the greatest poetic art is seen as pale and inferior
when set beside nature. The implication for poetry is that the most desirable
poetry will be that which is most natural, most like nature. The further
implication is that free verse is natural and that metered, rimed verse is
artificial. Still another implication is that metaphors, similes, and contrived
paradoxes (“conceits”) are artificial.
In Frost‟s poem successful poetry is seen as an improvement on nature.
Though it uses natural materials, it orders them, imposes form on them, and
thus gives them a power which they do not have in their natural state. In
repeating the words “by measure” in line 13 and placing a period after them,
Frost gives the phrase tremendous emphasis. Song, he insists, is “measured”:
rather than taking form from nature, it gives form to nature. Thus nature is
made humanly meaningful.

William Shakespeare
SONG: HARK, HARK! (P. 754)
Even with onomatopoetic words, we must not assume an identity between
sound and meaning. The French equivalent of “cock-a-doodle-doo” is co co
rice, in German it is ki-ke-ri-ki, in Spanish it is kikiriki; and in Shakespeare‟s
original (unmodernized) text it was cockadiddle-dow.

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Carl Sandburg
SPLINTER (P. 755)
“Thin” and “splinter” (also “cricket”) are phonetic intensives, and in line 4
their effect is reinforced by the short I‟s in “singing” (and, though their effect
on the ear is slight, by those in “It” and “is”). The consonance of “last, ” “first,
” and “frost” “also adds to the effectiveness of this miniature.

Robert Herrick
UPON JULIA’S VOICE (P. 756)
“Silvery” (literally like silver) suggests something precious, beautiful,
smooth to the touch, softly gleaming in color. Julia‟s voice is smooth, soft,
agreeable, and precious to the speaker. “Amber” (a fossilized resin) is a
translucent substance that glows with soft rich golden-yellow light. Julia is
singing and accompanying herself on a lute made of wood but finished with an
amber colored varnish. More importantly, the sound of the lute under her
fingers is softly and richly resonant, golden-toned, the perfect complement to
her voice. It is as if the melodious words she sings each melted into a purely
translucent amber lute.

Robert Frost
THE SPAN OF LIFE
No one who has ever been greeted at the door by an affectionate and
enthusiastic puppy can miss the image implicit in the second line, which is all
the more effective understatement (almost un-statement) of it. [Actually the
Greeks, whose versification was based on duration rather than on accent, had a
name for the second foot in the first line (it was called a colossus) but we see
no reason to burden English students with it. ] Frost‟s title universalizes the
subject of the poem, making the dog a symbol of human as well as of animal
life.

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Alexander Pope
SOUND AND SENSE (P. 763)
Introducing his topic with the general observation that good writing is the
result of art (it looks easy, but mastery is acquired only by long practice), Pope
then states the thesis of his passage in line 4: In good writing “The sound must
seem an echo to the sense. ” He elaborates and demonstrates this thesis
(simultaneously) through a series of five examples, each included within an
iambic pentameter riming couplet. When a poet writes about a gentle west
wind and a smooth-flowing stream, Pope begins, the verse should also be soft
and smooth. (The following scansions represent my sense, and may be
modified to fit yours. )
SOFT is / the STRAIN / when ZEPH- / yr GEN- / tly / BLOWS, /
And the SMOOTH / STREAM / in SMOOTH- / er NUM- / bers
FLOWS. /
The reversal of stress in the first foot gives additional emphasis to “soft, ”
which is the key word in the first line. Most of the words in the line are soft in
sound, especially “Zephyr” whose z-f-r combination of consonants is softer
than the w-st-w-nd of “west wind” despite the latter‟s alliterating w‟s. The in g
“gently” is a j. The explosive is gentled by the following / and long vowel
sounds. “Soft” and “strain” contain gentling o and n respectively. In the second
line the key word “smooth” itself a smooth-sounding word, is emphasized (a)
by the meter, which joins it with “streant” (also smooth in its long vowel sound
and concluding m), and (b) by its repetition in “smoother. ” The fourth foot
contains the soft consonants n and m. the fifth combines the soft fl- with a long
vowel. The repeated s‟s in these two lines (1 suspect) take on the color of their
surroundings.
But WHEN: N/LOUD SURG- / es LASLL / the SOUND- /
Ing SHORE, /
The HOARSE, / ROUGH VERSE / should LIKE / the TOR- /
Rent ROAR. /

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 It is arguable whether the key word “loud” is a loud sound (its vowel, of
course, is a diphthong, and is the sound we use for a cry of pain- “ow!” or
“ouch!”), but it is inarguable that the meter puts a stress on it appropriate to its
importance in the sentence, and that its effect is intensified by its near-rime
with “sounding. ” The onomatopoetic “roar” is emphasized by its anticipation
in “shore, ” “hoarse, ” and “torrent. ” The alliteration of “loud” and “lash” and
the consonance of “hoarse” and “verse” give emphasis and linking to these two
pairs of words. Though none of the words in these two lines sounds particularly
harsh (the roughness and hoarseness, and we may imagine in “rough” and
“hoarse” disappear from ruff and horse), by bringing three accents together in
“hoarse, rough verse, ” the meter puts extraordinary emphasis on words that are
hoarse-meaning and rough-meaning, and pushes together three syllables that do
not articulate easily. The grammatical pause contributes to this lack of
articulation.
When A-/ jax STRIVES / SOME ROCK‟s / VAST WEIGHT /
To THROW, / The LINE / TOOLA- / bors AND / the WORDS /
MOVESLOW. /
It is not just the five stressed syllables in a row that slow down the first line
and give it such a sense of strain and muscular effort, it is the impossibility of
sliding these words easily off the tongue, the muscular effort required in the
reading. The mouth has to be reshaped for each word in the series. Even in a
single word like “strives, ” effort is required, for we must pronounce five
distinct consonant sounds-t-r and v-s with only one vowel sound between them
(v-s is harder than s-t-r). In the second line the two spondees, bringing three
stresses together at two points in the line, slow the line down.
NOT so, / when SWIFT / Ca-MIL- / la SCOURS/ the PLAIN, /
FLIES o‟er / the nu- BEND- / ing CORN, / and SKIMS /
A - LONG / the MAIN. /
In each of these lines the reader has the choice of stressing the first or the
second syllable in the opening foot. I have elected to stress “Not” because (a) it
signals the change from the grunting effort of Ajax to lift his rock to the

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effortless ease of swift Camilla running, (b) the two unstressed syllables
following it speed up the line, and (c) the increased distance separating the first
two stresses give added emphasis to the second stress-“swift” – which is the
key word in the couplet. The name “Camilla” (like “Zephyr”) first Pope‟s
purpose perfectly, so easily do the syllables flow together. (Contrast the effort
and speed involved in saying the three syllables of “Camilla” and of “rock‟s
vast weight. ”) The assonant short I‟s of “Swift, ” “Camilla, ” and “skims”
quicken these words, as well as link them in meaning. In the second line I stress
the initial “Flies, ” again because the reversed stress gives added emphasis to
the more important word in the meaning, and because the unstressed syllables
succeeding ass speed to the line. (The three unstressed syllables together were
not allowed by the strict rules of Pope‟s day, however, not the two consecutive
vowel sounds in “the” and “un-“. Pope‟s un modernized text- th‟ unbending
corn- blends “the” and “un” together in one syllable. ) The notable variation
here, however, is the introduction of a six-foot line (called an “Alexander in”)
into the pentameter pattern. The extra foot, making it possible to divide the line
into two three-foot segments (separated here by a comma), gives the line
additional lightness.
HEAR how / Time-O- / theus‟ VAR- / ied LAYS / sur- PRISE, /
And BID / al- TER- / nate PAS- / sions FALL / and RISE! /
With no other text than that before us, the reader with a sensitive ear can
confidently declare that Pope put the accent on the second syllable of
“alternate. ” With the accent on the first syllable, the meter goes smash. Put on
the second syllable, the line perfectly alternates unstressed and stressed
syllables (it is the most regular line of the whole fourteen), thus echoing the
alternation of passions of which Timothy‟s sings. (British usage, as opposed to
American, even today stresses the second syllable of alternate when used
adjectivally, as we do with the word alternative. )
Pope‟s passage is a brilliant display of technical virtuosity.

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 Alexander PopeTHE RAPE OF THE LOCK
CANTO I : The poem opens with an invocation to the Muse, John Caryll,
and proceeds to outline the general theme, that of a terrible deed which had
been done to a lady. The poet plunges immediately into the story by describing
the details of Belinda‟s boudoir, and of the heroine‟s gradual awakening. Ariel,
her guardian sylph, addresses her in a dream in the form of a beau, and assures
her that departed souls turn into sylphs who are invisible protectors of poor
mortals. He warns her against the evils of vanity, but again informs her that
sylphs are always in attendance in case any harm should befall her particularly
at the hands of a scheming beau. Just then Belinda‟s lap dog, shock, wakes her
up by licking her face, and she proceeds with the rigors of dressing and making
up for the day‟s social activities. Pope then proceeds to give a detailed account
of Belinda‟s cosmetic preparation. He does this by describing her as a goddess
and a priestess, performing sacred religious rites before an altar. The items of
the “Toilette” are itemized for us like offerings to the gods. Gems form India,
perfumes from Arabia, combs, pins, powder-puffs, Bibles and love letters are
arrayed before her in all their magnificence. The harder Belinda works at her
“Toilette” the more beautiful she becomes her blushes become deeper and her
eyes mort sparkling. The canto ends with the sylphs fussing round the heroine
like busy maids in attendance. Some fix her hair, others fold her sleeve, and
some work on her gown. Belinda is now fully prepared for her emergence into
the daylight, where she will face society looking radiantly beautiful.
CANTO II: we are now taken aboard a boat on the river Thames which will
take Belinda the belles to the fashionable meeting place Hampton Court. All
eyes are upon the heroine, who smiles at everyone in order to offend no one.
The two locks of hair that hang behind her are now described and are compared
to traps intended for man‟s capture. The scheming Baron sees the locks and
determines that he will seize them by fair means or foul. In order to achieve his
ambition, he builds an altar from French romances, garters and gloves; he then
lights a fire with old love letters and prostrates himself in prayer. As the boat
makes its way along the Thames, everyone is happy except Ariel, who, sensing

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disaster, calls all the spirits to a meeting. As they swoop down on the boat, their
invisible wings give the impression of a breeze blowing. Ariel opens his wings
and addresses them. He begins by outlining their respective duties: some spirits
control the planets, while others pursue shooting stars; some cause storms at
sea while others guard the British throne. Ariel and his spirits have the task of
looking after the welfare of belles, however, and of maintaining their beauty.
He tells them some great calamity is about to take place, and that Belinda is to
be the victim. The sylphs are therefore assigned various tasks: Zephyretta will
guard the fan, Brilliant the earrings; Momentilla will protect the watch,
Crispissa the loch of hair ; Ariel will guard shock; while fifty sylphs will watch
over the petticoat. He ends his speech by outlining the drastic things that will
befall any sylph who is neglectful of duty. When he finishes immediately
proceed to their stations, where they await the terrible event.
CANTO III : We are now confronted with the boat‟s destination, Hampton
Court. Pope describes it as the place where statesmen plot the downfall of
nations overseas and maidens at home. Queen Anne sometimes takes advice
here, and sometimes tea. The beaux and belles gather. To gossip about topics
ranging from the queen to furniture. It is now afternoon, and Belinda decides
she wishes to play the card game Ombre against two noblemen. The cards are
dealt, and various sylphs descend on Belinda‟s cards to defend them. The card
game now commences, and is described as if it were a major battle. Four
Kings, four Queens and four Knaves set forth to meet in combat. Belinda calls
out that Spades are to be trumps. Belinda‟s cards go into action first, and she is
victorious to begin with. Then the Baron attacks and he overwhelms the belle‟s
cards by clever maneuvering; when his Knave of Diamonds captures her
Queen of Hearts, she sees disaster ahead. But a quick turn of fate brings her
victory. Coffee is then poured, and is described as if it were another religious
ritual. The fumes attack the Baron‟s brain, and he decides to remove one of
Belinda‟s locks. Taking a pair of scissors in his hand, he places them behind
the lock, whereupon the sylphs spring to warn the belle, but in vain. The Baron
snips her lock cutting a sylph in two as he does so and Belinda‟s screams of

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horror fill the air. The prize is won, and the Baron is full of glee, claiming that
his name will be immortal because of this deed. The canto ends with a few
lines on the power of steel; steel, Pope tells us, destroyed the labors of the gods
when it destroyed Troy, and now it has ravished of the unfortunate belle
Belinda.
CANTO IV: The canto opens with a description of Belinda‟s almost
unbearable anguish over the of her beloved lock. We are now introduced to the
melancholy spirit Umbriel, who immediately goes underground to the cave of
the goddess Spleen. She is in her dismal grotto with her handmaids Ill-nature
and Affectation. Foul vapors hang over the place, and objects like teapots and
jars spring to life. Umbriel finds Spleen, and delivers a speech in which he tells
her of Belinda‟s plight, and asks if belle could possibly be affected with
Chagrin. Spleen fills a bag with such strange items as sighs and sobs, then fills
a vial with equally strange things like grief‟s and tears. Umbriel takes the bag
and the vial back to earth, where he finds Belinda woebegone; he opens the bag
above her head, and releases the furies. Belinda, suddenly enraged, bemoans
her lost lock, but swears that she will get vengeance, and that the prize will not
remain in the Baron‟s hands. She asks Sir Plume to recover her lock from the
Baron; Sir Plume, a foppish fellow, makes a feeble protest to the Baron, which
he ends by striking his snuff-box. The Baron shows contempt in his reply, and
adds insult to injury by displaying the stolen lock on his finger. Umbriel then
breaks the vial, releasing sorrows. Belinda becomes mournful, and goods over
the terrible fate that has befallen her. She wishes that she had never seen
Hampton Court, and that she could find some lonely isle to live on, where
things like this can never happen. She than remembers the omens that had
warned her earlier in the day, and that she had ignored. The lone lock hanging
behind her remains as a permanent reminder of the calamity which has
overcome her.
CANTO V: Everyone is deeply moved except the Baron, and now Clarissa
starts to speak. She asks why it is that women of great beauty are always
admired so much, when the virtue behind the beauty is what should be revered.

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She philosophizes that all the vain frivolities of the day do not succeed in
banishing old age or curing small-pox, and that good humor and honor are far
more powerful than empty beauty. She receives no applause. Instead, Thalestris
calls for war, and immediately a furious battle ensues. Nothing Homer
described equals this scene as beaux and belles enter the fray with gusto.
Umbriel watches the battle, while some of the other spirits take part in it. Sir
plume is killed when Chloe frowns at him, but comes to life again when she
smiles. Belinda takes some snuff between her thumb and forefinger, and throws
it in the face of the Baron who sneezes. The belle now removes a hairpin and
threatens to use it as a dagger unless the lock is handed over. The Baron pleads
for mercy, but Belinda insists, and her cries are louder than of Othello in his
anguish. Meanwhile, the lock has disappeared. Some people think it has gone
to the moon, where very strange are found, like broken vows and chains for
yoking fleas. Suddenly, the muse sees the lost lock, which has changed into a
star, shooting through the skies followed by a trail of hair. The heavens glitter
with the light it sheds, and the sylphs pursue it on its journey. Fashionable
society will be able to see it forever from the mall, and lovers will assume that
it is Venus. Pope ends his poem by consoling Belinda : when she and all her
contemporaries are dead, the lock of hair which once adorned her beautiful
head will shine on in the sky as a monument to Belinda is beauty. And her
name will thereby be inscribed among the stars, renowned and immortal.

Canto I:
The poem opens with a statement of how great injuries can be caused
through reasons of love, and of the strife that can be created because of
insignificant events. The poet invokes his Muse, Caryll, and introduces the
heroine of the poem, Belinda. He asks what possible reason there could be for
such a “gentle Belle” to reject a lord, for the lord‟s audacity, and for the lady‟s
ensuing anger.

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 Pope is here using the traditional epic techniques of making a “proposition, ”
or statement of contents, for the poem which follows, and an invocation to the
Muse.
He establishes the mock-heroic tone of the work immediately by making his
Muse John Caryll, who had suggested that Pope write the poem to heal the
breach between the two families. Lines 7 to 10 suggest vaguely that not all
belles are necessarily gentle, nor all lords well-bred. His reference to “Little
Men” in line 11 is an ironic comment on epic heroes, as well as on the fact
Lord Peter was a small man. Belinda is Arabella Fermor.
The story proper begins with the sun shining through white curtains, opening
Belinda‟s eyes, which are brighter than the daylight is self. It is noon, the
fashionable time for lap dogs and lovers to awake. To summon her servant,
Belinda rings a handball, knocks on the ground with her slipper, and presses
her watch, which makes a “silver Sound. ” She falls asleep again, and her
guardian Sylph summons a dream to come to her, in which he speaks to her in
the shape of a handsome Beau.
Note how the mock classical formality of line 13 gives way to the 18 th
Century delicacy of line 18. The almost cynical coupling of lap dogs and lovers
is tempered somewhat by the delicacy of the couplet itself. Lines 21 to 26
contain a good example of an epic technique used by Pope; that of contacting
the hero during sleep. Here, of course, the convention has been placed in an 18
th century setting, although the absurdity is modified by a tone of genteel
admiration for Belinda‟s serenity.
Ariel, disguised as a Beau, addresses Belinda as the ward of the Sylphs. He
warns her that, if she has taken heed to her education by nurse and priest, she
should be aware of her own worth and listen to advice from powers above
mankind. She is assured of being well guarded by the invisible spirits of the
lower sky, who are at all times hovering round such public places as the Ring.
The speech opens in the manner of epic delivery, and even the phrase
“distinguished Care” is a direct translation from the Iliad. The nurse and the

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priest were considered in those days the chief sources of superstition, and the
images in lines 33 and 34 are taken from hymns to the Virgin Mary. The
Militia of the lower sky refers to aerial, rather than ethereal sylphs, and the
Ring they protect was a circular carriageway in Hyde park popular with
fashionable society.
Ariel reminds Belinda that her guardian spirits, who act as her carriage,
horses and footmen, were once beautiful earthbound creatures like herself, and
had been transformed into sylphs when they died. He also stresses the fact that
woman‟s vanity does not vanish after death, but continues to make her
interested in such social niceties as gilded carriages and Ombre, a popular card
game.
Pope, in the deliberately high-flown style of the poem, is gradually setting
the scene for the mock drama which is to ensue. The passing of souls from one
body to another mentioned in these lines is called “metempsychosis. ” Pope got
the idea from Ovid via the 17th Century poet Dryden. The reference to the card
game Omber is important, since the game plays a large part in forty cards, the
value of the cards depending on their color and whether they were trumps.
The sylph proceeds to outline the various types of spirits into which the souls
of the dead are transformed. This is determined by “their first Elements”; the
spirits of fiery shrews become salamanders, for example, soft minds become
nymphs, while prudish spirits remain earthbound as gnomes, prowling around
in search of mischief. Flirts, on the other hand, become sylphs, flitting and
capering through the air.
Pope is here drawing on the old idea that a person‟s character was formed
according to the proportion of the elements in his body. He cleverly outlines
the spirits in relation to their corresponding terrestrial elements: salamanders
(fire), nymphs (water), gnomes (earth) and sylphs (air). He uses the word
“fiery” in line 59 as a pun, referring to both the nature of the shrew and the
elements fire. The phrase “Fields of Air” in line 66 is taken directly from
Virgil‟s Aeneid.

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 Ariel proceeds to assure Belinda that any belle who rejects mankind is
automatically protected by a sylph, who has the ability to adopt any sex or form
the treacherous design of scheming males at balls and masquerades, when a girl
is most vulnerable. Ariel answers his own question by telling her that the
sylphs should get credit for what mortals normally call “honor. ”
Pope is making some references here to contemporary 18th Century society.
“Midnight Masquerades, ” for example, were under attack at the time as being
immoral assemblies slang word for a showy type of man. Lines 77 and 78 are
almost identical with a couplet from Dryden‟s Hind and the Panther, and is
another example of Pope‟s willingness to borrow from earlier sources.
Belinda receives a warning that belles who are too come under the influence
of the mischievous gnomes. These spirits work to inflate a maiden‟s pride, fill
her mind with flirtatious thoughts, and at the appearance of nobility, redirect
her innocence onto downward path of the coquette. The sinister gnomes are, in
short, forever plotting to besmirch a girl‟s virtue.
Pope maintains a tone of gentle irony in this passage, directed against the
modish-and often hypocritical-attitude to female chastity which prevailed in
18th Century society. The phrase “sweeping Train” in line 84 is a cynical dig at
the foppish dress of the aristocracy, and is taken straight from Dryden‟s Aeneid.
The idea of the gnomes instructing belles in the art of flirting is borrowed from
an article in the contemporary train the young in the art of ogling.
Ariel reassures Belinda that when women are in danger of falling in this
way, the sylphs are there to protect them. This they do almost cunningly,
replacing one beau‟s advances with another‟s, insuring that the malice of one
approach. Although mere mortals call this apparently fickle feminine behavior
“levity, ” it is, in fact, divinely planned by the sylphs.
Again pope continues his tongue-in-cheek commentary on the superficial
flirtations, devoid of any emotional depths, which prevailed in his day; he
attributes them to supernatural design rather fashionable shallowness. The word
“impertinence” in line 49 means “something trifling, ” and the reference to “the

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moving Toyshop of their Heart” comes from another Spectator article, in which
the female heart is described as a toyshop. The “sword-knot” in line 101 was
the ribbon made by a belle and tied round the hilt of her beau‟s sword. This
whole passage is an example of Pope‟s mock-heroic treatment of the
supernatural interventions of classical epics.
Ariel now introduces himself by name, and tells Belinda that he has
descended from the air to protect her, since he received advance warring of
some disaster about to befall her. He has no idea what the terrible event will be,
but gives her dire warning to beware particularly of Man. Just then Shock,
Belinda‟s lap dog, wakes her with his tongue, and she opens her eyes. The first
thing she sees is a love letter, but the vision in her dream has vanished.
This passage contains several samples of Pope‟s habit of borrowing ideas
and devices from other poets. The “Protection” technique in line 105, for
example, comes from the Iliad, while line 105is a direct copy from Dryden‟s
way of starting a narrative poem. The remainder of Ariel‟s speech, from line
107 to 114, is reminiscent of Uriel and Gabriel‟s speeches in Milton‟s Paradise
Lost. The “clear Mirror” and “ruling star” in line 108 are images used together
in Plato‟s Timaeus. The warning technique between line 112 and 114 was used
often in classical epics, e. g., Hector‟s ghost warning Aeneas to flee on the
night Troy was sacked in Virgil‟s Aeneid. The name “Shock, ” given to
Belinda‟s lap dog, imported into England at this time.
This begins the description of Belinda‟s boudoir and her preparations for the
day‟s activities. Amidst silver vases-containing, presumably, cosmetics-
Belinda admires herself in the mirror. Her image is described as a goddess, she
herself as a priestess, and her furniture as an alter. She proceeds to lay out the
clothes and accessories with which she is going to adorn herself.
Pope describes the ritual of Belinda‟s “Toilette” with epic solemnity. The
vases in her boudoir are arranged to suggest mystical rites reminiscent of the
ancient classics, and this is reinforced by the allusion to Belinda‟s image as a
goddess and to herself as a priestess making offerings on an altar of furniture.

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The mock –heroic tone is sustained with superb control throughout this whole
passage, to the end of the canto.
There now follows a detailed description of the contents of Belinda‟s
boudoir. Game from India, perfumes from Arabia, and combs made of tortoise
shell ivory are arrayed, as well as “Puffs, Powders, Patches, Bibles, Billet-
doux” –a line often quoted from the poem. Belinda proceeds to adorn herself
and apply the cosmetics which will heighten her natural beauty, making her
blushes more pure and her eyes more sparkling. The canto ends with the sylphs
fussing round Belinda, acting as hairdressers and handmaids.
The references here to India and Arabia are examples of Pope‟s occasional
comments in the poem to places and events outside the rarified atmosphere of
upper-class London society. The famous line 138, quoted above, is in fact a
parody of the line “Rocks, Caves, Lakes, Fens, Bogs, Dens, and shades of
death” from Milton‟s Paradise Lost. In line 139, Pope is parodying the
preparation of the epic hero for war, and it could well have been copied from
Dryden‟s line, “I see fair Helen put on all her Charms, ” The last line of the
canto is a direct references to the Iliad, and the “Betty” in this line is in fact
Belinda. Pope borrowed the names Betty and Belinda from Congreve‟s play
Old Bachelor.

CANTO II:
Belinda sets forth a trip on the Thames to Hampton Court. She is compared
to a sunbeam because of her radiant beauty, and all eyes are upon her. Around
her neck she wears a cross, her mind is lively and her looks are alert. She grants
everyone the favor of her smiles, and if she has faults, they are certainly well
concealed beneath her sweet exterior. In any case, one glance at her beauty
would make you forget any blemishes in her character.
In his use of exaggeration, Pope is pocking gentle fun at Belinda, who is
described in the same way goddesses were described in ancient epics.
Belinda‟s trip on the Thames is reminiscent of Aeneas‟ voyage on the river

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Tiber as outlined in Virgil‟s Aeneid. The word “ease” in line 15 is used in the
18th Century sense of a quality arising from good breeding.
We are now introduced to the two locks of hair that adorned Belinda‟s neck.
They spell doom to mankind, and are compared to bird traps and fishing lines
created to lure and ensnare some unfortunate male.
Pope really becomes expansive here in his mock-epic description. The poet
is here using a traditional Greek image borrowed by English writers. Dryden
brought this idea into some of his poetry, and Milton referred to women‟s hair
as a net for trapping men.
The lord-called here the “Baron” –now makes his appearance. He sees the
locks, and immediately lays plans to obtain them by fair means or foul. We are
told that when a lover wants his way, few inquire as to his method of attack.
The lord now builds an altar to the Goddess of Love, composed of twelve
French romances, three garters, and a glove, all of which all relies of his past
love affairs. He lights a fire the to Goddess with love letters, and fans the
flames with sight of love. He throws himself down in fronted of the alter and
prays that he might win the hair and keep it. Half of his prayer is granted, while
the wind blows the other half away.
The traditional epic hero is being satirized here with devastating irony.
Praying to the gods before entering battle was, of course, a traditional ancient
ritual, and in this passage both the hero and the tradition are mocked by making
them appear ludicrous. The antithesis “By Force … or by Fraud” in line 32 is a
popular one in epic poetry. The lord‟s altar-building described between lines 36
and 42 is almost identical to an incident in Chaucer‟s Knight‟s Tale, and the
reference to the wind blowing half the prayer away comes from Virgil‟s
Aeneid.
The boat taking Belinda, together with other belles and beaux, to Hompton
Court, makes its way over the waves to the sound of music. Belinda smiles, and
the whole world brightens except Ariel, the sylph, who broods over the
forthcoming tragedy. He calls a meeting of all the sylphs, who descend upon

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the ship immediately. Their fluttering whispers are taken by the passengers to
be gentle winds.
Pope is again employing the classical device of the gods directing the destiny
of mortals. The image of Ariel, the sylph, brooding alone and unseen amidst
the happy throng is again a ludicrous one in keeping with the general spirit of
the poem. The “floating Tydes” of line 48 is taken straight from Dryden, and
the word “Denizens” in line 55 is used to mean “foreigners who have become
citizens. ” The idea of regimenting the spirits in line 56 was a popular one in
Pope‟s day.
The sylphs are described here in detail. They are too transparent to be seen
by mortal eyes. They flit around in the breeze, some unfolding their wings in
the sunlight, others floating freely in the bright light, their wings changing
colors to match the skies, Ariel, who is slightly larger than the rest, sits on the
boat‟s mast, unfurls his wings, raises his wand to get attention, and addresses
the gathering of sylphs.
The allusion to “filmy Dew” in line 64 comes from the old myth that
gossamer, which the sylphs resemble, was made from dew. The changing
colors of the sylphs to match the skies is reminiscent of a reference to “colours
dipt in Heav‟n” which Milton makes in Paradise Lost. By making Ariel taller
than the rest, Pope is sticking to the epic tradition that the hero was always
taller than his followers. Ariel‟s wand in line 72 is colored blue to blend the
sky.
Ariel begins his speech to the sylphs, to their female counterparts, the
sylphids, and to the other species of spirits, by outlining their respective duties.
Some flit around the air, others back in the sun; some guide the plants, others
have the less dignified job of following shooting stars; some inhale the mists of
the lower atmosphere, while others dip their wings in the rainbow; some cause
storms to rage on the sea, and others cause the gentle rain to fall; some guide
and guard the ways of men; of these the most elite are chosen to protect the
British throne.

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 Again Pope is using a classical epic concept here in a gently ironic way. The
cataloguing of the different occupations of divine creatures was a traditional
part of epic poetry, and is found in such works as Virgil‟s Aeneid and Milton‟s
Paradise Lost. Line 80 is copied from the Iliad. The reference to British royalty
in line 90 shows that no level of society escaped Pope‟s satire.
The chief sylph proceeds to outline for the assembled spirits the task at hand,
namely the guarding and from blowing away their face powder; stealing colors
from rainbows to be used as tints; curling hair and improving blushes; or
instructing the belles, through dreams, to alter the frills on their petticoats.
Pope is pocking fun at feminine vanity in this passage. The absurdity of the
switched roles of gods to sylphs and Greek heroes to 18th Century belles
becomes increasingly pronounced with every detail Pope outlines-shields and
armor being transformed to petticoats, for example.
Ariel now warns them of the impending disaster which lies in wait for the
fairest belle of all, Belinda. The Fates have kept the details a secret, however,
so he proceeds to outline some of the disasters that could possibly overtake her.
Belinda may tarnish her honor or break a China jar; perhaps she will forget to
pray or to attend a masquerade; at a ball she may lose her heart or, worse, her
necklace; she may even lose her lap dog, Shock. He then assigns special tasks
to individual sylphs, naming each one as he does so: Zephyretta guards the fan;
Brillante the earrings; Momentilla the watch; Crispissa the favorite lock of hair;
while Ariel himself has the honor of guarding Shock.
The wearing of forthcoming disaster occurs time and time again in classical
epics, and Pope uses it here in true mock-heroic fashion. His irony is in full
swing when he lists the possible disasters that could befall Belinda, more
important than staining brocade, for example, more important than staining
honor. The names Pope gives the sylphs are delightfully appropriate to the
fragile portrait he has drawn of them.
Fifty specially selected sylphs are given the job of tending Belinda‟s
petticoat, which requires such a large number because of its width and

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awkwardness. Ariel then ends his speech by issuing a dire warning to spirits
who in any way neglect their duties. Some will be bottled up and others
transfixed with pins; some cast into a bitter lake, others stuck in the eye of a
needle; some shall have their wings glued with gum, while others will be
shriveled up; some shall suffer Ixion‟s fate on a wheel, and the remainder will
choke in fumes of burning chocolate over a foaming sea.
Pope is making directs reference here to the epic shield as used in the Iliad,
the shield becoming, in this case, a petticoat. The punishments to be meted out
to wayward sylphs are in Hades as outlined in Virgil‟s Aeneid. The word
“Bodkin” as used in line 128 is a needle with a blunt point; elsewhere in the
poem it has other meanings. Ixion was a king in Greek mythology whom the
gods punished by strapping him to an eternally rotating wheel.
At the end of Ariel‟s speech, the sylphs come down from their perches on
the boat‟s sails, some to guard Belinda‟s hair and others her earrings. The canto
ends on a note of tension, with the spirits breathlessly awaiting the dire event.
The end of the canto leaves the reader in suspense, again with mock
solemnity and classical style. The description of the sylphs descending on
Belinda “Orb in Orb” in line 138 is a parody of the angels in Paradise Lost.
The last line, in which the catastrophe is anticipated, is an imitation of a line in
the Iliad.

CANTO III:
The canto opens with a description of the majestic towers of Hampton Court,
the destination of the boat carrying Belinda, the beaux, the belles, and the
sylphs. It is here, Pope tells us, that Britain‟s statesmen plan the downfall of
foreign tyrants, and Queen Anne takes advice-and tea.
Pope directs his satire here against contemporary British royalty and
aristocracy. There is more than a touch of irony in his referring to the victims of
British imperialism as “tyrants” and in his making Queen Anne take advice and
tea in the same line. This figure of speech, in which a single verb-in this case

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“take” –has as it object two incongruous words for comic effect-in this case
“Counsel” and “tea” –is called zeugma. The “three Realms” are England,
Wales and Scotland.
The beaux and belles, whom Pope calls “the Heroes and the Nymphs, ”
arrive at Hampton Court and indulge in discussing various topics of great
interest: who gave a ball or paid a visit to whom; the glory of royalty or the
charm of an Indian screen; the meaning of glances. Characters are torn to
shreds, and conversation is interspersed with the taking of snuff, the fluttering
of fans, laughter and, of course, ogling.
This is a delightful comment on the shallowness and frivolity of
contemporary society, written in a gently ironical tone. Indian screen had
become very fashionable in 18th Century England, and the taking of snuff
became popular in Queen Anne‟s reign.
It is now afternoon, the time of day when judges and juries get hungry and
sentence men to death so that the may eat. The labors of the “Toilette” are over,
and Belinda wishes to play Ombre, the card game, with two knights. The cards
are death, and the sylphs descend immediately upon Belinda‟s important cards:
Ariel sits upon a Matador, and the other sylphs sit on cards in order of their
importance. Pope informs us that sylphs, like women, are fond of social
position.
Pope draws on many classical epic conventions in this passage, which ideas
into the description of the card game seen as a major battle. Lines 21 and 22,
referring to the death sentence, contain a scathing comment on the callousness
of the contemporary judiciary system.

Emily Dickinson
I LIKE TO SEE IT LAP THE MILES (P. 764)
This poem is n extended description and personification of a railroad train.
By ascribing to a train the qualities of an animate being (personification) the
poet gives a graphic and vivid description of it. The poet pictures he train just

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as a child might; it seems to be some kind of gigantic animal which can lap up
miles and lick off valleys as if they were nothing. The “prodigious” (gigantic)
train eats at tanks, steps around mountains, peers haughtily into the
insignificant houses by its roadbed, slithers through a rock quarry, all the while
hurrying itself to its own stable door-the depot where it stops.
While the poem uses a childish view and at times childlike terminology
(“horrid, hoot in stanza, ” “chase itself down the hill”), there is nothing childish
about its structure. The entire statement is made by indirection. That is, the poet
never tells the reader that she is describing a train; rather, she gives a
description so accurate and imaginative that the reader sees the train for
himself. The metaphor which is used throughout the poem is that of some kind
of huge, snorting animal which rushes over the land, complaining and shouting
then stops at its own door. In this technique the poet captures at once the
behavior of a train, which certainly does rush headlong over the land, taking
mountains and valleys in its stride and shrieking as it goes; and at the same
time she captures the significance of this behavior. The only difference
between the train and a monster is that the train is under the control of
something rational. It does not go on a rampage forever, but stops where it
belongs. Two words in the last stanza, “docile” and “omnipotent, ” are
particularly significant. The train, a huge piece of machinery, ought to be
omnipotent or all powerful. It is not, however; it is docile, or obedient, because
despite its physical power it is controlled by the mind of man. This is why it is
“punctual as a star”; this is why it always stops where it should.
The basic metaphor of the poem compares a train to a horse, though neither
train nor horse is named in the poem. The subject is a train because it laps miles
and valleys up, feeds itself (takes water) at tanks, peers (with its headlight) into
shanties by the sides of roads, hoots (with its whistle), is punctual, and stops
“docile and omnipotent” obedient to the engineer but tremendously powerful)
at its stable (station or roundhouse). It is a horse because it laps. Licks, feeds,
steps, peers, has ribs, crawls, complains, chases itself, neighs, and stops at a

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stable, it is a whole train rather than just a locomotive because it chases itself
downhill.
The most unusual technical feature of the poem is that each of the first three
stanzas ends with a run-on line. These run-on lines give the poem, or the train,
a continuous forward motion (there are no periods until the end of the poem), a
forward motion that finally grinds to an abrupt halt on the word “stop” (line
16). The stop-it must be a strong one to stop a train-is made strong in a number
of ways: first, the word stop itself stops suddenly, ending with an explosive
consonant; seconds though in a normally unstressed position, the word receives
a strong metrical stress (with the partial exception of the preceding line, which
slows the train down, this is the only line in the poem stressed on the initial
syllable); third, it is followed and preceded by grammatical pauses; fourth, it is
followed and preceded (on the other side of the grammatical pauses) by
stressed syllables, with one of which it has assonance and with the other of
which it alliterates. All these features emphasize or isolate the word stop in a
remarkable way. The phrase that follows-“docile and omnipotent” –is a
beautiful expression of power at rest.
But before the train comes to a stop, it makes a variety of motions and
sounds in the first two lines the regular meter and the predominance of I‟s give
the train speed, while at the same time the monosyllabic words ending in p or k,
found throughout the first stanza, give it the clippety-cloppety-clackety sound
of iron wheels going over joints in the rails. In line 4 the big word “prodigals, ”
set off between commas, slows the line down as the train slows down to “step”
around a curve-an effect that is repeated in line 6. The division of what would
normally be line 9 into two lines, comma-interrupted, again slows the train
down, this time to a crawl, as it goes through a tunnel, tooting its whistle each
inch of the way. The three trochaic words in succession “horrid, hooting
stanza” – convey the regularity and repetition “horrid, hooting stanza” –
convey the regularity and repetition of the whistle‟s sound, intensified by the
narrow walls of the tunnel. The onomatopoetic word “hooting” sounds like
tooting but alliterates with “horrid, ” thus emphasizing the repetitiveness of the

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sound while also retaining the metaphoric sense that this is a creature rather
than a machine.
This brief analysis by no means exhausts the adaptation of sound to sense in
this poem, but it perhaps indicates the chief features. The poem employs
approximate rime (consonance) in even numbered lines. Lines 8 and 16 contain
overstatement.

Ted Hughes
WIND (P. 765)
The poem describes a house and the surrounding countryside during a
hurricane. The wind is accompanied by rain during the night (stanza 1); the rain
ceases with morning, but the wind continues throughout the day. In the last two
stanzas the poet and his companion sit before the fire, presumably that evening,
but can concentrate on nothing but the tremors of the house and the sounds of
the storm.
Throughout the poem the poet uses violent images to convey the violence of
the storm.
Many of the images are sound images, and these are reinforced by the use of
onomatopoetic words (“crashing, ” “booming, ” “drummed, ” “bang, ” “flap, ”
“rang, ” “shatter”) and effective use of sound repetitions. In the first stanza, for
instance, the alliteration of (“woods, ” “winds, ” “window, ” “wet”) is
accompanied by a remarkable series of repeated d‟s (“woods, ” “darkness, ”
“winds, ” “stampeding, ” “fields, ” “window, ” “floundering, ” “astride, ”
“blinding”), k‟s (“crashing, ” “darkness, ” “black”), and b‟s (“booming, ”
“black, ” “blinding”). The w‟s are appropriate to the whoosh of the wind, the
d‟s, k‟s, and b‟s to the thudding, crashing, booming, and banging noises caused
by it. In line 14 the onomatopoeic is reinforced by assonance (“bang, ” “vanish,
” “flap”). In line 15-16 rhythm also contributes in a remarkable way, the series
of stressed syllables I “BLACK-/ BACK GULL BENT like an I-ron BAR
SLOW-ly” reinforcing the visual slowness. Similar effects may be observed
throughout the poem.
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 The poem uses various kinds of rime, mostly very approximate, following
the scheme abba except in stanza 3, which is abab. The rhythm moves very
freely around what is basically a five-beat line.

Gerard Manley Hopkins

HEAVEN, HEAVEN (P. 766)
The speaker is a nun taking the vows that commit her to the cloistered life of
the convent. This life, dedicated to religious meditation and the worship of
God. Is metonymically represented by “heaven” and metaphorically
represented as a “heaven” or sheltered place. In the extension of the metaphor,
the sea represents life in the outside world and the storm are especially violent
commotions in that life-passions, desire, appetites. The “heavens” are pictured
in the first stanza as gardens or sheltered fields (as inside a convent wall), in the
second stanza as harbors protected from the ocean swells. “Spring” (2) refers
both to springs of water sources of pure refreshment-and to the mildest season
of the year. Free from wintry storms. “Lilies” (4), because of the pure white
color of Easter lilies, are a traditional symbol of purity, chastity, religious
worship, absence of sexual passion. Be sure your students realize that “blow”
(4) here means “blossom, ” not “sway in the wind. ”
The basic stanza pattern is iambic a3 b2 b5 a3, but there are many variant feet.
In the last line the substitution of anapests for iambs in the last two feet gives
the line a swinging motion that imitates its meaning. The effect is enhanced by
the use of monosyllables, by the extreme lightness of the unstressed syllables,
and by the alliteration of “swings” and “sea. ”

Wilfred Owen
ANTHEM FOR DOOMED YOUTH
The octave has its geographical setting on the battlefield (since this is a
world war I poem, in France. ) The sestet has its geographical setting back
home (since Owen was an English poet, in England). The octave concerns the
death of soldiers in battle. The sestet concerns the bereavement of friends and

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families back home. The imagery of the octave is primarily auditory. The
imagery of the sestet is stander. (Line 8 is transitional: the “sad shires” are back
in England. This line connects the deaths to the bereavement and shifts the
geographical locus from battlefield to home. ) Both octave and sestet are
introduced by questions.
Octave and sestet are unified by the central metaphorical image of an
Anglican funeral service. Neither the literal terms of this metaphor (battle and
bereavement) nor the figurative term (church funeral service) is name, so this is
a metaphor of the fourth form. The terms of the central metaphor are arrived at,
as it were, by adding up the subsidiary figures and drawing a total. In the
octave, at least, the central metaphor emphasizes contrast more than similarity,
for the point is that these soldiers will never have a church funeral. Instead of
the items in the second column of the list below (the figurative terms), they will
have only the items in the first column of the list below (the figurative terms),
they will have only the items in the first column (the literal terms):

Literal Figurative
Owen‟s poem anthem
Monstrous anger of the guns passing-bells
Rapid rifle fire orisons
Wailing shells choirs singing
Bugles calling voices of mourning
Glimmers of good-byes in boy‟s candles held by altar boys
eyes
Pallor of girls‟ brows pall-cloth on coffin
Tenderness of patient minds flowers
Dusk coming each evening drawing-down of blinds
The last metaphor on this list does not belong to the funeral service image,
but it too is associated with the formal observance of death. (In addition to the
metaphors, the octave uses considerable personification: guns are angry, rifles

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stutter and patter out prayers, shells wail and are Cemented, bugles call, shires
are seed. Words like “monstrous, ” “stuttering, ” and “demented” suggest that
the noises of battle are like those of a madman. )
Many will identify the “boys” with the “doomed youth” and read these lines
as referring to the gleam in the eyes of the dying soldiers on the battlefield.
Candles at a church funeral, however, are not held by the dead man but by
attendants (altar boys). The logical organization of the sonnet, moreover, places
this scene back home rather than on the battlefield. The boys and girls of the
sestet are younger brothers, sisters, sweethearts, or other persons close to the
dead.
The main point of the poem is that a church funeral service would be a
“mockery” for these dead soldiers. Funeral services are a means of ritualizing
or giving dignity to human death. These soldiers, however, did not die a human
death; instead, they were slaughtered like “cattle. ” The dignity of a funeral
service would be inappropriate to the indignity of their death. Owen‟s poem,
though a tribute (an “anthem”) to the dead soldiers, is mainly a bitter attack on
modern war. It expresses horror, indignation, and anger at the senseless
slaughter of human beings by mechanical means. Modern warfare, it implies, is
mass slaughter: a mockery of human dignity. Death in modern warfare is an
animal death, not a human death.
In the octave, sound is adapted to sense chiefly by the use of words and
phrases whose sounds imitate meaning. The onomatopoetic series “stuttering
… rattle … patter” is reinforced by the t‟s in “cattle, ” “monstrous, ” and
“hasty. ” The onomatopoetic “wailing” is reinforced by the I‟s in “bells, ”
“shrill, ” “shells, ” “bugles, ” “calling. ” (“Bells” and “shrill” may perhaps
themselves be considered onomatopoetic. ) The phrase “rifles; rapid rattle” is
given speed by its pronounced trochaic rhythm (the phrasing corresponding
with the meter) and by the alliteration of the liquid r‟s, but the hard p and d of
“rapid” reinforced the staccato quality of “stuttering… rattle… patter. ”
In the sestet, sound is adapted to sense chiefly by the linking together
through similarity in sound of words logically connected in meaning, e. g.
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“candles … hands, ” “glimmers … good-byes, ” “pallor…pall, ”
“dusk…drawing-down. ”

A. E. Houseman
EIGHT O’CLOCK
The place of execution is probably the courtyard of the town jail. The clock
is one of those that plays a four-note tune at a quarter past the hour, extends it
to eight notes at the half hour and twelve at three-quarters past, and then plays a
full complement of sixteen notes before beginning the bong, bong that
announces the new hour. The young man, strapped and hooded, with a noose
around his neck, sees nothing, but he hears the sixteen notes (the four
“quarters”) of the clock‟s tune “tossed” down upon the town, then the noises of
the clock machinery as it tightens its spring (almost literally collecting its
strength) before beginning the series of eight monotone strokes, at the first of
which the trap will be sprung beneath him, and he will drop the distance
(carefully calculated according to his weight) sufficient to break his neck.
The stanza form is iambic a3 b5 a5 b2, with the a-rhymes all feminine, but
with considerable metrical variation. The second line, for instance, with its
initial trochee and its very lightly accented “on” in the third foot, brings
together a number of unstressed or lightly stressed syllables that give it a speed
consonant with the indifferent brightness of the tune played by the chimes. In
contrast, the two internally punctuated spondees that being line 3 and the
internally punctuated first foot of line 5 followed by an initially stressed
trochee, slow these two lines dramatically in consonance with the subjective
experience of the protagonist. Of particular importance is the series of sharp k-
sounds beginning in line 6: “counted … cursed … luck … clock collected …
struck, ” and the heavy str-alliteration of “strapped” (5), “strength” and
“struck” (8). The syntactical displacement of “its strength” from the expected
position immediately following the verb places the alliterating monosyllables
“strength” and “struck” together in the final line, where the final word “struck”
culminated both the str-and k- series of repetitions. In addition, the heavy

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metrical regularity of this line, with its internal comma isolating the final verb,
gives “struck” enormous force (the result of alliteration, consonance, rime,
syntax, meter, and punctuation), thus putting a heavy emphasis on its double
meaning. Not only does the clock tower), personified as an executioner, brings
down its axe with a powerful blow on the neck of the victim, striking out his
life.
The use of “morning” and “neighing” as adjectives is unusual enough that
one may detect a suggestion of mourning and sighing behind them.

James Joyce
ALL DAY I HEAR (P. 768)
The central purpose of the poem is the evocation of mood, the objectification
of inner feeling. The mood is one of sadness or desolation, and the poet
projects in through both imagery and sound. He hears the noise of waters and
the cry of the winds. The waters seem to be “making moan” in a “monotone” -
a single sustained sound. He compares himself to the sea-bird which in
memory, in imagination, or in fact he sees “going / Forth alone, ” and which he
assumes is sad because it is alone (as he is. ) He winds as well, and they are
“cold. ”
The dominant musical device is the repetition of the long o sound,
phonetically linked with melancholy or sorrow (page 696). The six short lines
all end in rimes containing this vowel; the six long lines end alternately with
the word “waters” (three times) and with rimes containing the long o (three
times). The sound also occurs internally in “forth” and “cold. ” All of these o‟s
support the poem‟s one onomatopoetic word, “moan. ”
The speaker does not tell us the cause of his desolation, but the imagery,
emphasizing loneness, isolation, separation from a loved one, may be the
cause.
The meter is iambic, alternating tetrameter with diameter lines.

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Emily Dickinson
I HEARD A FLY BUZZ WHEN I DIED
Dickinson‟s preoccupation with death is once again revealed in this four-
stanza poem. In stanza one, the speaker sets the scene. She is on her death bed,
and her tone is more that of the dispassionate observer than that of the dying
individual. She evokes the atmosphere of deity by focusing on the silence in the
room and on the buzzing sound of a fly. In stanza two, the speaker turns her
attention to those who are witnessing her death. Their eyes ae dry from the
actual fact of death. In stanza three, the speaker turns back to herself and the
making of her will. She imagines herself signing over to her heirs everything
but her body and soul. It is then that a fly attracts her attention. In stanza four,
the speaker evokes the actual moment of death by focusing on the fly. She
notes the blueness of the fly, its intermittent buzzing, and finally the way in
which the fly seems to blot out all the light in the room.
The poem presents an acute analysis of the psychology of death. It concerns
itself with the wedge which death drives between the senses and the spirit, and
the final obliteration of the spirit itself. In the first three stanzas, the speaker
becomes progressively dissociated from the sense world. The fly of the first
stanza suggests that the body has already begun to decay. By focusing on the
silence broken only by the buzzing of the fly, the speaker suggests that her
other senses no longer respond to the world, that she has been cut off from the
sense world is intensified in stanza two by the dispassionate way in which the
dying speaker observes the people attending her death. She no longer operates
through her senses or through her feelings; she has been reduced to pure
intellect by the approach of death. In stanza three a further separation between
the individual and the sense world is suggested through the signing of the will.
The speaker first psychologically and then legally is cut off from the world of
things. Finally, the complete failure of the senses and of the consciousness is
suggested in stanza four. The poet powerfully conveys the shrinking of human
consciousness. For a person in full possessions of his powers, a fly is no more
than a minor irritation. Its sound, size, and color are for the most part simply

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ignored. However, here, the sound and size of the fly can completely
overpower the weakened senses of the speaker.
Of the more than seventeen hundred poems in Dickinson‟s collected work,
over five hundred are no the subject of death. Over and over she pictures or
imagines what the experience of dying is like, and what, if anything, exists
beyond it. He solutions to these problems are as various as Donne‟s on sexual
love. In this poem one of her greatest-the poet projects her imagination into the
future through a speaker who is recollecting the past-a technique she also uses
in “Because I could not stop for Death”.
The poem presents a death-bed scene-a conventional motif in nineteenth
century fiction when people had large families and died more often at home
than in hospitals. In these scenes the protagonist is shown on her deathbed
surrounded by relatives, neighbors, and friends, who have gathered to give
comfort, to hear any last words, and to say farewell.
Some readers will regard the appearance of the fly as the first event of the
poem because it is mentioned first, but the poem does not follow a strictly
chronological order. In line 1 the speaker announces her subject and theme,
providing the poem‟s “topic sentence, ” as it were. She then goes back and
relates what led up to it. (It‟s as if one said, “I shared a sandwich with our
president once. Here‟s how it happened” or “Here‟s how it was. ”) Use of the
past perfect tense in line 5 indicates that earlier there had been weeping and
lamentation, but now the mourners have ceased weeping and are restraining
external display of feeling in preparation for witnessing the solemn moment of
actual death. The “stillness” (both of sound and motion) in the room is not a
mere absence of speech and movement; rather, the atmosphere seems charged,
like that lull in a storm when the air takes on a greenish tint and the silence is
electric. The first “heave of storm” had been the weeping and mourning of
those gathered around the death-bed; the second will presumably accompany or
immediately follow “that last onset” – the moment of death itself. In stanza 3
the speaker is not “making out her will. ” The formal conveyance of her larger
properties (land, house, bank deposits, investments) would have been made, in

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the presence of a lawyer, long before. In the poem she is disposing of smaller
items (“keepsakes”), saying perhaps that she wants Cousin Lizzie to have her
blue scarf, her daughter to have her favorite brooch, and her son to have the
family Bible. The terms “willing” and “signing away” are metaphorical.
It is at this moment (“and then it was”), when everyone is silently awaiting
the moment of death, that the fly makes its appearance. Whether it has just
arrived or has been present all along but unnoticed is an unanswerable and
unimportant question. What is important is that the fly now dominates the
dying woman‟s awareness and does so till her actual death in the poem‟s final
line.
What are we to make of this fly-and of the poem?
The poem is structured on an ironic contrast between expectation and
fulfillment. The imagery and language of the second stanza (“last onset, ” “the
king, ” “witnessed”) indicate a confident expectation among the speakers, and
undoubtedly in the dying woman also, that some solemn is the phrase “be
witnessed” than “be seen. ” The king will appear to carry all the soul of the
dying woman.
And who is “the King?” the King may well be death itself. Personified as
majestic figure, perhaps, more likely, the King is God, or Christ, or the Angle
of death. But for the speaker all that appears is a small, nasty domestic insect-a
blue bottle-trying to make its escape through the windows, but continually
bumping up against the glass which it cannot see.
Some readers will interpret the windows in line 15 as the eyes of the dying
we man, but this interpretation is too allegorical. The “room” is not allegorized,
why should the windows be? The windows are literal windows, but as the
speaker‟s vision blurs and dims, they become the last thing she can discern; and
then they too go dark. It is her eyesight which fails, not the windows; but it fails
in the sense that her literal eyes can no longer see the literal windows. In the
final line, being dead, she can no longer see at all. She cannot see to see any

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illumination she might have hoped for from the windows, because of the
interposition of the fly, or death.
At one level, the poem may be given a purely psychological interpretation
about the experience of dying. One expect it to be a momentous and
illuminating experience; but, the poem hypothesizes, death may turn to merely
the diminution and final cessation of one‟s sensory and physical powers.
Instead of illumination at the end, the dying person‟s consciousness in the final
moments may be unable to focus on anything more significant than the sound
and movement of a blowfly.
Most readers, however, will want to give the fly more than a purely literal
significance, and, indeed, one can hardly avoid seeing the fly as a symbol of
death, coming not in the majestic form of a kin but in the trivial and even
repulsive aspect of a fly. However, if we stop with the simple assertion that the
fly is a symbol of death, we will lose much of the richness of the symbol. For
its fuller meanings we must examine all the connotations of the “fly” in this
context, especially as they contrast with those of “king. ”
In addition to the symbolic richness in this poem, we need also to appreciate
the marvelous vividness with the poet brings to life the actual, literal fly,
especially in line 13 (one of the most magical line in English poetry).
The basic rime scheme is xaxa xbxb xcxc xdxd, but the rimes are perfect only
in the final stanza. The one onomatopoetic word in the poem is “buzz” at the
end of line 14.
Finally, the b sound in “buzz” is preceded in line 14 by the b s “blue” and
“stumbling. Thus all the sounds in “buzz”- its initial and final consonants and
its medial vowel-are heard at least three times in line 11-13. This outburst of
onomatopoetic effect consummates the aural imagery promised in the opening
line, “I heard a fly buzz when I died. ” But line 13 combines images of color,
motion, and sound. Though the sound imagery is the most important, the poem
concludes with a reference to the speaker‟s dimming eyesight, and we may
infer that she saw a blur of the bluebottle‟s deep metallic blue as well as heard

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its buzz. The images of motion between “blue” and “buzz” belong to both the
visual and aural modes of sensing. The speaker hears and imperfectly sees the
“uncertain” flight of the fly as it bumbles from one pane of glass to another, its
buzzing now louder, now softer. The meter of line 13, if the poem is scanned,
is perfectly regular, but the two grammatical pauses help to give it an uncertain,
irregular effect. Would it be too fanciful to say that the line itself stumbles over
its three b sounds?

William Carlos Williams

THE DANCE (P. 770)
The repetition of the first line of the poem as its last line gives the poem a
circularity of form, which is emphasized internally by the repetition on the
word “round” (2, 2, 5) “around” (3), and its rimes “impound” (6), “Ground”
(9), “sound” (10), plus the assonant “about” (8). The poem lacks end rime, but
is rich in internal rime, exemplified in the above; in “prance as they dance”
(11); and in such approximations as “squeal”, “twiddle”, “fiddles” (3-4),
“tipping”, “thick”, “hips” (5-7), “bellies”, “balance” (7) “about”, “butts” (8-9)
etc. The abundance of participial verb forms-“tipping, ” “kicking, ” “rolling, ”
“swinging, ” “rollicking”- contributes also to the sense of vigorous motion. The
triple meter gives this motion speed, but is subject to occasional jolting
irregularities (as in 5, 6, 8) which remind us that these are thick shacked, big-
bellied, heavy-butted peasants dancing, not a graceful group of nymphs on
Mount Olympus. The great majority of the lines are run-on (only the last ends
with a full stop, and 1 and 6 with partial stops, ) thus giving the poem a sense of
continuous motion, especially when the lines end with such traditionally
unlikely words as “and, ” “the, ” and a hyphenated “thick, ” –where the reader
is thrown forward into the next line without even a pause to observe the line-
ending. This fact is further enhanced by the fact that all but three of the lines (5,
6, 11) have feminine endings, so that the meter as well as the grammatical
incompleteness throws the reader forward. A highly unusual feature of this
poem is that all but three (“around, ” “impound, ” and “about”) of the words of

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more than one syllable (there are twenty-six of them) are accented on the first
syllable; and this also contributes to the sense of continuous motion. The
exceptions to the foregoing observations occur just frequently enough to keep
the reader a bit off-balance, like the peasants themselves.

e. e. Cummings
THE GREEDY THE PEOPLE (P. 772)
When read in the two ways suggested, Cummings‟s poem reveals a
multiplicity of patterns. First, a rime pattern (abcbac), repeated in each stanza,
utilizing both approximate and perfect rimes. Second, a metrical pattern, built
on an anapestic base (five lines of diameter and one of monometer), in which
the corresponding lines of each stanza match each other exactly. Third, a sound
pattern which relates the two chief words of each first line by assonance
(“greedy”, “people”), alliteration (“timid”, “tender”), or rime (“chary”,
“wary”). Fourth, a syntactical pattern which matches the corresponding lines of
the various stanza, putting identical grammatical structures and parts of speech
in corresponding places, (The second line of each stanza, for instance, is always
a parenthesis in which the framework “as – as can – “ is filled in by words
related in form but opposed in meaning. ) Fifth, and most important, a
structural pattern in which the meaning of the first four lines of each stanza is
countered by the meaning of the last two, and within which words of similar or
related meaning and forms are balanced neatly against each other (such
pairings as “sell” and “buy, ” “don‟t” and “do, ” “when” and “how” are
obvious).
The Cummings trademark comes out in this poem in his imaginative
transformation of the parts of speech, particularly in the final word of the fourth
line in each stanza, in which conjunctions (“because”), pronouns (“which”),
verbs (“seem, ” “must”), and prepositions (“until”) are made to serve as nouns.
“Because” (4) for Cummings represents the cold sterility of abstract reason as
opposed to the warm life of instinct and emotion (Faith asks of materialism,
“why?”). “Which”(10) is a thing rather than a person (“Who”). “Seem” (16)

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indicates a mere illusion of existence as opposed to real existence (“be”).
“Until” (22) represents an indefinite future as contrast to the living present
(“Now”). “Must” (28) represents the restrictive authority f artificial social
conventions and rules as opposed to the permissiveness of nature (“May”).
Cummings concludes his poem with a triumphant pun, for “May” is not only
the auxiliary verb of permission; it is that season of the year which stands for
youth, for growth, for nature, and for life.
The two nouns in line 1 of each stanza represent undesirables in Cumming‟s
vocabulary [“people” (1) stands for masses rather than individuals; “tender”
(25) is probably meant in the sense of tender-minded rather than tender-
hearted. ] Of the two variables in line 2 of each stanza, the first always
represents something undesirable, the second something desirable [“you‟re”
(14) is a plural as opposed to a singular “I‟m”]. The activities depicted in lines
3-4 of each stanza are undesirable [“work” (27) represents materialistic
drudgery as opposed to creative play; “pray” (27) is directed toward an
authoritarian god (a “must”) rather than toward a God of love. ]
In summary, the poem opposes states of inbeing and being. The first four
lines of each stanza pass in review those people who feverishly pursue
materialistic goals and whose lives are governed by greed, anxiety, prudence,
convention, and conformity. In the last two lines of each stanza, the steeple
bell, moon, stars, sun, and earth offer a laconic comment on these people‟s
foolishness.

John Keats
ON FIRST LOOKING INTO CHAP MAN’S HOMER (P.
775)
Keats could read no Greek and so his knowledge of Homer was necessarily
limited to the rather refined eighteenth-century translations of the epics by
Alexander Pope. Then one night in October, 1816, Keats‟ teacher, Charles
Cowden Clarke, introduced his friend to the finest passages in George
Chapman‟s vigorous Elizabethan version of Homer‟s great works, and as

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Clarke later recalled the event, “Keats shouted with delight” at some of the
lines. It was six o‟clock in the morning before the young poet could tear
himself away from the calf-bound book he and Clark were reading, and as he
walked home through the deserted streets, the lines of a sonnet began to from
themselves in his mind. Once home, he wrote out the poem, made a copy of it,
and sent it off by messenger to Clarke, who found it on his breakfast table
when he came down later in the morning.
To quote Aileen Ward, “It is not hard to imagine Clarke‟s amazement as he
read the sonnet over. The poem was a miracle; not simply because of its
mastery of form, or because Keats was only twenty when he wrote it, or
because he wrote it in the space of an hour or two after a night without sleep.
Rather because nothing in his earlier poetry gave any promise of this
achievement: the gap between this poem and his summer work [see “to One
Whom Has Been Long in City Pent”] could be leaped only by genius … The
unity of form and feeling that begins in the first line and swells in one
crescendo of excitement to the final crashing silence was instantaneous and
unemployable. ”
This passage suggests one source of the sonnet‟s strength: its coherence, its
singleness of purpose, the appropriateness of all the parts to the whole. The
poem is unified by its central metaphor, the metaphor of voyaging for
discovery. Keats begins by stating that he has traveled much in “the realms of
gold;” that is, he has long been an admirer of Greek literature, which poets
have always recognized to be scared to Apollo, god of poetry and music. In this
travels, the author continues, he has often heard of one particular land, ruled by
“deep-browed Homer, ” but had never come to know it until he heard
Chapman speak out “loud and bold. ” That is, the translation of Homer by Pope
had given only a hint of the poet‟s greatness; it took Chapman‟s vigor to make
the glory of the epics real.
Note that tastes have changed since the early nineteenth century. Today the
romantic Chapman seems to convey no more of the essential Homer than does
the classical Pope. So astonished is Keats by this revelation that he must

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compare his metaphorical “discovery” of Homer with some actual discoveries,
the discovery of a new planet, for example, or of a new poem from the first
word to the last.
But there is more to this sonnet than its metaphor. Its tone, too, contributes to
its power. We have already noted the rather flabby sentimentality of “To One
Who Has Been Long in City Pent. ” Curiously, though that poem is written in
the third person, it is full of the poet‟s self-consciousness about himself and his
feelings. “On First Looking into Chapman‟s Homer” is composed in the first
person-the word “I” appears six times but it seems, nevertheless, much more
objective, as if its subject were as much the discovery as the discoverer. In spite
of such words as “ken” (range of sight; understanding) and “demesne” (region
or realm; pronounced to rhythm with “remain”) and such a phrase as “pure
serene, ” the work is quite simple to understand, its statement clear and direct.
The richness of the poem does not depend upon the use of such words as “lair”
and “debonair” and “languishment, ” but rather stems from the richness of the
metaphor itself, which links the discovery by Keats of Chapman‟s Homer with
all the great discoveries of the world, and more particularly, with the creative
capabilities of men, with the inexplicable rising of men above themselves (as
Keats rose above himself when he wrote his poem) in the face of great beauty.
Indeed, it is significant that Keats‟s first great poem should be about art. In one
way or another, art is the subject of all his best poems, and especially art as a
metaphor for all human creativity and self-discovery.
One more explanation for the power of this poem lies in what Keats called,
trying to account for Shakespeare‟s greatness, “thinness', ” the ability to find
the words that will infallibly convey the essence of a scene or an emotion. The
last four lines of the sonnet in particular have this quality. First, they are
remarkably specific. Imagine how much would be lost here if we were to
substitute such general terms as “explorer, ” “ocean, ” and “mountain” for
“Cortez, ” “Pacific, ” and “Darien. ” Note how the exalted calm of Cortez is set
off and accentuated by the agitation of his men; the men give extra depth and
reality to the picture. And note, too, how, the very sounds of the words

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contribute to what Aileen ward calls the “crescendo of excitement, ” a
crescendo that climaxes in the three words “wild surmise-/ Silent” whose bright
chiming of long “I” sounds offers such a marked contrast to the “crashing
silence” that follows.
At one point, Keats was perhaps too specific for his own good, and
generations of students have been able to feel superior to the poet over his
confusion of Cortes with Balboa. It is not clear whether Keats deliberately
made the error, preferring the sound of “Cortez” to that of “Balboa, ” or
whether the mistake was accidental. He has read William Robertson‟s History
of America containing descriptions of Balboa‟s discovery of the Pacific and
Cortez‟s first view of Mexico City, which recalled a painting by Titian that this
friend, Joseph Severn, may have pointed out to him during the summer or
1816, and perhaps the confusion was unintentional. The real point, however, is
that the error is not a significant one. Poets are devoted to the communication
of truth, to be sure. But the truth, the reality with which they are principally
concerned, is not so much historical truth as the essential reality of their
experience. Thus, to the extent that the power and the excitement and the
reality of the last four lines of this sonnet would be interfered with by the
substitution of Balboa for the better sounding Cortez, the passage paradoxically
truer for being historically inaccurate. Picasso once said that art is a lie
someone tells in order to tell the truth. “On First Looking Into Chapman‟s
Homer” supports that definition. The octave is concerned with exploration, the
sestet with the experience of discovery.
The octave is an extended metaphor in which travel is the figurative form for
reading, and “the realms of gold” for literature. The “goodly states and
kingdoms” are various kinds of literature, and the “western islands” are
specifically poetry, the domain of Apollo, god of poetry and inventor of the
lyre (from which the term “lyric” is derived). Though geography should not be
pressed too hard, these islands are probably called “western” to associate them
with the West Indies, where many of the early English and Spanish explorers
sought for gold.

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 The sestet consists of two similes conveying the thrill of discovery. First, the
speaker compares himself to an astronomer looking through his telescope when
“a new planet swims into his ken. ” Anyone who has looked through good
astronomical telescopes can testify to the “swimming” or quaking motion that
an observed celestial body has as it enters the field of vision. The word “ken” is
also beautifully effective here, for it not only means “range of vision” but is
associated by the astronomer‟s discovering a planet-a whole new world-
previously unknown to man.
The second simile partly derives its force from the fact that the early
explorers, seeking a shorter route to the East Indies and Cathay, at first though
they had found it and did not realize that what they had actually found was a
new continent separated from their destination by another whole sea. Balboa‟s
discovery of the Pacific thus came as a surprise and vastly expanded the exact
awestruck moment when the explorer and his men first encounter this vast,
shining, and unguessed at new iceman while crossing the mountains of a land
they did not know to be an isthmus.
One would prefer poets to be historically accurate, and it would be folly to
pretend that nothing is lost when they are not. Yet Keats‟s subject is not history
but human experience, and when one contemplates the consequences of
substituting the three syllables of bal-BO-a for the three syllables of “STOUT
COR-tez, ” one may even be glad for the blunder. (The name “Cortez” in
Spanish is accented on the second syllable, but common British pronunciation
reverses the accents. ) The first loss is the adjective “stout” which, along with
“eagle-eyed, ” gives strength and stature to the discoverer. The second loss is
one of sound and rhythm which support this strength. “STOUT COR-tez” with
its three t‟s, sharp k-sound, and two stresses, gives the adventurer just that
intrepid quality which is needed, while bal-BO-a softest its b‟s with a liquid /
and trails off into two vowel sounds suggestive more of grace than of strength.
The heroic description of the discoverer matches the heroic verse and voice
(“loud and bold”) of Chapman‟s translation, which for Keats first captured the
heroic qualities of Homer‟s epic narratives.

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 But if this poem were only about Keats‟s discovery of Chapman‟s
translation, it would be of limited interest. What gives it enduring value is
Keats‟s transformation of his discovery into a symbol for all discovery, his
magnificent success in conveying the excitement that may attend any
discovery, made by any of us, whether it be of universal or only personal
significance.

Geoffrey Chaucer
Canterbury Tales
THE GENERAL POLOGUE
In April the gentle rain. Warming sun, and gentle winds, a wakened nature
from its winter sleep. Then man yearned to travel. In this season in England,
from every corner of the land, people made their way to Canterbury to receive
the blessings of "the holy blissful martyr" – St. Thomas a Becket.
One spring day in Southward at the Tabard Inn, the narrator (Chaucer) a
waited the next day when he would commence his journey to Canterbury. That
evening a company of twenty-nine persons arrived at the inn, all of whom were
Canterbury pilgrims, Chaucer was admitted to their.
Company. Before the pilgrimage began, Chaucer took time to describe his
companions.

The Knight
The knight is the perfect and genteel man who loved truth, freedom, chivalry
and honor. He was truly a distinguished man. He had ridden into battle in both
Christian and heathen lands and in every instance served his king well. Despite
his valorous deeds, the Knight never boasted of his actions nor bored his
listeners with his feats.

Commentary

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 The Knight is the most socially prominent person on the journey, and certain
obeisances are paid to him throughout the journey. He tells the first story and
many pilgrims offer him compliments. One fact that Chaucer's audience would
be aware of is that of all the battles the Knight fought in, none were in the
King's secular wars. They were all religious wars of some nature.

The Squire
The Squire would be a candidate for knighthood. When not in battle, he
thinks of himself as quite a lady's man. He takes meticulous care of his curly
locks (hair) and is somewhat proud of his appearance. He could also sing lusty
songs, compose melodies, write poetry and could ride a horse with distinction.

The Yeoman
The Yeoman was a servant to the Knight and Squire. He dressed all in green
and was known as an expert woodsman and an excellent shot with the bow and
arrow.

The Prioress
A Prioress named Madame Eglantine was also among the pilgrims. She was
a gentle lady whose greatest oath was "by Sainte Loy". She was rather well
educated, even though her French was not the accepted Parisian French. She
was very coy and delicate. When she ate, she took great care that no morsel fell
her lips and that no stains were on her clothes. She was very courteous and
amiable and tried to imitate the manners of the Court. She could not stand pain
and would weep to see a mouse caught in a trap. She had three small hounds
with her which she treated very gently and tenderly. Her dress was very neat
and tidy and she wore a gold brooch with the inscription "amor vincit omnia"

Commentary
Chaucer's depiction of the Prioress is filled with gentle and subtle irony.
Here is a picture of a lady who happens to be a nun, but she never forgets that
she is a lady first. Her oath, "by Sainte Loy, " implies that she has chosen the
most fashionable and handsome saint who was also famous for his great

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courtesy. Her emphasis on her appearance and her possessions (including her
three dogs) suggest that she secretly longs for a more worldly life. Even the
inscription "amor vincit omnia (love conquers all) is a phrase that was used
both in religion and also in the many courtly romances. And the brooch is a
piece of lovely jewelry.
In general she would be the ideal head of a girl's finishing school in
nineteenth century America.

Associates of the Prioress

The Prioress had another nun with her who functioned as her secretary and
also three priests.

Commentary
Two of the three priests will relate tales, and one of these tales (The tale of
Chaunticleer) will prove to be one of the most popular of all the tales.

The Monk
The Monk was an outrider for his monastery (that is, he was in charge of the
outlying property). He owned several horses furnished with the finest saddles
and bridles. He loved hunting, fine foods and lots of it; he had several good
hunting dogs of which he was very proud. He dressed in fine clothes; some
were even trimmed in fur. He was rather fat, very jolly and bald headed. His
favorite food was a roasted swan. In general, he favored an outdoor life to that
of a closed, indoor existence.

Commentary
Chaucer's art is here demonstrated through his use of irony. While Chaucer
never makes a comment about his characters, he arranges and selects his
material so that the reader can come to a conclusion about the character. When
the monk says that he doesn't approve of the solitary prayerful existence in a
monastery, Chaucer pretends to be convinced that the Monk's argument is
right. But we see that it is right only because this particular monk tries to justify
his non-monastic activities and for this monk, it is the right existence.
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Everything that the Monk does is a violation of his monastic orders. His love of
the worldly goods, food, and pleasures, and his dislike of the quiet monastery
contradict his religious vows.

The Friar
The Friar was a wanton and merry man who had helped many girls get
married after he got them in trouble. When he heard confessions, he worked
under the principle that the penance is best executed by money rather than by
prayers. So the person contributing the most money received the quickest and
best pardon. The Friar was the type who knew the taverns and inns better than
he knew the leper houses and the almshouses. Chaucer says that there was no
better man than the Friar when it comes to the practice of his profession. He
was always able to get money from people. His name was Hubert.

Commentary
The Friar was a person licensed to hear confessions and to beg for money.
This Friar used every vicious and immoral method to extract money from the
parishioners, so when Chaucer says there were none as good as Hubert in his
profession, he is being ironical. That is, if we judge the Friar by how much
money he extorted from people, then he is a great success. But essentially, this
Friar is notoriously evil and cunning.

The Merchant
The Merchant was a member of the rich and powerful rising middle class.
He is shrewd and knows a good bargain. He talks and looks so solemn and
impressive, and transacts his business in such a stately manner that few knew
that he was deeply in debt.

The Clerk
The Clerk, who was a student at Oxford, was extremely thin, rode a very
thin horse, and his clothes were threadbare because he preferred to buy books
rather than clothes and food. He did not talk often, but when he did, it was with
great dignity and moral virtue.

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 Commentary
The Clerk was probably working on his M. A. degree with the idea of
attaining some type of ecclesiastical position. Next to the Knight, he is one of
the most admired people on the pilgrimage.

The Sergeant of Law

The Sergeant of Law was an able attorney who could recall every word and
comma of every judgment, a feat which earned him high distinction and
handsome fees. But he makes people think that he is busier and wiser than he
really is. There is an implication that he has perhaps used his position to attain
wealth without ever actually violating the letter of the law.

The Franklin
The Franklin was a large landowner with a certain amount of wealth, but he
was not of noble birth. He spent his money freely, enjoying good food, wine,
and company. His house was always open and he was a true epicurean,
devoting his energies to fine living and was generally liked by the other
pilgrims.
The Haberdasher, the Dyer, the Carpenter, The Weaver, and The Carpet
Maker
These were men who belonged to a gild, an organization similar to a
fraternity and labor union. Each was luxuriously dressed in the manner of his
calling, and each was impressed with his membership in the gild it which he
belonged. The guildsmen had a cook who was one of the best.

The Cook
The cook was a master of his trade. He knew how to boil, bake, roast and
fry. But Chaucer thinks it a shame that he had a running sore on his shin,
because his best dish was a creamed chicken pie whose white sauce might be
the same color as the pus from the running sore.

The Shipman

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 The Shipman was a huge man and somewhat uncouth. He was the master of
a vessel and knew all the ports from the Mediterranean to the Baltic. He could
read the stars and knew how to fight well. But he did not ride a horse well. He
looked like a fish out of water as he sat on his horse.

The Doctor of Physic

There was no one who could speak so well about medicine as this doctor. He
knew astronomy (astrology) and something of nature and could tell what
humor was responsible for a sickness. But everyone thought he was in league
with the druggist. He could quote all the medical authorities, but knew nothing
of the Bible. He had apparently made a lot of money during the plague, but
doesn't seem to spend it very readily. Since he prescribes gold for cures, he has
a special love for this metal.

The Wife of Bath

The Wife of Bath was somewhat deaf, but was an excellent seamstress and
weaver. She made a point of being first at the altar or offering in church. Her
kerchiefs must have weighed ten pounds and she wore scarlet red stocking. She
has been married five times and has been on pilgrimages to Jerusalem. Rome,
Bologna, Galicia, and Cologne. She was gap-toothed and rode a horse easily.
She enjoyed good fellowship and would readily laugh and joke. Her special
talent was her knowledge of all the remedies love.

The Parson
The Parson was very poor, but was rich in holy thoughts and works. He
would rather give his own scarce money to his poor parishioners than to
demand tithes from them. His principle was to live the perfect life first, and
then to teach it. His life was a perfect example of the true Christian priest, and
by his good example, he taught, but first followed it himself.

Commentary
Amid the worldly clerics and the false and superficial religious adherents,
the poor parson stands out as the ideal portrait of what a parish priest should be.

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The same can be said of the following portrait of the plowman. He is the ideal
Christian man.

The Plowman
The Plowman was a small tenant farmer who lived in perfect peace and
charity. He loved God with all his heart. He was always honest with his
neighbors and promptly paid his tithes to the church.

The Miller
The Miller was a big brawny man who could outwrestle any man (and even
a ram). He was short shouldered, broad and thick set. His red beard and a wart
on his nose from which bristly red hairs protruded made him look fearful. He
played the bagpipes as the pilgrims left the town.

The Manciple
The Manciple was a steward for a law school (or dormitory for lawyers) in
London and was in charge of purchasing the food. He was not as learned as the
lawyers, but was so shrewd in buying that he had been able to put aside a tidy
little sum for himself.

The Reeve
The Reeve was the manager of a large estate. He was a skinny man with a
bad temper. His close cut beard and his short haircut accentuates his thinness
and long legs. He was an able, efficient, and shrewd man who had reaped rich
rewards from his master.
The serfs, herdsmen, and workers feared him dreadfully because of his
unrelenting perseverance. Like the Maniple, he had reaped profits for himself
by being so shrewd at buying. He was once a carpenter and rode last among the
group.

Commentary
It is not important to the Reeve's characterization that he is a carpenter, but
Chaucer is anticipating The Reeve's Tale later on. The Miller will tell a dirty

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story about a carpenter, and since the Reeve was once a carpenter, he feels the
need for revenge by telling a dirty story about a miller.

The Summoner
The Summoner (a man paid to summon sinners for a trial before a church
court) had a fire-red complexion, pimples and boils, a scaly infection around
the eyebrows, and a moth-eaten beard. Children were afraid of his looks. He
treats his sores as leprosy. To make matters worse, he loved to eat garlic,
onions, leeks, and drink strong wine. He could quote a few lines of Latin which
he used to impress people. Chaucer calls him a gentile harlot (genteel fellow)
and implies it would be difficult to find a better fellow, because for a bottle of
wine, the Summoner would often turn his back and let a sinner continue living
in sin. He was also well acquainted with "ladies of questionable reputation. "

Commentary
The physical appearance of the Summoner fits his profession well. He is so
ugly and so gruesome looking that a summons from him is it self a horrible
experience. Thus, Chaucer ironically implies that he is a good fellow. But
furthermore, he is a good fellow because sinners could easily bribe him. The
reader should be aware of these subtle ironic statements which are often made
in paradoxical situations.

The Pardoner
The Pardoner was a church official who had authority from Rome to sell
pardons and indulgences to those charged with sins. He had just returned from
Rome with a bagful of pardons which he planned which he planned to sell to
the ignorant at a great profit to himself. He had a loud, high-pitched voice,
yellow, flowing hair, was beardless and furthermore would never have a beard.
Chaucer believes he was a "gelding or a mare. " But there was no one as good
at his profession as was this Pardoner. He knew how to sing and preach so as to
frighten everyone into buying his pardons at a great price.

Commentary

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 The Pardoner seems to be one of the most corrupt of the churchmen.
In the prologue to his tale, he confesses to his hypocrisy. And further more,
Chaucer implies that he is not really a man, that he is either sexually impotent
or perverted.

The Host
The Host, whose name is Harry Bailey, was a merry man who liked good
company and good stories. He was a large jovial person and was well liked by
the pilgrims.
These, then, were the principal members of the party about to leave for
Canterbury. That evening the Host of Tabard Inn served the company an
excellent dinner after which he suggested that, to make the trip pass more
pleasantly, each member of the party should tell two tales on the way to
Canterbury. On the return trip each member of the company should tell two
more tales. The man who told his story best was to be given a sumptuous
dinner by the other members of the party. The Host added that, to keep the
journey bright and merry, he would accompany them to Canter bury, and in all
things he was to be the judge of what was best for the group All members of
the company agreed to his proposal to act as governor of the journey.
Early the next morning the party departed. Two miles away at St. Thomas –
a-Watering, the Host silenced the group and announced that they would draw
straws to see in which order the tales would be told. The Knight drew the
shortest straw. The Knight agrees to tell the first tale, and here ends the
prologue and begins the first tale.

Commentary
If Chaucer had completed his original plants, that of each pilgrim telling two
tales going and two coming back, there would have been approximately 120
tales in all.
The Prologue gives an admirable description of the uncomplicated life of
England in the middle Ages. Here are portraits of all levels of English life. In

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this group Chaucer brings together all of the foibles and virtues of man and the
manners and morals of his time with remarkable clarity.
Throughout The Prologue, Chaucer alternately praises or chides the travelers
with deftly drawn word portraits which provide insights into the life of his time.
Before Chaucer, there were other groups of tales such as Boccacio's
Decameron, but never was there such a diversity of people within the same
group. It is then a stroke of genius that Chaucer uses the device of the religious
pilgrimage to bring together such a diverse group.
The shrine of St. Thomas a Becket to which the pilgrims are going was
reputed to have great healing qualities. Thus, some of the pilgrims are
undoubtedly going for health rather than religious reasons. For example, The
Wife of Bath was somewhat deaf, The Pardoner was beardless, The Cook had a
sore, The Summoner had boils and other skin trouble, The Miller had an awful
wart on his nose, The Reeve was choleric, etc.

THE KNIGHT'S TALE

PART I
Long ago there was once a Duke called Theseus who was the Lord and
Governor of Athens. He was also a great soldier who vanquished every foe he
met. Among his victims was a realm once known as Scythia, ruled by women
called Amazons? Returning home with his Amazon wife Hippolyta and her
sister, Emelye, These us met a group of women dressed in black who were
weeping and wailing. They told how each had been a queen or duchess, but had
lost their husbands during the siege of Thebes. The cruel tyrant Creon now
plans to dishonor the dead bodies.
The Duke, smitten with rage and pity, ordered Queen Hippolyta and her
beautiful sister Emelye to return to Athens where they were to dwell in peace.
Then, in anger, the Duke and his army marched on Thebes. There on a chosen
field of battle, King Creon was slain and the bones of their dead husbands were
restored to the mourning ladies.

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 After the battle was over, two young warriors of Thebes, fearfully wounded,
were brought before these us. He recognized them as young men of noble birth
and was informed they were royal knights named Arcite and Palamon. In
appearance, the two knights were very similar, being the sons of two sisters.
Theseus ordered that they be returned to Athens as prisoners who could not be
ransomed for any sum. They were, he said, to be his prisoners in perpetuity.
Several years passed by, and Arcite and Palamon lay in the prison tower in
grief and anguish. On a fair morning in May, however, the beautiful Emelye
arose and wandered happily about in her garden, which was adjacent to the
prison tower.
At that moment, Palamon, the sorrowful prisoner, glanced down through the
prison bars and saw the beautiful Emelye. He cried out in pain.
Arcite, alarmed, asked him what evil had befallen him. Palamon replied that
the beauty of the young lady had caused him to cry out. Arcite's curiosity was
aroused and he peered from the tower window. When he saw the fair Emelye,
he cried out that unless he could see her everyday he would die.
When Palamon heard this, he was enraged. After all, he cried to Arcite, I
found her first. To counter his argument, Arcite maintains that. He loved her
first. Thus, even thought they are kin and had sworn eternal friendship, they
decide that in love it is every man for himself. And so the argument continued
until their friendship gave way to hostility.
About this time, a famous Duke called Perotheus, a friend of both Theseus
and Arcite, arrived in Athens. He implored Duke Theseus to release Arcite on
the condition that Arcite would leave Athens forever, and if he happened to
return, he would be immediately beheaded.
Arcite then bemoans his fate. Even though he is now in prison, he can catch
a glimpse of his beloved, but in banishment, he will never again see the fair
Emelye. He acknowledges that Palamon is the winner since he can remain in
prison and near to Emelye. But Palamon is equally disturbed because he thinks
that Arcite can raise an army in exile, return to Athens and capture the fair

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Emelye. Chaucer then asks the reader which position is worse, that of Arcite or
Palamon.

PART II
Arcite returned to Thebes where he lived for two years moaning his hard
fate. His lamenting began to change his physical appearance. One night a
vision appeared before him and urged him to return to Athens and the fair
Emelye. Acrite arose and looked at himself in the mirror and realized that his
grief had drastically changed his appearance. So he took the name of
Philostrate and returned to Athens where he was employed as a page in the
house of Emelye. Several years passed, and Philostrate rose to a high and well-
to-do position in the Court of Theseus, even becoming a trusted friend of
Theseus himself.
Meanwhile, Palamon languished in the prison tower. One night, however, he
escaped. He hid in a field the next morning to escape detection.
That same day, by chance, Arcite arrived at the same field. Arcite was so
changed in appearance that Palamon did not recognize him. Arcite, thinking
himself alone, began to recite his entire history aloud. Palamon, hearing the
confession, jumped out of hiding and cursed Arcite as a traitor.
Arcite admitted his identity and challenged Palamon to a duel. The winner
was to have Emelye. The next morning Arcite brought armor, food, and sword
to Palamon. The duel began, and they fought fiercely. At this time, Theseus
and his entourage arrived upon the bloody scene.
Palamon explained who they were and why they were fighting. The King, in
a rage, condemned them to death. The ladies of the Court, including Emelye,
cried bitterly. Theseus finally agreed to give both of them their freedom on this
condition: they should return to Athens in a year, each with one hundred
knights. A joust would be held, and the winner would get the hand of Emelye.
Arcite and Palamon returned to Thebes.

PART III

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 During the year, Theseus spent his time building a magnificent stadium in
which the fight was to was to take place. He built an altar to Venus (goddess of
love), to Mars (god of war) and to Diana, (goddess of chastity). These altars
and the entire stadium were richly decorated with elegant details which the
Knight enjoys describing. At the end of the year, Arcite and Palamon, each at
the head of one hundred knights, returned to Athens for the joust. Theseus
welcomed them all and entertained them in high fashion with wine, foods,
singing, dancing and other forms of entertainment.
Again, the Knight enjoys relating all aspects of this magnificent feast.
Before the battle, Palamon goes to the altar of Venus and prays that he be
granted possession of the fair Emelye. If he can't have his beloved one, he
would rather die by Arcite's spear. Emelye also prays before the alter of Diana.
She asks that Arcite and Palamon's love be extinguished, and if not, that she be
given the one who loves her the most. Diana tells her that it is destined that she
marry one of the young knights, but she was not free to tell which one. Finally,
Arcite appears and asks Mars for victory in the battle. Mars appears and assures
Arcite that he will be victorious.
The three prayers and promises caused some confusion in heaven until
Saturn, god of destiny, promised that Palamon would win his love and Arcite
would win the battle.

PART IV
The great day for the joust dawned bright and beautiful. The entire populace
of Athens swarmed excitedly into the ampitheater. The contestants, on excited
steeds, gathered at the ends of the arena facing each other. The great King
Theseus arrived and announced that once a warrior was badly wounded he
would be removed from the field of battle by the King's marshal, in order to
determine the winner without needless loss of life. The milling battle began.
Finally, Palamon was badly wounded although he resisted the marshals; he was
taken from the field.

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 The victorious Arcite, in his blood-spattered uniform, rode his horse
triumphantly around the arena to receive the plaudits of the multitude and the
smiles of the fair Emelye. But all of a sudden a fury arose from the ground and
so frightened Arcite's horse that the victorous warrior was plunged to the earth.
Arcite was badly hurt.
The King returned to his Court, and the populace was happy because in all
the spectacle of the arena not one man was killed. Even Arcite, it was thought,
would survive his injury.
The Duke of Theseus summoned his physicians to attend Arcite. But Arcite
was dying. Gasping for breath, Arcite protested an eternal love for Emelye and
then adds that he knows no person better than Palamon and begs her to think
about accepting Palamon in marriage.
Arcite died. His earthly remains were reduced to ashes in a great funeral
pyre. After a long period of mourning, Theseus summoned Palamon to Athens.
Then in the presence of Emelye and the court, Theseus declared that Jupiter.
"The King, The Prince and Cause of all and everything. " had decreed that
Thebes and Athens should live in peace and that Palamon and Emelye should
be joined in marriage. They were wed and lived out their lives in "a love
unbroken".

Commentary
The Knight tells a tale of ideal love and chivalry. This type of tale might
seem somewhat tedious to the modern reader, but would have been very
popular in Chaucer's day. The reader should notice how well the story fits the
character of the Knight. He chooses a story filled with knights, love, honor,
chivalry, and adventure. Furthermore, fitting the Knight's character, there are
no episodes bordering on the vulgar and no coarseness. The love is an ideal
love in which there is no hint of sensuality. The love exists on a high, ideal,
platonic plane. The emphasis in the story is upon rules of honor and proper
conduct. It is befitting the qualities of a knight that he would bring armor to his
opponent before they begin to fight. The sense of honor is central to the story

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and the purity of the love each knight feels for Emelye tends to ennoble the
character.
It is also typical of the Knight that he would love to describe the richness of
the banquet and the elaborate decorate decorations of the stadium and the
rituals connected with the funeral. This type of richness and magnificence
would appeal to a man of such distinction as the Knight. Furthermore, the
extreme emphasis on form, ritual, and code of behavior are elements of the
knighthood.
The modern reader might find it strange that so many elements of chance
enter into the story. Chaucer himself comments on the role which Chance (or
Fortune or Destiny) plays during the narrative. The women at the beginning are
bemoaning the harshness of Fortune; it is by chance that Emelye walks beneath
the prison. Later it is by change that the Duke Perotheus knew Arcite. Again, it
is chance that Arcite is employed by Emelye and later accidentally meets
Palamon. Chance brings Theseus to the same spot where Arcite and Palamon
are fighting. And finally, it is the God of Chance or Destiny who determines
how the story will be solved. In other words, Chaucer or the Knight seems to
be implying that the lives of men are influenced by what seems to be chance,
but in the long run and in terms of a total world picture, there is a god who is
controlling the seemingly chance occurrences of the world. The universe, then,
is not as incoherent and unorderly as might first be expected. There is logic or
controlling purpose behind all the acts of the universe even though man might
not understand it.
Any reader the least familiar with ancient Greece will be a little surprised to
discover that the medieval custom of knights in armor jousting for the hand of a
maiden was an attribute of Athenian life. Of course it was not. Yet, we may
forgive Chaucer this anachronism. After all, what better way to begin his tales
than with the Knight, and a tale of chivalry and romance which a knight would
be expected to tell? The Knight does not tell of his own deeds of valor in
foreign lands. His tale is about men and women of ages past who lived in

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dream and fancy. The story could have happended in Greece, of course, but
hardly in the trappings of medieval.

THE MILLER'S TALE:

PROLOGUE
When the knight had finished his story, everyone said it was a fine story and
worthy to be remembered. The Host then calls upon the Monk to tell a tale that
will match the Knight's for nobility. But the Miller, who was drunk, shouted
that he had a noble tale, and he would match the Knight's tale with his. The
Host tried to stop the Miller because of the Miller's drunkenness, but the Miller
insisted. He announced that he was going to tell a story about a carpenter, and
the Reeve objects. The Miller, however, insists. Chaucer then warns the reader
that this story might be a bit vulgar, but it is his duty to tell all the stories
because a prize is at stake.

THE MILLEER'S TALE

Some time ago, the Miller said, there was a rich, old carpenter who lived in
Oxford and who took in a lodger named Nicholas. Nicholas was a clerk and
was also a student of astrology who, among other things, was able to forecast
the likelihood of drought or a shower, Nicholas was also a clever young man.
Neat-appearing, a marvelous harp player and singer, and a lover whose
passions were carefully clocked beneath a shy boyish manner and appearance.
Now it happened that the carpenter was married to an eighteen year-old girl
named Alison, and many years younger than the carpenter. Alison was a bright,
lively, pretty girl. It was not long before Nicholas fell in love with her. One day
he grasped her and cried, "O love-me-all-at-once or I shall die!" At first, Alison
made a pretense of objecting, but the young clerk soon overcame her
objections. They worked out a plan where by they would play a trick on her
husband, Old John the carpenter. Alison, however, warned Nicholas that John
was very jealous.

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 It happened that sometime later, Alison went to church and there another
young clerk saw her, and he was immediately smitten with her beauty as he
passed the collection plate. He was the parish clerk and was named Absalon.
Chaucer describes this clerk as being very dainty and particular. He is even
somewhat effeminate. The final touch to his personality is that he is so dainty
that the one thing he could not tolerate was people who expelled gas in public.
That evening with guitar in hand he strolled the streets looking for tarts when
he came to the carpenter's abode. Beneath Alison's window he softly sang.
"Now dearest lady, if thy pleasure be in thoughts of love, think tenderly of me.
”The carpenter was awakened but discovered his wife unimpressed with the
youth's entreaties.
One day, when the ignorant carpenter had gone to work at a nearby town.
Nicholas and Alison agreed that something must be done to get the carpenter
out of the house for a night. Nicholas agreed to devise a plan.
And so it happened that Nicholas, gathering plenty of food and ale, locked
himself in his room. After several days the carpenter missed the youth's
presence. When Nicholas told might be dead in his room. The carpenter and his
serving boy went to Nicholas room and pounded on the door. When there was
no answer, they knocked down the door and found the yought lying on his bed,
gaping as though dead, at the ceiling. The carpenter aroused the youth who
then told of s vision seen in his trance that Oxford was soon to be visited with a
rain and flood not unlike the one experienced by Noah. The alarmed carpenter
wondered what could be done to escape the flood. Nicholas counseled him to
fasten three boat-like tubs to the ceiling of the house, provision each with food
and drink enough to last one day after which the flood would subside, and also
include an axe with which they could cut the ropes and allow the tubs to float.
And finally, the three tubs should be hung some distance apart.

William Shakespeare
THAT TIME OF YEAR (P. 776)
My feeling of near death-like sorrow when seen by you will
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 Make you cherish me more before you take your journey; or my
Imminent death seen by you will make you love me more.
You may behold in me a feeling like that season of the year, when few or no
yellow leaves hang upon boughs shaking in the cold air, like the bare, ruined
choirs of a cathedral, boughs on which birds lately were signing. In me you
may behold a feeling resembling the twilight just after the sun has sunk in the
west, which twilight at once turns into a black night resembling sleep (Death‟s
second self), in that during night all is at rest. In me you may behold a feeling
resembling a glowing of embers lying on a bed of dead ashes, which were
formerly live coals, ashes now of the fire‟s one blazing youth, resembling an
ashy death-bed on which the glowing embers must soon expire, consumed by
the very ashes which formerly gave the fire vigorous life. Seeing this as my
condition, increases your love for me and makes you cherish me more before
you take yourself soon away from me (or makes you cherish me more before I
die. )
Humbler calls Sonnet 73 “a perfect instance of the Shakespearean sonnet, ”
There is a pause coming after the third. Each quatrain, the longest pause
coming after the third. Each quatrain treats one chief, visual image-autumn,
twilight, a glowing fire almost dead-all uniting to create a solemn awareness of
near-death:
“The couplet, two adagio lines, comments on what has gone before without
the slightest suggestion of the epigrammatic which so often mars the
conclusion of Shakespeare‟s sonnet. ”
Rows, calls this sonnet “extremely beautiful and much admired:
“Bare, ruined choirs‟ brings to the eye the roofless shells of
Monastic churches which stood out crawly to anyone traveling
round England in the latter part of the sixteenth century; and
„where late the sweet birds sang‟ carries a characteristic double
Suggestion. ” O. J. Campbell in his Bantam edition calls this sonnet
“one of the most famous and most artfully composed of all the
Sonnets in the sequence. ”
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 Quatrain 1: Shakespeare compares himself (in a metaphor) to autumn when
trees are virtually bare of leaves. In an allied metaphor he compares the forest
of bare trees to “bare ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang. ” That is,
the trees remind him of the Gothic outlines of ruined abbeys and monasteries;
the boughs where lately the sweet birds sang then would by implication to be
choirs stalls and choirs singers which now are empty of their vocalists-a superb
image and one of the greatest in English literature. In sum, the metaphors give
us a minute and vivid picture of Shakespeare‟s desolate feelings. Quatrain 2:
shows Shakespeare comparing his condition to a sunset, just as the sun has
sunk, at which point black night, death‟s second self (a secondary metaphor in
which night is compared not to death but to death‟s best imitator, sleep and
rest). So that is how Shakespeare feels-almost on the point of death. Quatrain 3:
This contains the most difficult of the metaphors: Shakespeare compares
himself to a glowing bed of coals almost on the point of dying out; the coals are
lying on a bed of ashes which formerly had given great “nourishment” to the
fire, but now are piled up high as dead ashes enough to kill what few remaining
living embers are left. This metaphoric statement is a profound analysis of the
tragic condition of life, which dies the sooner, the more intensely it lives. That
fire on the point of death is exactly how the poet himself feels. Couplet: The
three metaphors point logically to their application in the couplet, which is not
tacked on, but issues as a logical consequence of the three statements made in
the three preceding quatrains. Shakespeare‟s friend now perceives this
condition of near-death on Shakespeare‟s part, and, noticing Shakespeare‟s
condition, will love Shakespeare much more knowing that the poet has not
long to live. Some take line 14 in the sense that the friend should cherish the
poet all the more, knowing that the friend is soon to absent himself. It is in both
senses that I have written my paraphrase.
Shakespeare‟s technique is most subtle in metrical variant: the pause after
leaves, none, few (2) adds an emotional effect of slow and tragic solemnity
intensifying the mood. In Bare ruined choirs (4), three strong stresses vary the
iambic pattern (the first metrical foot is a spondee, the second a trochee), give

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emphasis and weight to the meaning of those words; in addition the vowels,
stretched out and lingering, in those three words, magically re-created the
Gothic desolation by mood, sound, stress, and picture. The artful use of
alliteration in but and by black night with their initial plosive consonants gives
a stark effect of sheer horror. Especially subtle is the alliteration in line 8 where
the sibilant‟s slither and slide stealthily along while “death‟s second self …
seals up all in the rest. ”
In this sonnet an aging speaker, constantly aware of his approaching death,
addresses a beloved person considerably younger than himself.
The structure of thought in the sonnet is perfectly matched to the formal
divisions marked out by its rime scheme. In each of the three quatrains the
speaker makes a metaphorical statement of his increasing age and nearness to
death, and in the concluding couplet he makes a counterstatement of his
beloved‟s increased love for him. This structure is formally expressed in the
language of the poem. Its opening line contains the words “thou mast in me
behold”, the second and third quatrains each begin “In me thou set‟s”; the
concluding couplet, before making its counter statement, summarizes what has
preceded in its opening words “This thou perceives. ”
In the opening the speaker compares himself to “that time of year” (late
autumn or early winter) when “yellow leaves, or none, or few” hang upon the
trees. In the second stanza he compares himself to the dusk of day, fading from
sunset into night. In the third he compares himself to sinking fire whose
glowing embers are about to be extinguished by the ashes of the fuel which
once “nourished” it. Though the quatrains (each a sentence) make parallel
statements, they are arranged in a climactic order and could not be rearranged
without loss. First, they are concerned with diminishing periods of time (a year,
a day, the length of time that a fire will burn), and thus they bring us
metaphorically closer and closer to the thought of death (weeks, hours,
minutes). In addition, the first quatrain emphasizes coldness (“bare” boughs
“shake against the cold”); the second emphasizes darkness (twilight fading
into “black night”); the third combines cold and dark in the image of the

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sinking fire which is losing both warmth and light. Finally, the first quatrain
looks backward in time to what has been lost, the second forward to what will
be lost, and the third combines reference to past and future.
Each central metaphor is complicated by an additional metaphor or
metaphors. In the first, the tree‟s leafless boughs are called “bare ruined choirs.
” A choir is that section of a church or chapel containing wooden choir stalls,
and the sight of “bare ruined choirs” would have been familiar to every reader
of Shakespeare‟s time because of the confiscation of Roman Catholic monastic
properties throughout England by Henry VIII some half-century earlier and the
subsequent spoliation of the monasteries by Reformation landowners. Through
this association of thought the “sweet birds” become not only the songbirds
which have migrated south for the winter, but the choir singers who once sang
in the now-ruined monastery churches. The image of desolation is thus
intensified. In the second quatrain, “black night, ” because of its association
with sleep, is called “Death‟s second self”-a kind of twin or surrogate of Death
“that seals up all in rest. ” In the third quatrain, the ashes of the fire become the
deathbed on which the fire‟s personified youth is expiring, paradoxically
“consumed” (in a third metaphor) by the food which once “nourished” it.
Against the three quatrains with their metaphorical statements of declining
life and approaching death, the speaker opposes a concluding counterstatement
concerning love. He throws human love, as it were, into the teeth of death. That
the couplet is a counterstatement is metrically signaled by the inversion of
stress in the opening foot. It begins, however, as a summarizing statement
“This thou perceives” where “This” refers for its antecedent to all of the image
in the preceding quatrains seeing or beholding). The speaker then asserts his
belief that the friend addressed throughout the sonnet loves the speaker all the
more intensely because of the friend‟s realization that the speaker must soon
die. The friend‟s increased love compensate for the speaker‟s impending death.
Death‟s negative is countered by an affirmation of love.

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 All so it would seem, on a first reading. On a second reading, the reader may
be less sure of the strength of the alliteration. The speaker, the reader notice, is
a person who needs to be loved. He does not conclude:
This thou perceivest, which makes my love more strong.
To love that well which I must leave ere long.
That is, he is not primarily concerned with giving love but with receiving it.
The reader may then ask what evidence he has for his final assertion and
perhaps question whether he is asserting a belief, expressing a hope, or making
a plea. The reader may also begin to wonder he is actually as old as the
metaphors in the quatrains suggest, or whether he does not mix considerable
overstatement with these metaphors, perhaps as a play for the beloved‟s
sympathy. The poem, seemingly simple on the surface, becomes increasingly
complex and ambiguous as the reader delves into it. Some readers will read it
for moral profundity; others will find it more notable or psychological
profundity. The questions raised here are more likely to rise in the mind of a
reader who has read more of Shakespeare‟s sonnets than in that of a beginning
student who reads the sonnet out of context.

By various hands

A HANDFUL OF LIMERICKS
The limerick can be useful for giving students personal experience with
versification. Give them a first line (“A freshman who snored in his sleep”) or
part of a first line (“There was a young man from ”) and offer a prize for the
best completion, taking into consideration both successful handling of the form
and cleverness of the punch line. (Be sure, if you give them the first foot) in
any line. Rarely, if ever, are the first feet in a limerick all anapests, but often (as
in “there was a young lady of Lynn”) they are all iambs.

Dylan Thomas
POEM IN OCTOBER (P. 781)

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 In tone this poem is rhapsodic. It begins on a note of delight and anticipation,
climbs steadily to joy, leaps into an exalted state of visionary experience and
recollection, then lapses slightly back into joy and hope. There are contrasts of
tone in the poem, but they are not sharp contrasts. The whole poem is pitched
at a high level of exultation. This exultation comes from the poet‟s relationship
with nature, not only its beauty, but a sacredness he senses in it, akin to what
Wordsworth found in it a century and a half earlier.
The poet celebrates his birthday by rising early in the morning (he hears the
morning beck on him to set forth) and walking beyond the gates of the town
and up the mountain that lies behind it. He climbs so high that he gets above
the weather. The month is October, and it had been raining in the town, but
high on the mountainside the sun is “Summery, ” birds are singing, and he
hears only “the rain wringing / wind blow cold” in the woods “faraway” under
him. From this height the town church seems small as a snail with its “horns”
(its two towers) rising through mist. Where he stands, however, “all the
gardens / Of spring and summer” seem to be blooming, and it is a fit spot to
“marvel” his birthday away-“but the weather turned around. ” We must be
careful not to put too much emphasis on that “but” or to read the following
clause literally. The weather does not turn from rainy to sunny or from fall to
summery; these changes had already occurred as he climbed the mountainside.
The weather does not turn from rainy to sunny or from fall to summery; these
changes had already occurred as he climbed the mountainside. The weather
metaphorically and psychologically turns “around” in that the poet‟s mind is
carried in vision and in time away from the “blithe” summery scene presently
before him where he could “marvel” his birthday away, back to his childhood
days when he felt an even intense and completer identification with the
“wonder of summer. ” He remembers the forgotten morning when “He walked
with his mother / Through the parables / Of sun light / And the legends of the
green chapels” (the woods), and “the mystery / Sang alive / Still in the water
and singing birds. ” In the final stanza the first three lines are a recapitulation of
lines 38-40 not a new turning nevertheless, this final stanza brings him slowly

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back to the reality of the present with its full recognition that the “true / Joy” of
his visionary experience had been that of a “long dead child, ” that it is now his
“thirtieth / Year to heaven” (a recapitulation of the opening line), and that the
town below him is wearing its autumn foliage. The poem ends with the poet‟s
prayer that on his next birthday he may still be capable of such visionary
experience.
Though less explicitly philosophical, “Poem in October” in several ways
resembles Wordsworth‟s “Tin Tern Abbey. ” The adult poet is a lover of
nature, responsive to its beauty, and a believer that it somehow embraces the
divine (as shown by Thomas‟s use throughout the poem of “sacramental
imagery” and language: “thirtieth year to heaven, ” “heron / Priested shore, ”
“water praying, ” “the blue altered sky”-with its concealed pun, “parables / Of
sun light, ” “legends of the green chapels, ” “mystery”). Yet the poet regrets the
loss of the even intense involvement with nature that he enjoyed as a child
when he felt the divinity of nature (his “true / Joy”) less consciously in the
intellect but more fully though his whole being.
A minor difficulty in this poem is caused by “Thomas‟s omission of the
hyphen from such compound adjectives a mussel-pooled, heron-priested net
webbed rain-winging, lark-full, and blue-altered. The involved syntax of the
first stanza has also caused difficulty. Its skeleton is “It was my thirtieth year to
heaven [that] woke to my hearing the morning beckon myself to set foot in the
town and set forth. ” Thomas has omitted the relative pronoun between lines 1
and 2. “Woke” is an intransitive verb modified by the prepositional phrase
beginning with “to”, the object of the preposition is the long gerund phrase “my
hearing the water beckon … ect. ” The object of the gerund is an infinitive
phrase with “the morning” as its subject and “[10] beckon” as its verb.

Matsuo Bash / Moritake

TWO JAPANESE HAIKU (P. 788)
Just as the limerick is a useful form for giving students experience with
versification, the haiku is a useful form for initiating them into original poetic

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composition (experiential rather than merely clever). The brevity of the form
forces them to practice verbal economy; its nature, by delivering them from the
hampering notion that meter and rime are essential to poetry, frees them to
concentrate on other dimensions –particularly imagery. The essence of haiku
poetry is that it suggests rather than states. It strives to give the rather some
unique perception of nature, of some immediate insight into the nature of
things, without intervention of the abstracting intellect. It accomplishes this,
most frequently, either by presenting a single sharply observed image or by
juxtaposing two images which parallel or contrast with each other in significant
and suggestive ways. So essential to the form is brevity that many writers of
haiku in English have abandoned the traditional 5-7-5 syllabic pattern and
written poems even briefer. The haiku composition assignment may therefore
be made in various ways. The important stipulation should be that the poem
purvey its perception though imagery rather than through abstract statement.

William Shakespeare
FROM ROMEO AND JULIET (P. 784)
Since Romeo and Juliet, except for a few brief prose passages, is written
through-out in iambic pentameter, and since much of it also rimes (the lines
riming sometimes alternately and sometimes in pairs), it is not surprising that
14 lines, from a total of almost 3, 000 should fall into the rime pattern of an
English sonnet. That this expect does so from design, rather than from
coincidence, can, however, be definitively demonstrated.
1. The passage had four kinds of unity: grammatical, situational,
metaphorical, and tonal. First, the passage begins at the beginning of a sentence
and ends at the end of a sentence. It is grammatically self-contained. Second,
the passage covers a self-contained episode or situation: it begins with the first
words of Romeo and Juliet and ends with their first kiss. Third, the passage is
unified by a single extended metaphor, one in which a pilgrim, or palmer, is
worshiping at the shrine of a saint. Fourth, the religious nature of this metaphor
-employing words like profane holy, shrine, sin, pilgrims, devotion, saints,
palmers, prayer, and faith combines with the delicious punning wit of the

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dialogue to give the passage unity of tone: a tone of earnest delicacy and
delightfully charming gravity which forces us to take seriously an episode we
might otherwise take cynically. Romeo we feel, is not simply a fresh young
man on the make and Juliet an easy mark: this is genuine love at first sight.
“Dear saint, let lips do what hands do” is tonally a great deal different from
“Gimme a little kiss, honey, won‟cha?”
2. In structure as in form, the excerpt is organized into three quatrains and a
final couplet. In the first quatrain Romeo, initiating the basic metaphor,
apologizes for taking Juliet‟s “holy” hand in his unworthy one, but humbly
offers to make up for the offence by giving the hand a gentle kiss. In the second
quatrain Juliet reassures Romeo, telling him that he has done no wrong but
shows mannerly devotion in taking her hand, for pilgrims quite properly touch
saints‟ hands, and pilgrims “kiss” by clasping hands. She thus simultaneously
encourages Romeo to hold her hand but with maidenly delicacy indicates that
there is no need for him to kiss it. In the third quatrain, however, emboldened
by this reassurance, Romeo decides to play the long shot and ask for a kiss on
the lips. But he puts the request delicately and charmingly. Do not pilgrims and
saints have lips as well as hands? He asks. Translated, this means, why should
we not kiss with our lips instead of merely with our hands? Juliet, still modest,
yet keeping to the metaphor, replies that pilgrims‟ lips are for praying with.
Then Romeo brilliantly seizes his opening: “Let lips do what hands do. ” The
line has two meanings. Hands not only kiss, they also pray. Lips not only pray,
they also kiss, So Romeo, shaping his hands into the attitude of prayer, prays
also with his lips; but what he prays for is a kiss. In the final couplet Juliet, not
unwillingly defeated in this contest of with (for what can a saint do when a
faithful pilgrim prays to her?) gracefully surrenders: she grants the kiss, thus
answering Romeo‟s prayer. The first quatrain is Romeo‟s apology; the second
is Juliet‟s reassurance; the third is the plea; and the couplet is the plea granted.
Structure follows from.
3. In Shakespeare‟s time the sonnet form was used primarily for the
treatment of love. His play concerns a pair of “star-crossed livers. ” The

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episode in the excerpt concerns their first meeting and their first kiss. What
more appropriate than Shakespeare should deliberately cast the episode into the
form of an English sonnet?

John Donne
DEATH, BE NOT PROUD
This tightly constructed sonnet matches structure to form while producing
some surprises for those acquainted with both the English and Italian sonnet
forms. There are three quatrains and a couplet (as in the English sonnet), but
the riming pattern is not abab cdcd etc., but abba abba cddc aa: the Italian
quatrain is used in the English rhetorical structure, and the English closing
couplet returns to the a-rime, thus implying circularity.
These formal elements are in harmony with the structure of though. The
sonnet, an extended apostrophe, consist of these rhetorical units: an opening
quatrain which makes an assertion (based on faith) denying that death is either
mighty or dreadful; a second quatrain offering “proof” that death is not
dreadful; a third offering “proof” that it is not mighty; and a couplet which
returns to faith and faith alone as a support, and to the riming sound of the
opening line while the speaker attempts to use reason and logical proof to shore
up his opening remark, he unwittingly reveals the weakness of his reasoning,
the falseness of hi premise, and the desperation that would lead a man to such
an undertaking; he reveals a man stating a deep wish as if it were easily
demonstrable truth.
The opening quatrain, in a tone of forced bravado, uses only two techniques
of argument, neither logically admissible; the simple insistence that what
“some” have said is not true, and the condescending tone of “poor death. ” If it
is a fact that people overthrown by death “die not”. Then the final phrase of the
quatrain is valid, for the syllogism is clear: death cannot kill, I am a man;
therefore, death cannot kill me. What is not established here, of course, is the
universality of immortality, so the syllogism, though valid, has been based on
an unproved major premise.

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 It is important to bring formal logic into the discussion of this poem, for the
patent illogically of the speaker is what makes the poem so moving. In his
desperate need to reassure himself, the speaker is nevertheless the butt of
dramatic irony, an example of the futility of attempting to prove an article of
faith by means of reason-and so intensely in need of such proof that he argues
fraudulently.
The second quatrain attempts to prove that death is not to be feared. But the
two “proofs” are fallacious: lines 5-6 argue by (death is like sleep; sleep gives
pleasure; therefore death gives plea suet), while line 7 employs the favorite
device of advertisers, the “endorsement” of “our best men. ” The third quatrain,
intended to prove that death is not powerful, opens with two illogical devices:
name-calling (“slave, ” because death is caused by other agents) and the
aspersion of dwelling with evil neighbors. It returns to argument by analogy,
insisting that drugs or spells induce a better sleep than death does, and then
closes with another belittling condescension.
The concluding couplet, in a tone of triumph, asserts that case has been
proved and that eternal life is our universal destiny. It doe so in paradox, the
death of death, which requires the only possible resolution, the faith of a
believer in Christian salvation.
The key to further meaning in the poem may be found in the speaker‟s
apparent unawareness of what he is additionally revealing about himself and
his feelings about death. When in the second quatrain he attempts to disprove
death‟s dreadfulness, he inadvertently uses death‟s might as his evidence: death
is more powerful than “rest and sleep, ” and it has the power to deliver the soul
from the captivity of the body. When in the third he attempts to disprove
death‟s power, he calls to witness its dreadfulness: in line 9, the frailty of
human life makes us subject to a frightening airy of powerful killers, and in line
10 the neighbors of death are a catalogue of dread. Perhaps even more telling is
the speaker‟s ambiguity about “sleep, ” death‟s analogue. In the second
quatrain, rest and sleep are the sources of “much pleasure, ” though not so
much as death can give. Yet in the third, the sleep induced by drugs or charms

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is “better” than the sleep of death and in the couplet, what is most desired is
eternal wakefulness, not rest or sleep. The great victory is that both sleep and
death “shall be no more. ”
The speaker knows what he wants-the eternal bliss of salvation-but he is
vainly trying to prove through logical argument that he can receive it. That
attempt is doomed, as theologians and philosophers have long demonstrated,
and the speaker‟s own desperation is vividly shown by his failure. Finally, he
rests where he began-and where according to the scriptures he can find his
much-desired certitude. He accepts and triumphs in the paradoxes of his faith,
which defy logical or rational analysis, but which assure him that “the last
enemy that shall be destroyed is death” (1 Cor. 15:26), that “death is swallowed
up in victory” (1 Cor, 15:24), and that “death and hell (will be) cast into the
lake of fire” (Rev, 20:14).

Martha Collins
THE STORY WE KNOW
The poem departs from the strictness of its chosen form by varying the two
refrain lines, which should be identical in language (if not in syntactical
function or meaning). Its maintenance of the proper rime scheme for a
villanelle is emphasized by the high incidence of monosyllables as rime words,
seeming to insist that we notice the perfect riming. That kind of self
consciousness about form and its fairness to subject (which is often the lone
adopted in lighter verse) is parodied in line 2, which presents a bouncing
iambic regularity in the monosyllables of an empty social encounter,
mimicking the shallowness of the occasion in the monotony of rhythm. Line 2
is also one of only three perfectly iambic pentameter lines, and is the only one
of them to punctuate pauses precisely between all of its feet, to reinforce its
sense of empty repetition (the other two, lines 4 and 16, vary the rhythm to
avoid such regularity).

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 The metrical norm in the poem, however, is anapestic pentameter, as
determined by the relative frequency of the triple foot, and particularly by the
meter of the two refrain lines:
The WAY / to be- GIN / is AL- ways the SAME. / hel-LO, /
And good-BYE / at the End, / that‟s EV- / er-y STO- / ry we KNOW.
/
This meter is well suited to such society verse as the villanelle, and Collins
plays ironically with the expectations aroused by this traditionally light, polite
form. In fact part of the poem‟s force comes from setting up a shallow, blasé
expectation in both reader and speaker, for if we are conditioned to the
superficial pleasantries of social verse, so the speaker in her ennui seems to
have conditioned herself to expect only superficiality in her relations with other
people. She “knows” how all relations begin and end: a social “hello, ” “and
Good-bye at the end, ” a pattern of uninvolved pairing with all the expected
accoutrements of love affairs with pout love-external things that take the place
of feelings. It is, as he says, a boring sequence, “a story we know so well / we
don‟t turn page. ” But on this occasion, something more takes place, not only a
mutual dependency but a shared fear of death. The social routine of the hello /
goodbye comes to symbolize the physical reality of mortal life, “the way we all
begin and end” signaled to the speaker by the “cold white sign” of snow
obliterating both the air the pine.
Blasé sophistication, so aptly captured in the form of light verse turns out to
have a darker implication, as the speaker learns that the pattern of her personal,
social life, full of empty beginnings and ending, is also the pattern of mortal
existence.

Randolph Stow
AS HE LAY DYING
As With “the greedy the people” students might be asked to diagram the
constants in this poem. The result would look something like this:
As he lay dying, two …

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 ………………………………………. . [rime]
And one …………. To the other:
“Brother,
……………. . …………. ……………… [rime]
Each stanza has five lines, with exact refrains occupying the first half of the
first line, he beginning and end of the third line, and all of the fourth line. The
refrains in line 3 and 4 rime with each other, and lines 2 and 5 have end rime.
In addition, each first line introduces a bird of prey, and each of the fifth lines
deals with a division of the prey. So the corresponding lines in each stanza are
parallel in structure as well as in form. Finally, the initial refrain of the three
stanzas is repeated at the end of the last stanza and is also used as the title (a
true title, used by the author, not just the first line used by the editor in lieu of a
title). This gives the phrase “As he lay dying” tremendous importance.
The theme of the poem? Perhaps that all life forms feed on other life forms?
The crows will feed on the flesh of the man, the hawks will feed on the crows,
and the cables will feed on the crows, and the cables will feed on the hawks
will feed on the flesh of the man, the hawks. And the man-there is something
mysterious here, for we are not told who he is or why he is dying. Perhaps we
should leave the mystery untouched; but, in absence of contrary evidence, we
tend to identify him with the parallel creatures in the poem. He too is part of the
food chain. Perhaps he was hurt in a hunting accident, or perhaps he
overstuffed himself eating Thanksgiving turkey. This is facetious speculation,
of course, but the poem does not suggest that he is different from other
creatures. All life sustains itself by destroying other life. This is the cruel fact
that even man cannot escape from.
The poem both in form and content has the flavor of the medieval folk
ballads, especially “Edward” and the “The Twa Corbies”.

Anonymous
EDWARD (P. 786)
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 The story told in “Edward” –a dark domestic tragedy of greed, guile,
murder, and remorse –is unfolded gradually through dialogue, question, and
remorse-is unfolded gradually through dialogue, question, and answer. Not
until the third stanza do we learn what Edward has done. Not until the last do
we learn why he has done it. The tension of the poem mounts steadily through
the first climax to the last.
A man of noble birth and heir to his father‟s estate, Edward has killed his
father because of the “counsels” of his mother, who had hoped to get control of
these properties into her own hands. To accomplish this end, she has been
willing to subvert her own son. Crafty, manipulative, greedy, and entirely
lacking in natural affection, she has somehow worked on her son‟s feelings
through hint, suggestion, and insinuation, until he has felt it his duty or his
interest to kill his father. But the psychological dimensions of the story exist
largely between the lines.
Why does the mother, if she put him up to it, have to ask why Edward‟s
sword drips with blood? She is perhaps surprised to see Edward “sad” rather
than rejoicing, and needs to confirm her hopes. Why does Edward lie about
what he has done? Since doing the deed, he has undergone revulsion of horror
and remorse, and is lying more to himself than to his mother. He cannot admit
to himself what he has done. The mother calls his bluff, presses her question;
Edward lies again, and is again detected; but the mother reveals something
about herself. One steed is the same as another to her, and she does not
understand that a man might have a peculiar affection for a particular steed,
especially an old one (Like his father). When Edward finally admits the truth,
the mother shows no emotion; it is what she had secretly known and hoped for.
In her question about what penance Edward will do for his deed, she cunningly
washes her hands of any share in the guilt. Edward, overcome with guilt, sees
exile from home and family and all he has loved as the only possible penance.
The next question –what will Edward do with his towers and hall? –brings us
to the center of the mother‟s interests. But Edward cares not a whit for the
towers and hall: they are the witnesses of his dreadful crime. Failing of the

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answer she wanted, the mother shrewdly digresses in her next question,
disguising her main concern. Edward‟s reply to what he will leave his wife and
children does not indicate that he is uncaring, but only that he is so emotionally
overwrought that he feels any provision made for them can only contaminate
them with his own guilt. In her final question the mother returns to her main
concern: “And what wul ye leive to your ain mither deir?” in that final phrase
we glimpse the mother‟s manipulative method. Twice in the poem she has
addressed Edward as her dear son (12, 28); now she reminds him that she is his
own dear mother. But she is totally unprepared for the switch in parental
allegiance that Edward has undergone since the killing. Edward uses the word
“dear” in the poem only in speaking of his dead father (21, 23).
Edward‟s final outburst comes with a shock to the reader as well as to the
mother. For the reader it is a double shock-that of hearing a son deliver the
curse of hell on his mother and of learning that he killed his father as his
mother‟s suggestion. Yet the reader is left, most likely, with a feeling of pity for
Edward and of horror for the mother. The emotional Edward suffers torments
of horror, guilt, and remorse for what he has done; the crafty and unnatural
mother feels nothing but greed.
The narrative kernel of each stanza (lines 1, 4, 5, 8) is in ballad stanza. The
two refrains (“Edward, Edward” and “Miter, miter”) keep the crucial family
relationship constantly before us. The repeated lines prolong the suspense and
add immensely to the emotional power.

Maxine Kumis
400-METER FRESTYLE
Although the poem pays tribute to stamina and “heart”, it primarily
celebrates a mastery of form achieved by discipline and hard training: “Thrift is
his wonderful secret; he has schooled out all extravagance. ” The economy of
motion that eliminates any wasted movement is “schooled. ” The swimmer‟s
feet “know the lesson” o steady cadence, and the lungs “know” not to list for
air.

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 Thrift is the poet‟s virtue too, and this poem drives steadily forward from
“The Gun” which starts the race to the announcement of the winner‟s “TIME:
4:25. 9. ” There is minimal punctuation, and there are no wasted words.
The sixteen horizontal lines of the poem match the sixteen lengths of a
Junior Olympic-size (25-meter) pool that have to be swum in a 400-meter race.
The three-letter vertical arcs connecting the lines imitate the flip-turn used in
modern competitive swimming. As the swimmer approaches the end of the
pool, he ducks his head under, and in one continuous movement he brings his
legs out of the water, knees bent, slaps the soles of his feet against the end of
pool while executing a half twist, pushes off hard, and glides underwater (as the
spectators watch “for sings”) before resurfacing and resuming his stroke.
For about one month in 1958, 4 min. 25. 9 seconds was the world‟s record
(men‟s) for this event. The poem was published in 1961. Maxine Kumis has
herself been a competitive swimmer.

William Buford
A CHRISTMAS TREE
The pattern of this poem is metrical as well as typographical. The lines have
respectively one, two, three, four, five, one, and two feet. The poem‟s meaning
is reinforced visually not only in the Christmas-tree shape but also in the word
“huddles, ” where the omission of the letter e huddles four tall-stemmed letters
together. The rime scheme is aabcxb, the b rimes being approximate.

Anonymous
GOD’S WILL FOR YOU AND ME

Gerard Manley Hopkins

PIED BEAUTY
The poetic deficiencies of “God‟s Will You and Me” are not far to seek. Its
literal language is trite (“when things go wrong, ” “God knows best”). Its
figurative language is trite (“willing feet, ” “our daily key”). Its remaining

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imagery is feeble (“song, ” “dark or bright, ” “child”). Fourteen of the poem‟s
sixteen lines repeat the phrase “Just to, ” ten times followed by “be. ” These
three words constitute almost 40 percent of the poem. The rest is mostly a
string of abstract adjectives- “tender, ” “true, ” “glad, ” “merciful, ” “mild, ”
“trustful, ” “gentle, ” “kind, ” “sweet, ” “helpful, ” “cheery, ” “loyal” –strung
together in no particular order, and often duplicative or overlapping in meaning
(kind–helpful, glad-cheery, gentle-tender-mild). Worst of all, the poem‟s
tripping triple meter and childish repetition of “Just to be” make God‟s will for
you and me seem simple, undemanding, and easy to carry out. In truth, no man
could do it successfully for one whole day. The poem not only fails to create
experience; it falsifies it.
Though both poems concern God, their themes are quite different. “God‟s
Will” is didactic verse instructing us how God wishes us to live our lives; “Pied
Beauty” is, first, a hymn of praise to God for the variegated, changing beauty of
the natural and human worlds, and, second, a contrast between this variegated
changing beauty of the created world and the uniform, unchanging beauty of
the creator. (The theme has its Biblical base in James 1:17: “Every good gift
and every perfect gift is from above, and cometh down from the Father of
lights, with who is no variableness, neither shadow of turning, ”)
The first theme is stated in the title and first line of the poem and is
developed and exemplified in the next eight. “Glory be to God, ” the poet
exclaims, for the beauty of things that are pied, dappled, couple-colored,
branded, stippled, plotted and pieced, fickle, or freckled. With one exception
these terms all apply to things that are of more than one color. The exception,
“fickle, ” referring to variation in time rather than space, ties in with “swift,
slow” and reminds us that this various beauty is in constant motion and is
constantly changing. The white clouds move and change in shape across a
brightening or darkening blue sky the decoratively rose-mole-stippled trout
swim in a changing current.
In line 5, which introduces human activities into the poem, farmers alter the
landscape by laying it out in plots of grazing, fallow, and plowed land.

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 The concluding two lines of the poem summarize the first theme and
introduce the second. The praise for this divers, changing beauty is due to
Creator whose beauty is “past [beyond] change, ”. The poem thus brings into
contrast multiplicity and unity, constant change and changelessness, plenitude
and amplitude, with the implication that the latter are greater. If the wonders of
the created world (which varies “who knows how?”) pass understanding, how
much more so must the beauty of their Creator!
The achievement of the poem lies, first in its packed, vivid imagery. Line 4,
for instance, in six words introduces three separate vivid images (two literal,
one figurative). There are “finches‟ wings” (black and gold) and “chestnut
falls” (fallen chestnuts beneath a tree, glowing in mahogany browns), these
latter compared by a compound adjective to fresh fire coals glowing golden
and umber in a grate. Though the imagery of the poem is chiefly visual, the
opposition of “sweet, sour” reminds us that the world is variegated in its appeal
to the other senses as well. Second, the poem is remarkable for its rich use of
sound: patterned end-time; paired alliterations linking words parallel or
opposed in meaning (“swift, slow”, “sweet, sour, ” “a dazzle, dim”), or simply
the complex orchestration of such a line as 4 (with the alliteration of Fresh-fire-
falls-finches; the assonance of fresh-chestnut and finches wings; the /-
consonance of coal-falls). Third the poem is remarkable for its concentration.
In line 4 every word is image-bearing; in line 9 all words but the initial “With”
carry a full freight of meaning (contrast such lines with the slackness of “Huts
to be tender, just to be true”) Finally, “Pied Beauty” is notable for its freshness
of diction. The four adjectives in line 7 are all apposite yet unexpected; the
adjectives in “God‟s Will for You and Me” are as predictable as those in the
Boy Scout oath.

Robert Francis
PITCHER

George E. Phair

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THE OLD-FASHIONED PITCHER
The first poem celebrates pitching as an art, the second as a feat of
endurance. This is their difference of intention at the literal level, but the
second poem has only a literal level.
“The Old-Fashioned Pitcher” is a familiar exercise in sentimental nostalgia
for “the good old days. ” Its one cleverness lies in its imitation of a more
famous poem of the same sort, “The Bucket” by Samuel Woodworth (1785-
1842). Woodworth‟s first stanza begins “How dear to my hear are the scenes of
my childhood” and ends by referring to “The old oaken bucket, the iron-bound
bucket, / The moss-covered bucket which hung in the well. ” Comparison of
their stanzaic pattern, and of their opening and concluding lines, shows that
Phair‟s poem is a conscious allusion to Woodworth‟s. Aside from this element
of parody, “The Old-Fashioned Pitcher” has little to recommend it. The
adjective “old” before “village green” (2) is an obvious sentimentalism
designed to elicit a stock response of warm affection for former times. The
phrase “ducks from the scene” (4) is trite and slangy. Line 7 is a blatant
example of “padding” (the use of unnecessary words to fill out the metrical
requirements of the line): “That” is the reason “could be reduced to “that‟s
why” or “therefore”, “thinker and long for” uses two verbs where one would
suffice.
The nouns “hurler” and “twirler” and used so often in sports pages simply as
variations for “pitcher” that it is difficult to know whether the poet here
intended to differentiate them. The can be differentiated, of course. A “hurler”
relies upon strength and speed simply to “fire” the ball past the batter. A
“twirler” puts a spin or twist on the ball, causing it to curve or break in a
manner deceptive to the batter. The former relies upon strength, the latter on
skill. Since throwing cure balls puts a greater strain on the muscles than
throwing fast balls, the “twirler” suffers more often from a sore arm than the
“hurler”. Does the poet recognize this distinction? Does he mean to confess “I
prefer strength to skill-Goliath to David?” Or is he not rather simply that “men
aren‟t what they used to be?” Evidence favors the latter surmise. If the old-
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fashioned pitcher was “iron-armed, ” what need had he to be “stout-hearted”? It
seems unlikely that this poet was thinking about seldom bedfellows:
“Pitcher” celebrates the skill and subtlety of the good pitcher. His “art” is to
be off-center. His “aim is how not to hit the mark he seems to aim at”-the
Batter‟s bat, or the dead center of the strike zone (directly over the center of the
plate and halfway between the batter‟s knees and shoulders). (Notice how the
two “aim‟s” vary slightly in meaning. ) He must “avoid the obvious” the pitch
that goes exactly where it seems to be going-but he must “vary the avoidance”
lest the batter learn what to expect. The other players on the team-infielders and
outfielders-throw to be understood (the shortstop throwing to first base does not
want to fool the first baseman); but the pitcher throws “to be a moment
misunderstood” by the batter (so that the batter will swing too low or too high,
or too soon or too late, hitting an easy pop-fly or an easy grounder or missing
the ball altogether). Yet “not too much. Not errant, arrant, wild” –the three
adjectives are not redundant (like “hanker and long for”) but are skillful
variations of meaning; no good pitch is “errant” (wandering or deviating from
his intention), “arrant” (flagrantly and shamelessly wide of the mark), or “wild”
(out of control). The pitcher does not want to walk the batter, cause his catcher
to drop his pitch, or throw so wide of the plate that the catcher can‟t reach it
(allowing base runners, if any, to advance).
Rather “every seeming aberration” is “willed” (intended, under perfect
control). He wants “Not to … communicate” (not to hit the batter‟s bat
squarely) yet (here is the paradox) he wants “to communicate”: he wishes the
batter to understand his intention but “too late” to make a base hit.
The poet exemplifies in his own verse the subtle skill he celebrates. He
“varies the avoidance” of the obvious, not only in his choice of words (“errant,
arrant, wild”) but in the very form of his poem. It consists of five pentameter
couplets, each different in its “riming. ”

Walt Whitman
COME UP FROM THE FIELDS FATHER
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J. H. Mc Naughton
THE FADED COAT OF BLUE
“Come Up From the Fields Father” and “The Faded Coat of Blue” both
concern the bereavement of a family by a soldier son who has met death on a
Civil War battle field. The first poem treats this subject honestly and with
insight, bringing out its inherent pathos and communicating genuine emotion.
The second poem, attempting to wring every possible drop of emotion out of
the situation, sacrifices truth to sentimentality.
Before endeavoring to justify this judgment, however, let us note a technical
difference in itself, will be necessary to the discussion of evaluative features.
This has to do with point of view, or how the story gets told. “The Faded Coat
of Blue” uses the first person viewpoint in which the speaker is the dead
soldier‟s mother. Where she is not made clear, but who she is established.
“Come Up From the Fields Father” uses an omniscient narrator who may be
identified with the poet himself. This narrator enters at will the mind of any
character, and can tell us what none of the characters themselves yet know: that
the son is already dead.
In the first stanza, we are told that he is buried “sad and lonely” in “a lonely
grave unknown. ” The tone of the poem nowhere suggests the presence of
dramatic irony. Rather it suggests a sentimental poet trying to overwhelm us
with grief.
“The Faded Coat of Blue” heightens every color, exaggerates every
sentiment, and spares no detail in the attempt to make its protagonist pathetic.
The soldier dies “faint and hungry” and “weary” and also “sad and lonely. ”
His uniform is “faded. ” No “gentle one” was near him “to close his sweet
eyes. ” No stone marks the “sod” over his grave, which is “lonely” and
“unknown”. The soldier himself is a compendium of all the virtues. He is
“brave”, “sweet”, “noble”, “good”, “true”, and he dies with his “mother‟s name
on his lips.

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 The author has poured the syrup on so thick that he has hid from himself the
fact that his poem is and uncooked batter if trite phrases (“heart that beat so
true, ” “sad and lonely, ” “nameless grave, ” “the good and true, ” “no stone
marks the sod”). Moreover, the poet gives no evidence to substantiate the
virtues ascribed to the: character he merely asserts them, repeating the same
adjective over and, over. The amount of repetition in the poem is astounding.
There is not only a fore-line refrain stanza. After each-line narrative stanza. But
the words used in the retrain stanza largely repeat words in the narrative stanza
the phrase faded coat of blue is used as a refrain both in the narrative stanza and
in the refrain stanza and thus is used eight narrative stanza and in the refrain
stanzas, and thus is used eight times in the poem (not counting the title. ) well
over half of the poem, therefore, consists of repetition. In addition, the phrase
“good” and “true” occurs seven times. In addition the adjectives “brave, ”
“sweet, ” and “lonely” each occur three times, the noun “grave “appears” eight
times.
To turn from “The Faded Coat of Blue to “Come Up from the Fields Father”
is to take a refreshing drink of pure spring water after a surfeit of syrup. This
poet, by treating his subject honestly, gives the natural emotion in it a chance to
come out; he does not have to use artificial sweetening. To begin with, he has
based his poem on an authentic insight: that the real tragedies of war are often
to be found back home rather than up at the front; death may be hardest for
those left behind. The poem begins with the arrival of the letter which is to be
its focus. During war-time, a letter from the soldier-son is the big event in the
day for any family. Short of catastrophe, only this would call the father up from
the fields before supper and bring the whole family together at the front door.
But while the family is congregating, the omniscient narrator pauses to paint
the scene: the autumn trees in yellow and red, the ripe apples in the orchard, the
grapes on the vine, the buckwheat in the fields, the rain-washed sky, the wind
in the leaves, the prosperous farm. In a few lines the narrator puts the scene
clearly before us and appeals to all our senses in doing so. This descriptive
passage not only serves to give the action of the poem a clearly defined setting;

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it also plays an important role in the structure of the poem. The poem is built on
a contrast between the “teeming” life of the farm where everything “prospers
well” and the deprivation of the mother through the loss of a single son. In the
serene weather of early autumn the trees are “deeper green, yellowier and
redder”; at the end of the poem the bereaved is dressed all in black. In the fields
all is calm, “vital and beautiful, ” but the mother wishes she could die. By so
much does a human life outweigh the vitality of teeming nature. But now the
mother comes hurrying quickly to the door, worried, not stopping to adjust her
hair or her cap as usual, for a letter during wartime may bring bad news, and
indeed she feels a premonition. The envelope is quickly opened; the mother‟s
heart sinks as she sees that the writing is in someone else‟s hand. The letters
swim before her eyes, but she skims it quickly, anxious to learn the worst,
picking out disconnected phrases that tell the terrible news. The son is badly
wounded. The oldest daughter, feeling her responsibility through her tears, is
the one who tries to comfort the mother. She seizes eagerly on the one sentence
of the letter that holds out hope. But the mother cannot be comforted: her son is
in the hospital. She feels faint and sick, and leans against the doorpost, her head
a-throb. The younger sisters huddle around dismayed, not knowing what to do
or say. The whole picture is filled with psychological truth, and there is no talk
of faded coats of blue or heavenly robes of white. But, the omniscient narrator
tells us, the boy is already dead. He was a brave and a “simple soul” (contrast
the four-times repeated “noble spirit” of the other poem), not a paragon.
Presently we see the mother, who by now has received confirmation of the
death, dressed in mourning clothes, fretful, unable to eat or sleep well, wishing
she could slip away from life and be with her dead on-not up in Heaven
“among the good and true” –but just with him. Her reaction is real, not
exaggerated. And thus the meaning and tragedy of war are borne home to the
reader by a scene from life truly presented-presented freshly and through the
senses and without trite phrases or the endlessly repeated insistence that the
dead boy and all his family were noble, sweet, gentle, good, brave, and true.
The contrast between the phrase “simple soul” used to describe the dead soldier
in this poem, and “noble spirit, ” used for the same purpose in the other,
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perhaps epitomizes the differences between the two poems. The first phrase
seems just, the other exaggerated. We might also describe the first poem as
“image-making, ” the second as “tear-jerking. ”

William Blake
A POISON TREE

Grandfield Kleiser
THE MOST VITAL THING IN LIFE
One might almost judge poems from their titles alone. The first title present
as image; the second is an abstract phrase, more suitable for an essay or sermon
than for a poem.
The second poem is abstract from beginning to end. It has no dramatic
situation. The poet addresses the reader directly. His message-that the most
vital things in life is to control one‟s feelings-is stated baldly and repeated over
and. The reader is told to “curb resentment, ” to “maintain a mental peace, ” to
“learn to keep strict silence, ” to “keep [his] mental balance. ” “The tone is
preachy and didactic. There is no development: the good advice simply comes
out in a string of platitudes. The poem is without imagery. Its one metaphor is
the utterly trite one of a battle” (13) The poet mixes formal diction
(“defrauded”) and colloquial diction (“peeved”) without purpose and without
any sense of impropriety. His meter (iambic-anapestic trimester, with feminine
endings in the odd-numbered lines) is much too swift and bouncy for so serious
a theme. A number of words seem included simply to sustain the meter: “quite”
(4), “mental” (6), “all” and “simply” (*), “Be assured” (23). This is didactic-
verse, not poetry; it conveys advice, not experience.
“A Poison Tree” also has a message, but it is conveyed through a parable or
extended metaphor rather than explicitly stated. The poem has a beginning
middle, and end, could not be rearranged in its presentation as could “The Most
Vital Thing in Life. ”

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 The speaker (who is not the poet) sets up the basic contrast and theme of the
poem in the first stanza. To tell one‟s wrath is to end it. To conceal one‟s wrath
is to cause it to grow and become destructive. The speaker presents two
episodes from his life: one in which he was open and candid about his feelings,
the other in which he suppressed his feelings. The first episode is presented
briefly, for it is of slow development. It is related in a sustained metaphor,
which begins in the last phrase of the stanza. The speaker has burled his wrath
like a seed, and like a seed it begins to “grow. ” In the second stanza the
speaker nurses his anger. He waters it with fears of his foe and with tears of
rage and frustration. He suns it with hypocritical, deceiving smiles. The seed
has sprouted. In the third stanza the seed-become-tree bears an apple,
poisonous because it is the fruit of wrath, but bright and shiny on the outside
because the wrath has been concealed. The speaker‟s “foe” sees and covets it,
and in the final stanza steals and eats it. The speaker finds his foe dead beneath
the tree and is “glad. ” Thus the consequences of concealed wrath are shown to
be horrifyingly destructive, for they include not only the death of the “foe” but
the moral perversion of the speaker. The most chilling aspect of the conclusion
is released by the word “glad. ” It touches emotional centers never approached
in “The Most Vital Thing in Life. ” The speaker has destroyed not only his
“foe‟ but himself. (It is here we see that the speaker is not the poet. Where the
speaker is “glad” for the death of his foe, the poet is appalled, and makes us
feel appalled. Dramatic irony is at work. )
Note the simplicity and economy with which this tale is told. The seed-
sprout-sapling-tree development does not need stating; it is implied in the verbs
of the poem. The facts that the apple is poison (stanza 3) and that the foe has
been killed by eating it (stanza 4) also need no statement; they are implied by
the title and the sequence of events.
Blake‟s message has been embodied in a simple but powerful and moving
poem; Kleiser‟s message remains a versified message. And what about the
messages themselves? Blake‟s poem advocates expressing one‟s wrath.
Kleiser‟s recommends suppressing. It which advice is more valid? One may

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wish to hedge a title here and to suggest that it depends on circumstances (the
occasion for the anger, its intensity, and one‟s relationship to the person
causing it). One can agree with Kleiser that it is unwise to express irritation
over every petty annoyance or to tell every stranger exactly what one thinks of
him. But Blake is talking about “wrath” and about wrath felt toward person
with whom one is in daily association. Kleiser‟s maxims are tepid,
conventional, and often questionable. (Is controlling one‟s temper really “the
most vital thing in life?” More important that love? More important than
standing up for justice? Is it really true that “to win a worthwhile battle / Over
selfishness and spite, / You must learn to keep strict silence / Though you know
you‟re in the right?”) Blake‟s advice is bold and unconventional and in fact
anticipated by over a century some of the insipts of Sigmund Freud. In short,
Blake‟s poem present a poet who is both feeling and thinking deeply; Kleiser‟s
presents a poet who is doing neither.
A further question remains about the interpretation of Blake‟s poem. Does
the speaker plan the death of his “foe, ” or is he merely pleased when it occurs?
In this poem about revenge? The answer, certainly, is that the speaker does not
plan the death from the beginning. The central issue of the poem is not between
forgiveness and revenge but between the expression and concealment of anger.
Suppressed anger, the poet believes, festers and turns poisonous. At some point
it turns into hate and the hate possibly into planned revenge. The question
cannot be answered. With certainty and is ultimately unimportant. The
speaker‟s gladness at his foe‟s death fully reveals his moral perversion whether
the death has been plotted or not. A good case can be made, indeed, for the
contention that the speaker‟s “foe” is his foe because the speaker conceals his
anger from him, rather than vice versa. If “friend” and “foe” were interchanged
in the first stanza, would not the “foe” become a friend and the “friend” turn
into a foe?

Richard Middleton
ON A DEAD CHILD

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John Crowe Ransom
BELLS FOR JOHN WHITE SIDE’ S DAUGHTER (P. 801)
A child‟s death is a dangerous subject for a poet. It invites sentimentality.
Though the occasion is one for genuine grief, there is always a temptation to
“hake” it up a bit, to sweeten it, to picture the child as a little angle and to
soften the harsher contours.
In both poems considered here, the speaker is an adult attending the funeral
of a child, and in both the speaker finds it difficult to believe that the child is
dead. In the first the speaker is possibly an older relative of the child or a close
friend of the child‟s parents. In the second he is specifically a friend and
neighbor of the child‟s father, named in the title. This title has a double
meaning. The “Bells” refer to the church bells which ring for the funeral in the
final stanza; they also suggest that the poem itself is a tribute, a chiming of
rimes, composed in the dead girl‟s memory.
“On a Dead Child” suffers from lack of specificity. All we learn about the
dead child is that he? / she? Was “a little rose” and liked to play games. But in
the poem it is the adult, not the child, who is playing a game. As if he did not
know why he had come, he “wander[s]” up to the child‟s casket, pretending
that the child is “no more dead” than the roses strewn about the grave. He tells
himself that the child lies motionless only because it is “tired” from too much
“straying” (suggesting a gentle kind of play). And though the child does not
greet him, the adult pretends to believe that it is not dead: “Yet still I knew that
you that were only playing - / Playing at being dead. ” In stanza 3 the adult
confesses that the child lay so still, its eyelids so quiet, that he “might have
thought” it really dead: but he rejects this thought immediately, assuring
himself that the child was “peeping” through its closed eyelids; and so he does
not cry. Instead, he smiles, gently calls the child by name, adds his own rose to
the “sweet heap of roses” around the grave, and leaves the child to its “game. ”
The first and last stanzas of the poem allude to a passage from the fifteenth-
century work Imitation of Christ by Thomas a Kemps “Man proposes, but God

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disposes”- meaning roughly that, whatever plans a good man makes, God has
the final disposition in human affairs. In the poem it is an additional method
used by the adult to soften the reality of the child‟s death. “Though God‟s ways
are mysterious. He does nothing without good reason, and the reason is always
for the best” might be a modern version.
“On a Dead Child” is a sentimental poem. It chooses its vocabulary from
words designed to educe tender feeling: “God” (twice); “little” (twice); “roses”
(four times); “childish feet” “smiled”; “gently”; “sweet”; it avoids words of
opposite feeling. It never persuades us that the child- “A little rose among the
roses” – is a real child; more seriously, it does not persuade us that the adult is a
real adult. The adult is the childish figure in the poem. By pretending that the
child is only pretending to be dead, he avoids confrontation with the harsh fact
of death; yet the poem presents this avoidance not as a form of neurotic
escapism but as acceptable adult behavior.
The poet-speaker in “Bells for John Whiteside‟s Daughter” also finds it
difficult to believe that the child he knew is dead. She was so rapid in her
movements, so fleet of foot, so loud and boisterous in her play, that her stillness
now is almost beyond belief. Rather than pretend that she is merely playing,
however, he speak of her as being in a “brown study” (a state of somber,
abstracted brooding). But such a state is so uncharacteristic of the child that it
“astonishes” the speaker and the other adults gathered for her funeral.
The child in this poem is clearly not a “little rose” but a real child-active,
noisy, and often vexatious in her play. Indeed, her games are metaphorically
described s “wars, ” whose clamor reached the adults in their “high window, ”
and whose tyrannies disturbed the geese whom she woke from their “noon
apple dreams” and “harried” into pond. The term “little lady” applied to her is
ironical rather than sentimental in intention and effect (her “rod” is both scepter
and prod). The one long sentence comprising the three central stanza has a
freshness of imagery and imagination unmatched in the other poem and gives
us a vivid impression of the child at her play. The geese-lazy, sleepy, proud -
serve both as victims of the child‟s play and as a character-contrast to the child

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herself; yet the poet‟s whimsy of having them speak “in goose” is appropriate
to the kind of imaginative play that a child might engage in.
In the last stanza, however, the speaker is brought back to the present reality.
The bells ring for the funeral service, and the adults who have been “sternly
stopped” by the child‟s death are “vexed at her brown study, / Lying so primly
propped. ” If they had been sometimes “vexed” by her play in life, they are
more “vexed” to see her here, lying so “prim” (who was never prim in life),
“propped” rigidly in her coffin (who had such “speed” in her body and such a
“tireless heart” in life). “Vexed” is an inspired word here; while pointing up
ironical contrasts, it expresses genuine grief through understatement.

Emily Dickinson
SOME KEEP THE SABBATH GOING TO CHURCH

Anonymous
MY CHURCH
In these poems of identical length, identical rime scheme, and similar meter,
both poets take nature for their church.
The difference between the poems is largely one of tone. In “My Church”
the tone is earnest, solemn; the language and imagery tend toward the
grandiloquent. The poet is making a universal pronouncement of his religious
belief. His religion has just one temple, which, being wide as the world, set
with stars, and without roof or walls or floors (“save the beautiful sod”) is
obviously the whole natural world. The poet‟s religion has no narrow creeds
restricting membership by requiring acquiescence in abstruse theological
doctrines. Its one article of faith is belief in a loving and illimitable God. The
though is noble, but the expression is not memorable. The poem is not notably
bad; but neither is it notably good. It lacks freshness, particularized imagery,
sense of occasion, striking originality.
The tone of “Some keep the Sabbath …” is playful, fanciful, and though not
unserious, not at all solemn. The reader senses a specific occasion: the poet is at

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home (as is her wont) on a beautiful Sunday morning while her family and
friend are all at church. The poet makes a personal rather than a universal
statement. While other people keep the Sabbath by going to formal services,
she keeps here by staying home. Her church also is nature, but instead of being
“wide as the world” it is confined to the area around her house and has “an
orchard for a dome. ” Her church has a bobolink for chorister and God for a
preacher, and God‟s sermon “is never long” never boring or uncomfortable to
sit through. The “sexton”-who sings instead of tolling a bell-is presumably
another small bird. Two of the metaphors are open ended. The poet, instead of
dressing in surplice, “just puts on her wings” (a joyful spirit? Readiness for
imaginative flight? Angelic behavior? –any or all of these perhaps). God‟s
sermon, likewise, may be any of a number of things-the joy He communicates
through the beauty of nature, the sunshine streaming through the orchard
branches-it would be unwise to be too specific. Whatever it is, it is pleasurable
and gives a life to the spirit. So also does the quite humor of the poet‟s
comparison (combining metaphor, metonymy, and understatement) of God to
“a noted clergyman. ” Underlying all is possibly a more appropriate way of
worship than attending formal, service. Others attend formal services every
Sunday out of duty and are sometimes bored. The poet attends her “church” out
of pleasure and is never disappointed. The others hope to be rewarded for their
dedicated worship by going to heaven “all along” (samples its pleasures every
Sabbath. )
“Some keep the Sabbath …” is the superior poem because of its continuous
play of fancy, its humor, the originality of its metaphors, and its particularizing
imagery. As a touchstone of the difference between the two poems, we might
compare the two lines in them most nearly parallel in meaning-line 4 (“And an
orchard for a dome”) from the first, and line 10 (“Nor floors save the beautiful
sod”) from the second. In the first poem we might have expected (would have
got from a more conventional poet) a substitution of “the heave” or “blue
skies” for the “dome” of her church; instead we are given “an orchard. ”
Because it is unexpected, it come with a small shock of surprise; at the same

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time it is seen to be appropriate, for it domesticated the poet‟s church (which
she attends by staying at home, ) makes it more personal, and reduces it to
manageable size (conformable with the bobolink and the “little sexton”. ) In the
second poem, to substitute for the “floors” of the church we are given the
“beautiful sod. ” The two words join with a “clunk” as in the coupling of
boxcars. The adjective is abstract and overused in poetry (the first poem creates
a sense of beauty without using the word); the noun seems to have been chosen
largely to rime with “God, ” for its connotations do not go well with “beautiful.
”

Malcolm Cowley
THE LONG VOYAGE

Sir Walter Scott

BREATHES THERE THE MAN (P. 806)
“The Long Voyage” arises from a specific situation. The poet, or speaker, is
on a ship rapidly taking him away from his native country. As is natural in such
a situation, powerful feeling of nostalgia, even of homesickness, arises in him
for the land he loves and is leaving. The emotion is convincing, first, because it
is expressed through images, concretely-hills, trees, birds, seasons-not
abstractly; second, because it is uttered in a quite voice-the poet does not rant
about the emptiness in his heart, the tears in his eyes, the anguish in his soul;
third, because he doesn‟t make exaggerated claims about this country, which is
like “almost any country”: its pines are no darker, its dogwood no brighter, its
birds no swifter. Nevertheless, this is his country, and that makes the
difference. He knows “its face, its speech. ” The very water folding back
against the prow reminds him of his country‟s earth breaking against the plow-
an excellent simile-and the foam on the water reminds him of his country‟s
dogwood. The emotion is not strained or exaggerated; the poem expresses a
universal feeling arising from a specific situation.

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 “Breathes there the man” does not arise from a specific situation. It talks
about no specific man. The poet is expressing not his own feeling for his
country but scorn for some other (hypothetical) man who has no such feeling.
There are no images in the poem-no sharply defined pictures, sounds, or
smells. The language is abstract. It is spoken not quietly but shrilly, at the top
of the poet‟s voice. The tone is oratorical, as established by the diction and the
construction of the sentences (“Breathes there the man …” “Go, mark him
well, ” “High though his titles …, ” “foreign strands” [for “shores”], “power
and pelf” [for “money”], “fair renown, ” and so forth). The poet climbs up the
ladder of his own eloquence till he calls his hypothetical victim “a wretch,
concentered all in self” who “doubly dying” shall go down to “vile dust. ” The
poet has lashed himself in to a frenzy of virtuous indignation, and the sentiment
is strained and exaggerated. Surely if a person lacks a love of country, it is
more his misfortune than his crime; he deserves compassion, not consignment
to the “vile dust”. Love cannot be compelled. Moreover, such a person is not
necessarily “a wretch, concentered all in self. ” Surely men who have
voluntarily left the country of their birth and found other places to live that they
liked better-whose hearts have not “burned” when they returned to the original
country-have lived decent lives, loved their families, been kind to babies,
enjoyed life, and been mourned by friends when they died. The poet has
exaggerated and oversimplified the facts of life, has whipped himself up by
means of words to an artificial state of feeling. The emotion does not well up
naturally. The poem rings resoundingly, but it also rings hollowly, like a drum.
Sir Walter Scott was a good man who wrote good novels and some good
poetry, but this from is “rhetorical. ” It is taken from the opening of Canto VI
of The Lay of the Last Minstrel, in which it is sung by the ancient minstrel who
tells the story.
In context it has a certain dramatic propriety, but it is not clearly
distinguished from an utterance that might not be Scott‟s own-that is, there is
no detectable dramatic irony. It is, of course, usually reprinted out of context as
a patriotic set piece.

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Eugene Field
LITTLE BOY BLUE

Coventry Patmore
THE TOYS
“Little Boy Blue” is an appealing poem. Its melody is pleasing, and so are its
rimes. The word order is natural and unforced, and so are its rimes. The word
order is natural and unforced, and so are the words themselves. The poem
makes effective use of alliteration and other musical device. The picture it
presents of the loyal toy soldier and dog awaiting the return of their Little Boy
Blue is touching. The poem is skillfully done, and it has been much beloved by
the American public. It is nevertheless a sentimental poem, manipulating its
materials to draw tears from the reader, subtly falsifying life by dimming the
darker colors and brightening up the warmer ones. It aims at being sweetly sad.
Its title is sweet. The boy who dies is not Bobby, or Peter, or Donald; he is
“Little Boy Blue” –the name has nursery associations. And he has not only a
sweet name but a sweet disposition. He played nicely with his toys on the
evening of the night he died (though he must have been sick, and most children
are short tempered and hard to manage when sick), and then he toddled sweetly
off to bed at the appointed time, without a single protest, quite contrary to
ordinary boy-nature. Little Boy Blue even had fits of ill temper or
disobedience, they are not mentioned; onls his pretty actions, such as hissing
his toys, are mentioned. In describing Boy Blue and his possessions, the poet
uses the adjective “little” eleven times in twenty-four lines. Not only is Boy
Blue “little”, his hands are “little, ” his face is “little, ” his chair is “little, ” his
toys are “little. ” Most of these “little‟s” are quite superfluous; the word is
being used only to manipulate the reader‟s sympathies, to evoke a stock
response. Also, instead of telling us that Little Boy Blue died, the poet says that
he was “awakened by an angel song. ” It is a sweet way of describing “death;
the uglier features are avoided, and death becomes a gentle and sweetly sad
experience, like a song. (Some readers will have difficulty with the “angel

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song” metaphor and think that Little Boy Blue grew up-apparently rather
suddenly-leaving his childish toys behind. ) This death occurred many years
ago, but the little toys are still true.
But now, three questions. First, how does the poet know that Little Boy Blue
“dreamt of the pretty toys” if he died in his sleep? Second, in what sense are the
toys “true”? Do they really wonder what has happened to Little Boy Blue
“since he kissed them and put the, there‟? Or is this not an example of what
Ruskin called “the pathetic fallacy” –the fallacy of attributing human emotions
to inanimate objects? That is, has not the author sentimentalized not only the
little boy but also even his toys? And third, why, after all these years, are the
toys still where Little Boy Blue left them? (Here is a question which the poet
did not intend us to ask. If the toys are still in the chair where Boy Blue left the,
his parents must have closed up his room when he died and resolved to leave
everything just as he left it. People occasionally do such things, to be sure, but
only very really; and we usually feel that such a reaction to death is excessively
sentimental or even morbid, not healthy. Quite understandably, the poet glosses
over this aspect of the situation and concentrates our attention instead on the
supposed fidelity of the toy dog and the toy soldier, as though this quality was
what really kept them there. ) In short, the author is not treating death seriously;
instead he is playing with us and with our emotions.
“The toys, ” as first view, may seem a slightly cruse poem beside “Little Boy
Blue. ” The meter is not so letting, the rime is not so regular, there is no stanza
pattern, and even the syntax may at times seem lightly strained. But the meter
is such as to keep our attention focused constantly on the content; it does not
set up a separate tine or by a pretty lilt soften and sweeten a pathetic subject
matter. Moreover, the treatment of the subject matter is honest. Having once
described his son as “little, ” the poet drops the adjective and does not use it as
a spurious means of attaching sympathy to his subject. He does not idealize the
behavior of little boys. Though his son is grave, quite, and thoughtful, he is
also, like most boys, sometimes willful and disobedient. The father‟s behavior,
as contrasted with that of the parents of Little Boy Blue, is normally human. He

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loses his temper, strikes the boy and scolds him, then later feels remorse and
worries about what he has done. But the boy, though he has been sobbing, is
not so grief-stricken that he cannot sleep, as a sentimentalist might have made
him, he is deep in slumber, and beside his bed, to console himself, he has
arranged his treasured collection of toys. These toys are enumerated and
described; they include “a red-veined stone, ” “a piece of glass abraded by the
beach, ” and “two French copper coins. ” The imagery is fresh and precise. We
are not told, moreover, that the boy kissed these toys before going to sleep, or
that he is dreaming of them, or that they, on their part, are faithfully waiting for
him to wak up. The incident is moving because it has been honestly treated.
Moreover, the poet has effectively used the incident to communicate, by
analogy, a larger truth about life. We are all children, ultimately, and have our
childish ways. We grown-up children have our grown-up toys no less foolish
really than the contents of a child‟s pocket. And we too disobey the
Commandments of Our Father and stand equally in need of forgiveness.
In referring to his son‟s having disobeyed “the seventh time” (3), the poet
enriches his meaning by a Biblical allusion to Matthew 18:21-22. When Peter
asked Jesus how often he should forgive his brother‟s sinning against him,
Jesus answered, Not seven times, but “seventy times seven. ”

Robert Frost
HOME BURIAL
In many ways, this work can be compared to “The Death of the Hired Man.
” Both poems deal with a man and woman coming to terms with the death of
another person: both are short, dramatic scenes in which the relationship
between the two speakers reflects a great deal about their characters and their
marriage generally; and in both Frost skillfully varies the tone and rhythm of
the blank verse as a means of indicating the differences between their
characters. Here, however, the similarities end. Warren and Mary had been
talking about Silas before his death, and their final agreement indicated the
basic love and harmony that existed between them. But in “Home Burial”,

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Amy and her husband speak about their death of their own child, and, as the
poem progresses, the reader are aware of the deep emotional gulf which exists
between them.
The extent of this division is indicated in the opening lines of the poem.
Amy does not at first see her husband because she is so completely immersed
in her own problems; and, as he regards her, he doesn‟t understand what it is
she looks at in fear. He asks: “What is it you see / from up there always –for I
want to know. ” His use of the word “want” indicates a force of wills which, as
will become evident later in the poem, he appears predisposed to use toward
her. Amy appears terrified as he stands above her saying the he will find out
and that she must tell him. She is convinced that he won‟t be able to see what
so troubles her. The word see is crucial in the poem, for neither of the
characters ever gains a true emotional insight into the other. Both do fail to see
the other‟s point of view, and herein is the basis of their tragedy.
However, the husband has caught a glimpse of the small burial plot visible
from the narrow upstairs window. The fact that Amy constantly looks out from
it indicates the limited aspect of her perspective; the only thing of the outside
world which she sees is her child‟s grave. Her view of life is totally controlled
by her thoughts of death. She reacts strongly to her husband‟s words, unwilling
to allow him to speak of the baby‟s death. In sorrow he murmurs. “Can‟t man
speak of his own child he‟s lost. ” At this point, the reader begins to understand
the nature of the tension between the husband and wife; it is in some way
related to the loss of their child. The rest of the poem explores their differing
attitudes and reactions.
Amy‟s reply to him indicates the extent of her feeling of distress. The
sentences are short and choppy and the rhythm abrupt. She is anxious to escape
from the house and tells him that no man can feelingly speak of a dead child.
Her desire to get out perhaps suggest that, unbeknown to her, she really wishes
to run away from herself rather than from her husband. His reply, as the
rhythms and the sentence lengths reveal, is subdued and conciliatory. He does
not wish her to take her grief elsewhere as she has done before, and he asks her

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to help him move toward a reconciliation with her. His love is genuine, but he
realizes that he does not understand her or know how to communicate with her.
“Let me into your grief, ” he pleads, asking that she break down the wall she
has built around herself, that she overcome what to him is an excessive grief.
The nature of their conflict is now more fully revealed: it is based on their
differing reactions to the death of their first born.
Amy‟s angry reply causes the husband to lose his composure, and he snaps,
“You make me angry! I‟ll come down to you. ” He is again relying on his will
of force his point of view. The origins of Amy‟s feelings are seen as she
describes the burial day. As she had observed him from the small window, the
symbol of her limited perspective, she had considered him very insensitive, for
he had dug the grave in an apparently light-hearted manner:
I saw you from that very window there,
Making the gravel leap and leap in air,
Leap up, like that, like that, and land so lightly
And roll back down he mound beside the hole.
Moreover, when he had finished, he had leaned the shovel by the door and
seated himself in the kitchen where he talked of the danger of the weather
rotting fence posts. Amy had taken this as a sign of his lack of grief.
Think of it, talk like that at such a time!
What had how long it takes a birch to rot
To do with what was in the darkened prior.
You couldn‟t care!
What Amy fails to understand is that her husband had been profoundly
affected by the death, but that he had hidden his grief, had tried to submerge his
feeling by hard physical labor. His digging seems to be violent exertion, not
light-hearted work, he talks about daily routines to occupy his mind and distract
himself from his grief.
As she is describing her earlier reactions, her husband laughs bitterly,
remarking that he‟s cursed. Even though he has tried to communicate with his
wife, she has not understood him, has probably never understood his deeply
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hidden emotional qualities. He feels cursed because his attempted
reconciliation has been defected from the start because of his wife‟s failure to
comprehend his character.
The depth of Amy‟a problem is further seen in her remark that no one can
really be near a person when he dies and that, in fact, mourners are more
concerned with their own lives. “But the world‟s evil. I won‟t have grief so / If
I can change it. ” She cannot accept the fact that life does go on, and that it is
natural for grief to end. She wants to make the death of her baby the absolute
fact of her existence, and she cannot tolerate anyone who does not share her
view. Not only does she not perceive the extent of her husband‟s sense of loss,
but she cannot countenance his attempt to overcome his grief.
Her husband attempts to console her; but, as he does so, he reveals a serious
defect in his character. He asks her to calm herself because someone is coming
down the road. He has too great a concern for appearance; not only does he
wish his wife his wife to overcome her unhappiness, but also he does not wish
others to se her in her present condition. The concern for appearances may also
have been manifested in his behavior while burying the child.
As the poem concludes, Amy prepares to leave the house as she had been
going to do at the opening of the poem, and her husband reveals his desire to
control her forcefully. “I‟ll follow and bring you back by force. I will! –“The
conflict has not been resolved. What has been at stake here is not only an
agreement about grief over a lost child, but also the entire happiness of their
marriage. Amy has let grief become her whole world, while her husband has
strongly suppressed grief and immersed himself in the world. Neither person
can understand the other because each is so set in his own way. The give and
take, the mutual respect and compassion necessary for married happiness is
absent.

T. S. Elliot
THE LOVE SONG OF J. ALFRED PRUFROCK (P815)

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 The poem dramatizes the state of mind of Perforce, a tragicomic figure of
uncertain age. He is very much in the mould of the Laforguian self-mocking
little man, by his own account physically unimpressive and sexually timid,
cultured and sensitive. He imagines going through sordid streets to the room
where the women chatter, but coming away having failed to achieve anything:
though this is his „Love Song‟, he cannot make a declaration of love. Nor dare
he do or say anything else of any significance (his „overwhelming question‟
suggests not merely a proposal of marriage, but a larger question as to the
meaning of life, ) he is so unheroic, so self-conscious, an so shy of
communicating with any of the women, whom he seems to despise as well as
fear. From them he turns to a fantasy of love with mermaids until real voices
call him back to the stifling real world.
Poems are not exhausted by any discussion, and this extraordinary poem
seems more inexhaustible than many others, but here are some introductory
points.
The title neatly undermines the romantic association of “Love Song‟ by the
ridiculous name, not forgetting its self-important initial „J. ‟ while suggestions
of prudishness may be combined with “Proof-rock‟ as a punning variant of
“Touchstone‟; for Prufrock is both primly proper and a test case for the reader‟s
reactions. Incidentally, the name is not entirely whimsical: young Eliot signed
himself T. Stearns Eliot; Prufrock was the name of a furniture dealer in St.
Louis.
As always in Eliot, the epigraph is also significant in various ways. For
instance, there is the parallel of a tormented sufferer in a personal hell; the
implication of the reader as a fellow inhabitant of Prufrock‟s hopeless world; a
suggestion that one part of Prufrock (timid and thinking) is deluding another
(passionate and feeling), turning him to fraudulent fantasy rather than true
engagement with life.
The „you‟ of the first line seems to be the reader at first, but „you and I‟
could be two aspects of Prufrock-his thinking self assessing his public
personality-though the final „we‟ that drowns may not be only the whole
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Prufrock, but a universalizing touch. Elsewhere „you‟ is the equivalent of „one‟
or can even be addressed to one of the women, and so on.
Notice how the opening sillies, likening the evening to a patient under
anesthetic and the streets to stages in a wearisome argument, and the metaphor
comparing the fog to a lazing cat, tell us more about Prufrock‟s mental state
(especially his morbidity and inertia) than the objects they are ostensibly
describing. This use of images to characteristic mood and feelings continue
throughout: look, for example, at the coffee-spoons and cigarette ends that sum
up Prufrock‟s dull days, or the way he (equally pathetically) pictures himself as
an insect stuck on a pin, or a cab deep in the sea. The final sea imagery of
aspect seems suddenly liberating after all the images of feebleness and futility
that culminate in trivia about eating and dressing, but reality quickly reasserts
itself, drowning Prufrock, not in the fantasy sea, but in the social world in
which he flounders.
The words of the epigraph (or motto), again a quotation from Dante (Hell
XXVII, 61-6), are spoken by the most famous warrior of his day, Count Guido
da Montefeltro (d. 1298), in Hell for false advice to Pope Boniface (d. 1303),
form a flame that trembles when the damned speak; „If I thought my reply
would be to one who would ever return to the world, this flame would shake no
more; but so no one ever return alive from this depth, if what I hear is true, I
answer you without fear of disgrace. ‟
Michelangelo: the great Italian sculptor and painter of grand and heroic
subjects (1475-1546), a contrast to Prufrock
And indeed there will be time: this and the following twenty-five lines
echo the words of the Old Testament preacher in Ecclesiastes 3:1-8:‟… A time
to born, and a time to die; … A time to kill, and a time to heal …‟
Work and days: the title of a poem by the Greek writer Hesoid (eight
century BC)
A dying fall: Duke Orison‟s description of a piece of music in
Shakespeare‟s Twelfth Night I. 1

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 Butte-ends: ends of smoked cigarettes
Wept and fasted, wept and prayed: a biblical imitation, in both the a-b-a-c
from of the repetition (as in Psalm 118: „Thou art my God, and I will praise
thee: thou art my God, I will exalt thee‟) and the vocabulary (as in 2 Samuel
2:22: „I fasted and wept‟)
My head … brought in upon a platter: as was the head of the prophet
John the Baptist, cut off at the request of Salome as a reward for her dancing
(Matthew 14:3-11)
The eternal Footman: apparently a personification of death, made socially
suggestive, this recalls the „Heavenly Footman‟ in the allegorical Pilgrim‟s
Progress (1678) of John Bunyan (1628-88)
Squeezed … ball/To roll …: recalls „To His Coy Mistress;, by Andrew
Marvell (1621-78), in which the poet urges his mistress to immediate,
passionate love: „Let us roll all our strength, and all / Our sweetness, up into on
ball. ‟
Lazarus: (a) the dead man whom Christ raised to life again (see the Bible,
John 11:1-44) (b) the poor man sent to Heaven, whom Dives, a rich man in
Hell, asks to be sent back from the dead to make the living repent (see the
Bible, Luke 16:19-31)
Tell you all: as Christ promised the Holy Ghost would „teach you all things‟
(John 14:26)
Sprinkled streets: sprinkled with sawdust, as in the Boston Eliot knew
while at Harvard
Prince Hamlet: Shakespeare‟s Hamlet; like Prufrock in his self awareness
and worry about being indecisive (the line-ending echoes Hamlet‟s „To be or
not to be‟ soliloquy), but unlike him in heroic stature. Prufrock goes on (in
imitation Elizabethan style) to liken himself, instead, to Polonius, the talkative,
moralizing old courtier in Hamlet; or even the court jester (the Fool)

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 Full of high sentence: description of the learned and elevated talk of the
Clerk in The Canterbury Tales of Geoffrey Chaucer (1340?-1400)
Bottoms of my trousers rolled: turned-up trouser-ends were then becoming
fashionable
Part my hair behind: again the latest fashion
Mermaids singing: recalls „Teach me to hear mermaids singing‟, in a
„Song‟ by John Donne (1572-1631); as well as contrasting with the sirens of
Greek legend whose singing led sailors to drown

Joan Ale shire

SLIPPING
The subject of this poem-seeing and reacting to the physical deterioration of
one‟s father-is rife with sentimental possibilities. Aleshire explores these
through the speaker‟s original indulgence in pity (and some self-pity) through
the first two verse paragraphs, cataloging the “slow slipping” of increasing
lameness and the growth of a cataract, and generously accommodating her gait
to his slowing pace. These physical failings she presents in metaphor and
simile (“curtain of mist, ” “like pickpockets, ” “like a raft on a river, ” “like a
child who keeps pulling on your hand, ” lines 3, 4-5, 8, 13-14), as if such
infirmities are best handled emotionally as the stuff of poetic comparison. In
this presentation, there are both emotional distancing and self-gratification,
masking pain and pity with slight cleverness-but most of all, avoiding
sentiment.
What the poem is revealing with some dramatic irony is a speaker who has
inherited the trait defined by the mother-a reluctance or inability “to talk about
feelings” (11). So she resorts to the indirection of poetic statement. She has
leaned to identify talking “about feelings” with sentimentality, and so at the
outset seems incapable of speaking a truly felt sentiment.
She realizes this flaw, and overcomes it, in lines 24-30. The “slipping” away
of her father‟s physical strength has broken down his “reserve”- and in

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response to his new, direct statement of feeling, she senses her own reserve
slipping. So his feeling is exposed “like a screen suddenly falling” (the last
figure in the poem) form a patient in his examining room, revealing himself as
a person who feels, and revealing to his daughter the honest, no poetic reality of
his again felts. The reserve of trying to avoid sentimentality can prevent the
expression of honest intent.

A. R. Ammons
PROVIDENCE
This example of “minimal” poetry, in brief free verse lines, without any
images, is an echo-response to Frost‟s “Nothing Gold Can Stay” (No. 131).
The only figurative language is found in the word “bright” (2), which
metaphorically compares visual brilliance to sense of newness and excitement-
not a very striking metaphor. Essentially, Ammons‟s theme is simple and
romantic: excitement, novelty, beauty, and the freshness of apparent
spontaneity all are predicated upon transience and mortality. Permanence is the
opposite of brilliance, and dullness and ennui its results. Whereas Frost makes
of this observation a wistful regret, a desire that beautiful could also be the
permanent. Ammons (through his little) declares this condition to be what God
ordains in our best interests.
The poem is formally quite regulars, for free verse: the first four lines are
disyllabic, the last three disyllabic; each line contains; each line contains only
two words; and the three concluding lines almost establish a metrical norm-
EARTH re-QUIRES / NO-IY THTAT / NOTH-ing STAY – two stresses
surrounding an unstressed syllable. The syntactical arrangement of the single
sentence (ungrammatical in the omission of a period at the end of the poem and
of a comma at the end of line 4) contains surprise. The phrase bright as
momentarily seems to be introducing a simple comparison (“bright as a penny,
” “birth as the sun”), but in fact the as is instead part of a simile, as if, creating a
negative contrast (comparing unlike things, as similes always do): the earth of
course is not fresh and new, though one would like to feel as if it were.

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Similarly, as if just momentarily implies a standard of justice, perhaps even
divine justice because of the title; but just turns out not to be an adjective but an
adverb in the phrase just thought of, colloquially informal and leading to the
omission of the comma.

Matthew Arnold
DOVER BEACH (P. 833)
The primary theme is loss of faith. The recollection of Sophocles is a link
between the strictly personal experience of the first stanza and the comparative
generalization of the third. The dominant “thought” (19) which Arnold finds in
this contrast and comparison is that while religious faith was once at full tide
and as universal as the sea, its tide is now sadly ebbing. The imagery of the
poem makes a strong appeal to the sense, primarily to the ear. Arnold‟s
agonized reaction to the insecurity of his times finds appropriate expression in
the irregular meter, which ranges from diameter to pentameter, and in the
rhyme scheme, which follows no standard pattern.
The primary theme is reality versus appearance. The speaker contrasts the
bright, calm, full sea with the ceaseless sad motion of surf, corresponding to the
“turbid ebb and flow / Of human misery. ” Later, he states categorically that
“the world, which seems” to be beautiful and certain and peaceful, “really”
lacks these qualities. Although the poem‟s central symbol is the sounding sea,
its use of light and darkness is subtler and ultimately more emphatic,
proceeding as it does from the open “moon-blanched” scene to the obscure
“darkling plain. ” Furthermore, the pattern of sound imagery is flawed by the
fact that the sea, whose ceaseless waves are imitated in the rhythm of 9-14 and
25, disappears at the end of Stanza 3.
Although “Dover Beach” contains but one brief mention of personal
affection, the primary theme is the power of love. In line 6 the poet asks his
lady to share the beauty of the calm, moonlit night with him, but he soon points
out to her the ancient eternal sadness “Of human misery” which he implies is
especially prevalent now that materialism has replaced faith. Recognizing love

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as the only power that can prevail in such a situation, the poet exhorts his lady
and himself to “be true / To one another” in the face of modern uncertainty.
One of the clues to the personal nature of the poem is poet‟s use of exclamation
points three times to emphasize direct dramatic speech, as opposed to
description and meditation. Although the reference to Sophocles creates an
atmosphere of dignity and antiquity, it is not strictly relevant to the emotional
progress of the poem. In fact, the poet might well have omitted the whole
second stanza without harming the thematic pattern.
“Dover Beach” is Arnold‟s lament over the decline of religious faith in his
time. “The Sea of Faith, ” he tells us, was once “at the full, ” but now he only
hears “its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar, ” like the roar of waves receding
or of the tide going out. Certainly, the mid-nineteenth century was a time of
religious crisis-a time when vast numbers of thinking people were losing the
simple Christian faith of their childhood teaching before the advance of
scientific and rationalistic thought. The conflict and the agony are recorded in
work after work of literature.
The speaker is in a room overlooking the cliffs of Dover. He is so situated-
where the cliffs curve-that not only can he look out over the English Channel
and occasionally glimpse the coast of France (twenty-two miles away at this
point) as it catches a gleam of moonlight, but he can also see, across the bay,
the face of the cliffs him selves and the waves breaking on the shingle at their
foot. In the room with him is a beloved women (wife or sweet heart) to whom
he unburdens his despair-not over any personal misfortune but about the state
of the world.
The poem turns on a series of contrasts, of which the two most important are
those (a) between the physical beauty of the world he sees outside his window
and its actual spiritual darkness, and (B) between the full tide he sees outside
the window and the ebbing “tide” of faith which he feels is responsible for the
world‟s spiritual darkness.
Looking from his window, the speaker is first impressed by the beauty of the
moonlit scene before him, and he summons his companion to the window to
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share it beauty with him. But then he becomes aware of the sound of the
breakers crashing on the shingle, and this sound is a sad one. Being a person of
broad intellectual culture, he is reminded by the sound of a passage in a Greek
drama by Sophocles, who compared the ebb and flow of the sea to the ebb and
flow of human misery. Then he thinks of his own time, and he is reminded by
the sound of the ebbing of religious faith. This thought is so melancholy to him
that he cries out to his beloved, “Ah, love, let us be true to one another!” for a
loving human relationship seems the only value left in a world which has lost
every other source of manning-a world which, despite its illusory physical
beauty, has “really neither joy, nor love, nor light, / Nor certitude, nor pace; nor
help for pain”-surely two of the most pessimistic lines in English poetry. The
simile ending the poem gives concrete embodiment to this abstract statement
ad is deservedly one of the most famous in English poetry. As an image for
complete meaninglessness in human life, it can hardly be surpassed. Words of
negative connotation pile up-darkling, confused, alarms, struggle, flight,
ignorant, clash, night-to give a picture of utter confusion, blindness, cross-
purposes, and uncertainty, in which warring armies cannot tell friend from foe
and strike at both alike in the darkness. This uncertainty embodies the lack of
“certitude” mentioned in line 34, which in turn stems from the ebbing Sea of
faith. The one remaining consolation-the possibility of a loyal personal
relationship between two lovers, because of its positioning, seems a very frail
one indeed. Instead of one person lost on a tiny raft at night in mid-ocean, we
are left with two people on the raft clinging to each other out of desperation.
The poem begins with light and ends in darkness.
This poem is not about war, nor was it written during time of war-it is a
poem about the loss of a common religious faith that once linked men together
in a belief, hope, and some degree of brotherhood or community-a loss that has
resulted in a word where men work only for self-advancement and at cross-
purposes with each other.
It is also important to note that the poem was written, not by a believer
blaming the rest of the world for its lack of belief, but by a poet who himself

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can longer accept the stories and assumptions on which the old faith was based,
and who regards its consolations and certainties as no longer possible for
thinking men. If he had been himself a believer, he would have cried out, “O
Lord! Bring these people back to a belief in your eternal truth and loving over
lordship!” Instead, his cry is to a human companion, “Ah, love, let us be true /
To one another!”
The syntax in line 7-14 is somewhat involved. The noun “roar” (9) is not the
direct object of “hear” but the subject of the infinitives (To) “Being, ” “cease, ”
“being, ” and “bring” (12-13). The direct object of “hear” is the whole
infinitive phrase of which “roar” is the subject. In reading the poem one must
reject the temptation to drop one‟s voice at the end of line 11.

W. H. Auden
MUSEE DES BEAUX ARTS
The poem descriptively alludes to three paintings by Pieter Burgher the
Elder (which might be shown to students): lines 5-8, The Census (or The
Numbering at Bethlehem); lines 10-13, The Massacre of the Innocents; and
lines 14-21, Landscape with the Fall of Icarus. The title of the poem may be
derived from the name of the museum in Brussels where the Icarus painting
hangs, the Musses Royaux des Beaux Arts, though it simply means “Fine Arts
Museum, ” a title general enough to include all three “Old Master” paintings.
The poem is in free verse and has irregular rime scheme. In the opening
verse paragraph the following lines rime: ¼, 2/8, 5/7, 6/13, 9/11, 10/ 12, and
there is no rime for line 3. The concluding paragraph, while not regular,
tightens up the rimes somewhat, in keeping with the single focus of the subject:
14/15, 16/20, 17/21, 18/19. The two sets of rimed couplets being to suggest
some more explicit closure of meaning for the poem, but the last two lines
return to the more random pattern, reinforcing the understated meaning-that
something as momentous as a boy falling out of the sky does not signal a
definitive event, but only a momentary amazement to the men who continue on
about their business. The apparently irrelevant or random riming may thus be

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seen as a reinforcement of the theme, that great events seem irrelevant or not
personally significant to the mass of self-involved people.
The sequence of the pictured event may also be seen as reinforcing the
theme: from the birth of Christ, to the slaughter by Herod of the first-born sons,
to the mythical story of Icarus events that would seem to the modern picture-
viewer of decreasing personal significance, even if the last of them did
originally symbolize a very human problem, the danger of rashly pursuing a
superhuman aspiration.

D. C. Berry
ON READING POEMS TO A SENIOR CLASS AT
SOUTH HIGH (P. 834)
The poet planning “to drown them” with his words, the power of poetry
floods the room, and the surprised poet and the class metaphorically swim
together until the ringing poet and the class metaphorically swim together until
the ringing of the school bell, which breaks the enchantment. All of them,
students and poet, then go on to other more normal pursuits, back to their
ordinary lives. The experience, however, has transported the poet beyond
himself, and it takes his domesticated, imaginatively named cat to bring him
back to normal.
The poet‟s defensive condescension-his prejudice that these students are cold
to poetry, his fear that his poetry may not move them-is washed away by the
mutual experience, to the extent that he himself must be restored to his human
form. The poem wittily converts the pejorative image of “frozen fish” into the
vital image of “thirty tails whacking words, ” and his plan of drawing his
audience converts into the water in which, for the time, the poet and students
have a medium they can share. Both “frozen fish” and “drown” are used
metaphorically, apparently as the poet‟s self-conscious device for asserting his
superiority, but both come so vitally to life that even after the experience the
poet feels fins at the end of his arms. Ironically it is his cat who restores him
from his fishy condition.

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Elizabeth Bishop
ONE ART
With a forced tone of nonchalance, the speaker in this modified villanelle
insists that all losses can be faced stoically. She begins with insignificant
losses-keys, a little time, memories of places and names-and proceeds to those
of greater emotional value-a prized keep sake, loved houses. Hyperbolically,
she reports the loss of realms, rivers, and a continent. The climax of the poem
occurs in the final stanza, the loss of a beloved person, which too can be
mastered, almost. The last line, with its parenthetic command to herself, reveals
that the mastery of this loss requires a great exertion of will, if indeed it can be
mastered at all.
Whimsically, the poem is presented as a lesson to the reader: “Lose
something every day, ” until practice in mastering the sense of loss will render
future losses less disastrous in their effects. The first three stanzas, in the
second person, present the lesson; in the last three the speaker offers her own
experience as supporting evidence. But with the increasing sense of regret and
even pain, the ironic stance of the speaker is made clear: mastering the sense of
loss is not “one art” that can be learned through coping with losses.
The word “loss” is used both metaphorically and literally, undercutting the
statement that all losses are equal. The inequalities are manifest when one
questions whether or not the references to losing keys, losing time, and losing a
beloved person employ the term “loss” in the same sense. What the poet
achieves, in seeming to believe-that the word is single in its meaning, is the
statement that not all loss can be mastered.

William Blake
THE GARDEN OF LOVE
The important words and images in this poem may be ranged in two
columns. On one side are the Garden of Love (1, 7), play (4), the green (4)
flowers (8, 10), joys and desires (12). On the other side are the Chapel (3, 5)

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shut gates (5), “Thou shalt not” (6), graves (9), tombstones (10), Priest in black
gowns (11), binding with briars (12). The words and images in the first series
have positive connotations: they represent the natural and are associated with
joy. Those in the second series have mainly negative connotations: they
represent institutionalized religion and are associated with death.
Black was a deeply religious poet who had his own unorthodox version of
Christianity. He believed strongly in individual liberty, he felt man‟s natural
impulses are good, and he despised the institutions of church and state for
attempting to control man‟s behavior with repressive rules and laws. In this
brief allegorical lyric the speaker relates what the institutionalized church has
done to the natural state of man. It has replaced the green where the speaker
used to play as a boy with a chapel, its gates shut, and “Thou shall not” writ
over the door. The garden beds around the chapel, where sweet flowers used to
grow and ought to be growing now, are filled with graves. Black-gowned
priests, following prescribed rounds, are binding the speaker‟s joys and desires
with briars. Clearly “desires” and the “sweet flowers” in the “Garden of Love”
are linked with the joys of what the speaker regard as an innocent sexuality,
which the Church has forbidden or restricted by threats of punishment
(“briars”) and death (“tombstones”) under a repressive and negative moral code
(“Thou shalt not” … pick the flowers, fornicate, commit adultery, engage in
natural pleasures). As is evident from “Soft Snow” (page 603), Blake believed
in free love, just as he believed in political and religious freedom. (Ideas and
opinions expressed on this program are not necessarily those of the
management. )

William Blake
THE LAMB (P. 836)

William Blake
THE TIGER (P. 836)

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 The primary theme of the poem is the creation of evil. The tiger is a symbol
of evil, just as the Lamb is a symbol of good. Although un capitalized, the “he”
of the poem is the Christian God, whose Son was “the Lamb of God, which
taketh away the sin of the world” (John 1:29). The evil of the tiger fills the poet
with such terror that he wonders how God could have wanted to create it, let
alone “smile his work to see. ” The imagery of fire, traditionally associated
with hell, permeates the poem.
The theme of the poem is natural energy, a force symbolized by the tiger.
The poet calls this force neither right nor wrong; he says in effect that it exists
and that it is awesome. It is characteristically active, in contrast to the principle
of inertness in the universe, symbolized by the passive Lamb. To embody the
power of this force, the poet uses an appropriate extended metaphor,
conceiving of the tiger as a living instrument forged by a powerful blacksmith.
The creator of the force was pleased with his work, for he knew that both
energy and inertness are necessary to nature.
The theme is the physical beauty, strength, and destructiveness of the actual
tiger. Instead of presenting the reader with a photographic imitation of the
animal, the poet suggests its nature by naming only a few vivid characteristics:
the brilliant “burning” color, for example, that symbolizes the tiger‟s fiery
destructiveness, and the difficulty of forging the heart, which implies the
degree of strength. The relevancy of the questions in 19-20 depends on the fact
that in the balance of nature animals like tigers must prey on animals like
sheep. The last stanza, with its almost identical repetition of the first, comes as
a kind of religious incantation expressing the physical dread of, and esthetic
admiration for, the tiger. The vigorous rhythm of the piece owes something to
the accent of the initial word “Tiger” and to the employment of masculine
rhymes in every line.
Blake described the two volumes as “Showing Contrary States of the Human
Soul. ” Though the poems in Songs of Experience are generally darker in tone
than those in the earlier book, Blake is not necessarily suggesting that

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innocence is better than experience. Rather, each state shows the
incompleteness or the inadequacy of the other.
In the “Introduction” to Blake was bid by his muse to “Pipe a song about a
Lamb. ” This is it. The central question asked in this poem is “Little Lamb,
who made thee?” The central question asked in “The Tiger” is “Did he who
made the Lamb make thee?” “The Tiger was obviously written to
complement” “The Lamb. ” Together the two poems make poetic diptych.
In “The Lamb” the speaker is a child, and the chief effect of the poem is a
childlike simplicity, produced by the use of a simple vocabulary-mostly
monosyllabic, end-stopped lines-one statement to a line, a song-like meter (six
four-beat lines in each stanza, framed at beginning and end by a pair of three-
beat lines), paired rimes, and frequent repetitions. The situation and content of
the poem also express this childlike simplicity. The child talks to a lamb, asks it
a question and answers the question himself, and in his answer shows his
trustful unquestioning acceptance of the Christian story he has been taught. The
lamb was created by Christ, who in the New Testament is called “the Lamb
was created by Christ, who in the New Testament is called “the Lamb of God, ”
and who through his incarnation became “a little child. ” The child and the
lamb are thus one with Christ in name as well as in gentleness and love, and the
poem appropriately ends, “Little Lamb, God bless thee. ”
In “The Tiger” the speaker is an adult, possibly the poet; he does not literally
speak to the tiger, he apostrophizes it; and the central question of the poem is
left unanswered.
The image in the first two lines is one of the most vivid in English poetry.
Primarily we are meant to see two eyes glaring in the dark (line 6); but if we
think of the orange and black stripes of the tiger‟s body, we also have a flame-
like image. The tiger is associated with images of fire throughout the poem. He
is imagined to have been made in a cosmic smithy (“forged, ” “hammer, ”
“chain, ” “furnace, ” “anvil”), and his creator is personified as a powerful
smith. But is this smithy in “distant deeps or skies “ –hell or heaven? And was
the smith Satan or God? And, having created the tiger, did the smith “smile” to
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see what he had made? These are the question urged on the reader, insistently,
like the blows of a hammer on an anvil (the interrogative “what” is used
thirteen times during the poem), and in a meter whose accents fall also with the
force and regularity of hammer blows. The tiger is described as awesome-that
is, as arousing both fear and admiration in the beholder. Its “fearful symmetry,
” the burning brightness of its eyes, its twisted sinewy heart, the “deadly
terrors” of its brain-these qualities suggest beauty, strength, fierceness, and
violence. But if the tiger is awesome, its creator is even more so. He is
“immortal” (3, 23) daring (7, 8, 24) winged (7), string (9, 10), “dread” (12, 15),
and an artist (9).
The difficult lines 17-18 have been explained in too many ways to go into
here-in terms of astrology, as metaphor for dawn and dewfall, as symbolic of
love and pity, as an allusion to the war in heaven between the good and the
rebel angels depicted in Milton‟s Paradise Lost, as an allusion to symbols in
Blake‟s private mythology, as an image for shows of sparks sent out from the
cosmic forge and of the water used to temper the glowing metal, etc. perhaps,
in their broadest and simplest sense, they can be taken to suggest, “When even
the stars wept, did the creator of the tiger smile?”
No answer to its central question is stated in the poem. Is one implied? A
survey of Blake criticism produces no consensus. About half of the critics say
that the question is rhetorical intended by Blake to be answered "yes. " The
creator of the Lamb was also the creator of the Tiger, and He looked on his
work and found it “good”. The power of the poem is the power with which it
expressed this mysterious paradox in the nature of God, creator of both the
rainbow and the whirlwind. But another half say that the question is
unanswerable, and was not intended by Blake to be answered one way or there
other-that Blake‟s poem is about the mystery and ambiguity of the universe,
which is ultimately beyond man‟s understanding.
A greater variety of answers is produced by the question, "What do the lamb
and the tiger symbolize?" The poems obviously call for symbolical reading.
Among the answers suggested are good and evil, God‟s love and God‟s wrath,

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gentle meekness and powerful energy, innocent purity and strong sexuality,
peace and war, mercy and justice, pardon and punishment.
The text of “The Tiger” used here differs in line 12 from that published by
Blake in Songs of Experience (“What dread hand? And what dread feet?”) In
the original manuscript this line is followed by a discarded stanza of which the
first line is “Could fetch it from the furnace deep?” The cancellation of the
stanza left line 12 syntactically incomplete, and Blake seems to have been
dissatisfied with it, for in a copy later given to a friend he altered the line in ink
to “What dread hand formed the dread feet, ” and another friend, perhaps on
Blake‟s authority, printed the poem in a book of memoirs with “forged” in the
place of “formed”.

Lucille Clifton
GOOD TIMES
Occasions for joy in the lives of the poor are few and far between, but when
they come they are likely to be jollier, more spontaneous, and more festive than
the pleasures of the well-to-do. The joyousness of the occasion is in direct
proportion to its rarity. Lucille Clifton, a black poet, here present just such an
occasion in the lives of a poor family. The first stanza state the causes for
celebration, the second stanza presents the celebration itself. For once the rent,
the insurance premiums, and the electric bill have all been paid, and uncle Brut
has “hit / for one dollar straight” –that is, his one-dollar ticket in a lottery or
numbers game has won the whole prize: it does not have to be divided among
several winners. The result is that the mother has made home-made bread,
Gram paw has come to visit, and there is spontaneous dancing and singing in
the kitchen with a bottle to add to the gaiety.
The speaker is one of the children in the family, possibly the oldest one. She
is so deeply impressed by the “good times, ” which are in such contrast with
their usual life of debt and privation, that she ends each stanza with three lines
devoted to proclaiming the, and then adds a two-line coda in which she

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instructs her younger sisters and brothers to “think about the / good time. ” Lay
them up in your memory, for you may not experience many more.
The irony in the poem is that the “good times” being celebrated in this poem
are what a middle-class observer would call hard times.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

KUBLA KHAN (P. 840)
The poem is purely a lyrical fragment, full of romantic suggestion and
haunting beauty. The fragmentary quality, appropriate to a dream, is a result of
the colorful images and references that lead nowhere specific, the break in
vision between Sections 2 and 3, and the inconclusive incantation of the final
lines. The musical beauty of the poem depends partly on the frequent use of
alliteration and assonance in each section.
The poem is a structurally unified drama of profound conflict. In the first
two sections, the poet creates a relationship between natural and artificial
beauty above ground and supernatural mystery below, resolved in Section 3 by
the evocation of religious awe at this creation. The bright beauty of the
pleasure-park and the cold dark if the caverns beneath can symbolize the
elemental forces of life and death, united by the “sacred river” that flows
through both.
The first publication of this poem included a lengthy note by Coleridge
attributing its inspiration to a combination of having taken a prescribed does of
opium, for an illness he was suffering, and then reading a seventeenth-century
travel book about the Chinese ruler; he claims that in his “reverie” he had
composed between two and three hundred lines of verse, but as he was
beginning to write them down he was interrupted by a visitor and returning to
his work discovered that he had forgotten the rest. (The account is available
here. ) Whether this was literally true is less important than the effect Coleridge
had in mind in reporting it; the account was written some fifteen years after the
poem, and seems to have as its purpose emphasizing the air of magic and

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mystery of the poem itself, as well as promoting the Romantic ideal of poetry
as spontaneous, impulsive, and free of narrowly rational thought.
But as many commentators have shown, the poem itself is highly crafted, not
likely the product even of a practiced poet unless he is paying close attention to
his effects. Elisabeth Schneider analyzes at length the assonance, consonance,
alliteration, and internal and end rimes of just the first five lines, demonstrating
the “half-caught echoes, correspondences of sound felt but too complex to be
anticipated or to remain tabulated in the mind even after they have been
analyzed. ”
Through line 36 the poet describes the site of Kubla Khan‟s pleasure-dome:
a landscape of contrasts and opposites, with a river bursting forth with great
force from a fountain in a “romantic chasm, ” meandering through a peasant
valley, and then sinking once again into a cavern leading to the “sunless sea. ”
The dome itself is built over “caves of ice, ” and the dome is surrounded by
gardens and forests, bounded by walls and towers. The scene combines
wildness with calm obliteration, warmth with coldness, holiness with
demonism, tumult with lifelessness, artifice with nature, the momentary present
with an ancestral past, light with dark, a peaceful scene with prophecies of war.
It is, says Harold Bloom a “vision of creation and destruction, each complete. ”
It present “the balance of reconciliation of opposites” which for Coleridge was
“the mark of the creative imagination. ”
At line 37 the poem turns to a different scene, a “vision” the poet once had
of another distant and exotic moment, of a singing maiden playing on an
antique instrument whose song seems to him to have corresponded to Kubla
Khan‟s pleasure-dome. If he could revive within himself the feelings aroused
by this vision, he too would be able to create “in air” what Kubla did on earth-
and his creation would mark him off from the multitudes who would see in him
a holy man of magical powers.
His desire is to create poetically the totality that was expressed in Kubla
Khan‟s achievement; as he phrases it, however, this is only a wish, something‟s

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beyond his powers. Yet as Bloom points out, what the poem “Kubla Khan”
does is precisely that.

Emily Dickinson
BECAUSE I COULD NOT STOP FOR DEATH (P. 844)
Beyond doubt, this is the most discussed of Emily Dickinson‟s poems, and it
has excited a wide array of interpretations. The literal content seems to offer
few difficulties: a woman so busy with her life is called away it by a kindly
gentleman (Death), who takes her for a carriage ride past the living, pauses at
what must be her grave, and proceeds through centuries toward the destination
“eternity. ” There are many fine details characterizing the stages of life stanza
3; stanza 4 emphasizes both the femininity of the speaker and the chilliness of
her ride; stanza 5 mysteriously understates her burial; and the last stanza
perpetuates the ride in Death‟s carriage beyond the human comprehension of
time (the concept of eternity, as Keats says in the last stanza of “Ode on a
Grecian Urn, “teases use” out of thought”).
There is little quarrel among the critics about these literal matters. The
continuing question is what this little allegory means. Does it link death with
sexuality (the gentleman come courting)? Does it pretend to render a judgment
on posthumous experience? Does it define the values of life as they are
discovered in the moment of dying? Does it celebrate the soul‟s entry into
heaven? These suggestions, and several others, have been made by eminent
critics and scholars. Furthermore, there is little agreement about the tone of the
poem-is it confident? Whimsical? Terrified? Triumphant? Uninvolved?
Death is remarkably, and surprisingly, characterized in this personification
as “kindly, ” a word which so violates normal expectations as to signal the need
for interpretation. Death has traditionally been thought of as “kind” to the
extent that it releases a person from a life of suffering or from the limitations
imposed by mortality. Such a meaning might be implied by the fact that
“Immortality” is included as a personified fellow passenger in the carriage, but
the image of life I the poem do not suggest a life pain-it contains both labor and

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leisure, nonchalantly linked by alliteration, which are as easily put away as a
basket of sewing; and it is represented by the playing children and the maturing
grain. In fact life and death seem equally attractive, and the speaker, pleased
with Death‟s “civility, ” apparently accepts his invitation with pleasure. The
poem presents Death‟s visit not as an inevitable and unavoidable event, but as a
polite invitation which the speaker finds attractive-an interpretation which
divides the speaker from the ordinary people.
The tone of the poem is governed by the speaker‟s willingness to accept
Death‟s kind offer, and the key to the speaker‟s choice lies in the final stanza.
Until then, the poem has been a retrospective recollection of events, reported
from the speaker‟s present situation and colored by her perceptions and
attitudes “centuries” later. Although in real terms (calendar terms, sun terms)
hundreds of years have passed since the beginning of the ride with Death, to
the speaker this whole span of time “Feels shorter than the day” she died. Now
being dead, the speaker no longer shares the feelings or the ideas of the living.
The word “surmised” underscores this, for in mid-nineteenth century America,
and in several other poems by Emily Dickinson, (the word had decidedly
negative connotations; it meant to guess in error, or to guess without personal
experience as a basis. The speaker guessed at the destination of her ride-
eternity-but neither has nor reached what the living suppose that implies
heaven. Instead, what she is now experiencing is an endless, cool, and detached
journey toward an unknown destination. The speaker retains the power to
remember her life, and retains her consciousness, but her present situation is
under finable. In this interpretation, the poem presents an allegorical
dramatization of posthumous experience: it is neither hellish or blissful, but
only eternally conscious and emotionless.

Emily Dickinson
I TASTE A LIQUOR NEVER BREWED
The poet‟s delight in nature is expressed through an extended metaphor in
which ecstasy is likened to intoxication. The liquor on which the poet gets

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drunk is air and dew and all the beauty of summer. This liquor is natural: is has
not been brewed; and “not all the vats upon the Rhine” (famous for its
breweries) yield comparable liquor. She drinks it from “tan lards scooped in
pearl” (cumulus clouds in summer skies). The “inns of molten blue” are
summer skies, and “endless” is an overstatement modifying “days” or
“summer” or both. Bees and butterflies (both of which take nectar form
flowers) are her drinking companions, but the poet declares she will out drink
both-drink both -drink them under the table! Indeed she will make such a
spectacle of herself and raise such a hullabaloo that seraphs and saints will run
to the windows of heaven to investigate, and, looking out, will see the poet
leaning drunkenly against the celestial Impost!
The fancifulness of the poem‟s metaphors keeps the poem bubbling with
high spirited fun. The alliteration of debauchee of dew” (6) follows the vowel-
alliteration of line 5 (all vowels alliterate with each other), in which every
syllable it is like taking continuous small sips of air. The trochaic substitution
in first foot of line 7 not only emphasizes the word “Reeling” but introduces a
reeling movement into the line. (The basic metrical and rime pattern is iambic
x4 a3 x4 a3, but in line 15 a metrical pause replaces the last beat, giving
emphasis to the delightful assonantal “little tippler” by which the poet
characterizes herself. )

John Donne
THE GOOD-MORROW
As the title announces, this poem is a morning greeting addressed by the
speaker to his love. The question in the opening lines colloquially declare a
parallel between this morning‟s awakening and an awakening to life that took
place when they began to love. All-time before then was like infancy, or like a
miraculous two-century sleep. The conversational quality of these lines
continues throughout the poem, producing the kind of syntactical and elliptical
problems found in line 5: “but this, all pleasures are merely imagined ones. ”
The mock innocence of the first three lines is elaborated on in lines 6-7: the

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speaker has in the past had his share of sexual experience, but to his innocent
sleeping soul they were only prophetic dreams of the love he now shares.
Pursuing his reference to other love exploits, the speaker assures his lady that
there can be no cause of jealousy between them. He puns on the words “watch”
and “wake, ” synonyms in Donne‟s time, of insist that the alertness to each
other which this morning has brought is not for fear of loss, because (he
logically says) our mutual love rules out the possibility of loving others. Each
of them is the whole of the other‟s society, just as the room they share is
equivalent to all other places. The elliptical syntax of lines 11-12 extends this
spatial reference. “Let” in these lines means both “let us concede” and “let us
ignore. ” For other people whose sense of the spaciousness of the world drives
from, traveling, explorers and mapmakers are the necessary; but these two
lovers in themselves contain all world. (Line 14 alludes to the Renaissance
theory that each individual human being is a microcosm, a little world that
parallels the greater universe and contains all its elements. Each of the lovers is
thus a world, and being joined by their love, each has a world).
The third stanza further extends the geographical metaphor, but it begins
with a Renaissance commonplace, that the face of the lover is mutually
mirrored in the eye of the portent, both of them being simultaneously a mirror
and the image in the other‟s mirror. Line 16 momentarily returns to the theme
of jealousy, as the speaker assures his love that their mirrored faces reveal the
honesty in their hearts. They are themselves like the hemispheres of the newly
explored and mapped earth-but better, since they do not have the sharp
coldness of the north, or the sinking sunset of the west. Lines 19-21 employ
another Renaissance notion, that mortality and decay are the result of the
mixture of unequal or dissimilar elements in the body. Done concludes that
since the two of them are not dissimilar (being “one” in their love), or, at least,
since they are completely “alike” in the intensity of their feelings, they need not
fear death.
The rich allusiveness of the poem, with its hyperbolic declarations balanced
against recurrent denials of any need for jealousy or the fear of infidelity, make

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this a more complicated poem than its declarative statements suggest. The
speaker insists on the perfection and permanence of their mutual love, but this
idealism is presented in a context that acknowledges the probability of change.
The references to new geographical discoveries attest to the temporal nature of
human knowledge, just as the opening stanza show that individual human
beings develop and change. Despite the insistence in the last three lines, death
is a certainty for these perfect lovers; and if the real hemispheres of the earth
contain “sharp north” and “declining” west, ” the microcosm of the lovers‟
united being will ultimately be subjected to the same vicissitudes. At the same
time that the poem declares the permanence of this love, it alludes to the actual
impossibility of it.

John Donne
SONG: GO AND CATCH A FALLING STAR (P. 874)
In general, this poem expresses extremely disillusioned and cynical view of
human life and particularly of feminine virtue. The speaker, addressing an
unidentified interlocutor, bids him in the first six lines to perform a series of
takes which have the common characteristic of being impossible. The
implication is that the task he commands in the last three lines of the stanza is
equally impossible: to find any condition of life that favors the advancement of
“an honest mind. ” In modern idiom, “Nice guys finish last. ”
In the second stanza the speaker zeroes in on his true target-feminine virtue.
If, he tells his companion, you are a person with a gift for seeing miraculous
events or things invisible to the ordinary eye, go on a journey, ride, “ten
thousand days and nights, ” do not return until you are old; no matter how wide
or long your search, even with your gift for seeing wondrous things, you will
be unable to find a woman who is both beautiful and faithful in love. He may
perhaps find some faithful ugly ones, but those women with opportunities to be
unfaithful will take them.
In the third stanza the speaker seemingly retreats half a step from this
extreme conclusion. If you find one, he tells his companion; let me know, for it

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would be sweet to make a “pilgrimage” to see such a saint. But then he retracts
this in junction, showing that he has not really retreated at all. Do not tell me,
he says, for even were she still true when I received your letter, still, by the
time I could complete my journey, were it only next door, she would have
proved unfaithful to two or three lovers. His “pilgrimage, ” he is convinced,
would turn out to be a fool‟s errand. It is as impossible to find a woman both
“true and fair” as to catch a falling star.
How seriously are we to take this poem? Should we imagine the speaker or
poet as a man extremely embittered from a series of personal betrayals?
Possibly. But it is called a “Song, ” and was indeed written to an “air” already
in existence. Its meter is songlike (tetrameter, expect for two monometer lines
in each stanza. ) its riming is copious alternating in the first four lines, then a
couplet of feminine rimes, then three rimes, on one sound. Moreover, its
images and overstatements ate so extreme, or so witty and charming, and its
progress so amusing, that it is hard to take the poem gravely. It seems more
playful than disenchanted, more entertaining than sad. The poet, one feels, has
adopted a fashionably cynical pose and tried to see how ingeniously and
entertainingly he could deal with it. In short, the poem and its speaker are too
lively to be lugubrious.

Keith Douglas
VERGISSMEINNICHT (P. 848)
The setting is probably the North African desert where British forces under
General Montgomery fought a prolonged and bitter campaign against German
forces under General Kummel (“The Desert Fox”) during World War II. The
speaker, a British soldier, accompanied by one or more fellow-soldiers, has
returned, three weeks afterwards, to the site of a particularly fierce engagement.
They find still sprawled under the barrel of his antitank gun, the body of a
German soldier who had made a direct hit on the speaker‟s tank before being
killed, in the gun pit spoil the speaker finds a photograph of the dead German‟s
sweetheart, signed with her name and the German word for “Forget me not. ”

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The poem is based on a series of incapable now of memory; the fact that dead
soldier‟s war equipment is still “hard and good” while its user is “decayed”; the
horrible contrast between the living man loved by the girl and corpse with its
burst stomach and dusty eyes; the dual nature of man which makes him capable
of both love and killing the fact that the short amide at the soldier “has done the
lover mortal hurt”, an ironic understatement. What the speaker discovers in the
dead German is a man once much likes himself. His tone expresses neither
enmity, hate, nor triumph, but only pity and shared humanity. The poem may
be usefully compared with Hardy‟s “The Man He Killed”

Carolyn Force
THE COLONEL
The country is EL Salvador, as we know from the context in which it
appears Forche‟s book The Country Between Us in which perhaps a third of the
poems stem from visits to EL Salvador made over a two-year period. On the
other hand, there may be value in asking them to identify as nearly as possible
the local of the poem. There are sufficient clues to identify the locale as a small
Latin American country dominated by American culture and governed by a
military regime, against which there is considerable opposition.
The precise date appended at the end suggests that the poem is based on an
actual incident. Does this mean that the poem is factual, not fictional? It is
written in prose, not verse. How does it differ, then from a reportorial account?
In many ways. No names are named, either of persons of places. The poem is
addressed to a particular reader (a “you”), nit to a general reader. The poem
uses images that would not ordinarily be found in a newspaper account: “The
moon swung bare on its black cord over the house. ” Perhaps most importantly,
the last two sentences are surrealistic. They take us into a fantasy world. How
distant they are from the first two!
The first two sentences reveal that the poem is a reply to a friend back home.
The friend has asked her some such question as “Is it true, as I heard on a news
report, that you have been to Colonel's home?” The speaker replies, “I was in

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his house. ” The failure to give the “his” an antecedent in the poem, plus the
fact that the friend knows his name, suggests that the colonel is well known
outside his country and is important within it. His name has appeared in the
newspapers. He may be the military dictator; he is at least a member of the
ruling military junta. What does he mean when he talks of “how difficult it had
become to govern”? What would he consider the signs and purposes of good
government?
The central point in this poem lies in the shocking contrast between the
civility and the brutality implied by the colonel‟s life style. The tray of coffee
and sugar, the daily papers, the pet dogs, the TV set, the good dinner-all
suggest a style of civilized and gracious living such as many in our country
enjoy. But the pistol on the cushion, the broken bottles embedded in the walls,
the bag of human eats, and the colonel‟s angry outburst against “rights” all
suggest something quite different.

Robert Frost
ACQUAINTED WITH THE NIGHT
“Acquainted with the Night” also has fourteen lines of the sonnet from, but,
like “Once by the Pacific”, it does not have the conventional from of the
sonnet. The division of the poem into four triplets and a concluding couplet as
well as the use of an interlocking rhyme scheme, in which the second line in
one triplet becomes the main rhyme for the following triplet, reminds one of
the stanza form used by Shelley in “Ode to the West Wind”. As we might
expect, Frost‟s departure from the conventional sonnet form is deliberate and is
made to produce a specific effect. As in “Once by the pacific”, he is trying to
build one on line to create a total impact and the interlinked rhyme scheme, by
caring the reader forward, helps to do this.
The title, “Acquainted with the Night”, refers to more than the physical night.
The darkness of the evening, the emptiness of the city, and the eeriness of the
sights and sounds all serve as symbols of an inner spiritual and psychological
loneliness. As the reader moves through the poem, he notes that seven of the

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fourteen lines begin with the words “I have”. At times, the repetition seems
almost monotonous. This is intended, for it suggests he empty sameness of the
speaker‟s life. Moreover, the poem opens and closes with the same phrase: “I
have been one acquainted with the night. ” Just as the poem is enclosed by this
phrase, so too the speaker is enclosed by his loneliness-there is no escape.
The details of the poem all help to build a feeling of absolute, desolate
loneliness. He has walked out and back in rain: nothing has happened during
his walk, he has escaped into darkness beyond the light of the city, its saddest
lanes. Yet his loneliness cannot be communicated: when a watchman looks
questioningly at him, he drops his eyes, “unwilling to explain. ” Even the
sounds of the night-someone crying in his sleep, the call of someone in pain-
cannot pierce the shell of loneliness. People do not care for or call to him. They
do not “call me back or say good-by. ” The final image captures the
meaninglessness of his life:
One luminary clock against the sky
Proclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right.
The lighted dial of the village clock, which measures the time of the lives of
the other people of the town, does not speak to him, for in his loneliness he is
outside ordinary concerns.
At a purely literal level this poem says merely that the poet has taken many
walks at night through the city and is thoroughly familiar with its nighttime
aspects. But clearly the poem is meant to be read symbolically. The chief
symbol is the night, which suggests the darker aspects of existence. But to
grasp anything like its full significance.
That the poet has walked out and back in rain indicates that he has endured
physical discomfort. That he has walked beyond the furthest city light-beyond
the city limits-may suggest that he has “transgressed”-gone beyond legal or
moral limits. His having looked down “the saddest city lane” indicates that he
has seen the poverty and misery of the city‟s slum areas. His unwillingness to
explain to the watchman what he is doing out so late at night suggests feelings
of guilt or embarrassment. The “interrupted cry” across houses from another
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street-possibly a scream of terror cut short by strangulation-suggests violence
and evil. That the cry is not directed toward him suggests his loneliness. The
illuminated clock which seems detached from the earth and at “an unearthly
height” (because its tower is blotted out by darkness) may at first seem like
something supernatural, but is really only a manmade instrument which can
“proclaim the time” but cannot judge it. It thus suggests a universe without
moral or divine oversight-a universe indifferent to man.
The night in Frost‟s poem is thus a remarkably subtle and evocative symbol
for hardship, guilt, sorrow, loneliness, evil, desolation, and isolation at the
personal, social, and cosmic levels. The clock against the sky, man-made but
“at an unearthly height, ” strikingly proclaims the absence of authoritative
moral direction, human or superhuman, in an indifferent universe.
And how does the poet respond to this dark perception of the universe? The
calm, matter-of-fact tone of voice in the first and final lines counters the dark
experience of the intervening liens with a quite refusal to be daunted. The final
line is indeed an understatement. The poet has been more than “acquainted”
with says, in effect, “I can take it. ”
Though the poem resembles a sonnet in containing fourteen lines if iambic
pentameter, its rime scheme is that of terza rime, made famous by Dante‟s use
of it in The Divine Comedy, of which the “Inferno” is the best-known section.
Some critics hae read the “luminary clock” as a metaphor for the moon. But
(a) one cannot easily tell time by the moon as one can by sun; it raises at a
different hour every day and is often observable in full daylight; (b) this is a
city poem and its imagery is city imagery (if the clock were the moon, then the
phrase “at an unearthly height” would be literal), obvious, and uninteresting:
(c) Frost has himself identified the clock as a tower clock in Ann Arbor.

Robert Frost
WEST RUNNING BROOK (P. 812)

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 Many critics see “West-Running Brook”, the title poem of Frost‟s fifth
volume of poetry, as a summation of the poet‟s ideas and theme. In many ways
this is so. Two people, a husband and wife, engage in dialogue; this dialogue
reveals their differing approaches to life; the setting of the poem is in the
country; and the “action” of the poem is in the country; and the “action” of the
poem focuses on the characters reactions to a basic symbol in nature. However,
the poem differs from earlier works in one significant way: whereas the earlier
poems were often dramatic presentations of conflicts between people, “West-
Running Brook” is essentially philosophical: it embodies ideas about the nature
of existence.
The wife‟s opening speeches introduce the major symbol, the brook, and
indicate her attitude to life. After asking why this brook should run westward
when all the others in the area flow eastward, she states:
It must be the brook
Can trust itself to go by contraries
The way I can with you-and you with me
Because we‟re –we‟re – I don‟t know what we are.
What are we?
Her speech indicates that she approaches life intuitively, not rationally
understanding her philosophy, but knowing that it is true. She sees the fact that
the brook does not flow as others do as a symbol of the love in their marriage.
It too is united through the two partner‟s ability to trust and love each other
even though each approaches life differently. Yet the nature of the difference
and the bond she cannot articulate. However, she sees that the natural fact of
the river parallels the spiritual fact of their marriage.
The husband‟s reply is worded philosophically. After explaining
scientifically that the backward moving wave in midstream is created by the
resistance of the water to the rock, he sates that the river and wave have been
this way forever. He does not see the rock or brook as having any direct
relation to their own lives. For him, the backward flowing wave is a general
symbol of life: although the river, like life, moves constantly onward toward

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the ocean-in life, toward death-the pressure of the rock creates an apparently
constant wave. It represents those forces of life which gene a shape and
seeming permanence to the flux. It is man‟s acting, man‟s desire to give order,
which gives shape, form, and meaning to his life. It gives “a momentary stay
against confusion. ” In considering the husband‟s reply, we can see clearly the
differences between him and his wife: he sees abstractly, philosophically,
impersonally, whereas she sees intuitively, emotionally, and personally. These
two contraries work together to create the harmony and the form and meaning
of their married life.
To the these remarks, the wife replies that the movement of the brook serves
as an annunciation to her; that is, it is a divine proclamation. To Fred, this
represents a feminine way of seeing things; a way he does not quite understand.
Loving him, his wife realizes that he too has a way of looking at things and
asks that he explains. He believe that the river symbolizes the constant change
and flow that is the essence of life:
It seriously, sadly, runs, away
to fill the abyss‟ void with emptiness.
The universal cataract of death
That speeds to nothingness
Against this inevitable flow and change, there is a counterforce. Represented
by the rock in the river causing the wave to move against the river in the
stream. The water in the wave is always changing, always new, yet the general
pattern of the wave remains the same. It is this force which gives pattern to the
wave and which symbolizes the meaning which gives pattern to the changes of
life. Fred refers to “some strange resistance in itself, / Not just a swerving but a
throwing back. ” Both forces are necessary; the two way movement is vital.
Similarly, the marriage takes on meaning through the interaction of man and
woman and of conflicting views. The husband sees this as the basic law of
nature:
Our life runs down in sending up the clock,
The brook runs down in sending up our life.

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 The sun suns down in sending up the brook.
And there is something sending up the sun.
The concluding lines indicate the love that makes the marriage meaningful.
They are two different people, but they are united because their differences are
blended harmoniously. The wife opens the concluding dialogue:
Today will be the day
You said so. ‟
„No today will be the day
You said the brook was called West-Running Brook. ‟
„Today will be the day of what we both said. ‟

Robert Frost
MENDING WALL
One of the best known and best loved of Frost‟s works, this poem has long
defied the attempts of critics to give it specific meaning. Perhaps this is the
basis of its charm. Beneath the vivid description and the conversational
rhythms of the blank verse, there lies a subtle suggestiveness which, like the
will-o‟-the-wisp, recedes before the traveler intent on capturing it and
completely analyzing it. Perhaps the gravest danger lies in seeing the poem as
an allegorical example of the opening statement: “Something there is that
doesn‟t love a wall. ” To take such a view is to assume that the speaker is
Robert Frost himself and to forget that the poet often treats his narrators
ironically.
The poem recounts the thoughts of the narrator when, by prearrangement, he
meets his neighbor to engage in the annual chore of replacing the rock of the
stonewall which have been heaved from their places by the winter frost. As he
prepares to work he things to himself that some unknown force is hostile to the
building of walls and therefore disrupts the pair of the winter damage. Each
person keeps to his own side of the wall, replacing the boulders which have
fallen on his own property. The narrator considers annual event a kind of game
because of the fact that neither person needs a wall in this place. Yet the

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neighbor only says “Good fences make good neighbors. ” Mischievously, the
narrator questions his co-worker‟s belief; stating that it isn‟t necessary to erect
barricades and that by so doing he may be offending someone else. The
speaker is tempted to attribute the betaking down of the wall to elves: “But it‟s
not elves exactly. And I‟d rather / He said it for himself. ” Looking at the
neighbor, he imagines that the other man is like a stone-age savage, moving out
of darkness, armed with weapons. The neighbor, pleased with his view of the
matter, repeats his belief that “Good fences make good neighbors. ”
It is interesting to note that the poem begins and ends with diametrically
opposed notions: “Something there is that doesn‟t love a wall. ” The speaker‟s
view; and “Good fences make good neighbors, ” the neighbor‟s attitude.
Keeping this point in mind, it becomes apparent that Frost is not so much
concerned with emphasizing one view but with contrasting two attitudes, the
basic differences of which can be seen by studying the statements of the men.
The narrator‟s approach is negative: something, perhaps a force in nature, does
not love a wall. The words love and wall are significant. Love suggests a
positive human emotion, wall suggest a definite, complete barrier, The
neighbor‟s view is more positive: more positive: He does not see a wall but a
fence, which suggests something more easily seen through or climbed over.
Moreover, it is a means of improving human relationships; it helps to make
good neighbors. Perhaps this is so because by making boundaries it helps
preserve the individually and privacy of each person. But even though this may
be the case, the neighbor says so not so much because he has discovered the
truth of the statement, but because his father has held same view. He relies
somewhat unthinkingly on tradition.
With this fact in mind, we may be inclined to think that the speaker is the
one who shelf-reliantly, independently speaker for himself: he refuses to accept
tradition for its own sake. But his view is limited: he does not know what it is
which causes the breakdown of the wall, and even though he questions his
neighbor‟s view, it is he who arranges with the other man to meet each year to
do repairs. Moreover, he does not attempt to understand the other‟s point of

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view and tends to see him as being like an unthinking primitive. “He moves in
darkness as it seems to me. ” Notice this is his point of view and that he does
not see that he too has a limited comprehension of the situation.
In the end, it seems that neither man has a clear-sighted and balanced view
of the operation in which they unusually engage. There is a certain justice in
both points of view, but similarly a certain short sight ness. The wall they seem
to mend each year is the lack of understanding which exists between them.
Each stays on his own side of the fence and builds up his own prejudices. Thus
it appears that the poem is not written to support either view but to serve as a
character study of two men so opposed in attitudes to life that communication
is impossible.
At first reading this poem will seem to be about walls and about two New
England farmers who have opposite philosophies concerning them. Each
philosophy is stated twice: the speaker‟s in the first live and in line 35:
“Something there is that doesn‟t love a wall”; the neighboring farmer‟s in line
27 and in the final line: “Good fences make good neighbors. ” But as we dig
into the poem a little deeper we may conclude that the poem is less about walls
and opposed philosophies concerning them than it is about opposed kinds of
mental habit. The neighboring farmer‟s philosophy is clear and definite, and we
know exactly where he got it. He got it from his father, who got it from his
father, who got it …. In short, it is a traditional piece of folk wisdom, a
proverbial saying which he has accepted as dogma without questioning its
meaning or validity. The speaker, on the other hand, states his philosophy more
tentatively: “Something there is that doesn‟t love a wall. ” He seems not quite
certain what that “Something” is, though, as a matter of fact, he knows exactly
what “spills the upper boulders in the sun” over the winter months. It is “the
frozen-ground-swell” underneath the wall: the expansion of the earth caused by
the freezing of the moisture always present in the ground. Nature causes the
wall to crumble. But he inclines to think there may be more to it than that: not
just nature but something in nature or in the-nature-of-things “doesn‟t love” a
wall. He hasn‟t put a label on it. But not only is he more tentative in his

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thinking than his neighbor, he is also more reflective, thoughtful, and flexible.
He has a questioning habit of mind. Of his neighbor‟s saying he asks, “Why do
they make good neighbors? Isn‟t it / Where there are cows? (“Why” is the kind
of question his neighbor has never asked. ) But in asking this question, or
rather these two questions, he confesses that there is some truth in his
neighbor‟s positions, and identifies exactly the source of that truth. When one
or both neighbors own livestock, the wall prevents contention between them
keeping the livestock in their proper fields and keeping one farmer‟s cows from
eating the other‟s crops. (A “good neighbor, ” as defined by the proverb is one
whom you can live next to without friction. ) The neighbor‟s attitude toward
walls, like most proverbial wisdom, contains a half-truth. (“Look before you
leap” and “He who hesitates is lost, ” though contradictory, both state half-
truths; that is, each is true in some situation, neither is true in all situations. ) It
is now apparent that the speaker‟s attitude toward walls is not so diametrically
opposed to his neighbor‟s as at first appeared. He recognizes the necessity, the
desirability, of some walls. Indeed he has all by himself on occasion gone out
and “made repair” after hunters have completely torn down part of a wall. Still,
the desirability of a wall depends upon the situation, and “here there are no
cows. ” Before he built a wall he‟d ask what he “was walling in or walling out.
” Before he built a wall he‟d ask what he “was walling in or walling out. ” He
continues to think that there is “Something” that “doesn‟t love a wall, / That
wants it down, ” but he is not himself opposed to all walls, just unnecessary
ones, and especially those that wall in or wall out something that ought not to
be walled in or out. However, he is flexible, He is he one who contacts his
neighbor “at spring mending-time” to let him know when he is available. He
knows what his neighbor‟s attitude toward walls is, and he knows that to stay
on neighborly terms with him, he must honor that attitude even while trying to
argue him out of it.
But there is much more to the contrast between these two farmers than
simply their attitudes toward walls. The speaker is observant: he can tell the
difference between the gaps made by the frozen-ground-swell in winter and

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those made by hunters on other season. He knows how handling rocks all day
can wear one‟s fingers “rough. ” He has imagination, a playful, whimsical turn
of mind, and a sense of humor. Some boulders, he observes, are round that they
“have to use a spell to make them balance: / „Stay where you are until our
backs are turned. ‟ “He compares the process of mending wall to “just another
game, / One on a side. ” He anticipates his point about the cows by saying: “My
apple trees will never get across / And eat the cones under [your] pines. ” His
perceptiveness is apparent when he thinks about how to explain what he
“Something” is that doesn‟t love a wall. Whatever it is (Love perhaps? Some
principle of community or brotherhood?), the speaker knows that, to reach his
neighbor‟s understanding, he must communicate the idea in concrete terms, not
in abstraction. He feelingly think of “elves” because his fancy has a fondness
for elves and because elves (if one actually believes in them, as the speaker
almost surely doesn‟t) are a physical agency which the neighbor‟s mind could
grasp-and might accept if he were an Irish peasant rather than a New England
farmer. But the speaker immediately realizes the absurdity of this explanation
and casts it aside, for “it‟s not elves exactly, and I‟d rather / He said it for
himself. ” This last remark shows the speaker‟s grasp of an important principle
of education: that the learner will be much more likely to grasp and accept a
concept that he has figured out for himself than one he has merely had
explained to him (if you want a fancy name for this method of teaching, it‟s
heuristic). Thus we find in the speaker a mind that is probing, perceptive, and
critical, but also imaginative whimsical, and playful, though possibly a little
indefinite in its inability to define that “Something” even to itself. In the
neighbor we see a matter-of-fact, uncritical mind which accepts traditional
wisdom unquestioningly and holds on to it dogmatically. It is this contrast of
minds that provides the central interest of the poem. In the speaker‟s perception
his neighbor “moves in darkness” –the darkness of ignorance and uncritical
acceptance. He sees his neighbor there, “Brining a stone grasped firmly by the
top / In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed. ” The implications of the
simile are two: first, than an unquestioning habit of mind is primitive, like that
of Paleolithic man, second, that there is something potentially menacing about
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such a habit of mind. No doubt the speaker and his neighbor will continue to
get on amicably enough, and not start throwing rocks at each other: the
neighbor is conscientious and hard-working, and both men want to be “good
neighbors” in some sense of the term. Nevertheless, it is people shouting
slogans, changing to half-truths dogmatically, who rush into wars against each
other and go on “holy crusades. ” It is this kind of mental set that creates
unnecessary “walls” between men, and which “Something” (Love? Reason?
Brother hood?) “wants down. ”
Such, at least, is my reading (a fairly old-fashioned one) of what has become
one of Frost‟s most controversial poems. On one axis, the range of opinion
goes from Robert Grave‟s statement “If anyone asks: „But what is the
something that doesn‟t‟ love a wall?” the answer is, of course, „frost‟ also its
open hearted namesake, Robert Frost, ” to Elizabeth Jennings assertion that
“Good genes make good neighbors” is the moral of the poem. On another axis,
opinion ranges from Carson Gibbs‟s assessment of the speaker as “witty,
tolerant, and reasonable” to Donald Cunningham‟s that he is “hollow, vain, and
foolish. ”
“Good fences make good neighbors” may be the most famous phrase in all if
Frost‟s poetry. Like many famous quotations, it is misleading when quoted out
of context or when it is offered as Frost‟s “philosophy. ”
The poem is a narrative, restricting itself to the speaker‟s attitudes. It poses
the narrator against his neighbor, as men of two opposing philosophies, and as
can be the case when we report our experiences, the narrator is given the
privilege of considering his position the correct one. The neighbor is only
permitted to speak his famous line, twice; what he thinks of the speaker is
altogether missing from the poem. It can be instructive to ask a class to imagine
exactly what the neighbor might be thinking about the speaker –what a man
who “will not go behind his father‟s saying” (or so the speaker claims) thinks
about a man who first informs him it is time to mend the wall, and then wants
to ask what walls are for, and who seems to believe in some vague “something
… that doesn‟t love a wall. ”

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 A proper reading of the poem requires taking into account the limitation and
the implicit prejudice that result from one participant‟s report of a debate, and
which naturally renders the resolution suspect: the speaker clearly thinks he has
“won” because he is a thinking man who wants “to go behind” rural lore, while
his neighbor “moves in darkness” of the mind. The reader also needs to
understand the dialectic opposition of the two points of view. The speaker is a
man who wants to know the reasons for his actions, who investigates and
meditates, who likes to believe (probably thinking himself only whimsical) in
the vague “something, ” in using spells to balance the stones, even-almost-in
elves. That is, he is a compound of rationality and a desire to find something
beyond rationality. He is also a man of apple orchards, of domestication, of
playing games according to quit able rules, who takes pride in being civil and
civilized.
Stripped of the prejudiced reporting of the speaker, the neighbor is a man
who accepts traditional teachings, who shares in the responsibly of maintaining
private property, and whose land is in its natural state, a pine forest. He also
believes in neighborliness and the soundness of workmanship. What the
speaker‟s attitude contributes to the portrait of the neighbor reveals more about
the speaker than about his opponent in the game of wall-mending. Because of
the neighbor‟s taciturnity, the speaker thinks him shallow-minded, ignorant,
primitive, and unable to think or investigate. That is, he interprets the
neighbor‟s attitude as further evidence of his own superiority. The man who is
different from him is the man who is inferior to him. Does the neighbor go so
far in interpreting the speaker‟s difference?
John F. Lynne points out that the poem presents an unresolved question:
“Should man tear down the barriers which isolate individuals from one
another, or should he recognize that distinctions and limitations are necessary
to human life?” Attempting to answer this question, many readers have tried to
pin the poem down to a simple set of paired opposites-liberal and conservative,
rational and instinctive, civilized and primitive, and many more. But although
the terms of the poem teasingly invite the search for easy symbolic reading, and

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also tease the reader into supposing that the speaker is “right, ” no easy
symbols or easy solutions are available.

Isabella Gardner
GIMBOLING
For anyone familiar with Lewis Carroll‟s two Alice books, the title of this
piece will call to memory that delightful piece of nonsense veers
“Jabberwocky, ” at the end of the first chapter of Through the Looking-Glass. It
begins, “‟Taws billing, and the slithy troves / Did gyre and gamble in the wage.
” In a later chapter, Humpty-Dempty “explains” the poem to Alice. Billing
means “four o‟clock in the afternoon-the time you begin broiling things for
dinner. ” Slithy means “lithe and slimy. ” It is “like a portmanteau” it has “two
meanings packed up into one word. ” Togas are “something like badgers-
something like lizards-and … something like corkscrews” and “they make their
nests under sun-dials. ” To gyre is to “go round and round like a gyroscope, ”
and to gamble is “to make holes like a gimlet. ” The wabe is “the grass-plot
round a sun-dial, ” so-called “because it goes a long way before it, and a long
way behind it-and a long way beyond it on each side. ”
Does this allusion to “Jabberwocky” help us in understanding “Gamboling”?
Perhaps in part. Both poems have the power of seeming to be nonsense and at
the same time to be making some strange kind of sense if we could only just
grasp it. But there are differences as well. The chief difficulty in
“Jabberwocky” is produced by the strange words used-nonsensical words, not
found in the dictionary. In “Gamboling” the difficulty lies mainly in the
grammar-what do all those adjectives (Nimble, sleek, supple, compliant.
Folding, and unfolding) modify? The words themselves are all straightforward
except for gamble and gamboling. But in them too we face a puzzle. The
present participle of gimble would be gambling, not gamboling. Why does
Gardner make this change? Perhaps she is making her own portmanteau word,
combining gimble with gamboling, meaning frolicsome play. And indeed,
gamboling seems to be the chief activity of the poem. The poet is gamboling

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with the sounds of words, and the whatever-it-is or the whatever-they-are
gamboling with each other in the water.
And here is another difference. The activities in Gardner‟s poem take place
in an underwater world, not in front of a sundial. Perhaps wabe made Gardner
think of wave? In any event these activities are playful and erotic yet innocent.
Normal judgments apply. The last two lines perhaps explain why. They speak
of “the sweet waking / the floating ashore into sleep and to morning. ” Perhaps
this underwater world is a dream world, and its entire content is a dreaming?
That would account for its vagueness, its suggestiveness, and its lack of logical
connections.
One thing we may be certain. The poet is gamboling or gamboling with the
music of words. Perhaps we should just sit back and enjoy it.

Christopher Gilbert
PUSHING
Lines 21-22 generalize the central idea of the poem, thought with enough
vagueness of specificity to invite a symbolic interpretation. They define two
kinds of motive-desire and rebellion against limits or restrictions. The title
refers to the second of these, and is exemplified by two of the three events in
the poem-the boy‟s “pushing” beyond the limits of the shop-owner‟s
restrictions (returning to “try his never again”) and their throwing snowballs at
the sun. The shop-owner too pushes, not as a means of going beyond limits but
in order to establish them: „”buy something or else you got to leave. ” The
narrator, being pressed by his young brother to explain why they push against
the restriction (knowing as they both do that what they “want” is to be
warmed), finally comes up with his “guess” about the second kind of motive.
The things that the boys “can‟t” do include both the naturally and the
artificially prohibited: they cannot own the cars they name nor escape the
restrictions imposed by the store owner, both examples of limits placed by
social and economic forces; nor can they alter the cold weather or hit the sun
with their snowballs. The word “can‟t” nicely represent the two kinds of limits:
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strictly defined, it refers to absolute impossibility-if you cannot, you cannot; but
its colloquial usage, as a substitute for “may not, ” refers to the prohibitions of
social order. What the older boy is learning (and teaching) is that the apparent
impossibility of a task should provoke you to try to do it, rather than to accept
inability. “Pushing” is an appropriate title, for it does not offer any false
promise of achievement, only an attitude toward restriction.
One may infer from line 9 (“a decent White man”) that the speaker, like the
poet, is black, and that the restrictions presented in the poem symbolize
conditions beyond the rules shop-owners make to protect themselves from
“boys and what they are “up to” in loitering in the aisles.

Thomas Hardy
CHANNEL FIRING
Hardy‟s dating of this poem may make it seem prophetic, since World War I
broke out in August, 1914; but it was a prophecy almost anyone could have
made, for the event referred to in line 1 was well known: the royal Navy was
conducting gunnery practice in the English Channel, and the guns could be
heard many miles inland. (Hardy is reported to have been surprised, in fact, that
the war began only a few months afterward. )
The speaker in the poem is one of the dead, presumably a clergyman buried
within the chancel of his church where the clergy were usually interred; he is
familiar with the alter, chancel windows, and “glebe cow, ” and seems to be in
the habit of having chats with others buried nearby, including “Parson Thirdly.
” The folk like simplicity of the poem, achieved through its tetrameter quatrains
and simple diction, makes the whole experience seem rustic and
unsophisticated, the material of a ballad. The dead have been awakened by the
great guns (“loud enough to wake the dead, ” we might say), and at first they
suppose that “judgment day” has come. The noise has even terrified the
hounds, the church mouse, the worms, and the cow-not because they anticipate
the apocalypse, of course, but because they instinctively fear loud sounds.

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 God, however, sardonic but comforting, tells the dead to return to their sleep:
it‟s only men threatening men, not a divine event. Although many men deserve
to go to hell, God has not destroyed the world, nor does he seem to want to
anytime soon, for takes pity on mankind‟s need for “rest central. ”
Parson Thirdly‟s reaction to this news in the penultimate stanza is pragmatic:
if God is not going to separate the sheep from the goats, it might have been
more pleasant to have “stuck to pipes and beer” instead of depriving himself
for the sake of piety.
The tone of the poem shifts markedly in the last stanza. Instead of the folk
narrative of the speaker and the paternal chattiness of God, the last stanza turns
to brooding lyricism. Alliteration, consonance, and assonance
(roaring/readiness; again / guns; hour / roaring; readiness / avenge) pack the
first two lines. The last two abound in st and sounds: Stouten Tower, Camelot,
starlit Stonehenge; and the last two feet in this iambic poem are trochees,
mysteriously trailing off in the mournful music that the theme demands. The
bulk of the poem has been whimsical, folksy, and nit particularly alarming-
ironically, since the subject have included naval bombardment, skeletons,
damnation and piety, and God‟s potential wrath; but the theme is the
persistence among men of aggression, violence, and the recurrence of military
conquest to establish and maintain civilization. God (who tends to speak in
clichés, the rustic father of his rustic flock) puts it directly: “The world is as it
used to be. ”
A “glebe cow” is pastured in the parcel of land allotted to a clergyman as
part of his benefice; like the land and the parsonage, it is provided for his use
but is not his private property. The name “Parson Thirdly” may allude to the
Holy Trinity; a Parson Thirdly is a character in Hardy‟s novel Far from
Madding Crowd. The style and the time references implicit in the last stanza.

A. E. Housman
BREDON HILL

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 The poem dominated by the imagery of bells, their chiming partly conveyed
by the three times in each stanza. But the bells have a different meaning for the
speaker at different time in the poem, and in this difference the drama of the
poem lies.
In stanza 1-4 the speaker recalls summer Sunday mornings spent with his
sweetheart on Bred on Hill. They heard the bells reining for church service in
“steeples far and near. ” Though heedless of the summons, they found the
ringing a “happy noise, ” for it formed a background to their delight in each
other. That she preferred his company over going to church probably made the
bells even sweeter to the speaker, and he would call back to them, “Oh, peal
upon our wedding” and we will come “in time. ”
In stanza 5-6, however, we learn that the girl went to church that winter, not
for a wedding but for a funeral service-her own. “Unbeknown” to her lover, she
had died and gone to church (was carried there in her coffin) without him. Only
one bell was tolled-a bell in only one church, and only one bell of its set of
bells the funeral bell.
In the final stanza the lover again hears the bells ringing on Bredon as he had
that summer. But they no longer make a “happy noise”; they only remind him
more keenly of his lost happiness. In accents of extreme bitterness he cries out
(futilely) to bid them “Be dumb, ” and with almost surly resignation adds, “I
hear you, I will come. ” He will come when he is ready, either to mourn at his
sweetheart‟s grave or to be buried himself.
Bredon Hill is in Worcestershire close to the Shronshire border: these are the
two shires mentioned in line 3. From the top of Bredon on a clear day one can
see three additional counties Herefordshire, Warwickshire, and
Gloucestershire. The image of “colored counties” (8) conflates that of farmland
laid out in plots of different colored crops with a map showing the counties in
different colors.

A. E. Housman
TO AN ATHLETE DYING YOUNG (P. 856)
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 The speaker is a fellow townsman of the dead athlete, possibly (though
not necessarily) one of the pallbearers carrying his coffin to the cemetery for
burial. The athlete had died within months of winning the annual race for his
town. The poem is an extended apostrophe addressed by the speaker to the
athlete.
The parallelism of action and language between the first two stanzas
beautifully underscores the ironic contrast in situation. After his victory in the
race, the towns-people had “chaired” him (borne him in triumph on their
shoulders) through the marketplace to his home. Now, less than a year later,
they bring him “home” again, again “shoulder-high. ” But the meaning of
“home” has changed between the two stanzas. In the second it is a metaphor for
the grave. The “road all runners come” is death, and the youth is being borne
“shoulder-high” in his coffin. The “town” to which he now belongs (“stiller” –
an understatement than that which noisily “cheered” just a few months ago) is
the cemetery on necropolis.
The chief ironic shock of the poem, however, comes in the third stanza.
Most people would consider the death of a young athlete at the peak of his
ability an occasion for lamentation; the speaker considers it one for
congratulation. “Smart lad, ” he says (not Poor lad), and proceeds to praise the
young athlete for dying “betimes. ” Expect for his hyperbolic use of the word
“Smart” when he literally means fortunate (the athlete did not commit suicide),
the speaker is perfectly serious, and speaker for the poet; that is, the irony
involved here is neither verbal nor dramatic but situational. Both speaker and
poet regard the athlete as fortunate; the irony lies in the discrepancy between
our expectation (initiated by the title and sustained through the first two stanza)
that the athlete‟s death will be regarded quite otherwise.
In the rest of the poem the speaker supports this attitude and is not undercut
by the poet. The athlete has “slipped away” from “fields where glory does not
stay. ” It is better, the speaker feels, to die when everyone is singing your
praises than to die in obscurity years later (as so many once-celebrated athletes
do). The “fields where glory does not stay” are literally athletic fields,

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symbolically earth or life in general; the “glory” is fame and the pride of
triumph. The “laurel” is the symbol, not just of victory (the ancient Greeks
awarded a laurel wreath or “crown” to victors in the Python games) but of
fame. The “rose” is traditionally a symbol for a girl‟s beauty. Though athletic
fame is won by young men at an early age, the speaker declares, its duration is
even shorter than a young woman‟s beauty. This runner, who set a new record
for the course he ran, will not be alive to see his record broken; the silence that
would have greeted his future athletic decline will sound “no worse than
cheers” (an ironical understatement: he will be aware of neither) now that he is
dead. In stanza 5 the speaker praises the athlete for having won
(metaphorically) one more race: he has raced his fame to the grave and has
arrived there first (has died while his name is still unforgotten). In stanza 6 the
speaker again speaks to the athlete as if he had some choice in the matter, and
urges him to set his “fleet foot on the sill of shade / And hold to the low lintel
up The still-defended challenge cup” (his trophy) is the kind that has the
winner‟s name inscribed on it each year and which the winner is allowed to
keep until he is defeated, when it passes into the hands of the new winner. This
athlete has died with the challenge-cup still in his possession.
The last stanza contains a sophisticated literary allusion that supports some
identification of the speaker with the poet (Housman was a celebrated classical
scholar). In Book XI of the Odyssey, when Odysseus visits the Greek
underworld (Hades), he is surrounded by shades of the “strangles” dead. Since
these shades are depicted as peculiarity impotent strengthens and senseless,
Housman is not predicting here some kind of immortality for the dead athlete,
but simply making one more contrast between what he was in life and what he
will become in death, “strengthens” and senseless. Nevertheless, these shades
will find “unwithered” on his dead the laurel garland (fame) “briefer than a
girl‟s” rose garland (beauty). The last two lines of the poem allude to the
symbols of stanza 3.
Housman in this poem dwells on the transience of youth, fame, and beauty,
and on the desirability of draying while one still has them rather than after they

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are lost. It is a theme that appears elsewhere in his poetry. It reflects one part of
Housman‟s mind but not the whole of it, as can seen from “Terence, this is
stupid stuff” and “Loveliest of trees”

Randall Jarrell
THE DEATH OF THE BALL TURRET GUNNER (P. 858)
The poem captures both the terror and the ironic humor of its subject in the
phrase “washed me out, ” which takes literally the euphemism for the failure to
qualify for military duty. Rather than failing to measure up to training
standards, the speaker has been so mutilated that his body must be flushed from
his turret by a water hose.
The poem refers explicitly to the U. S. army Air Corps in World War II. The
B-17 “Flying Fortress” bombers had a gunner‟s glass turret on the belly of the
fuselage, and airmen word fur-lined leather jackets; anti-aircraft shells were
called “flak” as an acronym for the German word “Fliegerabwehrkanone, ”
though the shorter word sounds like an onomatopoetic imitation of the noise of
the explosion; and the bombers were attacked by squadrons of fighter planes.
The first three lines of the poem abound with musical devices, chiefly
alliteration (sleep, state; loosed, life; fell, fur, froze) and assonance (mother‟s,
hunched; fell, belly, wet; sleep, dream). These culminate in the internal rime
“black flak, ” whose flat a and harsh k sharply bring to a halt such devices.
After this rime, the only musical device is the concluding and horrifying rime
“froze / hose. ” This pattern of sounds reinforces the irony of the poem‟s
conclusion. The metaphors of the first two lines create a parallel between the
position of the unborn child in his mother‟s womb and the man‟s position in the
“belly” of the bomber. The movement from one to the other is ominously
referred to as falling, and the animal processes, of generation and birth are
obliquely implied in “my wet fur. ” The speaker seems to pass directly from the
moment of birth to his place in the gun turret, and his existence is governed by
the dreams of his mother (for her child‟s success, happiness, and safety) and
the subsequent dream of the “State” (for its own safety and its national ideals. )

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These dreams are both shattered when, flying above 30, 000 feet, he is shocked
by the shells of anti-aircraft guns to the opposite kind of freak, the nightmare of
attacking fighter planes. He awakens from idealistic dreams to discover that
reality is a nightmare, but his wakefulness lasts only a moment.

Ellen Kay
PATHEDY OF MANNERS
Though it wittily satirizes certain modes of social behavior, this poem does
not quite fit the literary category of “comedy of manners, ” for it has no happy
ending; nor does it fit the category of “tragedy, ” for it does not dramatize the
sudden “fall” from high to low estate of a protagonist of heroic stature. It is
accurately labeled a “Pathedy of Manners, ” for it concerns the pathetic waste
of life and talent by a woman whose false values made her prefer appearance o
substance and choose manners over merit. In a smuch as her false values are
also those of a class, the poem presents a form of social pathology.
Brilliant, beautiful, and wealthy, the woman of the poem wasted her gifts on
inauthentic goals. She might have made some great and useful contribution to
humanity; instead she chose to shine in fashionable society, and expended
herself in acquiring the superficial graces to make her successful there. She
learned to distinguish authentic pearls from paste (in necklaces or cufflinks)
and to tell real Wedgwood from a fraud, but she let fashionable opinion
(“cultured jargon”) govern her artistic tastes rather than a truly formed and
independent judgment. Back home from the obligatory trip abroad, she made
an “ideal” marriage (that is, she married a man with impeccable social
credentials) and had “ideal” (well-behaved, well-dressed, clean) but lonely
children, in an “ideal” (fashionably situated and well-appointed) house. (The
thrice-repeated adjective exemplifies verbal irony. )
Now at forty-three, her husband dead and her children grown, she is going
through a middle-age crisis, reevaluating her life and regretting that it has not
been more meaningful. She “toys” with the idea of taking a new direction, but
it is too late. The phrase “kill time” (19) has a double meaning. She would like

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to destroy the time lost since her college years, but she can only waste time by
dreaming of doing so. Her dreams of taking up that lost opportunity are only an
illusion; and she can only “re-wed” (another double meaning) these illusions.
Unable to pursue an independent course of action, she can only fend off
“doubts” (about the value of her present life) with “nimble talk. ” Though a
hundred socially elite acquaintances call her, she is without a single intimate
friend. The poem ends with a brilliant combination of pun and paradox. “Her
meanings lost in manners, she will walk / Alone in brilliant social circles to the
end. ” In terms of true intimacy she will be alone, although she will move in
brilliant social circles to the end of her life; in terms of meaningful living she
will walk in circles till the end of her life, not advance along a line of
significant purpose.
The speaker is probably a college classmate of the protagonist, who has seen
her the day before, roughly a quarter-century after their first acquaintance. This
meeting has caused the narrator to reflect on the protagonist‟s life.

John Keats
LA BELLE DAME SANS MERCI
Even with full explication, this literary ballad retains its air of melancholy
mystery, because the meaning of the encounter between the knight and the
fairy lady is never made explicit of many folk ballads, and it may be that Keats
was after no more in the poem than a narration of fairyland and dream omens.
When the knight concedes “this is why I sojourn here, ” the reader might very
well reiterate the narrator‟s opening question, for the events reported by the
knight don‟t seem to account for his despair, his physical debility and suffering,
which are what the narrator has asked about.
The three opening stanzas ask the question-“what can ail thee?” –and
describe the landscape and the knight. Both are incongruous, the speaker
reports: knights should be hearty purposeful, strong, not pale and feverish; they
should be in quest of adventure, not “loitering” beside the dried marsh grass at
a lakeside; it is early winter, and the natural creatures have withdrawn either to

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more congenial climates or to their stored-up winter hoards. This is no place for
a knight, nor despite his armor does this man seem heroic.
The tale of the knight‟s encounter with the fairy connects her with the
fullness of nature: like an animal, light-footed and wild-eyed, she is met in a
meadow, and the knight bedecks her with nature‟s flowers, and as if rescuing a
lost maiden sets her on his horse, rapt with her beauty and her song. But lines
19-20 ambiguously report her initial response to him: does “as” mean “while, ”
or does it mean “as if?” like a goddess of nature, the lady repays his adoration
with nature‟s plenty, and speaks to him an unknown language; surely, he
supposes, she is saying she loves him. Strangely, once she has taken him to her
cave, her “sweet moan” becomes weeping and sigh in, and he must tame her by
kissing her “wild, wild eyes”; again, as if in repayment, she lulls him to sleep,
but that sleep turns to nightmare with a dream that began in the cave and
continues to be repeated here on the “cold hill side” where he awakens and the
narrator finds him. The dream is apparently of his precursors, vigorous kings,
princes and knights, now in the paleness of death as he will be, waning him that
he has been enslaved by “La Belle Dame sans Merci. ”
Obviously, what a reader wants to know is “who is this beautiful woman
without pity, and why has she done this to the man?” Does what happened to
the knight have any relevance to our lives? Does the poem do more than warn
us against sexual indulgence? One plausible (but by on means the only or
inevitable) interpretation links the poem with the processes of nature and
human attitudes toward them. The first three stanza establish a sense of
appropriate behavior as the season change, and of appropriate actions for
people: in winter, squirrels, birds, even grasses retreat before the coldness and
dryness, and wandering knights with their manly strength should be leading
this man has fallen in love with the beauty and wildness of nature, and
supposes that she loves him, and that he can tame her and live with her. What
his horrid dream discloses is that this is illusion, and that by loving her he has
become her thrall. His fate is the fate of all men-death-but he must also

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languish in despair because he has set his hearth on what must always be
changing.

John Keats
ODE ON A GRECIAN URN (P. 859)
The primary theme of the ode is that “Beauty is truth, truth beauty” –that is,
the beauty of enduring works of art like the run constitutes truth. The lasting
beauty of the idealized human figures carved on the urn is contrasted with the
effects of ephemeral „human passion” (28). Addressing mankind in general, the
urn speaks the last two lines of the poem.
The theme of the poem is that “Beauty is truth, truth beauty” – that is, the
creative imagination is the best means for apprehending essential truth.
Although a concrete artifact is the overt subject of the ode, the abstract
imagination is the actual requisite for hearing the “unheard melodies, ” for
fulfilling the lover‟s attempt to kiss, for recreating the ceremony and the town,
and for appreciating the transcendent meaning that “dost tease us out of
[rational] though. ” After quoting the urn‟s message (49), the poet emphasized
the importance of the message to the reader (49-50).
The theme of the poem is that “Beauty is truth, truth beauty” is a limited
view of the nature of human existence. Throughout the ode “on” (not “to”) the
ancient work of art, there is an undercurrent of awareness that a great gulf
exists between
Such suspended animation and the moving realities of human life, full of
“woe” (47) though these realties may be. For this reason, the poem‟s speaker
finally rebukes the figures on the urn (49-50), after quoting their composite
message to “man” (48-49).
Like other poems by Keats (e. g., “Ode to a Nightingale”), this ode explores
the human desire to escape the inevitable effects of living in a temporal world,
expressing this desire in response to the permanence of an art object. The poem
is a meditation on the continuing beauty of a painted vase from classical

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Greece and what it seems to communicate to a man who knows his time on
earth is brief by comparison. The structure is a dramatic enactment of the stage
of the speaker‟s emotion and imaginative projection.
The poem opens with the speaker praising the urn‟s calm stillness and its
freedom from the ravages of time. Punning on the word “still, ” Keats
encapsulates his attitude: the urn is both silent and unmoving, and it still exists
in time. Like the maidens painted on its surface, it has retained its virginal
beauty as well as the freshness of a bride. In the paintings on the vase he sees a
similarly tantalizing double ness: they seem to have narrative meaning,
displaying figures (human or divine) in a state of motion, yet as paintings they
cannot move. He asks, in the last six lines of the first stanza, a sequence of
increasingly insistent questions: to what narrative events do the paintings refer?
In the second stanza, however, he changes his attitude, presumably in the
light of his not receiving answers to his questions. (In Keats‟s odes there is a
skillful manipulation of psychological transitions that occur between the stanza,
where changes of thought and feeling are only implied by what precedes and
follows the break. ) The speaker moves from the excited forcefulness of his
questions to a calm denial of the validity of answers. He now prefers not to
hear the narrative facts that the urn will not reveal, and relishes instead the
“unheard melodies” of feelings without explicit meanings. In lines 15-20, he
turns to one of the scenes on the urn: a pastoral scene in which one youth
makes music, a tune played on pipes, while another, a “bold lover, ” is about to
capture a maiden he pursues. The speaker celebrates the fact that this amorous
pursuit will never end –neither in “winning” the woman nor in losing her. Since
they are permanently in “winning” the woman nor in losing her. Since they are
permanently frozen in a painting, the youth will continue to exist in his state of
anticipation just as her beauty will never fade.
The third stanza extends the speaker‟s delight in the image of time stopped at
the height of anticipated bliss: the pictured trees will never be subject to
seasonal change, the piper will never tire of playing, and the unfulfilled lover
will be forever young and forever in the excitement of desire. This is contrasted

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with the state of “breathing human passion, ” which is subject not only to the
debility of time but also, more emphatically, to the certainty that continued
intensity of feeling would finally exhaust and sicken a mortal human being.
Human passion such as the speaker is capable of feeling would ultimately
become cloying or feverish, a fact previously implied in the excessiveness of
the line the speaker devised to describe the permanence of bills: “More happy
love! More happy, happy love!”
Perhaps because he has exhausted his own capacity to respond to the scene
of the piper and the lover, or perhaps because he recognized that his ecstatic
description has become “cloyed, ” or perhaps because his celebration of the
lover‟s happiness has led him to think of the reality of the human condition-that
is, for a number of psychological reasons implied between the stanzas-the
speaker in stanza four turns to a second scene, on the other side of the urn. A
priest (“mysterious, ” because he is an initiate in secret rituals, and because he
is himself a mystery to the speaker) is leading a heifer bedecked for ritual
sacrifice, and a crowd of worshippers follows. Like the end of the first stanza,
the beginning of the fourth presents the speaker asking for information: who
are the people? What or where is the altar? The priest‟s mystery extends
beyond his religious rites to envelop the whole scene. Imaginatively stepping
beyond the pictured scene, the speaker asks further: if these people are here,
what has happened to the place they have come from? Line 38 is a turning
point in the poem, for the speaker for the first time projects his imagination to a
place not actually portrayed on the urn-he tries to create an image to answer his
question, the image of an empty, abandoned town.
The psychological space between the fourth and fifth stanza is the most
striking the poem. In his desire to penetrate beyond the pictured events, the
speaker had created an image of desolation, an emotional contrast to the
permanent anticipation of the lover or of the priest and worshippers. He
discovers that such permanence as he has been praising implies other “still”
moments of opposite emotional meanings. While some people are frozen in

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their state of desire (both lover and worshipper), he can imagine other scenes of
permanent desolation.
In the fifth stanza the speaker recoils from what his imagination has
produced. The urn is no longer a “sylvan historian, ” a source of feeling and
meaning-it is now, as he willfully distances himself from his projected feelings,
a “shape” covered with “marble men and maidens, ” a “silent form. ” It has
tantalized him into expressing his own desires for permanence (ideas that
“thought” could not support, any more than thought can encompass “eternity”).
He has been tempted in the course of his meditation to celebrate a pastoral
world of idealized love and perfection, but he now recognized that it is not the
warm, sunny world he wanted, but a world gone cold with the realization that
the stoppage of time necessary for its perfection implies the permanence not
only of love‟s anticipation but also of loneliness and desolation.
The last five lines, with their famous simplifying tautology that “beauty is
truth, truth beauty, ” comment ironically on the value of the urn as a source of
wisdom or feeling. It will outlive the generations of man, and will retain its
beauty while human beauty fades. Though its beauty makes it seem friendly, its
philosophical advice can never satisfy someone in quest of the meaning of
change and transience.
The urn can only “is”, nit “will be, ” and thus though it will outlast the life of
a human being, it cannot give any information that will make his passage
through a lifetime any more meaningful. The urn beautiful exists beyond time
as the speaker has said in the first stanza and cannot teach the meaning of living
in time.

John Keats
ODE TO A NIGHTINGALE (P. 860)
The primary theme is the immortality of beauty created by the nightingale‟s
song. Hearing but not seeing the bird gives it a disembodied, spiritual quality,
and the variety of occasions when others have heard it (Stanza 7) emphasize its
agelessness. Although neither wine, poetry, nor death can join the mortal man
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to be “immortal Bird, ” the poem‟s speaker has still been in contact with eternal
beauty.
The theme is the fleeting and deceptive quality of the aesthetic experience.
The poet‟s response to the nightingale‟s song involves successive consideration
of “drowsy numbness” (Stanza 1), intoxication (Stanza 2), olfactory
stimulation (Stanza 5), the death-wish (Stanza 6), and fantasy (Stanza 7). As a
member of the real world, “Where Beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes, ” the
poet ends by berating his “fancy” as a “deceiving elf” and doubting the
transitory “vision” of the nightingale as merely a “waking dream. ”
The theme is the unity of opposing forces and feelings in the experience of
beauty. The poet‟s response involves such dual reactions as feeling both
heartache and happiness, appealing to both real wine, and the “viewless wings
of poesy, ” and finding the song both ecstatic and “plaintive. ” Although the
poem sets the bird transcendently above man in trees, in the bright night above
the darkness, and in immortality-the imagery throughout actually emphasizes
humanity in all its sensuousness and mortality.
The thematic elements of this great poem are at the heart of Keats‟s work:
poetry, human misery, time and change, and the power of sensations. The
speaker, moved by the beauty of a nightingale singing, wishes he could join
with the bird and escape “the weariness, the fever, and the fret” of human
existence. At first he supposes that wine might be the vehicle, but then decides
that the poetic imagination will serve him better; and no sooner has he said so
than he feels himself transported on “viewless wings of Poesy” to be with the
bird. Unable to see in the darkness, he can only guess by scent at the richness of
nature, all of it partaking of the “fast fading” intensity of growth and decay.
Still listening in the dark, he recalls his repeated wish to escape the world
through death, and that desire seems even more intense as he is ravished by the
beauty of the bird‟s song.
But the nightingale is a bird of life, not of death-it is immortal in the sense
that nightingales have flourished in ancient days, in biblical days, and even in
legends and fairy tales. Yet through all the past and in fiction, the word
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“forlorn” has existed, as the speaker discovers to his charring when his
imagination leads him to re-create an image out of fairy land. He discovers as
well that though the imagination can cheat us out of our grasp of reality for a
time, the power to think and understand will once again intrude. To use the
word “forlorn” in imagining a fairy world is to invite the analytic mind to see
that one is not in fact “with” the bird, but alone, a “sole self. ” Returning to
one‟s own reality also leads to the recognition that the song of a nightingale is
the creation of a living thing, and it too will fade, move away, and finally die
away, “buried deep” in another valley.
The poem ends in a state of puzzlement: was the experience a “vision”
(revealing a supernatural reality) or a “waking dream” of what can never be?
Without the actual stimulus of the singing bird, without its music, the speaker is
left to ask which is the true state of awareness –this present, grasping the literal
reality of existence, or that moment of poetic transport.
No one knows for certain the order in which Keats composed his odes in the
spring of 1918. One conjecture, however, is that he wrote the "Ode to a
Nightingale" right after the "Ode to Psyche" and before any of the others. The
poet's friend Charles Brown has left this account of the writing of the poem:
"In the spring of 1819 a nightingale had built her nest near my house. Keats
felt a tranquil and continual joy in her song; and one morning he took his chair
from the breakfast table to the grass plot under a plum tree, where he sat for
two or three hours. When he came into the house, I perceived he had some
scraps of paper in his hand, and these he was quietly thrusting behind the
books. On inquiry, I found those scraps, four or five in number, contained his
poetic feeling on the song of our nightingale. "
Without getting too deeply involved in the grammatical controversy or in the
many subtle explications of the lines which depend on one or the other reading,
we can at least make one or two points about the final phrase of the ode that
should seem reasonable to nearly everyone. For though the words "beauty" and
"truth" are indeed terms so broad as to be almost meaningless, as some critics

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here contended, within the context of the poem they seem to have at least one
fairly clear meaning.
If we review the ode in our minds with the aim of discovering in it a
dichotomy, a contrast, the tow parts of which my be represented by the words
"beauty" and "truth, " one such contrast immediately suggests itself between
perfect, changeless art (for which "beauty" is an appropriate term), and
changing, time-bound life (adequately conveyed by the word "truth").
The expression "Beauty is truth, truth beauty" summarizes, then, the whole
intellectual content of the poem, states briefly, in an aphorism, the reciprocal
nature of life and art, and more particularly their identity. "Beauty is truth. " Art
very simply has no existence apart from life; life, in turn, has no meaning – and
therefore no reality-without art, the preserver. And therefore, in a very literal
sense, this statement of the reciprocal nature of life and art is all men know on
earth and all they need to know (we are assuming here that it is the urn that
speaks the last line and a half). In spite of Quilter-Couch's criticism, Keats is
facing facts, for what other facts are there in the world besides experience and
the attempt to preserve it?

John Keats
ODE TO PSYCHS
This great secular hymn, with its long irregular stanzas-developed at least in
part out of the sonnet form-was the first of Keats' famous odes to be written in
the spring of 1819. The poet labored long and hard over it, or so he declared in
a letter to his brother and sister-in-law, George and Georgina, with which he
enclosed a draft of the poem, "The following poem, " he wrote, "the last I have
written is the first and the only one with which I have taken even moderate
pains – I have for the most part dash'd of[f] my lines in a hurry-This I have
done leisurely-I think it reads the more richly for it and will I hope encourage
me to write other thing[s] in even a more peaceable and healthy spirit. " And
as W. J. Bate has pointed out, the poet's efforts were not in vain, for within a
month he had rapidly (far more easily and spontaneously) produced all the

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remaining odes, except the ode "To Autumn. " As so often with Keats … the
deliberate care bestowed on one poem laid a foundation and permitted the rapid
writing of another. "
ANALYSIS: The "Ode to Psyche" begins with an invocation and a
description which return us to the classical sylvan landscape of "Endymion"
and the "Hyperion" fragment. Before copying out the new ode in his letter to
George, Keats had reminded his brother: "You must recollect that Psyche was
not embodied as a goddess before the time of Apuleius the Platonist who lived
after the Augustan age, and consequently the Goddess was never worshipped
or sacrificed to with any of the ancient fervor-and perhaps never thought of in
the old religion –I am more orthodox than to let a heathen Goddess be so
neglected. " This, then, was to be the neglected goddess Psyche's celebration, a
celebration in which both her nature (symbolic of man's mind or soul) and her
story (her relationship with Cupid, or Love) take on central philosophical
importance to the poet.
The legend of Cupid and Psyche (which Keats read in William Adlington's
translation [1566] of Apuleius-chapter 22) is a dramatic one, a kind of classical
version of the old story of Beauty and the Beast. A certain king and queen have
three daughters, the youngest of whom is so extraordinarily beautiful that the
goddess Venus becomes jealous of the homage that is paid to her by people,
even strangers, from far and wide. Resolving to punish her, she orders her son
Cupid to visit the girl and make her fall in love with a foul and loathsome
creature. But through a mix up the young love-god himself is wounded by his
own arrow and falls in love with the beautiful princess. When she in turn
begins to pine away from unknown reasons, her parents consult the oracle of
Apollo, which advises that she be left alone on a mountaintop, where her
husband – not – a man or a god, but a monster, a terrible serpent – will claim
her. Yet when this advice is followed, it is Cupid who comes to the
mountaintop to claim his bride, though Psyche, of course, does not know his
true identity. For a while the pair are blissfully happy, meeting only by night, in
the dark. But soon Psyche's older sisters, always jealous of her beauty and

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popularity, begin to plague her with malicious hints and doubts. How does she
know, they ask, that her hitherto unseen husband is not after all the terribe
serpent Apollo's oracle had predicted? At last, distraught, Psyche yields to
temptation, and though her husband has warned her that she must never under
any circum-stances look upon him, she lights a torch and sees to her astonished
relief that she is wed, not to a serpent, but to Love himself. The allegorical
implications of her discovery are, of course, obvious. In the end, though the
pair are temporarily separated by Psyche's rashness, after many sufferings and
trials they are reunited in heaven, symbolizing, finally, the perfect union in man
at his most blessed of mind and heart, soul and body, thought and love.
All this, of course, all the intricate paraphernalia of this legend, is simply part
of the background of Keats' poem, which, as we have seen, is not a narrative
but a hymn, a kind of elaborate descriptive invocation of the goddess, a song in
praise of her spirit, the spirit in whose honor (and in whose manner) Keats, a
latter –day disciple, plans to make his own soul.
Lines 1-4, as we already noted, invoke the goddess. Then in lines 5-23, the
poet describes a vision of her which he has just had. Professor Bate notes that
some aspects of this description's style seem to revert to the slightly banal,
sugary manner of Keats' earliest poems: "fainting with surprise, " for instance,
or, worse, "O happy, happy dove …
His Psyche true!" (where "dove" obviously has no function except to rhyme
with "love"). This occasional sentimentality is all the more surprising because
Keats claimed to have worked so hard on the poem. But perhaps, as Bate
suggests, the poet was so occupied with his metrical experiments – his
development of a new stanza form for the ode-and with his intellectually
charged subject matter, that he barely noticed these now unusual flaws in his
work. At any rate, much of the description in stanza one has the sureness and
concreteness, the rich and vivid detail, with which every "rift" of "The Eve of
St. Agnes, " his last major poem, was certainly "laden. " The "hush‟s, cool-
rooted flowers, " for instance, are carefully and sensually depicted, while the
"bedded grass" in which the lovers lie reminds us of the "pleasant lair" of grass

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in which Keats himself so often dreamed out his poems (cf. "Sleep and Poetry,
" "Endymion, " "I Stood Tiptoe, " etc. ) though the phrase may also have been
suggested by Adlington's "bed of sweet and fragrant flowers. "
At any rate, here the old "lair" is described with a realistic vividness that may
have been lacking in some of its earlier appearances.
In stanza two Keats turns from the concrete immediacy of his vision of the
goddess and her lover in the grass to a more abstract discussion of her beauty
and of the state of her religion. Since, as he reminded George, she is the "latest
born" of all the Olympian hierarchy of gods, she has no established church:
"No shrine, no grove, no oracle, no heat/ of pale-mouth prophet dreaming!"
Yet, though never worshiped, psyche-symbolic of man's soul, with all its divine
potential-is far "fairer" then any of that now "faded" and obsolete canon of
immortals.
In stanza three Keats begins to outline what be his own relationship to
Psyche. Though he lives "too late" for the "antique vows" of old religions,
indeed, by his own admission, of all established churches, Keats is yet able to
"see, and sing by my own eyes inspired. " He can, in other words, create
himself as a poet; make his own soul, for there is no religion to make it for him,
no "fond believing lyre" to accompany his song. The days of holiness are past,
the days "when holy were the haunted forest boughs, / Holy the air, the water,
and the fire. " Yet even so, self-inspired, Keats will, all by himself, constitute a
religion of the goddess Psyche, a secular religion, really, a religion of man's
mind.
In stanza four Keats elaborates this idea, which is, indeed, the central idea of
the poem. Note that he will "build a fane [shrine]/ in some untrodden region of
[his] mind" – the mind of which the goddess Psyche, to whom the shrine is
dedicated, is, paradoxically enough, a symbol. Here "branched thoughts, new
grown with pleasant pain" (thus oxymoronically including the whole range of
experience that supplies the materials of both art and religion) "instead of pines
shall murmur in the wind, " while dark tress will climb high along the wild
ridges of steep mountains (recalling the mountaintop of the original legend,
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perhaps). And "in the midst of this wide quietness" – all, we must remember,
within his mind-the poet will "dress" a "rosy sanctuary …/ With the wreath'd
trellis of a working brain, / … With all the gardener Fancy e'er could feign, /
Who breeding flowers, will never breed the same. " These lines, probably the
most important in the poem, get at the essential relationship between art,
religion, and man's mind which is, after all, Keats' main reason for addressing
such an extravagant Ode to Psyche in the first place. The poet has built a
structure, like nested Chinese boxes, of mind within mind (the "working brain"
producing flowers of Fancy within the "wide quietness" of the mind, all in
honor of the goddess of the mind), and in this framework he is able to express
what he believes true holiness to be "in these days so far retir'd/ From happy
pieties. " No longer the spontaneous, ignorant ("fond" in line 36 connotes
foolish as well as loving) worshipers of the past, modern poets must "sing by
[their] own eyes inspir'd, " and they must worship not the "faded hierarchy" of
traditional religion but the very soul of man that inspires and makes possible
their song.
The use of internal landscape here-of the whole elaborate scene within the
mind which the poet constructs in praise of the mind, as if to demonstrate his
own mind's powers-is, of course, quite modern, almost symbolist in quality.
Yet the allegorical "gardener Fancy" reminds us, too, that there is a long
tradition behind this seemingly modern technique, a tradition which dates back,
for instance, at least to Guillaume de Lorris' medieval Roman de la Rose, in
which just such a garden represented the soul of man.
The last four lines of the poem bring stanza four, which has already reached
an intellectual climax in lines 59-63, to its emotional climax, with their newly
significant return to the Cupid and psyche relationship described in stanza one.
And there shall be for thee all soft delight
That shadowy thought can a win,
A bright torch, and a casement open at night,
To let the warm Love in !

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 Thought, with all its powers, is still "shadowy" compared to "warm Love, "
Keats reminds us, and the mind and heart shadowy soul and warm body must
be mutually interdependent. In Keats' idealized "sanctuary, " in his shrine for
the goddess, the will help-rather than hinder-her marriage to Cupid.
"A bright torch" will let her see her bridegroom; an open window will admit
him to her chamber; and the soft, the ultimate delight of the insubstantial mind
will be ever-present the warm, substantial, all-enlivening delight of Love.

John Keats
ODE ON MELANCHOLY
The "Ode on Melancholy" was originally to have begun with the following
stanza, later canceled by the poet:
Though you should build a bark of dead men's bones,
And rear a phantom gibbet for a mast,
Stitch creeds together for a sail, with groans
To fill it out, blood-stained and aghast;
Although your rudder be a dragon's tail
Long sever'd, yet still hard with agony,
Your cordage large uprootings from the skull
Of bald Medusa, certes you would fail
To find the Melancholy-whether she
Dreameth in any isle of Lethe dull.
There are several explanations for Keats' decision to abandon the stanza.
First, his poem was to be a consideration to abandon the true nature of
melancholy, and to devote the first two of the ode's four stanzas to what
melancholy was not must have struck him as excessive. Then, the gruesome
humor of the more serious later stanzas.
Whatever the reasons for the revision, the poem now begins with a
peremptory warning, its imagery familiar from the Nightingale Ode:
No, no, go not to Lethe, neither twist
Wolf's-bane, tight-rooted, for its poisonous wine …
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 And the rest of the stanza continues in this vein, warning of how not to come
to an understanding of melancholy, heaping up conventional images of gloomy
despair for the sole purpose of dismissing them. (Keats had been reading
Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy at this time. ) What the poet has against such
a conventional approach to the subject, he makes clear at the end of the first
stanza, when he writes.
For shade to shade will come too drowsily,
And drown the wakeful anguish of the soul;
That is, the traditional images of melancholy are all associated with darkness
and the desire for forgetfulness, while-says Keats-melancholy, being one of the
most important realities of life, should be confronted with full awareness, with
full consciousness of the experience.
Besides, owls, poisons, dark trees have nothing really to do with the
innermost nature of melancholy; they are merely the theatrical trappings of
unhappiness. The profoundest source of melancholy, as Keats saw it, is man's
knowledge of the transience of life and beauty; consequently, at moments of
deepest melancholy, the sufferer should make it his business to confront the
most fragile symbols of beauty he can find.
But when the melancholy fit shall fall
Sudden from heaven …
Then glut thy sorrow on a morning rose,
Or on the rainbow of the salt sand-wave,
Or on the wealth of globed peonies ….
This device of responding to melancholy by feeding it raises a question. Is
the poet being perverse or even masochistic in his recommendation of this
technique? The answer, of course, is no.
He has simply come to realize, as he states very clearly in the "Ode on a
Grecian Urn, " that joy is a function of sorrow that beauty moves up precisely
because it is transient, and that therefore the fullest appreciation of joy and
beauty demands an equally profound acceptance of sorrow and death. No one
who hides from the latter can experience the former.

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 The third stanza of the ode begins by invoking this "beauty that must die"
with the poignant images of "Joy, whose hand is ever at his lips/ Bidding
adieu" (who has ever experienced real joy or beauty without recognizing,
sorrowfully, at the very moment of greatest pleasure, that the perfect moment
must pass?) and "aching pleasure nigh, turning to poison while the bee-mouth
sips"; that is, painful pleasure (note the oxymoron), beginning to cloy even at
the instant it most pleases.
It is not surprising, then, that "Veil'd Melancholy" should have her shrine "in
the very Temple of Delight, " or that she can be seen there by.
none save him whose strenuous tongue
Can burst Joy's grape against his palate fine.
The image is a particularly sensual one, even for Keats, and expresses, better
than anything else in the poem, the paradoxical nature of melancholy. For the
man who would experience joy to the full must have the heroic temperament to
accept an equally intense sorrow. This is the central theme of the "Ode on
Melancholy, " and explains why the predominating tone of the piece is
triumphant rather than gloomy.

John Keats
ODE ON INDOLENCE
The "Ode on Indolence" doses not achieve the stature of the other odes,
perhaps because in it Keats prefers to strike an unconvincing pose rather than to
take a position which he cares deeply about defending. The poem is in the first
person and harks back to a letter the poet had write ten to his brother George on
March 19, describing his indolent state as one in which he was relaxed "to such
a happy degree that pleasure has no show of enticement and pain no unbearable
frown. Neither poetry, nor Ambition, nor Love have any alertness of
countenance as they pass by me: they seem rather like three figures on a Greek
vase-A Man and two women-whom no one but myself could distinguish in
their disbursement. "

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 The poem develops this same imagery of the urn and the three allegorical
figures of Love, Ambition, and Poesy, figures who pass by the poet three times,
the third time raising their faces to him so that he can recognize them. But he is
feeling so content in his indolence that he dismisses all three, Love quite easily,
Ambition with not much more difficulty, and Poesy with a simple "no. " The
whole performance, however, is without conviction.
Perhaps most striking about the "Ode on Indolence" is the way in which it
echoes the other odes: phrases from the Nightingale Ode, the open casement
from the odes "To a Nightingale" and "to Psyche, " the Greek vase-all put in an
appearance. Poets are obsessive people who deal over and over again with the
same few images, arranging them constantly into different patterns until they
find a pattern that works. The "Ode on Indolence" is not such a pattern.

Galway Kinnell
BLACKBERRY EATING
In this brief poem Galway Kinnell uses gustatory imagery with gusto. The
taste of those “fat, overripe, icy, black blackberries” is conveyed from the
speaker‟s tongue to the reader‟s imagination so vividly as almost to make the
reader‟s mouth water. The vivid gustatory image is compounded with visual
imagery (“fat, ” “black”) and tactile imagery (“icy”). There is tactile imagery
also in “the stalks very prickly” where the repeated k-sound (which also picks
the k‟s in “black” and “breakfast” of the preceding line) reinforces the
prickliness. Then, since the speaker is a poet as well as a blackberry-eater, he
notes that the “ripest” berries “fall almost unbidden to [his] tongue, / as words
sometimes do. ” The poet slyly uses the word “tongue” in two senses here, first
as an organ of taste and then as an articulator of speech. Notice that
blackberries (like raspberries, dewberries, and loganberries; unlike
blueberries, cherries, and grapes) are composed of many smaller parts (called
drupelets). The words that he especially loves. Like the blackberries, come in
“fat” little lumps: they are “one-syllable” but “many-lettered. ” The words
“strengths” and “squinched, ” both containing nine letters, are according to

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authorities the longest monosyllabic words in the language (squinch, to be
found only in an unabridged dictionary, is a dialect word meaning to twist).
But notice that the speaker demonstrates his love for such words not only by
his two examples but by choosing three seven-lettered monosyllabic words
(“squeeze, ” “squinch, ” and “splurge”) for his verbs in the final clause of the
poem.
The speaker‟s favorite word in this poem, however, is “black. ” It occurs
three times by itself and four more times as part of “blackberries. ” We may
profitably examine its three solo appearances. In its initial use, “black
blackberries” (2), it may at first seem a redundant, but it is not, for unripe
blackberries are green, and the speaker is emphasizing that these berries are
ripe or overripe. The poet must have chuckled to himself when the next phrase
fell “almost unbidden” to his tongue. He was so charmed that he invented a
whimsical myth to go with it. The blackberry stalks were given their prickles as
a penalty for knowing “the black art” (5) of blackberry-making! This myth
obviously lacks the magnitude of the myth of Adam and Eve in the garden,
which inspired Milton to write Paradise Lost (the prickles are a “penalty, ” not
a punishment), but it is perfectly sized for the brief poem Kinnell puts it in, and
is a delightful spin-off from the phrase “the black art. ” The black arts are
ordinarily the arts practiced by witches and conjurors for unauthorized and
wicked purposes, but in Kinnell‟s poem the phrase is stripped of all of its
negative implications. The art of making blackberries is a black art only in that
it produces black berries; the word is placed in a context where it means only
good, not bad. Finally, in its last two lines, the poem gives us a “black
language” of “blackberry-eating, ” thus completing the metaphorical
comparison between blackberries and words-both of them good. The image of
“black language” may summon up for the reader the image of black words
printed on white paper; but in any form it calls up an experience of pleasure
and delight.

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Etheridge Knight
THE WARDEN SAID TO ME
As an example of verbal irony, this poem requires the reader to recognize
the distance between the speaker‟s expressed attitude and his real intention.
The repeated parenthetical phrase “(innocently, I think)” has two distinct
meanings. In line 2, it pretends to allow the possibility that the warden‟s
bigotry is merely ignorant and therefore excusable; in line 6, it indicates that
the speaker intends to seem obsequious and ignorant, to please the warden.
These phrases are verbally ironic, since the speaker does not accept the
warden‟s mock ignorance as a sufficient excuse for his bigotry, nor is the
speaker sincerely innocent in his rejoinder.
The warden‟s purpose in asking the question is also verbal irony used in the
service of sarcasm: he does not want to know why his black prisoners don‟t
attempt to escape, but rather is taunting the black prisoners with the fact that
they are more stupid, obedient, passive. It is that taunt which the speaker
answers with stereotyped gesture and statement: “yes, sir, we cast our eyes
down and scratch our heads when we have to answer hard questions, and we
finally come up with the simple fact that you already know-there‟s no place for
a black man in this world. What the speaker means, of course, is that a society
constructed on the lines approved by the warden, in which color defines
attitude and ability, excludes all thoughtful and sensitive people.

George Mac Beth

BEDTIME STORY
“Bedtime Story” is science fiction in poetic form. The speaker is a parent
(mother or father) telling a “bedtime story” to a child of its species; but this
story is supposed to be true-a chapter from history (19), not a “fairy tale. ” It
concerns the accidental killing of the last man, “the penultimate primate” (the
ultimate primate being the monkey or ape that the man was stalking), the
extinction of the human race as a species. The time of the telling of this story is,
from our point of view, in a far distant future; and the time of the incident
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which it concerns is, from our point of view, still a distant future; but from the
teller‟s point of view it is in a remote past-not “Once upon a time, ” but “Long
ago when the world was a wild place …”
The speaker is a huge ant, evolved in size and intelligence from presently
existing species. Because of the Queen and the sting, readers may suggest a
bee. But ants too have queens and stings, and these insects “march” rather than
fly through the forest; they are organized in a military fashion (in “brigades”);
they forage for greenfly (a kind of aphid that some ants keep like cows and
“milk”); and their jaws cut through bark. Ants, moreover, have developed a
high degree of social organization and cooperation and are thought by many to
be the nearest competitors to man in the struggle for existence. In the poem
they have become the dominant species, are larger than men, have developed a
language and a recorded history, and have an ethical sense superior and a
recorded history, and have an ethical sense superior to man‟s.
Although this “bedtime story” tells how the last man was inadvertently killed
by a soldier ant, the point of the poem is that man has destroyed himself-or,
since the poem is set in the future, may destroy himself. Two facts are stated
about man: that he exterminates other species of animals “for pleasure, ” and
that he kills his own kind in wars that “extinguished the cities. ” The poem is
thus an indictment of man‟s passion for killing and a prediction that unless he
acquires the power to govern himself by peaceable methods and becomes as
“humane” to other species as the ants in the poem, he will be replaced by
another form of life.
The conclusion of the poem links the fate of man with that of the dodo.
Dodos are a presently extinct species with a reputation for foolishness. “Dumb
as a dodo” is a familiar expression.
The poem is written in dactylic lines of four feet in the first three lines of
each stanza and two feet in the last. The phrasing and run-on lines make it
difficult to read trippingly, however, and it should not be read so.

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Naomil Long
MADGETT MIDWAY
Line 5 establishes the speaker of the poem as black, and the context,
especially the second stanza, shows that she is speaking not as an individual but
as a representative or embodiment of her race. The “you” of the poem is
obviously the white race, and the journey imagery throughout the poem
(“Midway, ” “I‟ve come this far, ” “turn back, ” “destination”) is a metaphor
for the struggle of American black people to overcome their cruel subjugation
by the white race and to achieve freedom and equality. The mountains looming
ahead represent the obstacles to be surmounted before the destination is
reached.
This song of determination is remarkable for its aggressive use of musical
devices (alliteration in “Mighty mountains, ” assonance in “prayed and slaved
and waited, ” alliteration plus consonance in “sung my song, ” and especially
the patterned feminine end rime in line 3-4 of each stanza, which surprisingly
turns up again as internal rime in the fifth lines).
But this song of purposefulness gains its greatest force from the skillful and
varied use of its swinging dipodic meter, with regular alternation of heavier and
lighter stress given to the stressed syllables, from the syncopation provided by
the spondees ending lines 1, 2, and 5 of each stanza, and from the effect of run
over feet at the ends of lines 3 and 4. The metrical pattern is repeated
identically, so the scansion of the first stanza will illustrate:
i‟ve COME / this FAR to FREE - / dom AND I WON‟T / TRUN
BACK. /
I‟m CLIMB- / -ing TO the HIGH- / way FROM my OLD / DIRT
TRACK. /
I‟m COM- / ing AND I‟m GO- / ing
AND I‟m STRETCH - / ing AND I‟m GROW - / ing
AND I‟ll REAP / what I‟VE been SOW - / ing OR my SKIN‟S / NOT
BLACK.

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 The sound of run over feet is the result of the line breaks coming in
mid-foot at the ends of lines 3 and 4, which would be perfectly regular (and of
course lose their emphatic rimes with lines 5) if printed thus:
I‟m COM - / ing AND I‟m GO - / ing AND
I‟m STRETCH - / ing AND I‟m GROW - / ing AND
I‟ll REAP / what I‟VE been SOW - / ing OR my SKIN‟S / NOT
BLACK. /
These syncopated rhythms are suited to the purpose of the poem-to express
an unsophisticated confidence and optimism, despite the hardships and
injustices of both the past and the present. This simple, singing determination is
particularly fitted to the spondaic ends of the long lines, so emphatic in their
insistence on the key ideas: “I won‟t turn back, ” “I‟ve still grown strong, ” “it
won‟t be long, ” and so forth.

Andrew Marvell
A DIALOGUE BETWEEN THE SOUL AND BODY
One of the oldest and deepest philosophical problems is that sometimes
referred to as the body/soul or the mind/matter problem. Are the body and soul
two separate entities, like a paper bag and its contents? Or are they simply two
aspects of a single entity, like the two sides of the sheet of paper, and thus
inseparable? From this problem hang various contingent problems. How are
body and soul related in life (the problem of determinism and free will)? What
happens to them at death (the problem of immortality)? These problems are as
legitimate a subject for poetry as for religion, science, and philosophy. In
literature they especially invite allegorical treatment.
In an earlier poem, “A Dialogue between the Resolved Soul and Created
Pleasure, ” Marvell, a puritan poet, pictures the resolved Soul, armed with the
shield of faith, the helmet of salvation, and the sword of spirit, as a soldier
singly facing a whole army under the command of Pleasure. Pleasure, however,
instead of challenging the Soul to combat, invites him to share “Nature‟s
banquet” and there with offers him a series of earthly temptations (the

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pleasures of the five senses: taste, touch, smell, sight, and hearing; plus the
pleasures of love, wealth, and glory). The Resolved Soul easily rejects each of
these in a victory so effortless that the reader gets no sense of conflict.
How much more interesting and complex is the allegory in “A Dialogue
between the Soul and Body”! Here, though there is no combat, the conflict is
real, and the poet does not betray his sympathy for either side. He even allows
Body the last word, though in the earlier poem he was clearly on the side of
Soul. Here each participant complains of his bondage to the other. They are not
two completely separate forces armed against each other, as in the simplistic
concept of the earlier poem. But neither van get loose from the other. Their
“Dialogue” is a debate, and the object is to see which can make his plight seem
more burden some and him more oppressed by the other. Which wins? Does
anyone have the audacity to judge?
But how wittily the debate is conducted! What a succession of brilliant
paradoxes, stunning metaphors and multi-dimensional words! The Soul
complains of being “fettered” with “bolts of bones” (how does sound here echo
sense?), “blinded with an eye” (paradox), and “deaf with the drumming of an
ear” (the paradox enriched with a pun on “drumming”), “hung up in chains …
Of nerves, and arteries, and veins” (metaphor), and being tortured in a “vain”
head (useless, hollow, egotistical) and a “double heart” (two-chambered,
duplicitous, an organ of the body).
The body, in turn, laments that his soul so “impales” him that he is “his own
precipice” (in danger of falling off the edge of his own upright self). He
concedes that his soul warms and moves him, but declares that a mere fever
could do as much, and complains that his feverish soul has never let him rest.
In the third stanza the soul replies, in a series of dazzling paradoxes, that it
suffers the pains of the body as well as its own. Being the more compassionate
and “sensitive” partner (though without senses), it shares whatever suffering
the body undergoes: “I feel, that cannot feel, the pain. ” Thus the soul is
“Constrained not only to endure / Diseases, but, what‟s worse, the cure; / And

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ready oft the port to gain, / [Is] shipwrecked into health again. ” The “port”
(29) in this metaphor is heaven; the “cure” (28) is entry into heaven.
But, replies the body, in the final stanza, the ills visited by the soul on the
body cannot be cured by any medicine. The “cramp of hope, ” the “palsy
shakes of fear, ” “the pestilence of love, ” “hate‟s hidden ulcer” all are maladies
of soul that are imposed, upon the body, just as those in stanza three were
maladies of the body imposed on the soul.
It is evident, in this poem, that the poet believed body and soul to be two
entities, not one, for both disputants are confident that they will eventually be
separated and relieved of their mutual bondage. The body declares (18) that the
spirit “Has made me live to let me die. ” And the soul complains (29-30), when
the body is saved from death, that he (the soul) has been “shipwrecked into
health again. ” But this minor theme in the poem; the major theme is the
intricate entanglement of the soul and body during life.

Cleopatra Mathis
GETTING OUT
The most striking detail of this failed marriage is “our matching eyes and
hair, ” for it established the identical nature of the two people, as well as the
sort of immaturity that would lead a wife and husband to share a matching hair
style. But if they are such a “match, ” what caused their marriage to fail? The
poem seems to suggest that it was their very closeness, the resemblance they
had to one another. With one exception, the statements in the first two stanzas
are first-person plural, relating that the stages in the break-up were mutually
achieved: “we hardly slept, ” “we gave up … escaped, ” “we paced, ” “we
cried, ” and then the final sentence, “We held on tight, and let go. ” The
exception is in lines 12-14, when the husband “tried to pack up and go” –but
failed.
The extended metaphor in the poem, begun in the title, reinforces the idea of
mutuality, for they together were “like inmates” wanting to escape, “finally
locked into” blaming each other as the last mutual act before the divorce. Their
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marriage was a prison, increasingly more restricted and confining to them both,
until, finally, they began to find things to accuse each other of. This looks
ironic, that they shared the increasing sense of imprisonment as if they together
had been locked up by someone else, until they finished with what we would
expect at the beginning of the process, turning against each other.
The poem embodies in the person of the lawyer the reader‟s proper response:
bewilderment. Clearly from her tone, the speaker still loves her former husband
and his reassuring annual message implies that he cares for her. How can so
much love cause a divorce? Yet it can. The concluding image expresses best
the tone: love and regret.

Marianne Moore
NEVERTHELESS
As the title implies, the object of the poem is persistence and pertinacity,
both physical and moral. The various examples plant life “overcome” apparent
obstacles, from which the poet derives the moral lesson for human beings:
“Victory won‟t come to me unless I go to it. The weak overcomes its menace,
the strong overcomes it. What is there like fortitude?”
What looks like random diversity, mingling bizarre examples has its order,
from seed to root to tendril to fruit, an upward growth representing the cycle of
a crushed strawberry (trans formed, by its “struggle” to maintain its integrity,
into the semblance of animal forms); it proceeds to the protected to the
protected internal seeds of an apple, doubly enclosed in the core. Whether
vulnerably superficial or protectively enclosed, these seeds are designed to
reach fertile soil and give birth to new growth.
Parallels exist in the root references: there is growth both in the rigid
enclosure of frozen soil and in exposed air and some plant‟s roots undergo such
twisting that they seem to transform themselves into the shapes of animal
forms. Even the fragility of grape tendrils and the stems of cherries possess
transforming potency, the frail tendril capable of binding what has supported it,
the “thread” transmitting the ripening coloration of the cherry. And the poem
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ends its plant references where it began, with sweet fruits that carry the source
of new growth.
Thus what may seem a random collection of “oddities” in nature has a
direction, drawing comparisons between the seemingly disconnected
examples? The whole plant world illustrates the power of life to maintain and
propagate itself and so the human world should learn to persist, employing its
inner moral virtues as well as its outward physical powers. To paraphrase the
moral statements: “Real bravery, and true victory, is seen only in overcoming
external dangers but also in self-control. ”
The poem is written in syllabic verse (only the number of syllables in a line
is counted, not accents) rimed xaa. The form, which appears like free verse,
thus echoes the meaning, since random rhythms (like bizarre subjects) are
“locked in” by syllables count and rime.

Howard Nemerov
GRACE TO BE SAID AT THE SUPERMARKET
Superficially the butt of Nemerov‟s satire seems to be the application of
technology to the presentation of food, the complaint of a man who is disturbed
by standardized, hygienic market methods. But this commonplace of modern
social critics is given a sharper edge when the speaker pretends to be praying
not to technology, but to geometry. His target is more ancient and more
universal, the very source of these modern effects: our intellectualizing
tendencies that we express not merely in the uniform packaging of meats but in
the packaging of ideas in language.
The diction of this seriously witty, ironic poem is highly varied, ranging
from plain colloquialism to scientific and mathematical terms, from the
language of religion to that of literary criticism. Such wide linguistic reference
punctures the pretensions of all these mis-users of language: advertisers
(“streamlined … for greater speed, ” “like a philosopher should”), casual
conversationalists (“if you want to put it that way, ” “maybe”), literary critics
(“aesthetic distance, ” “significant form”), philosophers (“the greatest good”),
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preachers and theologians (“our birthright, ” “the mystical body”). And –the
metaphorical center of the poem mathematicians (“cubes, ” “cylinder, ”
“ellipsoid, ” and the rest).
All of these display what Nemerov regards as a linguistic replacement of the
honest, natural expression of human nature with inflated –or deflated –
terminology. The subject of the poem is the human being as a carnivore, and
the variety of dodges we employ to avoid acknowledging the fact. Line 15
represents the only honest expression of it: both we and the “brutes” we
consume lead “bulging and blood swollen lives, ” though we would prefer to
think and speak otherwise.

Naomi Shihab Nye

FAMOUS
The word famous generally means someone (or some act or thing) widely
known or celebrated. Alexander the Great is a famous person. Sir Walter
Raleigh‟s throwing down his expensive cloak so that Queen Elizabeth would
not soil her shoes at a muddy crossing is a famous act. The Taj Mahal in India
is a famous thing. Fame is relative of course. Adolph Hitler is more famous
than Genera Franco. Nevertheless, the scale of fame in Nye‟s poem takes us by
surprise. She works at the opposite end of the scale. Every one and every thing
is famous (important, much though about, well known) to someone or
something. Nye‟s poem is about the humbly famous, about things that are
“famous” to limited audiences. In the first eight divisions of her poem she gives
examples of this kind of fame. In the last two she tells us the kind of fame she
desires for herself. She wants to be famous to the shuffling old and to the sticky
young. She wants to be:
famous in the way a pulley is famous,
Or a buttonhole, not because it did anything
Spectacular,
But because it never forget what it could do.

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 The pulley and the buttonhole, both small things, the buttonhole almost
nothing at all; but each one always ready to perform its function, always useful,
never doing anything spectacular, but each always there, never forgetting or
failing to perform what it can do.

Emily Dickinson
IN WINTER IN MY ROOM

Robert Graves
DOWN, WANTON, DOWN

Sharon Olds
THE CONNOISSEUSE OF SLUGS

These three poems all deal with the same subject: the manifest physical
indication of sexual arousal in the human male; they treat this subject, however,
with wide difference in tone. In each, the speaker may be taken, without harm,
as the poet.
Emily Dickinson‟s speaker treats the subject with a combination of
fascination and fear mounting to terror. The poem is a Freudian fable using
Freudian symbols (though Dickinson would no have known to American
readers). The worm, “pink, lank, and warm, ” is clearly the male penis in its
ordinary, untumescent state. The speaker, not quite at ease with it despite its
apparent weakness, ties it with a string to something in her room. When she
next looks, it has turned into a snake, mottled and “ringed with power” –the
penis has become tumescent and erect. The speaker‟s fear is manifested by her
“creeping blood” and by her shrinking from the snake. When the compliment,
rightly or wrongly, as dangerous flattery (“propitiation‟s claw”) designed by
the snake to insinuate itself into her favor. Recognizing her fear, the snake
pretends incredulity (“Afraid … of me?”) but the speaker the query as a
menacing hiss, and admits (in a tremendous understatement) that she feels “no

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cordiality” toward it. Then, as the snake, beginning to throb, approaches nearer,
her fear turns to terror, and she flees to a distant town, many towns away from
her own town.
The speaker‟s fear of the snake is obvious. Her fascination with it is revealed
in her description of it as having “mottles rare, ” being “ringed with power, ”
moving with “a rhythm slim, ” and projecting it in “patterns. ”
Throughout her poetry Emily Dickinson expressed strongly ambivalent
attitudes toward sexuality and male dominance. Many of her “love poems”
express a desire to be swept away on a tide of passion for some man whom she
will humbly serve as her “master. ” In other she expresses a resolute
determination to maintain herself dependence and to be her own “master. ”
In its explicit treatment of sexual matters, Dickinson‟s poem is a truly
remarkable one to have been written by a nineteenth century female, especially
one who almost certainly dies a virgin and who lived in a small New England
town like Amherst. Partly to disguise its impropriety, she ends the poem
saying, “This was a dream. ” The designation is perfectly appropriate for a
fantasy which, if read literally, is about a worm that turns into a talking snake.
But we would be badly mistaken if we thought that Dickinson did not know
what the dream was about. The descriptions are too exact and their purport all
too clear.
In “Down, Wanton, Down” the tone is one of comic embarrassment. Graves
present us with an extended apostrophe in which the object addressed is
presented through an extended personification in which the literal term of the
comparison, though never named, is easily inferred. The speaker addresses and
uncontrollable part of himself which he personifies as a poor “bombard-
captain, ” “wanton” and “witless, ” who constantly annoys or embarrasses the
speaker by springing up, staunchly erect, at the merest thought or intimation
(“whisper”) of Love or Beauty. Love and Beauty are also personified, but as
feminine rather than masculine. In stanza 2 the word “ravel in” refers literally
to a triangular outwork in fortifications, but metaphorically to the pubic region
of the female; the word “breach” has obviously both military and sexual
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meanings; and in the word “die” Graves uses a favorite pun of Renaissance
poetry in which “die” means not only to suffer death but also to experience a
sexual climax or orgasm. The last two stanzas present a series of rhetorical
questions, to all three of which the implied answer is Never. The humor of the
poem derives in part from the speaker‟s predicament (never before, to my
knowledge, thematically addressed in a poem), from the comic yet appropriate
incongruity between the literal and figurative terms of its central
personification, from its puns, and from its cunning withholding of any name
for its central subject. But if the poem is comic, it is serious as well, for the
ability to distinguish between lust and love, between physical and spiritual
attraction, is one of the most important problems of our lives.
The title of this poem is taken from Shakespeare‟s King Lear, 2. 4. 121-26,
where the Fool says, “cry to it, uncle, as the cockney did to the eels when she
put emi‟ the paste alive. She knapped „em o‟ the‟ coxcombs with a stick, and
cried, „Down, wantons, down!”
The speaker in Sharon Old‟s poem expresses neither fear nor
embarrassment, but wonder and delight, at her first viewing of a male erection.
In content the poem falls into two parts, the first (line 1-16) beginning with
“when” and the second (lines 16-22) with “Years later. ” For the title and first
line she coins the word “connoisseurs, ” meaning a female connoisseur, and in
the first part of the poem she relates the delight and wonder she felt as a girl
when she would observe a garden slug unfurl, transforming itself from a
shapeless gelatinous blob into a snail-like creature with mouth, antennae, and
eyes. The adjectives “gold, ” “translucent, ” “glistening, ” “glimmering, ”
“sensitive, ” “delicate” and “intimate” indicate the quality of the experience or
her. In the second part of the poem, the speaker, no longer a girl but a young
woman, gaps “with pleasure to see that quite / mystery reenacted” in a naked
man. Adjectives like elegant and gleaming parallel those used in earlier lines.
The two parts of the poem, linked by the word “naked, ” are not visually
separated, for both phenomena are natural processes, and the poet wishes to
indicate that they are natural, not shameful. But if they are natural, they are also

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a “mystery” (the word has religious overtones), something to be wended at,
something finally inexplicable, but something to be accepted “with pleasure. ”
These three poems treat a common phenomenon with widely different tones.
It may be noticed, however, that all avoid an explicitly sexual vocabulary
(words like penis, erection, pubic, and orgasm, used in this discussion), and this
avoidance may partly account for their success.

P. K. Page
THE LANDLADY
Through line 10 this portrait generalizes the landlady‟s attitudes and
motives, and includes the attitudes of her boarders.
Although they seem “impersonal, ” her hovering, curious presence causes
them to alter their behavior: they become secretive, punctual, and reticent to
display their feelings. The second line initiates the syntactical pattern of the
poem: the subject “boarders” is omitted from the two clauses of the second
sentence. This device becomes the controlling pattern form lines 11 (“She
peers”), after which “she, ” or more properly the title “The Landlady, ” is the
subject of the sentence fragments that constitute the remainder of the poem.
The portrait is of a woman whose curiosity about the lives of her boarders is
obsessive. She achieves no contentment simply from knowing all there is to
know about their habits, their actions, or even their health. “Like a lover, ” but
without love, she is consumed with the details of their lives, and “must know
all, all, all, ” even “all” is insufficient for her hunger for knowledge, for what
she seeks is the most secret meaning of their lives, “hopping the worst” will be
revealed to her at last.
Without real malevolence but with an insatiable desire to know every thing
about them, the landlady becomes at the end of the poem a kind of monster of
curiosity. But is this really the woman, or is it the speaker‟s invention? As the
poem focuses ever more narrowly on the landlady as the speaker sees her,
attributing to her an insane attachment to the lives of her boarders, a reader

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might legitimately wonder whether the portrait does not represent an equally
obsessive hunger for privacy on the part of a boarder.

Linda Pastan
ETHICS
The poem appears to present an elementary (one might say childish)
problem demanding solution for a hypothetical conflict between art and life. To
define it thus is to demonstrate that the poem is not in fact about ethics, for that
branch of philosophy cannot mediate such a conflict, and as the final sentence
of the poem indicates, no childish (or childlike) answer could suffice anyway.
Which is more valuable, an old woman or a beloved painting? Or, which is
more valuable, an old painting or a beloved woman? If the woman has only a
few “years left” and the painting can last more or less forever, is this a question
of permanence? If the painting can give pleasure to millions over the centuries,
how much pleasure can the old woman give? Can one measure the pleasure of
a grandmother “in her usual kitchen”?
That is, the central purpose of this poem is not to leave readers asking
“which is the right answer, ” but rather to remind them that such questions are
both unanswerable, and fruitless. Even if you could decide that a person is
more valuable than a painting-or that a painting is more valuable than a person-
what would you have achieved? The poem basically pits the abstract against
the real, the intellectual ability to ask such dichotomizing questions against the
vividness of real perceptions. This satiric dimension of the poem is reinforced
by the apparent impossibility of its literal statement. How could that class “opt
one year for life, the next for art”? The situation must be taken figuratively,
perhaps symbolically, as an abstraction of childhood, authority, and ethical
quandaries.
The resolution is signaled when the speaker finds herself “in a real museum,
” not the “half imagined” one that her teacher conjured for her. All that
imaginary experience, and the imagined necessity of choice, are replaced by
the richness of the experience of being old and seeing a Rembrandt the
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hypothetical vanishes, and the paradoxes of life replace it: “woman and
painting and season are almost one” not only beyond the ethical answers a
child might obediently give, but beyond the abstracting, defining separating
exercises of the intellect. In a sense, then, one might regard the ethics class and
its perpetual question as a symbolic presentation of the natural desire for simple
either / or answers, to which one may respond dutifully or whimsically, and so
be categorized. What will replace such simplifications can come only, if at all,
through maturity and experience.

Dudley Randall
BALLAD OF BIRMINGHM
The year 1963 was the peak year for civil rights agitation in the American
South. On April 2 Martin Luther King, Jr., led a freedom march, starting in
Birmingham, Alabama, protesting racial segregation in the nation‟s schools.
On May 2-7, police used dogs, and firemen used high-pressure firehouses, to
breakup parades. On May 11 the bombing of a black leader‟s home and of a
desegregated motel caused presidential Kennedy to station federal groups in
bases near Birmingham. On June 11 Governor Gorge Wallace defied a
presidential order by banning two black students from enrolling in the
University of Alabama. On June 12 Edgar Evers, a black civil rights leader,
was murdered by a white sniper in Jackson, Mississippi. On August 28 over
200, 000 civil-rights activists converged on Washington, D. C. to protest
against racial discrimination and heard Martin Luther King, Jr., deliver his
famous “I Have a Dream” speech. On the morning of September 15 just as
Sunday School was ending a bomb exploded in a black church in Birmingham,
killing four small girls and injuring twenty others.
It was against this background, and with these materials, that Dudley
Randall, a black poet. Wrote “Ballad of Birmingham. ” Specifically Randall
melded the freedom marches of May 2-7 with the church bombing of
September 15 to create a powerful situational irony. A mother will not let her
young daughter participate in a freedom march downtown because of the

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dangers involved, only to find that the church, traditionally a sanctuary, is the
more dangerous place of the two.
Appropriately Randall chose the form of the medieval folk ballads to relate
his story. Many of them also started out as accounts of some contemporary
local violence. Randall uses the ballad stanza (four lines of alternating iambic
tetrameter and trimester with the second and fourth lines riming) used in most
of the ballads. And he tells much of the story, as they do, through dialogue.
Even his epithets (e. g., “night-dark”) sound like those of the folk ballads. The
result is a very effective rendering of contemporary events in an old, old form.

Alberto Rios
NANI
The sestina, of which this is the only example in this book, is a highly
contrived fixed form making use of the patterned repetition of six end words
through six stanza, followed by a three-line envoi in which the six words are
repeated in the middles and at the ends of lines. Rios has slightly disguised the
fact his poem is a sestina by not providing stanza breaks except between what
the pattern defines as the third and fourth stanza, and before the envoi.
But even if we do not recognize the form for what it is, the poem becomes
hypnotic in the repetition of end-words which in themselves are emblematic of
the poem‟s theme: serves, me, her, words, more, and speak (to list them in the
order of the first stanza). These words display a variety of sound links,
including the assonance of serves/her/words and me/speak and the alliteration
of serves/speak and me/more, which increase the feeling of repetition and
reinforce their significance in the poem. Essentially Rios presents a small
domestic scene in which a man is being served food by his grandmother, “the
absolute mama” (nana and nani are diminutive nicknames for a grandmother in
the Spanish of America). Her serving, and then her smiles, and climactically
her wrinkles, are her love for the speaker and for her dead husband, and finally
about her children and all the ties of love. The speaker has lost two-thirds of his
ability to speak or understand Spanish, so even when his grandmother speaks, it

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is to him as if her words dribble down her chin; but mostly she does not speak
words, only gestures, looks, wrinkles, though she is so eloquent in these that
when she cooks something at the stove it is as if she were doing “something
with words. ”
The “me/her” relationship is tenuous, not held by language but by a deep
sense of closeness. As the “absolute mama, ” nani speak by serving, loves by
feeding, and expresses the rich heritage of the family by the accumulated
wrinkles of a long life of service and love. To the grandson who has lost the
spoken language, the question is how much of this heritage he will be able to
maintain: “I wonder just how much of me/will die with her, what were the
words/I could have been, was. ” Yet the nani goes on serving, serving love.

Edwin Arlington Robinson

MR. FLOOD’S PARTY (P. 875)
The poem humorously characterizes an alcoholic old codger ostracized by
the community. Mr. Flood‟s chronic alcoholism is revealed by the typical
activity of drinking alone, getting drunk, talking to himself, going through the
physical motions of an illusory situation, weeping, and pitying himself. Despite
the poignancy of the situation, the tone of the poet is for the most part light and
witty, as in the contrast between Mr. Flood and Ronald. The poem
sympathetically characterizes a respectable old man who has outlived his time.
Eden Flood, once known and liked by men who have since dies, attempts to
cheer himself up by a mild, circumspect, and rather unaccustomed intoxication.
Despite Eben‟s shortcomings, the poet‟s tone is sympathetic, as in the
comparison between Mr. Flood and Ronald.
Few poems balance so precisely on the point between comedy and pathos,
tears and laughter, as “Mr. Flood‟s Party. ” For the poet to have poised it so
was a triumph in the management of tone.
The drunk has always been a figure of comedy, and Mr. Flood, as he drinks
and sings with him, “with only two moons listening, ” is richly comic. The

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similes enhance the humor. Mr. Flood with a jug at his lips and the ghost of a
warrior with a horn at his lips may be visually similar, but the discrepancy
between their emotional contexts makes the comparison ludicrous. Mr. Flood
setting his jug down may resemble a mother laying down her, sleeping child,
but the incongruity between the drunk‟s solicitude for his jug and a mother‟s
solicitude for her baby again is ludicrous. But the fun is not supplied entirely by
the poet. It is supplied also by Mr. Flood himself. The grave solemnity, the
punctilious courtesy, with which Mr. Flood goes through the social ritual of
greeting himself, inviting himself to drink, welcoming himself home, and
cautioning himself against a refill (“No more, sir; that will do”) all show a rich
vein of humor which makes us laugh with Mr. Flood as well as at him. This is a
lovable drunk though he is not loved. With two Mr. Floods, and two moons, we
are almost prepared ourselves to believe that “the whole harmonious landscape
rang” (it takes two people to create harmony) until we realize that this is only
the heightened sense of appreciation that every drunk has for the beauty of his
own singing.
But the things that make Mr. Flood ludicrous also make him pathetic. The
allusion to Roland winding his horn calls up one of the most famous and
moving episodes in all literature, in The Song of Roland, and the comparison,
though ludicrous, is also plangent and moves us with emotions more profound
than comedy. Roland was sending out a call for help, and Mr. Flood needs help
too; but we known that no help came for Roland in time to save him. The
comparison to the mother and her sleeping child, in much the same way,
reminds us of the familial relationship and gentleness and love which are
missing from Mr. Flood‟s life. These two images, with the help of the silver
moon, lay a veil of tenderness and soft emotion over the poem, which moves is
to compassion as well as laughter. Mr. Flood, after all, is not a mere ne‟er-do-
well. He has a delightful sense of humor and an old fashioned courtesy. He was
once honored in the town below and had many friends there. He has an
educated man‟s acquaintance with literature: in speaking of the fleetingness of
time, he can quote from “The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayam” (“The Bird of Time

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has but little way/To flutter-and Bird is on the Wing”) and then use the
quotation wittily and gracefully to propose a toast. The reference to The Song
of Roland, though made by the poet, reinforces our sense of Mr. Flood as a
sensitive and educated man. The song he sings “For auld Lang syne” has
added force because Mr. Flood can look only backward for better times; he
can‟t look for them in the present or the future. Mr. Flood is old: the husky
voice that waves out and the trembling care with which he sets down the jug
are sings of age as well as of drink. His loneliness is stressed throughout the
poem: he climbs the hill “alone” (lien 1), there is “not a native near” (lien 6), he
speaks “For no man else in Tilbury Town to hear” (lien 8), he must drink with
himself (line 9), he stands “alone” (line 17), the moonlight makes a “silver
loneliness” (line 45), he is “again alone” (line 52), he has no friends in the town
below (lines 54-56). A ghost in the moonlight, Mr. Flood sends out his call for
help, and is answered only by other ghosts “A phantom salutation of the dead”
old memories.
We are not told why Mr. Flood has been cast out from the town below, why
he is no longer honored, for what social sin or error he has lost his place in
society. We know only that he is old, alone, friendless, dishonored, deserving
of compassion but getting none. The “strangers” who would have shut their
doors to him in the town below are probably many of them literal strangers, but
some are former friends from whom he has been estranged. The final note of
the poem is not one of laughter, but of heartbreak.

Theodore Roethke
I KNEW A WOMAN (P. 877)
This poem is a tribute of praise and gratitude from a middle-aged poet to a
younger woman whose eager sexual genius taught him in fullest measure the
delights of sensual love. The verb in the title may be understood in both its
ordinary and its Biblical sense. The imagery of the poem throughout
emphasizes physical movement and the attractions of the body. The woman
was “lovely in her bones, ” and “when she moved, she moved more ways than

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one. ” The “bright container” (4) is her skin. The tribute paid in lines 6-7 is
both humorous and deeply meant, for “English poets who grew up on Greek”
would include such favorites of Roethke‟s as Sir John Davies, Ben Jonson, and
Andrew Marvell. In stanza 2 the terms “Turn, ” “Counter-turn” and “Stand” are
the English equivalents of the Greek words strophe, antistrophe, and epode,
indicating the movements of the chorus in Greek drama while chanting a choral
ode. The metaphor in lines 12-14 compares the women to the curving sickle
that cuts the grass in harvesting and the speaker to the straight rake which
gathers it up. Moving in synchronism they produce a “prodigious mowing. ”
Although the metaphor hardly needs further explanation, it is not irrelevant that
the verb “to mow, ” in Scottish dialect, means to have sexual intercourse, and
that the noun “rake” refers not only to the harvesting tool but to a sexually
oriented male. Stanza 3 continues the poem‟s tribute to the sexual talents of the
woman. The “mobile nose” in the whimsical mixed metaphor of line 20
suggests that of a rabbit (or other animal) sniffing the air.
Stanza 4 is difficult, for the poet here turns philosophical, and his transitions
are abrupt. But if the precise meanings are puzzling, the tone is not. Clearly the
poet sees no contradiction between “eternity” and enjoyment of the sensual life.
He swears his lady cast a “white” shadow, not a dark one. Perhaps such
pleasure as she afforded him is a foretaste of eternity. If he is “martyr to a
motion not his own [hers], “he has been a willing martyr, and his old bones still
“live to learn her wanton ways. ” “To know eternity” is the important thing,
“But who would ways. ” “To know eternity” is the important thing, “But who
would count eternity in days?” The question is rhetorical; the answer is. No one
but a fool; eternity may be tasted in a minute. The poet himself measures time
“by how a body sways. ” The first line of the stanza seems to refer to the
natural process of the human life-cycle from conception to death, but also to
glance back at the sexual metaphor in lines 12-14. The simile “white as stone”
calls up the image of a white marble gravestone, a marker separating life from
eternity. The use of the past tense in the first three stanzas, and the switch to
present in the fourth, may indicate that the woman is dead (and the poet himself

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is certainly older). But the last two lines indicate that he has not forgotten the
lessons she taught him. The poem ends, as it began, as a celebration of sensual
love.

Theodore Roethke
THE WAKING (P. 878)
In form “The Waking” is a villanelle. A villanelle is a nineteen line fixed
form using only two rimes and having two refrains (on the same rime) in the
following arrangement (where A represents the first refrain, and A the second):
AbA abA abA abA abA abAA.
In “The Waking” the poet joyfully affirms his acceptance of a life in which
the only constant is change. Though its tone is clear, the details of its meanings
are not, and the following suggestions are made diffidently. Line 1: “I wake to
sleep. ” Literally this means, I wake in the morning only to have to sleep again
at night. Symbolically it means, I am born to die-death is the inevitable
concomitant of life. Nevertheless, the tone indicates a full acceptance of life on
these terms. The speaker takes his waking “slow”: he wishes to savor it fully.
Line 2: The speaker feels his “fate” (change and death) in what he cannot fear
(the life process). Line 3: He learns about life only through experiencing. It
Line 4: “We think by feeling. ” Our deepest understanding come through
intuition and emotion rather than through reasoning. Line 5: The speaker hears
his being “dance from ear to ear”: he is joyfully conscious of his existence.
Line 7: He is conscious of other people, and wishes to know about them. Line
8: He blesses the earth, which is the “Ground” of this existence and will be his
place of burial. Line 10: Life is a mystery. The ultimate the “tree of Life, ” or of
how spirit enters matter, cannot be intellectually known. Line 11: Life is
process. The worm climbs up the evolutionary scale of being: death constantly
recurs in this evolutionary life cycle. Lines 13-15: Great Nature holds death and
dissolution in store for all of us, so let us enjoy each moment while e may.
“Lovely” may be construed as an adjective (Paralleling “lively”), as an adverb
(modifying “learn”), or as a noun of direct address to the “you” of lines 7 and

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14. Line 16 (the most difficult of the poem‟s several paradoxes): Physical
decay and the speaker‟s knowledge of constant change (degeneration and
regeneration) in life‟s processes keep him resolved to make the most of life and
to trust the goodness of the cycle Line 17: The present falls away from us
eternally; what falls away from us is permanence. Change and death are
constantly “near” to us. Line 19: Take all the above suggestions with who
pinches of salt. At best (like all paraphrases) they are reductive, and some may
be flat wrong.

William Shakespeare
FEAR NO MORE (P. 879)
Both the tone of this dirge from the fourth act of Cymbeline and the dramatic
situation which is its occasion are characteristic of the late romances of
Shakespeare. This is sung or spoken by two young men who suppose their
adopted step brother is dead; but not only is the stepbrother only in a drugged
sleep, “he” is really a princess who has had to flee the tyranny of the court and
the two singers who have been raised as Welsh shepherds are in actuality her
long-lost princely brothers. These plot details contribute little to interpreting
this song as a poem. But they make it, in its place in the play, a reinforcement
of the mysterious powers of goodness that defeat the malevolent plotting of the
villains in Shakespeare‟s last play. Since all does work out for the best, despite
all odds, a funeral lament like this emphasizes escaping life‟s pains and fears,
not the grief of the mourners. Their love is expressed not in joy that the dead
person has gone to heavily bliss (the play is set in pre-Christian Britain), but in
the consolation that he is now safe from danger and is sharing in a universal
fate.
The “fears” that beset the living are of two kinds: natural (summer heat,
winter cold, lightning and thunder and social, ) with the greater emphasis on
the latter. Although they personally know nothing of court life, these young
men describe the conditions of a capital city, where ordinary people have to
work for food and clothing, and where social disparities (chimney-sweepers

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with their grueling and miserable lives contrasted to “golden lads and girls”)
subject people to the frowns of their superiors and the cruelty of tyrants as well
as to slander and rash censure. There is some “joy” in such a life, however
slight: there is love, momentarily alluded to in line 17. But the preponderance
of experience has been “moan, ” and death‟s release is to that extent to be
welcomed.
The universality of death, encapsulated in the repeated rime “must … come
to dust, ” contrasts the equality of the dead to the social hierarchies and
injustices that govern the living. Rich and poor, mighty and weak, learned and
ignorant, all “must … come to dust, ” and the inequities of society will be
obliterated. Death is the great deliverer and equalizer.

William Shakespeare
LET ME NOT TO THE MARRIAGE OF TRUE MINDS
(page 880)
True love is constant, loyal, unchanging and unchangeable in the face of
time.
Let me not to the union of two loyal lovers of like mind admit there can be
obstacles to their love: love is not really true love which changes when it is met
by differing circumstances; nor does is lessen under the threat of time of
remove the beloved. O, no! it is like an eternally fixed sea beacon, which shines
through storms but is never shaken; true love is constant, like the North Star to
all sea-going ships; a star whose influence and worth is unknown to the
voyagers, although its height in the sky can be reckoned. True love is not
subject to the decay of time, although youth is subject to time‟s attack through
age and death; true love does not change with the passage of time, but lasts
even to the edge of destruction. If I am proved wrong in what I say, then I
never wrote, nor has any man ever loved.
This sonnet majestically proclaims for all celebrated is quite unromantic.
Here it stands for true friendship, man for man, Platonic and divine. To
Shakespeare, at least in the Sonnets, such a love was not possible between man

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and woman. Rowse claims that the sonnet sounds like a valediction, which is
doubtful. The word impediment (2) seems to have some from one of
Shakespeare‟s favorite books, of Common Prayer: “If any of you know cause
or just impediment …” (from the marriage service). O. J. Campbell calls this
sonnet “the most admired and most quoted of all the sonnets” (P. 145).
Quatrain 1 declares true love to be unchanging and firmly founded.
Quatrain 2 declares it unchangingly steady, whose true value is unrealizable.
Quatrain 3 says true love is not changed by Time but is eternal, and the Couplet
declares in an infamous letdown that it is true. The single ideal, the definition
of true love between friends, through more and more intense imagery, reaches
its superb climax in line 12. The rest is silence –or should have been, for all that
could have been said on the subject had already been said –certainly no jigging
couplet was needed or wanted.
Quatrain 2 compares love to a sea beacon (5) unshaken by tempests. Then
it is compared to a star (the North Star), which guides lost brakes at sea on the
right course; these ships can measure the height of the star with a sextant but
never will they learn its value or worth. Similarly true love serves as the perfect
model for other lovers on earth who are guided by it, even though they may not
know its true worth. The metaphor is logically superb, and superbly effective.
Quatrain 3 shows that although the rosy lips and cheeks (9) of young lovers
may be cut down by Time (who is pictured as a person moving sown wheat
heads (the rosy lips and cheeks), their true love is not subject in this way to
Time‟s bending sickle. True love may even endure beyond time to the Day of
Judgment, if the phrase “edge of doom” (12) is taken in this sense.
This sonnet makes an interesting contrast to the one which follows, “My
mistress” eyes. “The subject here is a union of minds, while the other is a poem
about physical attraction; and this sonnet is idealistic, the other realistic. The
opening sentence refers to the marriage ceremony in the Anglican Book of
Common Prayer: “…if either of you do know any impediment why ye may not
be lawfully joined together in matrimony … confess it. ” This reference is

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made emphatic by the extreme metrical irregularity of the first line, and made
more vivid by the regularity of the first three feet of the second line.
The first quatrain proceeds negatively: I do not admit impediments; love is
not love if it alters or bends. The second quatrain reverses the rhetoric, insisting
that love is permanent and fixed; and the third returns to the negative, “Love‟s
not Time‟s fool” and again, “Love alters not. ” In effect, the three quatrains
describe what intellectual love is not, what it is, and again what it is not. (One
scholar discovers in this, and in other details of the poem, that this sonnet is
“protesting too much, ” and that it must be seen as ironic overstatement. While
the poem may seem too hyperbolic when laid beside “My mistress‟ eyes, ”
there really is little within this poem to suggest less than sincerity. )
The examination of the three quatrains as rhetorical parallels reveals a
frequent pattern of Shakespeare‟s sonnets: they are repetitive, offering three
different contexts to make the same statement. In the first quatrain, the context
resembles a courtroom or public debate, as the echo from the marriage
ceremony implies question and response. Here, the response is suitably
intellectualized, a matter of defining terms which is appropriate to the subject
of “minds. ” The diction reinforces the effect, being rational and legalistic (“let
me not, ” “admit impediments, ” “alters … alterations, ” “remover to
remove”).
The second quatrain develops two two-line images, the “ever fixed mark” of
a beacon or lighthouse unshaken by storms, and the pole star by which
navigators steer, both images sharing the context of nautical travel, its dangers
and its safe-guards. Line 8 states our inability to know the exact value of the
star, even though we can make use of our instruments to steer by its
steadfastness, and it contrasts the “wandering” of human life with the star‟s
immobility. True intellectual love preserves us in danger, and guides us when
we wander.
The third quatrain continues to develop single images in two line statements
linked together in a common context. “Time‟s fool” is the toy or plaything of
personified time, having no value to him. This is “Father Time, ” who
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dispassionately destroys the “rosy lips and cheeks” of the young (this is the
only reference to physical beauty in the poem –it is “Time‟s fool”). Time with
his sickle is linked to the “grim reaper” who at the day of “doom” will finally
destroy all life, and only then will the “marriage of true minds” be dissolved.
The couplet returns the poem to the courtroom of the opening quatrain. The
poet invites disproof of his testimony, and employs as his witnesses two
incontrovertible facts: since I have written (this poem proves that), and since
certainly at least one man has loved, then my statements must be true. The
couplet seems irrefutable, except that its conclusion is not necessarily valid:
while it claims that these self-evident, there is no real connection. The “proof”
is rhetorical rather than logical (and like the opening quatrain, couched in
negative rhetoric).

William Shakespeare
MY MISTRESS’ EYES (Sonnet 130) (P. 880)
I love my mistress, faults and all, and think her as
beautiful as any man’s mistress pictured falsely by
exaggerated and insincere comparisons.
My mistress‟ eyes are not so bright as the sun‟s, coral is far more red than her
lips; if snow be white, why then her breasts are dark, if hairs be wires, then
black wires grow on her head. I have seen roses of a mingled red and white
color, but no such color is in her cheeks; and in some perfumes there is more
sweetness than in the breath that my mistress exhales. I love to hear her speak,
yet I am well aware that music is much more pleasant in sound; I never saw a
goddess walking, I grant, but when my mistress walks she treads on the
ground. And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare as any woman described
by her lover with false and insincere comparisons.
This sonnet is satiric, and one hopes it was circulated privately among his
friend and not actually handed to his mistress. With other anti-Petrarchan
poets such as Donne, Shakespeare here ridicules the Petrarchan mode of
description, by now a standard cliché: the lady is a goddess, her hair golden

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wires (wires were used in building hair-dos), her lips red as coral, her breasts
white as snow, her breath redolent of perfume, etc. incidentally, line 4 informs
us that his brunette had black hair. The remark about her breath, says Rollins
(jokingly?) may refer to the mistress indulgence in the new fad of “drinking” (i.
e., smoking) tobacco.
This witty sonnet might serve as a model of courtship, if a lady were to be
won by realistic honesty. The speaker at length rejects the customary (lying)
praise of hyperbolic lovers, insisting that his lady is only a woman, not a
“goddess, ” and yet she is “as rare” as any woman who has been praised with
overstated comparisons. In other words, he loves her for what she is, and does
not think she wishes to be lied to about qualities she dose not posses. It is a
different kind of praise he offers, a high estimate of her common sense and her
delight in wit.
The object of his satire is the “false compare” of the Petrarchan sonnet
tradition. The formalities of the tradition required that the poet begin by
praising the lady‟s hair (usually as fine and bright as spun golden wire),
proceed to her ivory or alabaster forehead, her eyebrows arched like Cupid‟s
bow, her pearly teeth, cherry-red lips, and so on, moving down the various
parts of her body (generally rather coyly below the waist) to her delicate light
feet. But Shakespeare seems realistically to present the order in which a man
might look at a woman whose inner worth is also important to him, moving
from eyes to lips to breasts, then to hair, cheeks, breath, voice, and gait, and at
each stop he realistically claims her to be less than ideal. To the modern ear, the
least complimentary word in the poem is “reeks, ” but the word was not used to
mean “stinks” until the eighteenth century, and Shakespeare‟s meaning is much
less offensive-it means “exhales. ” His tactic throughout the poem is not to
substitute some other quality for the traditional overstatement, by just to say
“she is not like that. ” What she is like is a woman, and for that he loves her.

Gary Soto
SMALL TOWN WITH ONE ROAD

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 The speaker, now a man whose “easy” job is “only words” (poet?
Professor?). has returned to the cotton farming valley where he was raised. He
is accompanied by his small daughter, and as they “suck roadside snow cones
in the shade, ” he meditates on his beginnings. He recalls being a barefoot kid,
leaping across the black asphalt highway to spend dimes for red candies, and a
home life busy with dogs, cats, chickens, beans for supper: “It‟s a hard life
where the sun looks, ” for “Okie or Mexican, Jew that got lost. ” The memories
are of a life of manual labor, sweating in the hot sun, dreaming “the money
dream” of relief from “shovel, hoe, broom. ”
And yet there is a vividly sensuous side to this reminiscence, a richness
captured in images of sigh, sound, feeling, taste-captured particularly well in
the sixth line- “Sweetness on their tongues, red stain of laughter” –where the
color of candy or snow cone is transferred to the tongue in a synesthetic
mingling of taste and color, so that the pleasure of the state is transferred to the
color, and that in turn is the color of laughter. Soto intensifies what might be a
prosaic description (open-mouthed laughing kids reveal the candy‟s red dye
stain on their tongues) through the concentration of metonymy and metaphor.
The leaps of meaning in this phrase are like the leaping kids themselves.
The tone of the poem is thus complex: the speaker is pleased that he is no
longer trapped in the “hard life, ” fearful that the success he has had in escaping
it might disappear, and concerned for his worrying, serious daughter. Yet as he
recalls himself (and then sees himself in the “brown kid” standing and then
leaping as he had done, ) he feels nostalgia for the rich exuberance that he has
lost-and probably a little regret that his daughter will not experience it for
herself.

Wallace Stevens
THE DEATH OF A SOLDIER
This poem has both a specific and a general subject, and it might best be read
a symbolic statement: it presents what the title says, but the meaning expands
from the specific issue of the death of a soldier on a battlefield to encompass

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human death in general. The “soldier” is only an extreme example, whose
death invites certain special responses not always associated with the death of
ordinary people-chiefly, those traditional attitudes that are so easily evoked by
apologists for war, by national holiday commemorators, by politicians and
patriots: those who die in war “have not died in vain, ” but have served some
national (or religious, or universal) purposes. Stevens has chosen a soldier so as
to excite such stock responses, which he subjects to situational irony: a military
death is apparently the most meaningful in a secular, non-theist society-and it is
no more meaningful than the changing of the seasons.
Death in this poem is part of a natural process, linked in simile twice to the
change of season in autumn, just another “fall. ” It is not the occasion for
imposing upon survivors the duty of memorials or funeral pomposity. Its
apparent uniqueness-that something in particular has stopped, a singular human
life-is compared to the momentary cessation of wind, a stillness which is
deceptive in the larger context of climatic motion. No human life is important,
no human death is important, not even those which a secular, patriotic nation
celebrates.
Such nihilism is not pleasant to contemplate, yet this poem has a shapeliness
and rhetorical power that make the ideas less repugnant. There is after all, a
kind of beauty in the stark, simple, and unadorned presentation of the idea: an
individual human death is no more important than the change of the season,
and the impersonal physical processed of the world will go on, “nevertheless, ”
in the impassive reality of absolute truth. (“Never theless” is a marvelously
evocative word, in this context, for in its double negation it emphasizes
Stevens‟s point: mere human life or death can never make any less the reality
of a world of factual truth. )
Formally, the poem reflects its reductive philosophy in its structure. The free
verse stanzas have a syllabic pattern made visible by the printing. The norm is
an opening line of about 10 syllables, a second line of 8, and a final line of 4
(the last stanza offers this variation: 7 in line 2, 5 in line 3). The stanzas
themselves, that is, seem to dwindle down toward immobility and silence, “as

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in a season of autumn / when the wind stops … “Yet, as the stanzas repeat the
pattern and thus imply continuity, the clouds (and poetry) will go, nevertheless.

Wallace Stevens
THE SNOW MAN
The single sentence constituting this poem is ambiguously framed, either
offering advice or a definition: in its barest statement, if can be paraphrased,
“only a person as cold-minded as a snow man would not think such a cold
place implies misery. ” Is the speaker advocating such emotionlessness, as
appropriate to the surroundings and as a defense against despair? Or is he
lamenting the inhumanity that would be necessary to escape such emotions?
The last two lines provide a partial answer: the reality of the situation is that
this observable landscape contains “the nothing that is, ” and that it has no
further dimensions of meaning beyond its mere physical existence. To “think
of misery” therefore is to add a false meaning, one derived not from reality but
from an observer‟s emotional reaction.
These last two lines may echo Hamlet, 3. 4, when the Ghost appears to
Hamlet in Gertrude‟s closet but remains invisible to her. Hamlet asks his
mother, “Do you see nothing there?” and she replies “nothing at all; yet all that
is I see” (lines 131-32). Stevens‟s snow man is an unemotional, practical
realist, unable to see anything but actuality, and able to see that the actuality
implies nothing beyond itself. Neither ghosts nor implications of meaning are
available to him.
The only way a person can avoid thinking of misery in such a barren place is
to be, like the snow man, “nothing himself, ” a person without feeling. The first
three stanzas create the visual scene, in details that seem quite forbidding. The
trees have been subjected to wintry transformation, “crusted” and “shagged”
and made “rough” in appearance by the weakness of the distant sun. Stanza 4
and 5 add the effect of the “sound of the wind, ” which to an emotional
observer would imply misery. The defense against such feeling is “a mind of
winter, ” coldly unemotional and in total harmony with the surroundings.

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 While this is the overt statement of the poem, there remains a third
alternative to either misery or emotional coldness: the visual imagery implies
the possibility of perceiving beauty in the chiaroscuro of shapes and textures.
The three types evergreen threes have distinctly different shapes, and the winter
has given them three distinct textures. The crusted pines tower above with their
foliage at the tops of their tall trunks: the shaggy junipers sprawl flat and
disorderly in their low branching; and the conical Christmas-tree-shaped
spruces are roughened but glittering. Although the scene is not inviting, it
nevertheless possesses stark beauty. The snow man‟s coldly analytical
philosophy is a defense against misery and a definition of reality, but it does
not comprehend aesthetic responses.

Wallace Stevens
A HIGH-TONED OLD CHRISTIAN WOMAN (P. 884)
This is another frequently anthologized poem of Stevens. As with the
majority of this poet‟s work, there is no record available of the circumstances
which prompted its creation. The title gives us the best clue: the poem is a hard-
knuckled refutation of a certain kind of religious stance-let us say rigid, narrow,
super-orthodox, unyielding, positive, fanatical-held by the personage of the
title. Against this kind of religious attitude the poet speaks, precisely, rapidly,
ironically, equally positive in his stance, taking on his antagonist without
tenderness but, at the same time, with full awareness of her toughness and
respect for her intelligence.
In this monologue, the speaker (presumably the poet) makes a flat assertion
that poetry is “the supreme fiction. ” That is, it is a construct of the human
mind. He goes on to imply that the religious convictions of the old lady are also
“fictions, ” leading her to this agreement “in principle” by a series of logical
“proofs. ” It may be, he ends, that her ascetic and self-denying “heaven” is
about equally valid with the joyous projection he imagines and that all her
practices are just as valid (or invalid) as his own. This fact will make widows
(all those who have lost their loves-see “Another Weeping Woman”) “wince. ”

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The truth, “fictive things, ” however, “wink as they will. ” As a matter of fact,
and paradoxically, the “real” seems to take pleasure in making those living in
illusion (widows) “wince, ” especially at the truth.
Steven‟s voice here is dramatic and forceful and argumentative. The speaker
pushes his thesis without letup from first statement to last with a brilliant and
paradoxical set of propositions, which may leave the reader confused on first
reading. A character is crated to deliver the ultimatum-for such it is. He is not
the quizzical, rather uncertain dandy of “Le Monocle de Mon Oncle” but a
fairly powerful and direct personage who is fed up whit a particular brand of
nonsense and is going to deliver himself of his pent-up conclusion without
interruption. Still, the reader is led by the very directness of his assertion to at
least one of two conclusions that the “high-toned” old lady‟s “fictions” are at
least as valid as the poet‟s; that Stevens did not believe in the validity of any
religious system beyond its “fictive” value.
In form, “A High-Toned Old Christian Woman” is blank verse throughout,
riding on a basic rhythm of iambic pentameter but full of variants which do
much to contribute to the dramatic quality of the poem. Some of the lines are
end-stopped (that is, the rhythm and the sentence are completed at the end of
the line, as for example in the first line and the fifth), others enjambed (that is,
the sense runs over into the next line, overflowing the basic line meter, as for
example lines three-four, lines six-seven, and many others. The whole poem is
constructed in the form of an argument: the first line is the proposition or thesis,
the rest of the statement a demonstration of the validity of the thesis. This tone
of dry intellectuality is supported by the sub-points and minor conclusion
(“Thus”-“Thus”-“Allow”). But clashing with this is a vigorous imagistic
current which rises to a crescendo in lines nineteen-twenty. In lines twenty-one
and twenty-two, the poet in effect assumes that this crescendo has vanquished
his opponent, and he is free to tweak her nose with some quick verbal snaps.
The style, in spite of its parody of the academic rhetorician, is basically
imagistic. There is a systematic analogy to the building of a church; “prey-

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style” is a row of columns supporting a roof; “flagellants” are ascetics who
whip, or flagellate, themselves in punishment for sins.
It is written in the form of a dramatic monologue. The speaker says that the
heaven of the stern old lady is as much a construction of her imagination as
poetry is of his. She has, therefore, no right to take that “high-tone” with him as
if she were right about existence and everyone else were wrong.

Wallace Stevens
PETERQUINCE AT THE CLAVIER (P. 885)
There are few poems of Stevens that take narrative form. “The Comedian as
the Letter C” is one of the few exceptions, and its narrative is more
psychological than real. This poem is another exception. However, the story of
Susanna and the Elders is not the subject, which is how beauty and truth are
born in the imagination. In this sense “Peter Quince” is another meditation, but
one taking the form of dramatic monologue with an extensive narrative
support?
A musician plays at a clavier (a keyboard instrument of the piano family).
Just as his fingers make music, so there is an interior music of the spirit. This
leads him to the conclusion that music is “feeling, not sound. ” By a rapid
transition he equates this to the responsive feeling is like that awakened in the
Elders by Susanna: “the basses of their beings throb/In witching chords …. ”
In the second part, which includes sections II and III, the scene is made
immediate. Susanna, having bathed, emerges from her garden bath. But the
Elders are spying upon her, and when her maids come they find her crying in
her shame.
In the third part, the meaning of this narrative is given: Beauty, as the mind
sees it, is transient; its only immortality is in “the flesh. ” It is flashed into
existence by the knowledge of death. It is only when an object “touches the
bawdy strings” of man that it reverberates and becomes an object of the

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imagination. Then such object receive another kind of “immortality” by the
evocation of memory.
Again Stevens is concerned with exploring the relationship between
imagination and reality. In this unusually lyrical piece, full of rare elegance of
phrase and a sensuality quite unique in Stevens, the poet projects himself as the
rather naïve and lovable clown of Shakespeare, further conceived as a
seventeenth century musician. Stevens also, perhaps, expects the rather to recall
another famous dramatic monologue in which a musician powers; Browning‟s
“Abt Volger. ” The reader might also recall Browning‟s doctrine of perfection
vs. imperfection for useful insights into Steven‟s similar ideas.
Formally the poem breaks into two parts. There is a framework of
meditation about a highly musical rendering of the story of Susanna and the
Elders. Susanna of course was the beautiful woman of the Bible who was
deliberately observed bathing naked in her garden by a group of elderly men.
This filled her with shame. The scene was a favorite of the artists of the high
Renaissance (Titian, Tintoretto, Rembrandt, for example, all rendered it). Of
the four parts of the poem, the first two are unrhymed, the second two rhymed.
Each section has its own metrical system: the first is made up of five three-
lined but metrically systematic stanzas; the second, of four free-verse stanzas of
varying length; third, of five rigidly rhymed two-lined stanzas; the fourth, of
richly rhymed couplets built on an iambic pentameter base.
The reader should especially note the great number of words which have to
do with music or musical instruments: clavier, keys, sounds, strain, basses,
throb, chords, pulse, pizzicato, Hosanna, melody, muted, cymbal, crashed,
roaring, horns, noise, tambourines, refrain, choral, strings, plays, viol. The
reader should also notice the considerable number of feminine rhymes (two
syllables matching): tambourines-Byzantines, portal-immortal, going-flowing,
scenting-repenting, auroral-choral, escaping-scraping. These elements
contribute in no small measure to the effect of music in the verse.

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Wallace Stevens
THE EMPEROR OF ICE CREAM
& DISILLUSIONMENT OF TEN O’CLOCK
Both of these short poems, like the one just treated, are famous anthology
pieces. “Disillusionment” is possibly the most famous example of the
American Imagism School. Perhaps it will make clearer than any other of
Stevens‟ poems how his particular poetry works.
“The Emperor of Ice Cream”: Someone a woman has died, and this is
announcement of her death. The two verses are full of directives on how the
world is to celebrate it. But the main point is that death is the end of illusion, of
“seeming, ” and in the last analysis there is no other “emperor” but the supreme
controller-death himself-here in his downgraded, but nevertheless powerful
embodiment as the “Emperor of Ice Cream. ”
On “The Emperor of Ice Cream”: Death has been “realized” in any number
of ways: as a svelte thief, as a corrupted skeleton, as a shadow-hooded figure,
even as a kindly physician; why not then as a cigar chewing, fat, though ice
cream vendor, an impresario of childish pleasures? And why ice cream?
Because ice cream is a feature of celebration. What have we to celebrate: the
end of “seeming. ” One is dead. That is the end. Obtruding into the scene is the
actual corpse itself: “her horny feet” leave nothing to have illusions about.
Face-says the poet in a double fanfare, one at the end of each stanza the fact:
Death insists on the destruction of all illusion, no matter how the mind
conceives it.
“Disillusionment of Ten O‟clock”: The world is dull, it is late evening, the
people are going to sleep. Their night apparel shows no imagination: all plain
white. Nor are their dreaming minds going to release suppressed but vigorous
fantasies. No, even their subconscious minds are blank. Only a drunken old
sailor in his boots dreams of exciting adventures.
On “Disillusionment of Ten O‟clock”: the poet practices here a radical
synecdoche (giving the part for the whole throughout). The nightgowns stand

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for the inhabitants how are seen only as their nightgowns; they are erased from
reality. They have, in effect ceased to exist except as nightgowns; the gowns
flit through the houses like ghosts. The very Puritan blankness of the gowns
symbolizes the blankness of the people‟s minds; they have no imagination.
They are going to sleep, and even in sleep they will be dull and blank. In
contrast to them there is a visible old sailor, who has a body because his
imagination is alive. He dreams of catching tigers in “red weather. ” Red, in
connotation, is the opposite of white. White of course here symbolizes
blankness, an unsullied existence without imaginative experience. “Red”
symbolizes life, real existence. The old sailor, in his “boots” has lived. The
whole poem serves as Stevens‟ indictment of contemporary America: its
boredom, its blankness, its acceptance of the poverty-stricken life without
imagination‟s vitality. It is a cry for richness and blood in a land where poetry
is regarded as unimportant to existence.
“The Emperor of Ice Cream” is, in form, made up of two eight-line stanza,
unrhymed except in the final two lines of each, and in couplets in the final four
line of the second stanza. The reader will note the repetition of the important
last line, its importance strengthened by the isolated rhymes. It is basically a
song pattern, but here Stevens gives the verse the power of a public
announcement because none of the lines are declarative statements except the
doubly affirmed last line; all the rest are imperatives and orders. In style, the
verse gets much from Shakespeare, especially in the vocabulary of the fourth
line (“wenches dawdle in such dress”) and the seventh lines of each verse
(which recall Shakespeare‟s “The Phoenix and the Turtle”). Note too the thick
crowding of alliterated “c‟s” in the third line.
The form of “Disillusionment” is free verse. The movement of the lines is
“wavy, ” imitating in form and rhythm the slowly trembling movement of the
nightgowns. In style the poem is thoroughly imagistic, giving the reader the
images themselves to consider. Spare in these images, the poet yet manages to
suggest the rich profusion of possibilities available (“baboons and
periwinkles”). Note too that it is not “at Ten O‟clock, ” which would imply that

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the speaker was disillusioned, it is “of Ten O‟clock” which implies that the
state is inherent in the situation itself.

Wallace Stevens
SUNDAY MORNING
All critics are agreed that “Sunday Morning” is one of the landmarks of
American poetry‟ Yvor Winters, a not especially partisan critic, calls it one of
the great poems of meditation in English. If we wish to place it in a tradition,
we might set it in line with John Donne‟s Anniversary poems, Wordsworth‟s
Prelude and Tintern Abbey, and certain of the poems of T. S. Eliot, such as
Four Quartets and “Ash Wednesday. ” But in the last analysis it is unique, for
the profundity of the problem it explores, the richness of its diction, the
majestic cadences of its rhythms, the fertility of its imagery are rarely found
combined anywhere else in English outside of Milton and Shakespeare. Its
eight sections of fifteen lines each, together form one of the high peaks of
English verse. Here Stevens explores the whole question of religion as it relates
to reality, the problem of faith in the world-especially in the modern world-and
offers his own conclusion.
The scene is set. It is Sunday morning, but the lady through whose
awareness the question of religious faith is to be filtered, is not at church.
Instead she sits in her dressing room, a rather ornate affair, lolling in a negligee,
over coffee and oranges. It is a sunny morning. Her pet cockatoo is out of its
cage and flies about the room. All this helps to put aside but ultimately does not
destroy the religious significance of the day, for to all Christians, the day is one
on which the death of Christ for the salvation of mankind is recalled: attending
church is a declaration of one‟s belief in the sacrifice, in Christ. The believing
Christian orders his life by this belief, but this lady has given up her practice.
But as she dreams the “old catastrophe” encroaches and troubles the calmness
of the day, of her life. In imagination she crosses the seas to Palestine, site of
the life and death of Christ.

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 In section two, having established his theme and the subject of his
meditation, the poet continues. If Christ is dead to her, why should she give
allegiance to the dead? Can‟t she find in the world itself (in this fruit upon the
table, in the beauties if nature) objects of delight and comfort as good as
heaven? Wasn‟t the divine to be found in one‟s self? Wasn‟t physical existence
the measure and limit of one‟s total being?
In section three, the poet pursues this thought; the ancients had Jove, whom
they imagined, and who filled their lives with meaning. Then, the sky was
heaven and also filled with meaning. Are we to fail of imagination sufficient to
fill the sky with heaven? Is earth to be the only “paradise” we know?
The poet imagines a meeting of wood fowl in the pine forest of America.
One huge old bird, with the characteristic strut and self-regard bantam's show,
is challenged by another. “Who do you think you are?” he says, in effect. “You
think the sun itself rises and sets for you. I‟m just as important. Get out of the
way. You‟re big now and I‟m small, but I‟m taking over. I‟m not afraid of you.
”
If the reader sees that “Chieftain Iffucan of Azcan” is symbolic of the
Calvinistic religion, the rest of the poem‟s meanings fall easily into place.
Stevens is reiterating one of his essential points. Calvin‟s “reality” is only one
kid. He is offering another kind. Nor is he going to be frightened off by fear of
the “universal cock” that struts about in charge. Let Calvin beware. Stevens‟
view of reality is going to take over the reality of America. The poem is about
the clash in interpretations of reality and the need for America to re-image itself
in its own terms. By imagining the constantans (himself as one) in this
ontological contest as small wood fowl, Steven reduces their contributions
accordingly. The world is vast, reality is vast. The Calvinist “cook” is large, but
he is only “a ten-foot poet among inchlings. ” Measured against the total
landscape, ten feet is not very big at all.
The poem constructed of five two line verses full of spondees (two syllables
stressed equally), unrhymed. It is strident and assertive in the extreme. One can
almost see the little bantam swollen with rage at the appearance of the larger
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bird. He descends even to name calling, using infantile invective: “Fat! Fat!
Fat! Fat!” Although the poem makes a serious point, it is offered in humorous
terms.

Wallace Stevens
ANECDOTE OF THE JAR
Here again we have a much anthologized verse. It is concerned again with
the relationship of man to his environment, specifically the relationship
between the products of man and their influence on the environment.
The poet says that he has “placed a jar” in the wilderness of Tennessee. The
first effect of this is that the wilderness became orderly, hence understandable;
it “surrounds” the hill where the jar is placed. The second effect is that the
wilderness ceased to be “wild. ” In the midst of it, the jar stands, still having the
air of domination. The third effect is that the jar took “dominion” over the
landscape. But the jar was “gray and bare, ” nonproductive, “Like nothing else
in Tennessee. ”
Most commentators on this poem read it this way: the products of man,
specifically artistic products (like the jar, absolutely symmetrical and perfect)
make the disorder of the visible meaningful by their influence. The artist
reduces the chaos of existence to understandable patterns, and this is, of course,
good. Only one commentator has pointed out that in the last stanza Stevens is
apparently denying that this effect is a good one; after all, the jar is “gray and
bare” while the rest of “Tennessee” flourishes. But the point that Stevens
makes is that any codification of reality is transient, temporary. A “fictive
thing” such as the jar (any work of the imagination) has three stages of
existence; first, it creates order in chaos; second, chaotic reality, under its
influence, systematizes itself; third, it takes “dominion, ” but it is no longer
viable: being “perfect, ” it is dead. But reality continues, even though
“dominated, ” to produce, to change, to flourish. The student should at this
point re-read “Sunday Morning, ” where Steven‟ position on this subject is
more fully given. The jar is a work of art, as is the Calvinist heaven, the lady‟s

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“Paradise. ” But the end effect of a work of art is that it no longer relates to the
real, is alien to it. Reality must constantly be reimagined. The marriage of
“flesh and air” must continuously be celebrated.
In the second part, which includes sections II and III, the scene is made
immediate. Susanna, having bathed, emerges from her garden bath. But the
Elders are spying upon her, and when her maids come they find her crying in
her shame.
In the third part, the meaning of this narrative is given: Beauty, as the mind
sees it, is transient; its only immortality is in “the flesh. ” It is flashed into
existence by the knowledge of death. It is flashed into existence by the
knowledge of death. It is only when an object “touches the bawdy strings” of
man that it reverberates and becomes an object of the imagination. Then such
objects receives another kind of “immortality” by the evocation of memory.
Again Stevens is concerned with exploring the relationship between
imagination and reality. In this unusually lyrical piece, full of a rare elegance of
phrase and a sensuality quite unique in Stevens, the poet projects himself at the
rather naïve and lovable clown of Shakespeare, further conceived as a
seventeenth century musician. Stevens also, perhaps, expects the reader to
recall another famous dramatic monologue in which a musician who considers
music as a symbolization of the imaginative powers; Browning‟s “Abt Vogler.
” The reader might also recall Browning‟s doctrine of perfection vs.
imperfection for useful insights into Stevens‟ similar ideas.
Formally the poem breaks into two parts. There is a framework of
meditation about a highly musical rendering of the story of Susanna and the
Elders. Susanna of course was the beautiful woman of the Bible who was
deliberately observed bathing naked in her garden by a group of elderly men.
This filled her with shame. The scene was a favorite of the artists of the high
Renaissance (Titian, Tintoretto, Rembrandt, for example, all rendered it). Of
the four parts of the poem, the first two are unrhymed, the second two rhymed.
Each section has its own metrical system: the first is made up of five three-
verse stanzas of varying length; the third, of five rigidly rhymed two-lined
338
stanzas; the fourth, of richly rhymed couplets built on an iambic pentameter
base.
The reader should especially note the great number of words which have to
do with music or musical instruments: clavier, keys, sounds, strain, basses,
throb, chords, pulse, pizzicato, Hosanna, melody, muted, cymbal, crashed,
roaring, horns, noise, tambourines, refrain, choral, strings, plays, viol. The
reader should also notice the considerable number of feminine rhymes (two
syllables matching): tambourines-Byzantines, portal-immortal, going-flowing,
scenting-repenting, auroral-choral, escaping-scraping. These elements
contribute in no small measure to the effect of music in the verse.

Wallace Stevens
THIRTEEN WAYS OF LOOKING AT A BLACK BIRD
Many who do not know any other work of Stevens know this poem. It has
appeared in numerous anthologies and in many poetry collections prepared for
use in high schools. There are a few ideas the reader ought to remember as he
reads it. First of all, it is almost a tour de force of Imagism; thirteen times
running, taking as his subject black birds, the poet presents pictures in which
blackbirds occur. In their lack of expository and abstract statements these
poems fulfill Pound‟s demand for a purely pictorial poetry. In a sense too, their
form of each verse is close to haiku the seventeen syllable Japanese verse
pattern which had some influence on Pound, Stevens and other modern poets.
Further, its brevity, its adherence to natural images, its metaphysical
suggestiveness, appeal to poets sick of the lush puddings of sentimentality
which most poets of the 1890‟s were serving. And lastly, the poem is a miracle
of improvisation. Stevens was highly skilled in the musical art of
improvisation: taking a common theme or image, he would exercise his skill as
an inventor by showing the numerous ways in which it could be treated. (The
most famous example of this ability per se is the incredible “Sea Surface Full
of Clouds, ” but other examples may be found throughout Stevens. The art of

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the painter and the art of the musician are both visible in Stevens‟ work. In
thirteen brief verses, the poet “looks” at the blackbird.
The blackbird is a fairly common symbol of death. If the reader notes
carefully, he will see that there is a plan to the verse: in the first verse the
landscape is full of snow, in the succeeding verses there is an implicit
movement out of these frozen wastes of winter into spring. Then the poet
passes into summer, autumn and again in the last verse to winter. There is a
movement also from the emptiness of winter (which for Stevens always
symbolized “raw” reality, unimagined and barren) toward the world as
imagined by the creative imagination (VIIIXI) to the world fallen back again
under the influence of death, to what it is without imagination, without men.
There are thirteen verse perhaps because thirteen is a number commonly held
to be both magical and disastrous. The entire poem treats of Stevens's common
theme: reality and the imagination, the acceptance of death as a precondition
for the knowledge of beauty. The blackbird, death, is always there. In the
solidified and still world of dead winter, his eye moves, watching: “the only
moving thing. ” At the end, under the overcast and snow stuffed sky, he still
sits in the cedar tree, from whose wood coffins are traditionally made to know
this is to force one to be real, unsentimental. We will not be like the visionaries
of Haddam who waste their lives on illusion; we will see that the blackbird
(death) walks about the feet of the women. We will also see that “A man and a
woman and a blackbird /Are one. ” And finally that, whatever we know, we
will know too that “the blackbird (death) is involved” in what we know.
Each verse is free verse. The first, second, fifth, eight, ninth, tenth, and
thirteenth are all single sentences. The first; third, ninth, twelfth and thirteenth
are pure haiku in mood and structure, although none is written in exactly
seventeen syllables. (This is one from Basho, a famous Japanese poet, “From
every compass point/winds drop cherry petals/On the holy lake”). The reader
ought to note two verses especially. In VIII, Stevens puts his finger on the
unique aspect of his poetic genius, his “lucid, inescapable rhymes”: these are a
gift, however, of his knowledge of the blackbird (death). In verse X, “bawds”

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are purveyors; in this case it means those “poets” who ignore the real and
continue to offer the candied, slick, and empty verse of mere “euphony, ” nice
sounds which say nothing. The diction is generally simple.
First there is the common association between any bird of black hue and
death to support this reading. Ravens, crows, and blackbirds are often
associated in superstitious minds with omens of ill luck, disaster, and death.
Stevens makes use of this conscious or unconscious association to develop his
theme. Secondly, the blackbird functions in this poem as death explicitly
functions both in “Sunday Morning” (“Death is the mother of beauty”) and in
the final section of “Peter Quince at the Clavier. ” Finally, the brooding quality
of imminent catastrophe which permeates the poem, and which appears more
dramatically in verses X and XI, would be inexplicable unless the blackbird
symbolized death itself.

May Swenson
QUESTION
Like Marvell in “A Dialogue between the Soul and Body”, but some three
centuries later, May Swenson is concerned with the soul/body question. Her
poem, however, should probably be classed as an extended metaphor rather
than as allegory, for it is neither narrative nor descriptive. It is a meditation
consisting of a series of questions which the speaker asks herself but is unable
to answer. The speaker-the “I” of the poem-is the soul. The body is the literal
term of a metaphor which has three figurative terms, all named in the first two
lines of the poem: house, horse, and hound. The linkages in sound of these
three words –all monosyl –lables alliterating on h, the first two having in
addition consonance on s, and the first and third having assonance on ou –
enhance the unity of the poem, which in its structure refers to each of them
three times. The first two lines of the poem explicitly announce its subject by
stating its central metaphor: the body is the speaker‟s house, horse, and hound
(metonymies for a human being‟s most basics needs-shelter, transportation, and
a means for securing food). Lines 3 and 4 state the “question” referred to in the

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title: “what will I do / when you are fallen/” Lines 5-7 break the question down
into three parts, line 5 referring to the house, line 6 to the horse, and line 7 to
the hound. In the following lines, the three terms are referred to again but in a
different order: lines 8-10 refer to the horse, lines 11-15 refer to the dog, and
lines 16-19 to the house. The final two lines of the poem introduce a new
metaphor. The word “shift” has a number of relevant meanings here, but the
most important one is a woman‟s thin undergarment. If the soul has nothing but
a could for clothing how will it “hide”?
The poem is written in a loose iambic diameter: the second foot in each line
is usually an iamb but occasionally an anapest. The first foot is more variant,
containing a number of trochaic substitutions. It has been noted that the poem
consists of a series, of questions: what? (3), where? (5), How? (6), What? (7),
Where? (8), How? (11), How? (16), how? (21). Each of these question.
Opening monosyllables occurs in a trochaic substitution in the first foot of a
line, thus giving these words a metrical importance that matches their
importance in the structure and meaning of the poem. Occasional riming (hunt-
mount, go-know, ahead-dead, sky-eye) adds to the attractiveness of the poem.

Jonathan Swift
A DESCRIPTION OF THE MORNING (P. 605)
There is a long tradition, stretching back to ancient Greece, of poetic
descriptions of morning, idealized and romantic treatments of the joys of the
beginning of a new day. One of the most famous in English is Romeo‟s
description of dawn in 3. 5:
Look, love what envious streaks
Do lace the severing clouds in yonder east.
Night‟s candles are burnt out, and jocund day
Stand tiptoe on the misty mountain tops.
Swift‟s poem plays with the tradition in two witty ways: it is a city morning,
not a rustic or natural one; and it presents details of realistic ugliness rather than
idealized beauty. One critic compares the poem to a drawing by Swift‟s

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younger contemporary William Hogarth, whose “Morning” shows such social
types as “the Begging Crone, the Loose Girl, the Persistent Rake, the Shivering
Page, and the Old Maid” in a snowy street scene with dark buildings and a
darker sky.
The first two lines of this poem are periodic, indicating their literary target in
the “poetic” phrase “showed the ruddy morn‟s approach. ” What signals this
morning, however, is not sunlight on a misty mountain top, but the beginning
of urban bustle as the traffic begins to appear. Lines 3-4 lead us to anticipate a
satire on sexual behavior between the upper and lower classes, as the servant
girl sneaks back to her bedroom from her master‟s, to muss up her own bed to
make it look slept in.
But Swift is not really in one of his satiric moods in this poem; the only other
direct references to the injustice of social rank occur at line 13 (the nobility can
live in debt, and must be pestered by bill collectors) and lines 15-16 (the prison
system requires the convicts to pay for their keep, and thus they are permitted
to roam the streets at night to “steal for fees”).
What the poem mostly catalogues are ordinary working-class people
energetically starting their daily pursuits. They are not particularly attractive,
but they are not grotesques: the apprentice in his worn-out shoes cleans the
grimy shop front and sprinkles water on the floor to keep down the dust; Moll
(a lower-class nickname for Mary), ruddier than the morn with her flaming face
(perhaps from drink), flourishes her mop ostentatiously as she prepares to
scrub; the scavenger pokes in the gutters for objects to sell; the dealer in
“small-coal” (either charcoal, or small lumps of coal, for domestic heating)
boomingly announces his wares, while his counterpart the truly small boy who
cleans chimneys chimes in with his shrill soprano voice. The town is busy, and
most of the business of these people is concerned with putting the street back
into some semblance of cleanliness. (The “small-coal man” is by contrast a
source of grime, both from the smoky fires he supplies and from the coal dust
that must coat his clothes and trail behind him as he walks. ) Whatever has

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gone awry in the night must be put to right, the removal of dirt and of thieves,
so along with the cleaners come the turnkey and the “watchful bailiffs. ”
The last two couplets put an end to the busy activities-the prison doors are
locked up, the bailiffs stand silently, and finally (late?) some schoolboys
shuffle slowly to their form of imprisonment. The scene subsides into a
relatively calm day.

Dylan Thomas
DO NOT GO GENTLE (P. 890)
In form this poem is a villanelle. Its nineteen lines utilize only two rime
sounds (based on “night” and “day”); its alternating refrains rime “night” and
“light. ” Most villanelles are charming, graceful, light poems, characteristic of
society verse. Thomas here gives the villanelle a force and intensity it had
never had before-though many poets have tried to match it since. (“Do not go
gentle” is perhaps a turning point in the history of the villanelle. )
As shown by the concluding section, the poem is addressed to the poet‟s
father. In some respects a fierce militant most of his life, the elder Thomas in
his 80s went blind, became ill, and showed a tendency to turn soft and gentle.
The son was dismayed by this change. He wanted his father to die as he had
lived, to maintain his salty individuality to the last. Though the poet was
something of a pantheist in his religious belief and felt that death was “good, ”
he still considered it right and natural that men should resist death, put up a
struggle against it, not die placidly. “Wise men … Good men … Wild men …
Grave men, ” he tells his father in separate stanzas (punning on the word
“Grace”, ) have all for good reasons raged against their approaching deaths. In
the last section (where his tenderness toward his father is manifest), he prays
his father (paradoxically) to “Curse” and “bless” him with his “fierce tears” and
to “not gentle into that good night. ” (“Good night” is both a metaphor for
death and a pun for farewell. )

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Dylan Thomas
FERN HILL
“Fern Hill” is Dylan Thomas‟s evocation of the delight, the wonder, the long
carefree rapture of boyhood summers spent on a farm in Wales. The reader is
made to share his pleasure in the barns and fields and orchards, in the
farmhouse itself, in the animals both wild and domestic, in afternoon and night
and morning. In the fourth stanza the poet compares this boyhood experience to
the experience of Adam and Eve in Eden. Like theirs, it chief characteristics
were joy and innocence and a feeling of timeliness. Like theirs, his experience
came at the beginning of life, and, like them, he felt it would last forever. But
the theme of the poem is the transience of youthful joy and carefree innocence.
All the time that he is heedless of time, he is bound by its chains, which hold
him “green and dying. ” Just as Adam and Eve were thrust out of Eden, so the
boy is to be thrust out of the garden of childhood.
The boy is the protagonist of the poem. Time is the antagonist-unseen,
unfelt, and unheeded by the boy, but comprehended clearly by the mature poet
looking back. The boy, “happy as the grass was green, ” feels that he has
forever. But, inexorably, in its alternation of afternoon and night and morning,
Time is carrying him out of the enchanted realm, “out of grace, ” toward age
and death. The boy how is “prince of the apple towns” (6)-and described with
such aristocratically connotative adjectives as “golden” (5), “honored” (6),
“lordly” (7), and “famous” (10), who feels himself master of all he surveys –is
at the same time, though unaware of it, a slave, held by Time in “chains” (54).
Thomas has a talent for refurbishing clichés and getting new or double
meaning out of them, both the old and the new. “Happy as the grass was green”
(2) and “Happy as the heart was long” (38) both remind us of the commoner
expression “Happy as the day is long” and gather is meaning into fresher
expressions. “Once below a time” (7) gathers up the meaning of “Once upon a
time” and bends it to the use of the poem‟s theme –that the boy is really a slave
of time, not master of it.

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 In “All the sun long” (19) and “all the moon long” (25) the post freshness the
familiar phrases by substituting metonymies for the expected “day” and “night.
” In “Adam and maiden” (30) Thomas substitutes for “Eve” a noun which
represents her in her innocence and at the same time sounds like “Eden, ” thus
tripling its significance.

Jean Toomer
REAPERS
The plural title ambiguously captures the central contrast of this brief lyric:
there are two sets of reapers; both identified as “black” men, in the first line,
and then “horses” in the fifth. The contrast is developed between the human
reapers with their sense of completeness (as well as their sense of tradition “as
a thing that‟s done” refers both to their satisfaction with the accomplishment of
a sharpened scythe, and to their sense that this is the way the job is to be done),
and the machine-like horses drawing the mechanical mower, insensitive to
what they destroy, cutting both “weeds and shade, ” and slaughtering animals
in their path.
There is of course a distortion in this contrast, since it does not pit the human
reapers against the human driver of the mowing machine. Instead it pretends
that the inhuman horses are the voluntary force in the use of the machine. The
focus moves from the observed and admired human mowers of lines 1-4 to the
observed and admired human movers 1-4 to the observed and detested effects
of mechanical mowing in lines 5-8. But do not human reapers also cut both
weeds and “shade, ” and do they not kill field rats? Contrasting the effect of the
mechanical mower to the attitudes of the human mowers is in its way unfair,
thematically, for it compares not the acts of moving, human or machine, but the
feeling of the observer. He sees in the reapers a collective humanity which
nevertheless maintains its individuality although they act in unison, and in a
traditional, inherited fashion, they start “one by one” (4). On the other hand, he
does not see the driver of the horses drawing the mower; in fact, he credits the
horses with driving.

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 It is tempting to see here a racial suggestion: to the white owners of the
fields, black men and black horses are synonymous. But there is the further
suggestion that the sensitive observer, pitying the bleeding rat, cannot see the
driver of the mowing machine. Is he white? Is he driving horses now, as he
drove black men formerly? And is the speaker of the poem black (as the poet
was)?
However we answer such questions, we must at least recognize that the
poem is clear in its preference for “black reapers” over “black horses, ” even to
the extent of glossing over the distorted comparison that result from such a
preference. The sound qualities of the poem reinforce the preference: in the
first quatrain, the frequent alliteration of s and st, the assonance of long e
sounds, and the lilting repetition serves to emphasize not “silent swinging” (4)
but “startled … stained” violence, and b and hard e alliteration lend weightiness
and abruptness, while the long e assonance turns up in words of negative
connotation: weeds, field, squealing, bleeds.

John Updike
EX-BASKETABLL PLAYER
So much of this pathetic portrait is involved with realistic detail that the
poem seems at first to have no purpose beyond the poignant presentation of a
has been. There is even the danger, in such precision of local detail, that the
reader may fail to “see” what the imagery presents. For example, the footnote
to lines 10-11 might be expanded to include what Updike remarks in the
prefect to his 1982 reprinting of the poem (The Carpentered Hen, p. xvi):
readers today “have never seen glass-headed pumps” and thus will not
recognize the cartoon-like personification as being very barely literal. And the
imagery of lines 29-30 is also very close to being literal, depending on one‟s
ability to visualize those particular (and now nearly forgotten) candy wrappers
and boxes in the variety of shapes and colors that might look quite a lot like
tiers if fans in the grandstands. This realistic near literalism, now rapidly losing
itself in specific reference that can only be recaptured historically, is directly

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related to the central theme of the poem; the obscurity of reference may be seen
as an analogue to the obscurity of the title character. He was, vividly and in
living memory (22), “the best” basketball player in a small-town high school.
But that reality has slipped into the past, and he is now only a gas-station
attendant.
The small-town atmosphere is evoked by the proper naming Pearl Avenue,
Colonel McComsky Plaza (no doubt named for a “famous” resident), Berth‟s
Garage, Mae‟s luncheonette-as if these local landmarks are totally familiar to
speaker and reader. Flick played for “the high-school then, the Wizards, ” not
for Central or Jefferson High-there‟s only one in this town. The team name
suggests how little, and how much, the magic of high school athletics may
actually achieve. Flick was the best wizard among the Wizards, setting “a
county record, ” but how big is a county? And more to the point of the poem,
what is the value of such a record, whatever the size of the poem, what is the
value of such a record, whatever the size of the competitive field?
That of course is Updik‟s question: what is the meaning of this life that
found its definition and achievement in an adolescent accomplishment, and that
now lives in the nostalgia of former spectators and adorers, but is vestigially
present only in “hands … fine and nervous on the lug wrench” (23)? The
situational irony of line 24 points to the value issues of the poem: “It makes no
difference to the wrench, though. ”
There are two potential difficulties in teaching this poem, depending on the
student level. If taught in high school, the poem may too easily be taken for a
sermon (“He never learned a trade, ” so we should or we‟ll wind up like Flick);
if taught in college, it may too easily lead to smugness (we knew better than to
make small-town high school and “a country record” our goals). These
potential problems may of course lead to fruitful discussions: is this a satire
directed at young people who have too narrow a goal? Did Flick choose t be
what he became? Was it Flick himself who defined his life, who bestowed on
himself the nickname that so aptly fits a star basketball player, but now

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ironically seems to refer to nothing more than what he must do with his ashes
as he “smokes those thin cigars”?

David Wagoner
RETURN TO THE SWAMP
“To behind again … [to] shape, something from nothing” (line 1 and 18), is
the speaker‟s direct symbolic action of returning to a swamp so as to learn
“what the mergansers know” (12). The symbol is open-ended, suggesting as it
does the various possibilities on instinctual truth, divine inspiration, or creative
imagination. The speaker seeks certainties, wanting to penetrate the reflecting
and refracting surface of the water, wanting to find some hidden clue that will
make more meaning that he has been able to discover.
But the truth is presented with dramatic irony in the very description of the
swamp with which he begins: “its rich decay, its calm disorder” (2), the solidity
of shallow, the “upside-down redoubling” of the visible world (8). This
originally frustrating condition is the paradoxical truth that has sent him “back
to the swamp, ” to the origins represented by evolutionary development and/or
divine creation, where he hopes to find something more satisfying to his need.
What he finds is a redefinition of the world as he already knows it, all its
beautiful and frustrating swampiness made momentarily exciting by an
imaginative, artistic action. The very natural event of a “bass taking a fly” (20)
is metaphorically compared both to the illusive skill of a circus ring-master and
to the creative skill of a poet remaking the world in “beautiful exchanges of
stress” (22). The thing most sought for, the scientific / spiritual certainty, gives
way to the excitement of rediscovery “suddenly near, there, near in the water”
(25) of the fairy-tale forge-prince.

Derek Walcott
THE VIRGINS
Derek Walcott, a native Caribbean poet, is disturbed by what American
commercial exploitation (the “American dream” of a better life for all achieved

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through abundant material goods) has done to the once simple life and
unspoiled natural beauty of the American Virgin Islands. He expresses his
distress through his observation of (and observation on) Frederiksted, the chief
seaport of one of these Islands, while walking through its streets. His
observations are sharpened by his skillful use of irony and of words and
phrases of double meaning.
The irony begins with the title, for clearly these islands (originally named
after Elizabeth, the virgin queen) are no longer virgins. They have been
prostituted to American materialism. The “dead” (deserted) streets down which
the poet walks are deserted probably because of the midday heat, but the
adjective leads the poet to the reflection that the two n is “dead” in another
sense, having lost its soul to tourism. (The phrase “the first free port to die for
tourism” ironically reverses a more familiar pattern of words often found on
local monuments; the first citizen of this town to die for freedom). Continuing
his metaphor, the poet describes himself as walking at a “funeral” pace
(slowly). One suspects a pun in the adjective “sun-stoned” (built of stones
heated by the sun; drunk or drugged by the sun‟s heat). There is a complex
verbal irony in the poet‟s use of “civilized” and “the good life” and a situational
irony in the conjoining of “the good life” and “the American dream” with a
rising crime rate. The empty condominium (paradoxically drowning in
vacancy) gives evidence of a building boom in which the developer‟s eager
anticipations miscalculated the actual demand. The roulettes spinning “rustilly
to the wind” evidence the same kind of overdevelopment at the same time that
they testify to what “tourism, ” “the American dream, ” and “the good life”
actually substitute for the speaker‟s “small-islander‟s simplicities”: not only a
rising crime rate, but cheap dreams of quick wealth made at the gambling
casinos. In line 16 “trade” has the double meaning of trade wind and
commerce. The spinning of the roulette wheels in related both by circular
motion and monetary motivation to the “revving up” f motorboats and yachts
headed for the “banks” (fishing banks and money banks) of “silver” (silver-

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sided fish and silver coins). And if “silver” is related to coinage, perhaps
“green” is associated with dollar bills.

Marilyn Nelson Waniek

OLD BIBLES
Marilyn Nelson Waniek, a black poet, here gives a gently humorous portrait
of a speaker with an amusing dilemma what to do with a “sacred” object which
one no longer wants. The speaker would like to get rid of her old torn-up,
scrawled-on, cover chewed Bibles, but fears that to do so would be a sin. She
has therefore let them accumulate till they occupy a “whole shelf”.
Perhaps the chief problem in reading the poem is to make a correct
determination of its tone. Is this a portrait of a pious and perhaps slightly crazy
woman who regards throwing an old Bible away, “stepping on a crack” on the
sidewalk, and failing to “cross” one‟s fingers when telling a fib as sins! Or is
the speaker an intelligent woman who is slyly poking fun at herself for her
inability to throw away a worn-out Bible? The vocabulary, the images, and the
comparisons in the poem, all in my opinion, support the latter interpretation.
Dropping an American flag, even accidentally, is also a sin, the speaker tells
us sin that she herself had cone committed. She had felt guilty for weeks
afterwards. “A gaunt bearded stranger / in tricolor clothes” (Uncle Sam) had
come to get her. But since there is no real Uncle Sam, these events clearly
occurred in her imagination. She makes Uncle Sam the embodiment of her
self-accusing conscience. But did she really feel that much guilt and for that
long? Or is she not humorously exaggerating “embroidering” on the truth, we
might say, and possibly without crossing her fingers-making a joke at her own
expense?
The speaker is a religious person. Her very possession of so many Bibles is
evidence of that, but she is not so religious that she cannot perceive and laugh
at her own foibles. And thus, throughout the poem, she exhibits a sometimes
subtle and always delightful sly wit: the suggestion that Bibles may have souls

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“like little birds fluttering / over the dump / when the wind blows their pages”;
the statement that Bibles are holy, like “kosher. ”
This is not broad humor, however. Nit slapstick. In the last section, which is
the most poetically resonant in the poem, the humor is so interwoven with true
religious feeling that the two are inextricable.

Robert Penn Warren

BOY WANDERING IN SIMMS’ VALLEY
The poem begins with exploration; it ends with a revelation. The speaker,
whom we may not unfairly identify with the poet (who grew up in rural
Kentucky), is an adult recalling an incident from his boyhood. There are
several time levels in the poem, and it is important to get them straight. First,
there was a time (barely implied in the poem) when Simms brought his wife to
live in the isolated valley farm and together they were able to keep the place
“trim” (she the house, and he the fields). Then the wife fell sick and became
bedridden, and “for long years” Simms had to bear the burden of working the
fields and nursing her, while the place went gradually “to wrack. ” When the
wife dies, Sims let out his “spindly” livestock to forage at will, lay down beside
his wife, and shot himself. So isolated was the farm that their bodies were not
discovered till two years later, and then only by accident. A hunter, sitting
down to rest on the porch-edge, was disturbed by the smell, began to “prowl, ”
found two bodies in an advance state of decomposition in the upstairs bedroom,
and “high-tailed” to town. The town officials gave the bodies a decent burial
but were unable to find a purchaser even at auction (“tax-sale”) for the
rundown, isolated farm. The time of the boy‟s visit is many years later, and the
property has continued to deteriorate. There has been time for maples about
eighteen inches thick to grow in the remoter fields. The barn is down, the house
itself is “ready to fall, ” the “place” is being reclaimed by the wilderness.
“Lonely and forgotten, ” it has had few if any visitors since the burial of the
farmer and his wife. Its furnishings are undisturbed by human pillage; nature
has been the destructive agent.

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 In stanza 1 the speaker, describing his entry into the valley, gives some idea
of its inaccessibility (though there must have been easier access somewhere,
some road by which Simms took produce to market and fetched supplies from
town). He also subtly foreshadows. In stanzas 2-3 he relates what he knew (had
been told) about the suicide of Simms and the finding of the bodies. Stanza 4
opens with a generalization –“A dirt farmer needs a good wife to keep a place
trim” –as the boy reflects abut the dilapidation of the farm and the hardships of
Simms‟ life after his wife became ill. Stanza 6 finds him standing in the
upstairs bedroom, noticing further deterioration, and reflecting on the events
that had taken place there. In stanza 7 seven the sinking sun brings him out of
his near-trance, and he prepares to leave. But casting a last glance around, he
suddenly sees “the old enameled bedpan, high on a shelf, ” and is brought again
to a halt. In a final line, set off by it and breaking the stanza pattern, we re told
questions that arose in his mind. It is the bedpan which furnishes, in the full
Joyce and sense, the “epiphany” of the tale. It takes the boy deeper into the
meanings of the events than his reflections had yet gone; it makes his ask and
partially realize “what life is, and love, and what they may be” what they are in
essence, and Simmses”. Though the poem leaves us with a question, not an
answer, it provides some of the materials needed for an answer. It tells us at
once how terrible life can be, and how great human devotion can be. For
Simms the latter part of life had been struggling, without help, to keep a poor
farm going, the fields plowed and planted, the stock fed, and the crops
harvested; and love had been emptying bedpans for a sick wife-as revolting and
filthy a task as one can imagine (and certainly no part of “love‟s sweet dream”).
Yet life was worth living for Simms only so long as he could carry those
bedpans for his wife. When she died, he took his life, not in the fields or in the
barn but by her side, not because the burdens of life had become too much for
him (they could only be eased by her death) but because, when he had no one
to care for, he had nothing to live for. He did it deliberately, taking thought first
to let the lives took free to forage.

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 The poem is written in stanza riming abad. Though there is no sharply
definable meter, the rhythm flows loosely through five lines-except for the last,
which has six. The language (but not always the syntax) keeps close to the
colloquial –“12 gauge” (8), “to jaw” (9), “high-tailed” (12), “his old lady” (14).

Walt Whitman
A NOISELESS PATIENT SPIDER (P. 891)
The situation of a man accepting the energies of a spinning spider as an
example to himself should recall the famous story of the fourteenth –century
Scottish King Robert the Bruce (Robert I), who in apparent defeat retried into a
cave for refuge. There he watched, the tireless effort of a spider which despite
repeated failure refused to give up spinning; he King resolved to continue in
battle-and was victorious. By the nineteenth century this anecdote had become
a moral exemplum of the virtue of pertinacity (a narrative version of “if at first
you don‟t succeed, try, try again!”).
In its earliest unprinted version this poem had as its theme the poet‟s sense of
loneliness as he searches for love in a world of “fathomless latent souls of love.
”
The present version transforms both the moral tale and the earlier unprinted
poem, changing the subject to the soul‟s yearning for spiritual truth. “In
measureless oceans of space, ” the soul seeks security, an anchor. ” Despite the
traditional symbolism of an anchor as Christ or as the hope for salvation (see
Hebrews 6:19), the poem does not openly suggest that Christianity is the
answer to the speaker‟s problem. In fact, a “ductile anchor” attached to a
“gossamer thread” suggest fragility and plasticity, rather than the security of a
defined, systematic religion.
In Whitman‟s image, the spider resembles a fisherman, unreeling his lines as
he launches them forth. The vocabulary of the poem tends to corroborate an
implicit nautical or fishing context: promontory, launched, unreeling, oceans,
bridge, and anchor. Though the speaker seems not be consciously aware of it,
the imagery itself suggests a Christian solution to his problem, the anchor of
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Christian salvation, with the speaker‟s search evoking the church‟s role as a
“fisher of men. ”
While the poem draws an explicit comparison between the spider‟s activity
and that of the spiritually questing man there are clearly implied contrasts as
well: the contrast of size perspective (a spider‟s promontory is indeed “title, ”
and the area of exploration may seem to it to be a “vacant vast surrounding, ”
but the range of “measureless oceans of space” inhabited by man is
considerably grander); the spider‟s patience is in contrast to the “musing,
venturing, throwing, seeking” of the man; the noise-less ness of the spider may
be contrasted to this verbal outpouring from the human being; and of curse the
spider‟s actions must be read literally, the man‟s metaphorically.
The poem should be examined for examples of alliteration, assonance and
consonance, as poetic devices providing a replacement for regular rhythm and
rime overstatement, particularly in the spatial references, emphasizes the need
to recognize contrasts within the overt comparison.

Walt Whitman
THERE WAS A CHILD WENT FORTH
If readers have studied Tennyson‟s “Ulysses” (P. 639), they might be asked
to consider the difference between Ulysses‟ claim that “I am a part of all that I
have met” (line 18), and Whitman‟s statement that “that object he became, /
And that object became part of him” (lines 1-2). The two phrases of Whitman‟s
statement refer to two related but different psychological processes, one we
would call “identification” or “empathy, ” the other “memory. ” The first,
operating at the moment of perception, projects himself outward into objects,
the second extends the perception and empathy forward in time, absorbing and
collecting his experiences. Neither is a particularly intellectual process. The
implication is that the more sensitively he projects himself, the more inclusive
his memory. Furthermore, the poem implies that the growth of the individual
child relies upon this combination of projection and collection, and only

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moment (lines 27-30) is there an overt reference to the powers of the child to
reason or judge.
Each of the five verse-paragraphs consists of a single sentence (the question
marks at lines 29-30 are parenthetical, the long fifth sentence ending only with
the predication in line 39). After the introductory summary sentences, the finite
verb forms occur at the beginnings of sentences 2 and 3, and at the ends of
sentences 4 and 5. The rest of the poem consists of catalogues f noun-phrases
listing the “object” that “became part of him. ”
The four sentences following the introduction present stages of increasing
complexity in the child‟s perception: first, a perception of details of the natural
world, then of persons, then in a generalized way of his parents, and finally of
his parents in detailed actions arousing emotional responses. In line 27, the
child experiences his first doubts about what is real or unreal, and whether his
trusting eyes have been reporting objective truth. These questions are followed
by a review, in reverse order, of the objects of perception-back through the
human world and its activities to the natural world of water and sky. The tone
of the last lines, 31-39, emphasizes distance and the perception of variety and
beauty.
The essential structure of the poem is thus a collection of objects perceived
moving from the natural to the human; a turning point at which the child arises
intellectual questions about reality; and a generalizing recapitulation
emphasizing beauty-as in the doubting questions had to be ignored in a wiled
act of perceiving the grandeur which individual “specks” yield when seen from
a distance.
A final line which universalized his process to include the reader was
dropped by Whitman in 1867; “And these become of him or her that peruses
them now. ” Although the poem may seem more directly autobiographical
without that conclusion. Seem more directly autobiographical without that
conclusion. Whitman seems to have trusted that the process he presents will
strike readers as being true of them even without the line.

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Walt Whitman
WHEN I HEARD THE LEARN’D ASTRONOMER
This poem expresses a conflict which may seem even more cogent toddy
than when Whitman wrote it: precise scientific knowledge is an assault on the
cherished mysteries of the universe. Feelings similar to Whitman‟s were voiced
in the wake of man‟s first steps on the surface of the moon on July 20, 1969; as
the cameras of rocket probes send close-up photographs of the more distant
planets in our solar system, the skies may seem to lose their appealing wonder.
Whitman‟s ironic contrasts are readily perceived because of their directness
and abundance, and though it may be a violation of his attitude toward “charts”
and “columns, ” they may be indicated as paired lists:

Crowd in lecture room individual man

Much applause silence
Mathematical counting “unaccountable”
feeling
Lighted room dark night
Indoors outdoors
Approving audience tired and sick poet
Sitting rising and
gliding, wandering
Scientific precision random looking,
“from time to time”
Scientific thought poetic feeling

These ironic contrasts make the speaker‟s decision seem more natural, more
attractive, more human. The initial repetition of “when” in the first four lines
has a hypnotic sameness, imitating the poet‟s boredom with the regularity of

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scientific proofs; and the redundancy of “proofs, figures, columns, charts
diagrams, ” and “add, divide, measure” reinforces the sense of repetitiousness
and-for the speaker the meaninglessness of such data about the universe. The
phrase “perfect silence” in the last line ironically comments on the supposed
perfection of scientific knowledge: genuine perfection is not mathematical or
measurable, but is the harmonious response of perfect feeling to perfect stars.
The poem presents Whitman‟s distaste for precise, rational knowledge and
his love of emotional, instinctive wonder at the mysteries of nature. His choice
of the word “mystical” rather than “mysterious” extends his preference into a
claim that his experience surpasses the astronomer‟s knowledge in a religious
sense as well. His insight into the wonders of heaven seems to him to penetrate
the merely mysterious and to reach to supernatural wisdom.

Richard Wilbur
THE MILL
The death of a friend must always move us to questions that we cannot
answer, and leave us with a sense of emptiness and waste, especially if the
friend‟s life did not end successfully, if life in some way defeated him. What
has become, we may ask, of his memories, his appreciations, all his investment
in living and experience? In the lost, abandoned mill with its wheel still turning
and turning, Richard Wilbur has found the perfect symbol for those haunting,
unanswered questions, that sense of emptiness and waste.
The organization of the poem emphasizes the passage of time. It begins with
the “spoiling daylight, ” the late afternoon sun dying and for a moment coming
in at such a slant that every mote of dust in the air is made visible and
glistening. Then the friend recalls places in his past-“the names of streets, the
exact look / Of lilacs” in Cincinnati in 1903, the turning mill wheel in an
isolated valley in Brazil or Tennessee. The friend remembering is presented by
the poet remembering. But the poet has already forgotten whether the mill
wheel was in Brazil or Tennessee, and when he, too, dies, all of these memories
will be gone. What will it matter, then, that these places ever existed? Time

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needs, human life and human memory to give it significance. “Time all alone
and talking to himself” has no more meaning than a mill wheel which continue
to operate when it serves no human purpose.
Wilbur‟s choice of words for sound and manning is uncannily precise. The
“spoiling daylight” refers not only to fading daylight but to the passage of time
that “spoils” all. The friend‟s voice that “rose form the shades” of the darkened
barroom blends into the dead friend that rises from the shades of death in the
poet‟s mind. The word sound in “Your dead life‟s sound and sovereign
anecdote” serves both as noun and adjective having two quite independent
meanings, and sovereign not only means supreme but gathers in the meaning of
a British gold coin from its association with “round sums” and pocket change.
The onomatopoetic verbs and repeated k sounds of the “crazy buckets /
Creaking and lumbering out of the clogged race” reproduces the very sound
and motion of the buckets; the word rattle is onomatopoetic and suggests
sound-talk that has no meaning. In the line it is not only the mill wheel which
“turns and turns, ” but the mind itself which turns this memory “over and over.
” Sound, position, and arrangement all serve the economy of meaning.

Nancy Willard
A WREATH TO THE FISH
Hamlet riddling insults king Claudius with another such “wreath” as he
shows the “progress” of a ling‟s corpse: “A man may fish with the worm that
hath fed of that worm. ” But unlike Willard‟s, Hamlet‟s wreath is logically
connected, a casual sequence. Willard‟s poem seems to progress merely
associatively, apparently following no development except that an idea or
image used in presenting one thing will then be a subject for further
development with no end is sigh. So the “mail” (scales) of the fish protects it
against the cold of the stream, the stream leads to fishermen‟s lines, to the
hook, the hook to the caught fish, the fish to the Pope, and the Pope back to the
opening question, “Who is this fish?” Each of the topics is explored poetically,
through metaphor and metonymy, but chiefly through personification. The fish

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is an armor-clad dweller in the stream, his only wealth the suit of mail made of
“thin coins. ” The stream is a slightly mad woman who “lolls day in an unmade
bed” (one of many puns in the poem, which also seem to have associative
energy-as later the fishermen‟s lines lead to the written lines of scrawling eel).
The hook is a “fanatic who will not let go, and the fish, finally, “transfigured”
into a “little martyr, ” so that the title itself contains a pun as a figurative wreath
of glory is bestowed on it.
All of this wit springs from the speaker‟s playfully musing question, “Who is
this fish, ” the “who” representing the germ for the flowering of
personifications. But, the poem implies, once you start wondering about the
meanings of title things, you may find yourself on a long and convoluted path,
with little to guide you but you're with and your ability to find links and
connections. It is almost “a little miracle” that the poem manages to close the
circle.

Miller Williams
A POEM FOR EMILY
The best approach to this poem about “arithmetic and love” is probably
through the standard questions: Who is the speaker? To whom is he speaking?
What is the occasion?
The speaker is a grandfather, age 53, speaking to his grand daughter, age less
than one full day. The occasion is the birth of the granddaughter. But is the
speaker literally addressing the child or is he apostrophizing her? Since she is
asleep and would not understand his language even were she awake, he is
apostrophizing her. At the same tie, however, he is putting his thoughts and
feelings into a dead, she may read and understand and be warmed by. The
message is: “I stood and loved you while you slept. ”
But between the beginning and the end there are intermediate times to think
about, and some paradoxes to probe. The first paradox occurs, in fact, in the
first two lines. The speaker, only “a hand‟s width” way from the child, calls it
the “farthest oner” from him. The paradox however is easily solved. At that
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moment he is, of all his Kin, nearest the baby in space but farthest from her in
time. They are separated in time by 53 years (two generations).
The years later, he muse, the child will be “neither closer nor as far. ” The
first phrase can be read in two ways. The ten year old will be no closer in space
nor in time (they will still be separated by 53 years), but whichever way we
read it the second phrase offers a paradox. She will not be separated “as far” in
time as she is now. The paradox is resolved by realizing that chronological time
and psychological time are not the same. When the granddaughter is ten, she
and her grandfather will have a common language in which they can converse
and she will have learned something the distance in time between them.
In stanza 3 and 4 the speaker projects himself even farther into the future:
when he “by blood and luck” is 86, she will be 33, with children of her own.
(The word “luck” alters the initial “When” into something more like If. ) By
then, he is sure, she will have read her children (his great grand children) this
poem, so they will know he loves them (and says so) and loves their mother
(his granddaughter, Emily, whose birth inspired the poem). In the final stanza
(beginning with the last two words of the fourth stanza) the speaker both
projects himself into an even more remote time in the future and returns to time
present where he stands beside the new baby‟s bed. In this distant future, when
the baby is old and the speaker is dead, this poem, “a thing that might be kept /
a while, ” will tell her what he would have said then, and says now in the poem.
The speaker asserts in stanza 4 that “whatever is / is always or never was. ”
True things last forever; false things die. The true thing celebrated in the poem
is love.

William Wordsworth
RESOLUTION AND INDEPENDENCE (P. 896)
Wordsworth‟s sister Dorothy records in her Journal the meeting that she and
her brother had with the old leech-gatherer who is the subject of this poem.
That entry is from 3 October 1800. Among the characteristics she names are
the following: “an old man almost double”; “he carried a bundle”; His face was
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interesting. He had dark eyes and a long nose”; “He was of Scotch parents, but
had been born in the army”; his wife had borne him ten children, all of which
were dead now except one who was a sailor; “His trade was to gather leeches,
but now leeches were scarce, and he had not strength for it”; He lived by
begging”; He had been hurt in driving a cart”; “He felt no pain till he recovered
from his first insensibility. ”
The incident of the poem, then, was in 1800, but the creative idea did not
occur to Wordsworth until April, 1802. Remember his comment “that poetry is
the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion
recollected in tranquility …”
LINES 1-49 (STANZA 1-7): The poet establishes in the first two stanzas
the mood of nature when he traveled on the moor. The tense can be changes
after the first two lines to the present.
Again he changes the tense in stanza three to the past, but the past serves
here the uses of the present in the sense of active recollection of past emotion in
present tranquility. But at the beginning of stanza four introduces the contrast
that exists between the joy of nature and the dejection of the poet. The time that
he recalls was one of a rising sun, “calm and bright, ” singing birds “in the
distant woods, ” the “pleasant noise of waters” in the air, the world teeming
with “All things that love the sun, ” the grass jeweled with rain-drops, the hare
running is his glee. But the poet‟s morning is one subjectively of dejection; on
this morning did “fears and fancies” come upon him profusely. In the midst of
“the sky-lark warbling in the sky, ” he likens himself unto “the playful hare”;
“Even such a happy Child of earth am I [the poet says]; / Even as these blissful
creatures do I fare; / Far from the world I walk, and from all care …. ” This is
the joyous side of his life-so far, so good. But, in the midst of the joy, he thinks
of that other kind of day that might come to him, that day of “Solitude, pain of
hearth, distress, and poverty. ” He recalls (stanza 6) how his life has been as “a
summer mood, ” how the sustenance of life in all its nourishing variations has
come to him so gratuitously. But, then he thinks also of the possibility that it
will not continue so for one who takes no practical thought for his own care

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and keep. The question is, how long will nature continue to give freely to one
who does not with diligent responsibility harvest grain for the garner of future
days: “But how can He [in this case the poet himself] expect that others should
/ Build for him, sow for him, and at his call / Love him; who for himself will
take no heed at all?” The poet thinks of himself as poet, one endowed with the
blessings of poetic mind and spirit, and in the contemplation of his own
privileged, joyous place in life, there comes to his mind the names of Thomas
Chatterton and Robert Burns, poets in the English tradition that Wordsworth`s
would admire. The association that he makes of himself with them with the, is
at one and the same time joyous and imminent: “We Poets in our youth begin
in gladness; / But thereof come in the end despondency and madness. ” The
universal joy of the poet‟s life is contemplated in range of potential sorrow,
poets like Chatterton and Burns were the most joyful of men, but later life
spelled for them another tale.
LINES 50-77 (STANZA 8-11): The Now at the beginning of stanza 8 (line
50) marks a turning point in the poem. From this juncture to the end, the poet
will tell how he learned what we find in the title, resolution and independence,
and he learns significantly not from a graduate of Oxford, not from nobleman,
not from legislator, not even from the owner of an state-but, rather, he learns
from a wanderer, a man who has subsisted on the gathering of leeches, a man
who is now a beggar. As the poet thinks his “untoward thoughts” about life and
struggles with all their depressing suggestions, he meets in a lonely place,
“Beside a pool bare to the eye of heaven, ” a solitary man, the poet says “The
oldest man he seemed that ever wore grey hairs. ” The poet interprets his
meeting with him to be verily a gift of Divine Grace. Stanza nine is
Wordsworth‟s long simile (almost epic in length and complexity) for the old
solitary. The purpose of the simile is to describe the leech gatherer as alive but
almost not alive. Wordsworth compares him to “a huge stone … / Couched on
the bald top of an eminence, ” and to “a sea-beast crawled forth” through using
the sea-beast as simile for the stone. The old man is nearly become one with
nature: “Motionless as a cloud the old Man stood, / That hearth not the loud

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winds when they call …. ” The encounter reveals to the poet a man of great
age, bent double, “feet and head / Coming together in life‟s pilgrimage …. ” He
looks as if he might be made taut in his bent posture by the tight strain of some
past suffering, rage, or sickness. The poet is picturing him as very nearly
supernatural, at least somehow beyond the usual scope of human experience:
he seemed to bear “Amore than human weight …. ” Stanza sixteen will further
draw such a portrait, as will stanza nineteen.
LINES 78-105 (STANZA 12-15): The old man finally moves. The poet
sees him stir the waters by which he stands and then looks with fixed scrutiny
into the pond, “which he conned [con: to study, peruse, or scan], / As if he had
been reading in a book …, ” The poet greets him, and the old Man makes a
gentle answer, “In courteous speech which forth he slowly drew …. ”
Wordsworth uses the whole of stanza fourteen to describe his speech, “lofty
utterance, ” “stately speech. ” The poet (lines 88 & 89) asks him what is his
occupation and suggests that the place in which he dwells may be too lonely for
such a person as he. The old Man identifies his work as leech-gathering; this is
why he is in such a lonely place. He must, “begin old and poor, ” find his
subsistence here, though the work may be “hazardous and wearisome. ” He
depends on God‟s Providence to help him find lodging. But in all, he can be
sure that he gains “an honest maintenance, ” however much he may have to
roam “From pond to pond … form moor to moor. ”
LINES 106-119 (STANZA 16 & 17): The poet‟s responses to the old
leech-gatherer are told. While the old Man had been lonely a setting, the poet
becomes absorbed in the strange aspects of him who speaks. He loses the detail
of the answer the leech-gatherer is making; he cannot divide his words one
from another. Lines 109-112 contain the essence of the poet‟s articulation of
his feelings. They should be read carefully and compared to give voice to
experience that is very close to mystical absorption. Observe here that the poet
finds himself absorbed in the being of the solitary:
And the whole body of the Man did seem
Like one who I had met with in a dream;
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 Or like a man from some far region sent,
To give me human strength, by apt admonishment.
But the poet‟s dejection returns. He thinks again the heavy thoughts of fear,
of resistant, recalcitrant desperation. “Cold, Pain and labor, and all fleshly ills, ”
and of those poets who have been mighty, but who have died in misery. He
yearns to find some message of strength and hope in the leech-gather‟s words,
so he asks again, “‟How is it that you live, and what is it you do?”
LINES 120-133 (STANZA 18): The leech-gatherer repeats the nature of his
work, but he adds that whereas he once could gather the object of his industry
easily, he now because of the growing scarcity of leeches must travel more
extensively-still he perseveres.
LINES 127-133 (STANZA 19): The poet relates more of his private,
unspoken response to the old Man. Again it happens that his mind wanders, as
in stanza 16, while the leech-gatherer is answering his question. The poet
pictures him as even more a solitary than he is in his present state; the poet‟s
imagination working on the figure before him makes of the wandering salutary
very nearly a transcendent being, silent and eternal: “In my mind‟s eye [the
poet affirms] I seemed to see him pace / About the weary moors continually, /
Wandering about alone and silently. ” The poet is troubled by his own
imaginative responses to the Man fear that we find so often in Wordsworth‟s
work.
LINES 134140 (STANZA 20): The leech-gatherer‟s resolution and
independence is obvious to the poet in the way he moves from his
economically precarious condition to more cheerful utterances. The old Man
before the poet is obviously a person of firm mind, however decrepit he might
in appearance seem. He remains in the midst of whatever misfortune the
society of man or isolation with the bare elements brings him, a person of kind
demeanor and stately bearing. The poet compares himself to the leech-gatherer
and scorns himself for his dejection. He takes the old Man into his memory as
an anchor point for future days and asks that God will help him to preserve

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what he has learned: “God, ‟ said I, „be my help and stay secure; I‟ll think of
the leech-gatherer on the lonely moor!‟”
As suggested in other places in this study, most of Wordsworth‟s solitaries
live as a part of the nature in which they move. There is the effect in this poem
of the leech-gatherer going in and out of nature; the poet is for a time aware of
him as a person confronting him fact-to-face, but then he loses touch with him,
as if he had blended back into the nature out of which he had momentarily
stepped. One might profitably compare Pass episode in Book Sixth of The
Prelude. About lien 600 of that book Wordsworth speaks of an imaginative
experience in the following terms:
In such strength
Of usurpation, when the light of sense
Goes out, but with a flash that has revealed
The invisible word, doth greatness make abode,
There harbors ….
Wordsworth‟s light of sense seems near to going out at least twice while he
is talking to the leech-gatherer. One may also interestingly compare
Wordsworth‟s responses to the vision on Mount Snowdon in Book Fourteenth
of The Prelude with his experience while talking to the old Man he met on the
moors. He certainly intends for the reader to be impressed with the leech-
gatherer‟s insistence on survival, survival that comes to him, we feel, to great
degree because of a sheer act of will. Again, as with many of Wordsworth‟s
solitaries. Courage is presented as the capacity to endure. There is a notable
difference, however, between the courage of Michael and the courage of the
leech-gatherer; never being sure he will find them, as she has been to Michael,
whom though his farm is eventually lost after his death to owners outside his
family, can live the total of his years on land that has been made his own.
Michael draws continual sustenance more from his own deep wells of
unyielding fortitude. There is an obvious contrast also in this regard between
the leech-gatherer and the Old Cumberland Beggar. The leech-gatherer accepts
housing from those who will help him, but he does not have the regularity of

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affection and acts of kindness that the persons in the community of the Old
Cumberland Beggar‟s existence offer to him. Besides there is again with the
Cumberland Beggar an area of nature in which he can live and die, in which he
can make his home, Those who care for him are almost neighbors to him. The
leech-gatherer is much more thrown on his own resources. It is in this that the
poet learns his greatest lesson from him.
There is in the encounter between the poet and the leech-gatherer the work
of Providence. Wordsworth seems to say in the poem that this old Man was
sent to him for his own rehabilitation. This may seem in some ears to be very
close to blaspheming the preciously human, that one human being would be so
scarified for the instruction and welfare of another. But the rediscovery of
stability and hope in the midst of dejection for the poet who writes the poem is
certainly the direction for the poet who writes the poem is certainly the
direction of things from the early stanzas of the poem, where the glory of the
natural surroundings seem to be functioning expressly for the poet‟s ingesting.
The hare that leaps joyfully through the first five stanza of the poem
(mentioned three times in the five stanzas, in the second third, and (fifth)
becomes in a way emblematic of the poet‟s life. The hare is also a servant of
the benignant Grace of God, bringing to the poet reminders that he is “… such
a happy Child of earth …. ” There may be in the background the Biblical
records of god‟s directly expressed mercy for man, even as incursions that cut
with the particularity of biographical facts. But the leech-gatherer comes not so
much in the mood and manner of historical encounter as he comes in the form
of nature‟s extension of herself, ministering through an agency that is close to
being more a natural agency that a human one.
With regard to the language of the poem, Wordsworth is working with a
seven-line stanza or rhyme royal. The longer last line has the effect of slowing
down the narrative and giving more time to the reader for consideration.
Wordsworth‟s highly conscious artistry can be seen in his careful use of similes
that describe the old Man of the poem. The stone and the sea-beast of stanza

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nine, and the cloud in stanza eleven convey a sense of life that is hardly worthy
of the word.
On the subject of the language of the poem, one may question whether the
diction that the poet attributes to the leech-gatherer is “a selection of language
really used by men …. ” In stanza fourteen the old Man‟s speech is described
as “Choice words and measured phrase, above the reach / Of ordinary men ….
.”
Wordsworth as a narrative poet has most of his characters as active, persons
omitted to action. He consistently draws his characters so that they are easily
recognizable as human begins. They are usually three-dimensional characters
that have definite features. For all of his shared identity with nature-which is to
a very great degree-we still meet the leech-gatherer as man, not as thing. Stanza
ten and eleven are examples of Wordsworth‟s ability to create character in a
relatively few lines; in this he shares a fame that is owned by only a few artists,
men like Dante and Chaucer. The leech-gatherer is easily visualized, with his
body bent double, “propped, limbs, body, and pale face. / Upon a long grey
staff of shaven wood …. ” Such vivid character drawing is necessary to give
the old man the action of personality that he has, an action essential to his being
for the poet a model of resolution and independence. Fortitude not
implemented in action is hardly fortitude. Wordsworth‟s characters are real
because we can think of them as human beings. However heroic the leech-
gatherer may be, his heroism does not take him beyond the limits of the human.
We have in him no Achilles. His heroism is the kind that can be attained by
human begins we know and meet. Generally Wordsworth‟s characters are real
because we can think of them as human beings. The leech-gatherer shares
much more with Abraham than with Achilles.
But all of this is not to say that Wordsworth‟s characterization is simple a
matter of straightforward statement or description. Wordsworth‟s use of similes
in this poem has already been discussed. As a final comment on the subject, we
may notice in stanza eleven that rather than storming the beachhead of the

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reader‟s attention with utterly direct statement about the age of the man,
Wordsworth puts it all in the subtle simile of a cloud:
Upon the margin of that Moorish flood
Motionless as a cloud the old Man stood,
That hearth not the loud winds when they call;
And moveth all together, if it move at all.
What about the story in the poem? All narrative poetry to deserve its name
must tell a story in one way or another. The story of “Resolution and
Independence” has a beginning, middle, and an end. But it cannot be denied
that the story is rather slender. It is more or less lost in the midst of details
about natural slender, the feelings of the poet in his state of dejection, poetic
figures to describe the leech-gatherer, etc. one may say that the story in this
poem is to a considerable degree scarified for the ask of characterization. The
importance of the characterization, the lesser importance of the story, may
account for Wordsworth‟s having written this poem is stanzaic form. Each
stanza is really a unit by itself that has a beginning, middle, and an end. At the
end of each stanza the poet has to conclude, and at the beginning of each stanza
he must start a new. Such a structure within stanzas would naturally tend to
interrupt the flow of the story. The thin thread of the story, nearly lost at times
in the larger fabric of the characterization, may be the result of Wordsworth‟
having an idea, not a story, in mind that he wanted to elaborate in a poem. The
narrative structure is there merely to serve the idea, not the other way around.
The total impression left on the mind of the reader is that the story is not
particularly well-told, but that the idea is indeed well-illustrated. Further, the
story of “Resolution and Independence” is obstructed by the poet‟s insights
into himself. The poem is too subjective in character to be a story. The only
character that changes in the whole poem is the narrator himself. We are given
account of his psychic disturbances, and we are also given the opportunity to
observe him moving from dejection to hope. If we are to be engrossed by
“Resolutions and Independence, ” it must be for reason other than its engaging
story line.

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William Wordsworth
STRANGE FITS OF PASSION HAVE I KNOWN (P. 900)
The poet will tell of a strange fit of passion that he has known, but he will
tell his message only to lovers. The reason for such exclusiveness is that only
the lover would understand the curious psychological responses that he has
experienced while approaching Lucy‟s cottage (“cot”). A reading of the other
four Lucy poems would mean that we read this one knowing that Lucy is dead
at the time the poet tells of his strange fit of passion. However, stanza two may
be in itself enough to identify the fact that the lover tells of an incident that
happened while Lucy was still living: “When she I loved looked every day /
Fresh as a rose in June. ‟ On a moonlit night the poet rode towards his sweet
heart‟s cottage. Gazing dreamily at the moon, he fell asleep on his slipped
down the sky. When suddenly the moon dropped down behind the cottage of
his love, the “fond and wayward” thought slid into his mind, “If Lucy should
be dead!”
Probably of all the Lucy poems, the simplicity of thought and language is
best in this piece. The moon becomes for the poet in his fervent love a symbol
for his beloved; as with most human things, his great joy in her preciousness to
him made him fear the sorrow of possible loss. The poem is most human
probably for just this reason, the haunting, nudging fear of the certain limits of
mortality. However simple the poem may be as a love song, it is profound at
the point of commenting on the certain sorrow that comes in all human
relationships regardless of how joyful they be. Indeed, one of the very nearly
inevitable suggestions the poem has is that the greater the joy, the greater the
sorrow. Life is a blessed gift, but it is also a vexing mystery. The coffin worm
is never that far away from the flowers that celebrate birth or marriage.
Notice the traditional use of poetic figures of speech with the simile in stanza
two, “Fresh as a rose in June …. ”

William Wordsworth
THE SOLITARY REAPER (P. 899)
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 The poem is about the song that the poet has heard a “solitary Highland lass‟
sing. She overflows the vale with her music, “a melancholy strain” that she
sings while cutting and binding the grain. The second stanza describes the
poet‟s welcome of her song, describes it by way of clarifying that the reaper‟s
song is / as sweet as the nightingale‟s, / that her voice is more thrilling than that
of the Cuckoo-bird “Breaking the silence of the seas / Among the fartherest
Hebrides. ” In stanza three the subject of the reaper‟s song is contemplated. In
some of the most memorable poetic lines in the English language, the theme of
her song is considered as possible “… old, unhappy, far-off things, / And
battles long ago, ” or “… some more humble lay, / Familiar matter of to-day, ”
or “Some natural sorrow, loss, or pain, / That has been, and may be again. ”
The last stanza contains the poet‟s response to the song, beginning
appropriately “Whater‟er the theme …. ” The important fact about the music he
has heard is that it has so involved his imagination that he thought it eternal, so
entranced him that he finds it still echoing in his imagination as he goes on his
way.
The readers find many of the Romantics sensitive to music. In reading
Wordsworth‟s “The Solitary Reaper, ” one may find Shelley‟s “To a Skylark, ”
or Keats‟s “Ode to a Nightingale” coming easily to mind. In all three of these
poems (as would be true of others that could be cited), the source of the music
is alone so alone that it is either invisible or is very nearly invisible, the area of
the poet‟s hearing is overflowing with sound, the strain is to some extent
melancholy, though it might be joyous too. Indeed, one of the abiding
characteristic of the poetry of such Romantics as Wordsworth, Coleridge,
Shelley, and Keats is that the melancholy is at one with the joyous. As Keats
puts it in the “Ode on Melancholy, ” “Ay, in the very temple of delight / Veil‟d
Melancholy have her Sovran shrine …. ” Further, the Romantics more often
than not showed a great deal of interest in the far-away and the long-ago. But
the Romantics‟ interest is evident in “The Solitary Reaper. ” Wordsworth is on
the whole more prone to make poetic subject matter out of ordinary, everyday
human experience, though he handles such materials in a way that causes them

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to become uncommon, or romantic. Wordsworth in “The Solitary Reaper” uses
such allusions as the distant sands of Arabia and “the farthest Hebrides, ” but
they are still fenced in poetically: they are, however distant in miles or tone,
within the margin of the field of grain where the singer cuts and binds.
We know nothing at all about the reaper‟s real feelings as she sings, just as
we do not know what the words of her song say. In fact, the mystery of her
feelings is heightened by the mystery of the song she sings. We might wonder
whether she wants to be in the field or not, but we find nothing to tell us,
beyond the fact that her song is melancholy; but that does not really say
anything definite, for many workers essentially satisfied with their tasks in tone
plaintive melody. The lack of definitive explanation is deliberate. The poet‟s
intent is to draw the reader into the mystery that he has experienced and has
been haunted by. The poem is a success or a failure according to whether we
are engaged like the poet in the mystery of the encounter he has had, whether
we are made, as he was, “motionless and still. ” Whatever details we are given
(and we get very few details only in stanzas one and four) are to provoke our
imaginations so that we will continue the imaginative flow that the poet starts.
He only intends to prime the pump. Generally, Romantic art operates not by
statement but by suggestion, suggestion through imagery and myth. It is not the
character-drawing of the reaper that engages us, not in the sense of enumerating
characteristic. How much are we actually told about her as a blood-and-bones
person? She is alone in the field, she cuts and binds, she sings a melancholy
song, and she bends over the sickle-that is all we know. But we know more: we
know that she is closely allied in our minds with all the associations of
nightingale, shady haunts of Arabian deserts, silent seas, far-off Hebrides, old,
unhappy things, ancient battles, sorrow, loss, pain. The Solitary Reaper is what
we create her in our own imaginations to be. The poet will not give details; the
reader must do that.
The stanzaic form of the poem is an elaboration of the ballad stanza. Yet the
complexities of the tones and over-tones, the ingenuity of the rhymes, the
sweep of the rhythm are not matched by the ballads. “The Solitary Reaper” is a

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lyrical ballad in a strong sense of the term because it combines lyrical feeling
and careful artistry with the techniques and relative objectivity of the ballads.
As with other solitaries in Wordsworth‟s poems, the reaper is very nearly
merged with the nature that she works within. But, there is also in this poem, as
in others, an emerging seem to go on concurrently. At the end of “The Old
Cumberland Beggar, ” „Lucy Gary, ” “Michael, ” “Resolution and
Independence, ” “The Solitary Reaper, ” we have a remembrance also persons
as persons, possessing the dignity of human uniqueness, rising above their
surroundings, even at times impressing themselves on nature in acts of
imaginative assertion.

William Wordsworth
I WANDERED LOENELY AS A CLOUD (P. 896)
The subject is typically Romantic and Wordsworthian: the speaker in an idle
moment, alone in nature and feeling detached from it and from the social world
comes upon a natural event that moves him so deeply that his future life is
shaped by it, and memory of it can spontaneously return to him, to renew the
emotion of the original experience. But why should a scene of natural beauty
have such an effect? Is there more to this than the portrayal of the emotional
response of a sensitive person? Does he do anything of only passively receive a
gift from nature?
First, the speaker‟s condition before the event: wandering, alone, but also
“lonely, ” an emotional state in which he regrets his isolation, and yet in his
simile also glories in it-“lonely as a loud that floats on high, ” superior to the
valleys and hills of earth. And the simile contains another figure as well,
personification, so that the opening situation is an example of poetic
perception: the self compared to a loud the loud given two human attributes,
loneliness and superiority. So the speaker sets out from a point of poetic
creativity even while he feels himself to be idly uninvolved.
As soon as the daffodils are visible, the poetic imagination shifts into a
higher gear. The first impression, “crowd, ” is immediately and spontaneously
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revised into more reverberate “host, ” the daffodils are “golden” in more than
color, the rhythm takes on a little as the tetrameter line is broken in half with
“Beside the lake, beneath the trees” (beside and beneath establishing a different
spatial relationship from “high o‟er”), and the daffodils are given costume and
dance motions. What we might judge to be serene and dispassionate emotional
state in lines 1-2 suddenly leaps into creative energy which continues through
line 14.
The major figures of the second stanza is overstatement, revealing the
speaker‟s need to capture the intensity of his excitement-the flowers seemed
infinite, heavenly, brilliant, “never-ending, ” the speaker‟s sensitivity enabled
him to se “ten thousand … at a glance. ” They seemed all to be dancing in
unison, and the waves seemed to mimic (but of course fell short of) them in
dancing.
At line 15, the submerged self-consciousness that has been implied by the
spate poetic devices finally comes to the fore: the “poet” must examine both his
response and the external stimulus to it. He discovers that despite his reluctance
(“could not but be” implies that he has tried to avoid it-perhaps that‟s what he
was consciously doing by wandering “lonely as could”?), he feels cheerful
being in the “jocund company” of the daffodils. Unlike the “sparkling waves, ”
he does not try to dance with them, but only gazes and gazes, storing up the
emotion of the moment without knowing or thinking that the “golden
daffodils” brought him more wealth than the single experience.
The additional wealth is the ability to relive that experience, not only as a
memory but as an emotion even-what he did not do in the past-to the extent of
letting his heart figuratively “dance with the daffodils. ” But notice again the
emotional straits that he is in when they come to him: alone, lying on his couch,
“in vacait or in pensive mood, ” looking into him with “bliss” that comes from
solitude-then once again, unbidden and unexpected, the merry daffodils “flash
upon that inward eye. ”
But what is really flashing is his own creative power-for in fact the daffodils
cannot be jocund, cannot feel flee, do not dance. The lively, bright beauty of a
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surprising natural sight was the starting point for a poet‟s imaginative
creativity; that is what can fill his heart with pleasure.
The poem relates the awakening of the speaker‟s imaginative response to an
experience of wordless expression and the extended effect of the experience on
him. Apparently on a walking tour in the highlands of Scotland, the speaker
sees and hears a girl gathering grain while she sings a native song. Moved by
both her solitude and the sorrowful melody, the speaker tries to find
correspondences between the unintelligible song and other human experiences,
but finally acknowledges that whether he understands it or not, it has moved
him deeply enough to live on in his memory.
In accordance with his theories about poetry as the “spontaneous overflow of
powerful feelings. ” A power which he attributes to the singing girl,
Wordsworth frequently strives to give his poem both immediacy and the sense
of personal experience. In this case, however, his starting point was not at all
personal; the poem is based on a passage from a friend‟s manuscript account of
a Scottish tour. Thomas Wilkinson had written: “Passed by a female who was
reaping alone, she sung in Erse as heard. Her strains were tenderly
melancholy, and felt delicious long after they were heard no more. ” The poem
reports this (with direct quotation and verbal echo) as if it had happened to the
speaker, achieving immediacy in the first three stanzas by using the present
tense.
The opening lines emphatically establish the solitariness of the girl, and
awaken parallel feelings in the speaker” “single” (1), “solitary” (2) “by herself”
(3), “alone” (5). He has, or imagines, companions whom he exhorts to
“Behold” and “listen, ” demanding excited attention; yet this he balances
against the injunction to remain quiet so as not to disturb the girl‟s song and to
preserve her sense of being alone. What strikes him most in the opening stanza
are solitude and the “melancholy” nature of her song,, which seems to overflow
the deep valley in which she works.
In the second and third stanzas, as he listens to the music in a foreign tongue,
the speaker imaginatively searches for corresponding situations that will
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explain the emotions with which he responds. The second stanza offers two
comparisons, both suggesting relief from the hardships of natural surroundings.
The singer is like two very different kinds of birds in two contrasted
geographical locales, implying the universality of the experience: the
nightingale singing in an oasis in the parched Arabian desert, promising cool
comfort to exhausted travelers; or the cuckoo signaling the coming of spring to
the stark, rocky islands battered by the seas in the northernmost reaches of
Scotland. Both scenes are isolated, forbidding and lonely; both are momentarily
relieved; and both imply that the speaker feels himself isolated, wandering in a
wholly uncongenial natural setting momentarily restored by the beauty of the
song he hears.
The third stanza moves from geographical extremes to contrasts of time and
social rank. The song might be a traditional lament expressing grief for ancient
heroic battlefield defeats or it might refer to the “natural sorrow, loss, or pain”
of ordinary daily life in the present. Just as loneliness and weariness were
universalized in stanza 2, stanza 3 universalizes melancholy here and
everywhere, no and in the past.
The third stanza has asked for intelligible fact: what is she singing about? In
the final stanza, the poem suddenly shifts into the past tense, in its first line
denying the possibility (or even the necessity of understanding exactly what the
girl was saying. As it turns out, the speaker‟s inability to understand the
meaning of the song has been and advantage. He found in the melody and in
the singer‟s isolation the occasion for his own imagined creation of the
universal themes of loneliness and melancholy. Looking back on this
experience, he has discovered that his imagination was revitalized, and that his
profound feelings have persisted even after he has mounted up from the scene
of her singing.

William Butler Yeats

SAILING TO BYZANTIUM (P. 905)

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 In his book A Vision, Yeats wrote that if he could be given a month of
antiquity and leave to spend it where he chose, he would spend it in Byzantium
about year A. D. 525 Byzantium (later known as Constantinople and presently
as Istanbul), the eastern capital of the Holy Roman Empire, was in that period
notable for the flowering of its art: painting, architecture, mosaic-work, gold
and silver metal craft, book illumination, etc. for this reason, it represented for
Yeats a holy city of the imagination.
The title “Sailing to Byzantium” would seem to indicate that the poem is
about poem a voyage; but line 1 (“hat [not This] is no country for old men”)
together with lines 15-16 (“ … therefore have I sailed the seas and come / To
the holy city of Byzantium”) indicates that the voyage has already been
completed. It is an imaginary voyage, of course, for it has been made not just
across space, from Ireland to Byzantium, but backwards through time, from the
twentieth century to the sixth. The important considerations, therefore, are not
the voyage itself, but why the poet made it; and not Ireland and Byzantium, but
what they represent.
The poem deals with the antitheses of the physical and sensual world versus
the world of intellect and imagination, the mortal versus the eternal, nature
versus art. Modern Ireland represents the first term in these opposition,
Byzantium the second. The poet, growing old can no longer engage fully and
unreflectively in the life of the senses, and longs for something beyond the life
of the senses, for the life of the senses is mortal and dies. He finds what he is
looking for in works of art (“monuments of unaging intellect”), which are
eternal. The poem may be looked on as a kind of prayer: Let me leave this
country of the young, the unreflective, the sensual, and the dying and sail to the
city of imagination and unaging intellect.
There let my next incarnation be as an artificial gold-and-enamel singing
bird that cannot decay as my body is decaying now but which will exist
eternally. Let me be a work of art rather than a man!
Yeats thus seems to be elevating art above nature, the eternal above the
mortal. But there is a catch here. What will this gold enameled bird sing about?
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It will sing of “what is past, or passing or to come” a line that echoes line 6:
“Whatever is begotten, born, and dies. ” Art celebrates the mortal world-the
world of process, change, decay, and death. The poem thus has a circular
movement in which the last lien returns us to its beginning. The poet presents
us, with a preference but with a dilemma. He wishes to escape life. Art is both
superior and inferior to life. Though not subject to decay, it is an “artifice, ”
without life. The dilemma is comparable to that presented by Keats in “Ode on
a Grecian Urn”

William Butler Yeats

THE SECOND COMING
In 1919, the year this poem was published, Ireland was in the midst of a
bloody civil war; World War I had only recently ended; and Russia was
engaged in civil war following is Revolution of 1917. All these events
portended for Yeats the approaching end of the Christian era, the historical
cycle begun almost two thousand years earlier with the birth of Christ. In
Yeats‟s historical theory the transition from one historical theory the transition
from one historical era to another was always marked by an epoch of violence
and disorder.
The poem is divided into two sections. The first gives the poet‟s impression
of the present. The second presents an apocalyptic vision of the future.
His description of the present is terrifying. The opening two lines present a
symbol of a world out of control. In the ancient art falconry the falcon was
trained always to return upon a signal to wrist of the falconer. But in Yeat‟s
image the falcon has flown beyond the hearing of his master‟s signal. The
adjective “Mere” (4) here retains its obsolete meaning of absolute, entire, sheer,
” Ceremony” (6) had for Yeats particular value as connected with orderly and
civilized living (see “A Prayer for My Daughter, ” Which follows immediately
after “The Second Coming” in Yeats‟s Collected pomes). The closing lines of
this section describe a familiar crisis situation where good people, by nature
moderate and tolerant, are uncertain what should be done, while the bigots, the

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terrorists, and the assassination squads are full of “passionate intensity” all too
certain in their ignorant minds that they know exactly what is needed.
The opening lines of the second section seem to sound a note of hope.
“Surely, ” the poet declares, “some revelation is at hand” the word “revelation”
suggesting a divine manifestation; “Surely the Second Coming is at hand” the
words “Second Coming” reminding us of the Second Coming of Christ
prophesied in the Bible. Things can hardly get much worse; therefore these
violent actions must be auspices of change, sings of the shifting from one
historical era to another. No sooner has the poet uttered the words “Second
Coming” than he has a vision. And image arises to consciousness (not just
from his own in conscious but from the racial unconscious underlying it) of the
stone sphinx in the Egyptian desert slowly coming to life and “moving its show
things. ” The vision is vivid. Yeats depicts not only its gaze “blank and pitiless
as the sun, ” but the reactions of the desert birds to this amazing phenomenon.
In indignant clamor they “reel” in circles above the slowly awakening sphinx;
but Yeats with marvelous poetic economy depicts them only through their
shadows (thus giving us in one picture the shadows, the birds that cast them
and the bright desert sun that causes them). The vision is brief, but now Yeats
knows (or claims to know) that twenty centuries of “stony sleep” (the sphinx‟s)
were “; vexed to nightmare” by “a rocking cradle” (a metonymy for the infant
Christ), and he also knows what “rough beast, its hour come round at last, /
Slouches toward Bethlehem to be born. ” The vision is a vision of horror. The
new era, its time come to replace the old one, is symbolized by a “rough beast.
” (The question asked in the last two lines is rhetorical, as shown by the
ambiguous syntax of the sentences, in which “and” indicates the presence of
parallelism but in which “what” can logically be linked only with “that”) 19)
[“I know that … and what …”], making “what” not an interrogative but a
relative pronoun calling logically for a period at the end of the sentence. But
when was logic ever the most direct way to poetic power?)
Our expectation, set up by the title and by lines 9-10, that the poem would
concern the Second Coming of Christ are chattered by the last two lines of the

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poem. It is the coming of Antichrist which is prophesied. Legends tell us that
Antichrist will be born in Bethlehem, and Antichrist is referred to recurrently in
the New Testament as the “beast. ” It is Yeats, however, whose genius has
assimilated Antichrist with the desert sphinx and given him new dimensions of
horror and evil by his use of the adjective “rough” and the verb “slouches. ”
Surely, this poem drives its greatness from the feeling of evil and horror it so
powerfully evokes. Yet the most controversial critical question regarding the
poem occurs just here. Scholars familiar with Yeats‟s historical theories) have
pointed out that era Yeats expected to follow the Christian one was more
amenable to him than the Christian era, and that therefore the advent of the
“rough beast” is to be welcomed. As Marjorie Perl off has pointed out, “The
basic argument is whether the poem should be read as an independent text, in
which case its language suggests that the terror, or whether it should be read in
the light of A Vision, in which case one may argue, as Helen Vendler does, that
„Yeats approves intellectually, if not emotionally of the Second Coming ….
The Beast is a world-restorer. ”

William Butler Yeats

THE WILD SWANS AT COOLE
Both his theory and his practice point to the need to read an individual poem
by Yeats in the context of the rest of his poetry and of his life. A full
understanding of this poem requires at least a reading of Donald A. stuffer‟s
analysis in The Golden Nightingale 48-79. But even without the richness of the
Yeatsian context, the poem has beauty and power that are available to the
sensitive reader.
Both actually and superficially it is a meditation on nature and on the
passage of time which alters the human observer but leaves nature essentially
unchanged; it thus resembles Wordsworth‟s “Tintern Abbey” and Keats‟s “Ode
to a Nightingale” poem in which the response of the man is both intensely
present and also intensely subjective and retrospective. External natural facts
elicit feelings and memories, and time present is contrasted with time past,

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human and natural. Nature undergoes cyclical changes and keeps returning to
its same condition; the human being undergoes progressive changes which
include decay and death, but also memories of earlier states. Nature is
permanent and always in the present, man is transient but contains his own
past, his sensitive present, and his predictions of the future.
The elegiac tone of this poem is established in the first stanza-autumn,
dryness, twilight, stillness. But paradoxically the poem also contains terms that
contrast with these: beauty, mirror like clarity, brimming water, clamorous
wings. Yeats maintains the tone, and the also the contrasts, throughout the
poem, summing up his inability to understand the swans in the simple
declaration that they are “mysterious, beautiful” (26). Although he attributes
much to them, they cannot be wholly captured in his language or his
imagination, justifying the recurring Yeatsian strategy of the conclusion-a
rhetorical question. The questions in these poems are not really questions, for
the poem ahs implied the answer, as it does here. The speaker does not really
wonder where the swans will be (in fact, they will most probably be where they
are now, in the streams and lake of Cool Park, and if not these particular swan
then their indistinguishable offspring). Nor does the question really mean
“what other men will be delighted by them, ” for any man who sees them will
be delighted; nor does it mean “where will I be when „I awake some day / To
find they have flown away, ‟” for the answer to that is implicit too: since the
swans represent to him the continuity and permanence of the natural world, any
awakening that discovers them gone will be an awakening out of nature, into
death.
The number “nine-and-fifty, ” phrased archaically and with an implied hint
of magic, first introduces the “mystery” of the swans: although they seem
paired “lover by lover, ” the number is odd. The mystery of this number is
augmented by the other one, nineteen; both of them are prime numbers, both
end in nine, and both sound so very precise that a reader inevitably asks their
significance. Is there a meaningful link between 59 and 19? The speaker has
carefully kept track of the number of years he has been returning to this stop,

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and has carefully counted the swans, year after year –and yet, as he reports,
even on that first count he had not finished counting before they flew up off the
water. How can he know their precise number? As they suddenly mounted into
the air, perhaps disturbed by his presence, perhaps even reluctant to be
numbered, they scattered (suggesting random motion) yet wheeled; they flew
in rings but the rings were “broken. ” What this succession of images suggests
is a precise but uncountable number, a patterned movement that reminded in
completed: a contrast between the human desire to discover number and
geometric shape, and nature‟s reluctance to be comprehended in such
intellectual undertakings.
From this perspective, we can see that the qualities to the swans in the
remainder of the poem are human interpretations: their wings beat like bells
(tolling the passage of time, to the observer?), they are lovers, the water is
“companionable, ” they are “unwearied, ” their hearts do not grow old, and-a
clear indication that the qualities are not inherent in the swans “passion or
conquest” attend them. They are therefore genuinely mysterious, for the poem
has not penetrated their mysteries, but seen in them parallels and contrasts to
the human condition, revealing the impossibility of understanding them for
what they are.
The natural world, then, is impenetrable to the human observer. What
remains in the poem is the situation in which this places him-seeing the swans
in their continuity, recognizing in himself the changes have caused, and
projecting further loss in the future. As the final question indicates, there will
be other men to fill his place (as in fact there have been oth1er swans to
replenish the flock), but there is no consolation for the man in that fact, nor
does his verbal tactic of thinking of his future as an awakening lessen the sense
of loss.

John Milton Paradise Lost

BOOK I:

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 (ll. 1-26) Like the classical epics of Homer and Virgil, Milton s epic opens
with an invocation, a prayer addressed to the heavenly muse, the Holy Spirit (in
theology, the creative third person of the Holy Trinity). He asks God's help in
presenting his immense subject – Man's sin, through which he lost Eden, or
Paradise, and brought death and woe into the world – a subject, he says never
before at tempted in prose or verse. With God's help he will be equal to his
subject and “justified the ways of God to men" – help men to under stand the
reasons behind God's acts in history.
(ll. 27-53): The cause of Man's first sin is to be found in the temptation of
Eve ("the Mother of Mankind") by Satan, disguised as the Serpent. The
motives for Satan's act, in turn, were envy of Man and a desire to revenge
himself against God. For Satan and his angels, long before, had revolted
against God and been thrown headlong from Heaven to the depths of Hell,
where for nine days and nights they lay senseless in the fiery lake.
(ll. 54-124): Satan, conscious both of the loss of Heaven and of eternal pain,
surveys Hell: whirlwinds of fire that burn forever yet gives no light, where, far
removed from God, there is neither peace, nor rest, nor hope. Beelzebub, his
next in command, is near him, and Satan rages at God for having overcome
them, but does not repent. His terrible pride intact, he boasts that he will never
give in: they will learn from their defeat and be all the more resolved in their
war against the "Tyranny of Heav'n. "
(ll. 125-155): Beelzebub agrees that since they are angels they are indeed
eternal as strong now as ever. But what if God, who has shown that He is
supremely powerful, has not destroyed them merely so that they will continue
to suffer or used for His purposes?
(ll. 156-191) Satan encourages his lieutenant: even if God tries to use them,
to bring good out of evil, they will work against Him, bringing evil out of good
and, if they can, causing grief to God. Now, since the avenging army of angels
has been recalled to Heaven, he urges they leave the sea of fire and seek solid
ground.

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 (ll. 192-282) The two fallen angels, enormous as gigantic whales, painfully
raise themselves and, unfurling their huge wings, head for dry land. Satan
continues to cheer himself with the thought that it is better to reign in Hell than
be a servant in Heaven. (The poet, however, has already pointed out how
wrong he is: he could not stir if God did not let him: to think himself free and to
be repeatedly frustrated in his evil plans are part of Satan's punishment. )
Beelzebub urges him to call the troops together.
(ll. 283-621) Standing on the shore of the lake of fire. His gigantic shield on
his shoulders. His spear in his hand. Satan with a tremendous shout calls his
angels to him. They hear him, are ashamed. Rouse themselves, and come-an
army larger and more powerful than any known to men. They have lost their
heavenly names, which have been erased from the "Books of Life”. The poet
calls the leaders by the names men will give them later, mistaking these devils
for gods : Moloch, Chemos, or Peor, Baalim and Ashtoroth (general names for
types of devils); Astoreth, or Astarte, Thammuz, Dagon, Rimmon, Osiris, Isiris,
Isis, Orus, and Belial. (Note that the list includes both devils, or idols, of the
Jews mentioned in the Bible and gods from Egyptian and Babylonian
mythology. ) Satan commands his standard bearer, the cherub Azazel, to raise
the army's flag and, as he does so, the angels raise their banners with a great
shout, from ranks, and gather around their leader.
(ll. 622-669) Satan makes a stirring speech to the assembled army: their
strength and wisdom should have been enough to win, but God defeated them
by superior strength (which till then He had concealed in order to tempt them.
And God is therefore to blame for their fall) ; but if they could not win by
force, then they will carry on the war by trickery, beginning first, perhaps, with
the new world that, according to rumors in Heaven, God intended to create. As
he ends speech, the fallen angels cheer, militantly waving their swords and
defying Heaven.
(ll. 670-798) Led by Mammon, or Mulciber, once Heaven's architect, a
brigade of engineers goes to a nearby hill, smelts it into gold, and from this
material builds an immense palace, more glorious than any pagan temple

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known to men : Pandemonium, the head quarters of Satan and his
commanders. All the devils crowd in find themselves pinched for space, and
the rank and file is suddenly reduced to the size of elves and fairies. Satan and
his leaders, still gigantic, gather in the central hall and prepare to hold a council
of war.

MILTON'S LANGUAGE
Following the analysis of each book of Paradise Lost, you will find a brief
discussion of unusual or archaic words –words that for the most part you will
not find in the average abridged dictionary and cannot easily guess from
context. The words discussed here are characteristic of Milton‟s style in his
epic. With his immense knowledge of language, he often invents new words or
uses old ones in their root meanings. In addition, he imitates Spenser (in The
Faerie Queene) in his use of older English words that had become archaic even
in Spencer‟s day. (The spellings are those of the Oxford English Dictionary,
often different from Milton‟s original spellings. )
1. 78. WELTERING. Tossing or rolling in waves.
1. 87. LEAGUE. Agreement for mutual assistance.
1. 117. EMPYREAL. Heavenly.
1. 226. INCUMBENT. Pressing down.
1. 276. OBLIVIOUS. Here, causing oblivion, complete forgetfulness.
1. 285. ETHEREAL TEMPER. An adjectival phrase minus the preposition:
of heavenly workmanship (as in tempered steel).
1. 296. MARL. Earth, soil (originally a specific type).
1. 320. VIRTUE. The inner power that distinguishes a supernatural being.
1. 345. COPE. Vaulted ceiling.
1. 380. PROMISCUOUS. Mixed together in no special order.
1. 460. GRUNSEL. Doorsill.
1. 568. TRAVERSE. Across.
1. 597. DISASTROUS. Foretelling disasters, as eclipses were thought to do.
1. 609. AMERCED. Punished.
1. 672. SCURF. A scaly deposit.

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 1. 690. ADMIRE. Wonder at, be surprised.
1. 715. ARCHITRAVE. The main beam that rests on the top of a column
(technical term of classical architecture).
1. 716. BOSSY. Having bosses, swelling, or protuberances.
1. 724. FOLDS. The leaves of a folding door.

BOOK II
(II. 1-42) Satan, “uplifted beyond hope, ” opens the council by attempting
once more to show his followers the advantages of their predicament: their
God-created inner strength (“Celestial virtues”), cannot be kept down forever.
Furthermore, their defeat has unified them, since none can envy the leader who
bears the brunt of God‟s punishment. Satan then calls for suggestions for
carrying on the war against God.
(II. 43-105) Moloch, the most militant of the devils, made fearless by despair
first, arguing for direct attack on Heaven, without tricks. Nothing worse, he
says, can happen to them. Either they will be destroyed completely-preferable
to continuing in their present torment-or, if they are truly immortal (“Divine”),
their continuing warfare will trouble God enough to be in itself a kind of
revenge. (But note that Moloch admits that God is all-powerful and that the
devils therefore cannot hope for victory. )
(II. 107-225) Belial, the next speaker, is a contrasting type: gracious in
appearance, glib but without inner strength. As one might expect, he is against
continuing a war that even warlike Moloch doubts can be won. Moreover, as
he shows graphically, God might indeed have worse punishments for them if
they were to anger Him gain. Belial‟s proposal is that they try to accustom
themselves to their present suffering in the hope that eventually. God will be
satisfied. Even more clearly than Moloch, he acknowledges God‟s supremacy:
God is all-powerful (“Impregnable”): “incorruptible” (nothing the devils could
do would harm Him); and omniscient.
(II. 226-309) Mammon, Hell‟s master builder, suggests still another
possibility: he speak contemptuously of hoping for God‟s forgiveness, but

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argues that in Hell they are al least free of Him and that Hell itself has
possibilities for development. Hey should become acclimated to it, “dismissing
quite / All thoughts of Warr. ” A storm of applause greets Mammon‟s speech,
and the peace party seems about to win-the devils fear another defeat, and
besides are hopeful that, if they let well enough alone, they can build Hell up as
a rival to Heaven. Seeing how the debate is going, Satan‟s next in command,
the wise and stately Beelzebub, presents a plan devised by his leader.
(II. 310-505) Beelzebub is a realist. Hell is a prison devised by God, who
will rule it as He rules Heaven (“still first and last wills Reign/Sole King. ”); it
cannot be made a rival empire. In any case, they are at war; and peace is not a
serious possibility. So, if the war must continue and direct assault on Heaven is
too dangerous, perhaps they can gain something by attacking the new world
and race that, according to prophecy, are due to be created “about this time. ”
The Heaven (“the utmost border of His Kingdom”). Perhaps they can either
destroy it with hellfire drive out the inhabitants as the devils were driven from
Heaven, or subvert them (“Seduce them to our Party”) so that God will Himself
destroy His creation. In any case, the fallen angels would achieve revenge.
The other leaders at once vote for Beelzebub‟s plan, and he goes on to fill in
the practical details: they must choose someone for the dangerous mission of
locating the new world (“the happy Ile”) so that they can be to put their plan
into effect. The devils, however, are afraid to volunteer, and the meeting is
silent until Satan himself says that he will go. He orders them to keep a close
watch while he is away and like a clever politician forbids anyone else to
volunteer lest this lead to rivalry.
(II. 506-628) At this point, as the council breaks up, the poet introduces an
interlude between the two main episodes of Book II, telling what the devils do
while Satan sets out on his journey. Like the heroes of Homer or the knights of
medieval epics, some hold races or military exercises while others sing of their
heroic deeds in war. Still others pass the time in learned though pointless dis-
regions of Hell, the God-cursed “Universe of death. ”

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 (II. 629-870) Meanwhile, like a knight errant, Satan flies swiftly across Hell
until he reaches the fiery triple gate (three sections, each with a layer of brass
iron, and hardest rock). The gate is guarded by a hideous creature, half-woman,
and half-sake, surrounded by barking hellhounds. As Satan approaches, he
meets another monster who announces that he is Hell‟s real king and orders
Satan back to his punishment. The two are about to fight when the guardian of
the gate-the “Snakie Sorceress” stops them with an astonishing piece of
information: Satan is her father; the other monster is his son. She is Sin, born
from Satan‟s head when he began his war in Heaven. The other monster is
Death, whom only, God (“he who reigns above”) can resist.
Satan now drops his aggressive manner and smoothly sets about persuading
his daughter-lover to unlock the gate of Hell: he is looking for the “place of
bliss” on the outskirts of Heaven –the world. He promises, if he finds it, to take
Sin and Death there to be “fed and fill‟d” with the “race of upstart Creatures” –
Man. Sin agrees to do what he asks.
(II. 871-968) Sin opens the great gate, which is ever after to stand open, and
hellfire and smoke flare outward “like a Furnace mouth. ” Satan looks out on
the great void that separates Hell from Heaven, emptiness like outer space
without from-the state of matter before the creation of the universe-torn by
storms made by the conflict of heat, cold, moisture, and dryness. Chaos is
named as he “Umpire” of this conflict, hence the ruler of the void, though
Chance is over him. Satan flies outward until he finds Chaos on his throne near
the edge of his realm, surrounded by his courtiers: Night, his queen; Orcus,
Ades, and Demogorgon (Orcus and Ades, or Hades, other names for Pluto,
Greek god of the underworld; Demogorgon a snake-haired monster); Rumor,
Chance, Tumult, Confusion, and Discord-all spirits that represent the wild
formlessness of matter on which God has not yet laid His creative hands.
(II. 969-1054) Satan assures the king that he is merely trying to find his way
to Heaven and means no harm; deviously, he asks Chaos if he knows of a
newly created world. Chaos answer by complaining that his kingdom has been
diminished, first by the creation of Hell, then by Earth-and with this

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confirmation of what he seeks, Satan leaves him, springing upward “like a
Pyramid of fire. ” The going becomes easier as he struggles on across the
frontier of light and the created universe, until at last he sees the towers of
Heaven and the new world hanging from it by “a golden Chain. ”
We learn before the episode closes that Sin and Death have meanwhile
followed Satan, building an immense bridge from Hell across the emptiness to
the world. Hereafter, the evil spirits of Hell across the emptiness to the World
“To tempt or punish mortals, ” except for those whom God and His angels
protect by grace. “Such, ” Milton comments. “Was the will of Heaven”
meaning that the devils would not have had access to men unless God, who is
all-powerful, had let them for some purpose of His own.

MILTON’S LANGUAGE
L. 11. POWERS AND DOMINIONS. Two ranks in the hierarchy of angels.
L. 50. RECK. Mind, be bothered by.
L. 106. AMAIN. Violently, energetically; at full speed.
L. 238. PUBLISH GRACE. Proclaim forgiveness.
L. 254. RECESS. Here, a place of refuge.
L. 281. COMPOSE. Settle, come to terms with.
L. 292. FIELD. Battlefield.
L. 302. FRONT. Forehead.
L. 306. ATLANTEAN. Of Atlas, the titan thought to support the heavens.
L. 329. PROJECTING. Making plans for.
L. 334. STRIPES. Wounds caused by whipping.
L. 432. EXPEDITION. Promptness, speed.
L. 355. MOULD. Distinctive nature, character.
L. 536. PRICK. To spur (a horse), hence, ride quickly.
L. 538. WELKIN. The arch of heaven, the sky.
L. 595. FRORE. With extreme cold.
L. 919. FRITH. A firth, a long inlet.

BOOk III

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 (II. 1-55) All of the narrative until now has taken place in the darkness of
Hell and Chaos. As Satan approaches Heaven, God‟s dwelling, the poem
moves from darkness to light, symbol of God and of reason, and Book III
pauses appropriately for an invocation of the “holy light, offspring of Heaven
first-born. ”
Milton here speaks in his own voice and of himself: although the poem is
leaving behind “the utter and [the] middle darkness, ” returning to the light, the
light of day “Revisit‟st not these eyes, ” for the poet himself is blind. Yet if
Milton is cut off from light, from dawn and sunset, from the season, from the
sight of human faces, so much more must he pray that the “Celestial light /
Shine inward” so that he may “see and tell / Of things invisible to mortal sight.
”
(II. 56-265) God, on His throne in Heaven (the Empyrean), and Eve in the
Garden of Eden on Earth-and sees Satan approaching. Calling the Son‟s
attention to “our adversaries” who is “bent … On desperate revenge, ” God the
Father tells what the result will be and outlines the theology that underlies the
poem. Man will be tempted by Satan and, though he has the strength to resist,
will fall because God created him free. God has foreknowledge of the fate of all
His creatures, but this does not mean that they are predestined to good or evil.
Yet, though God‟s justice will be served by Man‟s punishment for sin, His
mercy “first and last shall brightest shine. ”
The son thanks the Father for the promise of mercy to Man, explaining that
otherwise Satan would indeed accomplish his revenge by destroying Man. The
reply of God the Father expresses Milton‟s view on one of the chief theological
issues of his time: Man will be raised from his sin, not by his own power but by
God‟s grace “freely voutsaft [given]”; some men, the Elect, will be sinless
through God‟s grace, but most will earn it by struggling against sin with
“prayer, repentance and obedience, ” guided by Conscience. Yet Man, by his
first sin, is incapable of satisfying God‟s justice unless some “Heavenly
Powers” can do so for him. Hence, just as Satan in Hell had called for a

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volunteer for the mission against Man, now God calls for one to “be mortal to
redeem / Mans mortal crime, ” and again there is silence.
God the Son says that He will put off “this gloried next to thee” and offer
His life for Man‟s, knowing that Death will be overcome and that in His life for
Man‟s, knowing that Death will be overcome and that in His victory over
Death He will lead mankind back to Heaven.
(II. 266-415) God the Father approves the Son‟s plan for Man‟s salvation
and explains that “Man … shall satisfie for Man”: the Son shall become a Man,
and mankind, in Him, will be lifted up to Heaven. There, incarnate, the Son
will rule forever, and at the world‟s end-“the general Doom”-will judge all
men. Afterward, “the World shall burn” and the just enjoy “New Heaven and
Earth. ” God calls on all the powers of Heaven to worship the Son through
whom all this will be accomplished, and they do so with shouts of praise. Then,
taking up their harps, they sing a hymn to the Father which the poet
summarizes: first of God the Father, the creator, “Author of all being, ” then of
the Son who drove the evil angels from Heaven and will “end the strife / Of
Mercy and Justice” by becoming the Savior of fallen Man.
(II. 416-543) The scene shifts from Heaven back to Satan as he approaches
the World. In order to visualize what follows, keep in mind the view of the
universe summarized in the Introduction. You will recall that according to the
traditional Ptolemaic system, the Earth is the center of the created universe,
which Milton calls “the World. ” Around it are formed ten concentric spheres
containing what we would now call the orbits of the Moon, the five known
planets, the Sun, and the Fixed Stars; the Crystalline Sphere, containing water;
and a tenth sphere, the primum mobile, or “First Moved, ” that keeps all the
other spheres in motion. The whole is surrounded by an outer shell, and all
around it is “Chaos (through which Satan passed to reach “the World”).
Heaven is above Chaos, Hell below it, with the universe between and Earth at
the center.
It is on this outer shell of the universe-“the firm opacous Globe” that Satan
lands and wanders, still in darkness except for the light from. Heaven, hunting
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Man. There are as yet no other creatures here, although in the future course of
human history part of it will become the “Paradise of Fools” the final resting
place of those who succumb to superstition. Among them, Milton includes the
builders of the Tower of Babel and most hermits and members of religious
orders. As Satan wanders on, he sees the gates of Heaven above him, joined to
the utter shell at a point above the Holy Land by a magnificent stairway. Down
these “steps of Gold” angels “On high behests” often pass and up them go
souls from Earth.
(II. 544-742) Satan looks down through the sphere of stars and flies through
them toward the sun, landing on a sunspot such as was first observed by
Galileo within Milton‟s own lifetime (the “glaz‟d Optic Tube” is the telescope,
which came into common use in the seventeenth century). Nearby, Satan sees
“a glorious Angle” and, hoping to get directions to Paradise, where Man is,
heads for him. The angel is the archangel Uriel, “Regent of the sun, ” an so as
not to be recognized, Satan changes his shape, disguising himself as a minor
angel (“a stripling Cherube”).
With his usual eloquence, Satan says that he is eager to see God‟s newest
and dearest creation, Man, so that he may the better praise Him. The archangel
is deceived, for, as Milton observes, “neither Man nor Angel can discern /
Hypocrisie. ” After praising Satan at some length for his supposed good
intentions, Uriel points out Earth shining in the sunlight, and the exact spot,
Paradise, where Adam, the first man, is to be found. Then he turns away, and
Satan with a low bow thank him and descends to Earth with all speed, landing
on Mount Niphates.

MILTON’S LANGUAGE
L. 93. GLOZING. Flatteringly persuasive.
L. 255. MAUGRE. In spite of (two syllables).
L. 418. OPACOUS GLOBE. The opaque sphere that surrounds the
created universe.
L. 434. YEANLING. Newborn.
L. 470. FONDLY. Foolishly.

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 L. 600. STONE. A reference to the philosopher‟s stone, the substance by
which alchemists hoped to change other metals into gold.
L. 605. LIMBEC. An alembic, a device used for distilling.
L. 627. FLEDGE. Full –feathered, ready for flight.

BOOK IV
(II. 1-129) Satan, still standing on Mount Niphates and still disguised as a
good angel, is filled with doubts at the mission he is about to undertake. He
suffers both the pain of Hell, which he carries within himself, and regret for the
bad things he has done and is planning. In this mood of despair he addresses
the sun that “with surpassing Glory crowned” looks like “the God / Of his new
World. ” He curses the sun‟s light because it reminds him of the Heaven he lost
through his rebellion against God and reviews the motives that caused it: “lifted
up so high, ” he hoped to equal God Himself-he blames destiny for having put
him so high that he could have such a thought. Yet even now, in his
punishment, he is incapable of repenting and giving in to God, and he resolves
that Evil shall be his good-that is, that he will aspire to evil the way others
aspire to good. He does not realize that while he speaks, his evil thoughts
change “his borrow‟d visage, ” making it obvious to Uriel, who sees him from
the sphere of the sun directly overhead, that e is not good angel after all.
(II. 130-392) Satan soon comes to Eden, which is on a high plateau whose
sides are covered with an impenetrable thicket rising higher than the highest
trees within. Milton refers to it as an Assyrian garden, locating it in the fertile
region between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, in what is now Iraq. Satan
finds only one entrance, a gate that “look‟d East, ” and scorning it, leaps over
the wall, and then flies up to the Tree of Life, from which he can survey the
“Heaven on Earth” that is Eden. Near it grows the Tree of Knowledge
knowledge, Milton observes in the next line, of god which can only be gained
by knowing evil.
Milton visualizes the Garden of Eden to be like one of the formal gardens he
must have seen in Italy, but grander and more peaceful in every way. It is
watered by a fountain that rises up through the mountain on which it stands.

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There are sweet-smelling trees and others that bear delicious fruits, lawns on
which flocks graze roses without thorns. Yet of all the marvels in this delightful
spot, the noblest are Adam and Eve, whose “Truth, Wisdom, Sanctities” are
“The image of their glorious Maker”: hand in hand, naked, they pass beneath
Satan‟s lookout. “Adam the goodliest man of men since born/His Sons, the
fairest of her Daughters Eve. ” They live on the fruits of the garden with little
effort. Around them peacefully play “All the Beasts of the Earth” which have
not yet learned to hunt and kill each other. Satan for the moment is speechless,
saddened by the beauty of what he sees and has come to destroy. He envies the
man and woman who enjoy the happiness the devils have forfeited, and would
pity them the loss he plans for them if his revenge on God did not make it
necessary “To do what else though damnd I should abhorre. ” The excuse of
necessity-Milton remarks in the next lines-is the one tyrants always make for
their evil deeds.
(II. 393-535) Satan descends from the tree and, assuming various animal
disguises, eavesdrops on Adam and Eve, whose conversation summarizes part
of the story that occurred before the present scene. Adam praises God for
having put them in this delightful spot with such light duties: they have only to
tend the Garden and refrain from tasting “that only Tree Of knowledge, planted
by the Tree of Life, ” for if they disobey God and eat of it, they will die. Eve
expresses her complete obedience to Adam and hence to God, and recalls how
she was formed from Adam‟s flesh, waked into life, and wandered aimlessly in
the Garden until they found each other. Now embrace and Satan looks away,
tormented by envy of their happiness. From the vital secret that Adam has
unwittingly revealed, Satan formulates hip plan: he will “excite their minds/
With more desire to know, ” so that they will state of the forbidden Tree of
Knowledge and die. With this thought, he goes off to explore the Garden more
fully before trying out his plan.
(II. 536-609) As the setting sun shines on the Gate of Paradise, which is
guarded by angels under Gabriel‟s command, Uriel arrives “On a Sun beam,
swift as a shooting Starr. ” He warns the warrior that a devil, disguised as an

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angel, is on his way to Paradise. Gabriel reports that no evil spirit has come in
by the gate, but says that if one has climbed over the walls he will find it “by
morrow dawning. ” Uriel, his message delivered, returns to his post as night
falls. Milton alludes to both Ptolemaic and Galilean astronomy: the sun sets
either because the sun moves around the earth or because the earth turns a
different side to the sun. )
(II. 610-775) Adam tells Eve that it is time to sleep, since they must be up at
dawn to get in with their gardening. With a further expression of womanly
obedience to man, Eve agrees and as they walk hand in hand toward their
bower, asks why the stars and moon shine at night while they are asleep so they
cannot see them. Adam charmingly explains that as they revolve around Earth
for the benefit of Earth‟s future peoples, they hold back utter darkness lest
Night (one of the spirits of Chaos) “extinguish life / In Nature and all things. ”
Before going to bed, the couple says a brief prayer to God: “Thou also mad‟st
the Night /Maker Omnipotent, and thou the Day …” Their worship has the
simplicity Milton (like other Puritans) believes “God likes best. ” They then go
straight to bed, and Milton ends this section with praise of “the Rite/
Mysterious of connubial Love, ” criticizing the prudes, harlots, and
sophisticates (“Court Amours”), whose love is corrupt.
(II. 776-1015) Meanwhile, Gabriel orders his second in command, Uzziel, to
take half the angel guards and make a circuit of the Garden. He will go in the
opposite direction with the rest, exception Ithuriel and Zephon whom he posts
as watch where Adam and Eve are sleeping. They immediately find Satan
squatting “like a Toad” at Eve‟s ear, trying to corrupt her dreams with pride
and wrong desires. Ithuriel pricks the devil with his spears and asks “Which of
those rebel Spirits” he is?
Satan scornfully tells them they should recognize a spirit as important as he
once was in Heaven, but Zephon reminds him, with equal scorn, that his sin has
spoiled his looks. Satan, still refusing to give his name, demands to be taken to
their chief and the angels lead him away. Gabriel, when they reach him,
recognizes Satan and demands to know why he has broken “the bounds

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prescribed/To thy transgressions. ” Satan (who naturally wants to conceal the
real reason for his trip to Paradise) calls Gabriel a fool not to realize that
anyone would try to escape the pain of Hell, but the angel pounces on the flaw
in his logic that shows he is lying: if his only reason was to reduce his pain,
why didn‟t the other devils come too? Satan tries another half-truth: In Hell
they have beard of the new world, and hoping to find a better place for them to
live he has come alone lest there be danger to his followers.
Although Gabriel has not discovered what Satan wants Gabriel has not
discovered what Satan wants, he knows he is lying and has evil intentions. He
orders Satan to “Flie thither whence thou fledst” (that is, back to Hell), and
warns him that if he returns he will be dragged back to Hell in chains and
locked up so he will not escape again. The Devil and the angels prepare for a
fight whose violence may endanger not only Paradise but “the Starrie Cope/ Of
Heaven perhaps, or all the Elements. ” To prevent such a possibility, God
intervenes with a sign that shows what the result will be: a pair of “golden
Scales. ” In one pan Satan sees “parting, ” in the other “fight. ” “Fight” flies up
“and kickt the beam, ” meaning that it is lighter, less important; that “parting” –
running a way –will be better for Satan than trying to fight the angel warriors.
Satan looks up, gets the message of Heaven‟s superior force, and hastily
departs “and with him fled the shades of night”; dawn comes as the book ends.

MILTON’S LANGUAGE
L. 10. ERE. Here, a preposition but with the usual meaning” before.
L. 134. CHAMPAIN. Level, open ground (French champagne
campagne, field). The image is of steep ground rising to a flat area
(“head”) with a mound in the middle.
L. 143. VERDUROUS. Green and thickly growing.
L. 225. IRRIGUOUS. Well –watered (compare irrigated).
L. 690. BOWER. An area covered, enclosed, and shaded by trees and
bushes. (The word, whose original meaning is cottage. Also at one time
meant bedroom, which is relevant here. )
L. 741. WEEN. Think, suppose.

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 L. 805. ANIMAL SPIRITS. In the physiology of Milton‟s time, the inner
principle that contrast sensation. And will (as opposed to thought and
moral choice).
L. 816. TUN. A barrel. The image is of a heap of gunpowder waiting to
be packed into a barrel, in which it will be stored in a magazine
(munitions warehouse) in anticipation of war.
L. 821. GRISLY. Horrible and ugly, inspiring fear.
L. 894. DOLE. Grief pain (as in modern doleful).
L. 962. AREED. Advice or counsel.
L. 971. LIMITARY. Having to do with limits, or boundaries. In Satan‟s
contemptuous use, the word suggests a border guard and one who both
sets limits on others and is himself confined within them.
L. 981. CERES. Roman name for the goddess of the harvest, here used
by association to mean grain.
L. 1001. PONDERS. Here, weighs, the original meaning (as in modern
ponderous, heavy).

Edmund Spenser
The Faerie Queene
GENERAL THEME: In Spenser‟s own words, the first book contains “the
legend” of the knight of the Red Cross, or of Holiness. ” The word “legend”
comes from a Latin word meaning “something that should be read. ” In actual
practice, the word “legend” is applied to a traditional “creative” story (often
with some reference to history, and even actually presented as authentic
history). The legend, according to medieval custom, often developed moral and
allegorical significance.
The two principal character in Book I are the Red Cross Knight,
representing Truth, and Una, “pure and innocent as a lamb” (the lamb being a
symbol of Christ), representing divine reveled truth. While Spenser adapts
Aristotle‟s definitions of the various virtues, and the distinction between them,
he by no means accepts Aristotle without very important modifications. The
idea of holiness, for example, comes specifically from Judaic-Christian
sources, particularly in its medieval applications. Holiness means “oneness” in
the sense that a virtuous man exercises justice in every department of life. He is

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consistent and, who follows occasional weaknesses, unfluctuating. Virtue for
Spenser, who follows Plato in this respect (as in the dialogue in the Protagoras)
is not the sum total of the different virtues. Rather virtue is one and entire, just
as parts of the face from the whole face. The names of particular virtues to the
differing particulars of life. Thus patriotism might be defined through the
common basis of justice as “justice” towards one‟s country, “love” as justice
towards one‟s friend or one‟s mate-in the words of the seventeenth century
poem, “I could not love thee, dear, so much, Loved I not honor more. ” The
basic unity of all the virtues I paralleled by Spenser in calling the symbol of
truth Una (a Latin feminine adjective meaning “one. ”)
So far, so good. But Spenser combines with this platonic concept of virtue as
“oneness” and unity the Christian idea of divine grace. From Plato (and
Aristotle) comes the idea of the natural virtues. But for Spenser this would not
in itself constitute holiness. Spenser‟s view is partly the result of the fact that
the pagan virtues, as understood both by Plato and Aristotle, do not completely
square with the medieval system. Humility, for example is specifically a
Christian virtue-one which, the Red Cross knight has to struggle to learn. This
is a supernatural virtue, that is, one above nature, the result of Grace, outside
the Aristotelian system.
In keeping with the conditions of the allegory in Book I, the Red Cross
Knight is a pilgrim to eternity (in Canto X, he has a vision of the Heavenly
Jerusalem, but he has a lot of work to do before he can reach it). He represents
the “Church militant” –that is to say, he is a Christian in a state of conflict,
development, “becoming, ” fighting his own recurrent weaknesses as well as
injustice in the world at large. He has to go back, as it were, for special
retraining programs, involving study, reflection, penances, as in the House of
Holiness (Canto X). He has to learn and develop a great deal, before he tackles
the dragon of iniquity in the last Canto.
Una is not presented, as the Red Cross knight is, in terms of conflict and
development. She is divine truth, constant and unchanging. She is of
“heavenly” birth, that is –of “revealed” religious truth. She is “veiled” as a sign

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of her almost frightening brilliance (similar to the way “Contemplation” is clad
in black in Milton‟s I1 Penseroso. ) She must wear this veil because, except
under special conditions, mankind could not at once bear the “brightness” of
her divine truth. Natural reason is symbolized by her attendant dwarf-he is so
far surpassed in statue by revelaed truth. Since Una is unchanging, knowing no
“mutability” (a favorite Spenserian word) she is not involved in the world of
action (and, therefore, of some frustration and defeat). The Red Cross knight,
on the other hand, is applying truth in a world of opposition and
misunderstanding (including his own inner problems), Una is truth, a source of
spiritual strength to the knight, but is unable in her allegorical function to give
him direct aid. In the final climactic struggle with the dragon, she has to stand
to one side, a concerned but passive spectator.
One of the things has to be kept in mind in the reading of Spenser is the fact
that, though he is a good story-teller, his characters do not always behave as
human beings might be expected to behave. Una does not always behave as a
woman. As a woman, she might have thought of some means of helping the
Red Cross Knight in his struggle with the dragon. But, as allegorical
dispassionate truth, in a kind of abstract sense, she has to keep apart. If
Spenser‟s figures do not always behave like human beings is to be found in the
nature of the allegory itself. In noting this, one should also keep in mind that
not everything which raises a question in the reader‟s mind will be answered by
the working of the allegory. Not all the details, not all the things that happen in
The Faerie Queene are meant to be allegorical.
A note should be added here, at the beginning of the reading of The Faerie
Queene, for readers not totally familiar with medieval terms. We must not think
of England as a densely populated country as it is today. It is estimated that in
Elizabeth‟s time, the total population was under three millions. “Nature” could
still be dangerous, and the “laws” of hospitality, influenced by religion, were
very strict, particularly in rural areas. Malbecco (Book III, ix) and Briana (VI, i)
violate these rules and are open to punishment. Briana abuses the “custom” of
the castle. A host could not “charge” the stranger who availed himself of his

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hospitality, but the stranger was expected to express his gratitude by some
service upon is degrading to the guest, and could therefore be refused.
The term “squire” is frequently met. A squire was a probationer for
knighthood. After proving himself in military experience and demonstrating
honorable conduct, he could be made a knight. The term comes from a French
word, escuyer, meaning a “shield-bearer. ”
CANTO I: The Red Cross Knight, with a silver shield battered and dented
as a result of many conflicts, with a cross on his breast the color destroy a
dragon, “horrible and stern. ” A lovely lady, her face concealed by a veil, rides
beside him. The lady is descended of a royal line whose scepters have
governed shores from east to west. She leads by a cord a milk-white lamb.
Trailing behind her is a dwarf carrying her baggage. (Christ came into
Jerusalem riding upon a donkey, preparatory to his Passion. The lamb is the
Paschal Lamb, a symbol of sacrifice important both in Judaism and
Christianity. )
A storm breaks, and this curious group has to seek shelter under lofty trees
bearing leaves so broad that light scarcely enters the forest. At last they come to
a hollow cave amid the thickest woods. The lady warns her companion that
they have come to the “wandering wood, foul error‟s Den. ” And the dwarf
(natural reason) points out that this is no place for living men.
But the Red Cross Knight plunges in, his glistening making a little light in
the dark hole. There he comes face to face with a repulsive monster, half
serpent, half woman (a combination of the deceived Eve and of the deceiver,
the Father of Lies, in Genesis). The monster is prolific, with a thousand young
ones feeding on her poisonous dugs. It hates light, particularly the spiritual light
of truth. A terrific battle takes place. She wraps herself around the knight that
either he strangle Error or be strangled by her! The knight manages to kill the
monster, and from her corpse comes a vomit full of books and papers. Her
offspring crowed around the dying mother and suck her blood.

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 The group continues its journey and comes upon an old man dressed all in
black, sad in appearance, saying his prayers as he walks. He claims to know
nothing of the world from which he has retired to live in his forest cell. But he
does know of strange men who ravage the surrounding countryside. They
arrive at the old man‟s hermitage, and the “holy” man (actually the evil
enchanter, Archimago, presumably symbolic of Spain and the Catholic
Church) intersperses his talk of saints and popes with prayers. When his guests
are asleep, he casts spells upon them, taken out of his books of black magic.

Calling upon:
Great Gorgon, prince of darkness and dead night.
At which Cocytus quakes, and Styx is put to flight.
He finds two spirits summoned from the lower world suitable for his work.
One is sent to the House of Morpheus (god of sleep) with a request that the Red
Cross Knight be subjected to a special erotic dream. The other spirit is made to
represent a beautiful woman the double of Una herself. The Red Cross Knight
dreams that his own Una is offering herself dishonorably to him.
CANTO II: When he is awake, the Red Cross Knight is led to think that he
has seen Una committing sin with unknown strangers, a young squire. The
knight and the dwarf leave in disgust. The true, innocent Una, the victim of
Archimago‟s deceits, is left abandoned and unprotected to roam the forests.
Meanwhile the Red Cross Knight meets a Saracen, Sansfoy (without Faith”),
accompanied by an immoral woman clad in red scarlet (symbol of sin as in the
Book of Revelation), wearing a Persian miter. She encourages her lover to
attack the Red Cross Knight, and the Red Cross Knight kills him.
He pities woman, Fidessa, who has apparently lost her lover. According to
her account, she, the sole daughter of an emperor, had been betrothed to a
handsome prince, who had been slain by his foes before the wedding day.
Sansfoy had then adducted her, she asserts, but their relationship had been
without dishonor.

401
 Continuing his journey with Fidessa, the Red Cross Knight seeks to rest
under the shades of two enormous trees. He plucks a bough from one of them
to make a garland for Fidessa‟s head. But as the branch breaks, some drops of
blood exude from a rift in the wood, and a voice begs him not to tear the flesh
of the man imprisoned in the tree, nor that of the wretched lady held fast in the
neighboring tree. One tree had once been Fradubio; the other, his beloved
Fraelissa. Fradubio had killed Duessa‟s companion who had boasted that his
lady (Duessa) was more beautiful than Fraelissa. Duessa had then yielded
herself prisoner to Fradubio. Fradubio had been tactless enough one day to
determine who was more beautiful, Fraelissa or Duessa. Duessa won the
contest through trickery, and Fraelissa was left behind, converted to a tree.
Fradubio had enjoyed Duessa for his “dame” until a certain day when he found
out that she really was a witch, foul, old, and ugly whereupon Duessa meted
out the same treatment to Fradubio she had to Fraelissa.
CANTO III: Meanwhile Una, afraid of nothing, seeks her knight in
wildernesses and deserts. While resting one day in a shady place, she is about
to be attacked by a savage lion. Comes near to her, he behaves quite differently.
He kisses her feet, licks her hands; innocence and beauty tame him. Una
weeps, comparing the lion‟s gentle behavior to that of the other lion, the Red
Cross Knight. Mounting her horse again, she finds the lion following her,
proud to guard her.
She meets a woman carrying a pot of water. The woman runs home, where
her mother “blind, sat in eternal night. ” Una arrives at the cottage where
Corceca (blink devotionalism) prays in a corner, devoutly penitent. Kirk rapine
(church plunderer) brings stolen goods to her daughter, Abessa, with whom he
has immoral relations. The lion rends him into a thousand pieces.
The old woman and her daughter run cursing after Una when she leaves. In
the meantime Archimago has disguised himself as the Red Cross Knight. He
overtakes Una, who now mistakes him for her true knight; she is happy and
reconciled. Archimago continues to play his cruel, deceitful game. They
encounter Sansloy (“without law”). Sansloy attacks Archimago, in the belief

402
that he is the true Red Cross knight who had killed his brother Sansfoy. He
knocks Archimago from his horse and is about to kill him. Una pleads, but
Sansloy, unpitying and relentless, lifts the helmet of his fallen opponent-only to
discover that he is indeed Archimago! - - - whereupon Sansloy seizes Una, but
is attached by the lion. The brave lion dies under the spear of the terrifying
Sansloy, and Una is left for a moment at the mercy of his rage and lust.
CANTO IV: In the meantime the authentic Red Cross Knight has been
traveling with Duessa, believing that she is really Fidessa. They come to the
mansion of a mighty prince. High walls hung with golden foil, delightful
bowers, and galleries make it impressive. Yet it was built on sand and every
breath of heaven shook it! Its outside was sumptuous, excelling ancient Persia
with its pompous pride. Enthroned against a cloth of state was a maiden queen
shining like the sun, and underneath her feet was a dreadful dragon with a
hideous train. Lucifera (the Latin feminine for Lucifer, prince of devils) was the
daughter of Pluto and Porserpina, the rulers of Hell. Lucifera followed no rule
of law in her realm, but, rather, themselves. They were Idleness, dressed in
black like a monk; Gluttony, who bore a “boozing can” in his hands; Lechery,
riding a bearded goat; teeth a venomous toad, in his bosom a snake; Wrath,
upon a lion, his clothes stained with blood. Behind them comes Satan with a
“smarting” challenges him to fight. Duessa is worried.
CANTO V: On the next day Lucifera, under a stately canopy, watches the
fight. In the course of a fierce battle when Sansjoy is about to lose, he is
covered with a thick mist. The Red Cross Knight is honored as the victor of the
Field. Duessa, apparently weeping over the wounds of the Red Cross Knight,
plays a double game as usual. She appeals to dreaded Night, most “ancient
grandmother of all” to rescue Sansjoy, but even Night cannot turn back the
stream of destiny, or break the chains of Necessity. But Duessa revealing to
Night who she truly is, the daughter of deceit and shame, persuades night to
take the body of Sansjoy into her chariot and convey it to hell, the sights of
which are then described in traditional mythological terms. Sansjoy is restored
to life by Aesculapius, the “father” of medicine.

403
 Meanwhile, in a dungeon the Red Cross Knight has seen huge numbers of
wretches who had mortgaged their lives to covetousness. He decides to leave
the unwholesome place quickly and, in the dawning light as he sets out, he sees
a dunghill of carcasses, “the dreadful spectacle of that sad house of pride. ” He
is still unaware that Fidessa is really Duessa in disguise.
CANTO VI: We now return to Una, who had been left alone with the fierce
Sansloy. He immediately makes every effort to seduce her, but she remains as
steadfast as a “rock of diamond. ” She is rescued in the nick of time by a troop
of Fauns and Satyrs, wild wood gods, who managed to frighten Sansloy away
from his intended wickedness. Glad as “birds of joyous of the pastoral woods).
She stays with the “savage” people a long time, teaching them the truth.
Satyrane, the son of a Satyr and a lady seduced by him, visits the woods
where Una is living. Satyrane, known throughout the land of Faerie for his
manhood and courage, has been brought up as a tough woodsman and to
escape from the Satyrs who worship her.
Leaving together, they encounter a traveler, with torn sandals, sun-tanned,
walking with a stick (Archimago again!). He informs them that the Red Cross
Knight is dead, the victim of a paynim (“pagan”) sword. Archimago is
exploiting his own humiliation in Canto III when he fell disguised as the
Sansloy, now wearing the armor of the Red Cross Knight, taken from
Archimago. Sansloy denies killing the Red Cross Knight; he is simply wearing
his arms. But Satyrane and Sansloy fight anyhow, while Una flees away.
CANTO VII :Duessa discovers that the Red Cross Knight has fled from the
House of Pride. She finds him disarmed by a fountain side, and reproaches him
for having left her (she was then Fidessa, of course). The Red Cross Knight
drinks of the spring at hand which had been enchanted so that whoever drank
of it waxed “dull and slow. ” He is about to become an easy victim for
Duessa‟s wiles when his “goodly court” of the lady is disturbed by a horrible
sound coming from a hideous giant, born of Earth, and Aeolus, the blustering
wind.

404
 Though puffed up with empty wind, the giant has unlimited arrogance. He
attacks the unharmed knight with a giant oak tree. Dussea pleads that Orgoglio
(for so the giant was named) spare the Red Cross knight. In return she will
become Orgoglio‟s bond slave and “leman” (mistress). The Red Cross Knight
is made a prisoner.
Orgoglio crowns Duessa with a triple crown (like the Papal crown), and
gives her gold and purple to wear. He also gives her a filthy monster with seven
heads, an iron breast, a back full of brassy scales, with bloody eyes shining like
glass. Its enormous tail stretched to the heavens:
And with extorted power, and borrow‟d strength,
The everburing lamps from thence it brought …
Bearing its rider, Duessa, it treaded all scared things beneath its feet.
The dwarf of the Red Cross Knight witnessed these events, and departed
with his master‟s armour, spear, and shield. On the way he meets Una again,
still in flight from the paynim Sansloy whom Satyrane engaged in battle.
Seeing the equipment in the dwarf‟s possession, she immediately fears that the
Red Cross Knight is dead. Her pitying heart “pants and quakes. ” She swoons
and throws herself on the ground.
The dwarf gives her a summary of events to death: the subtle tricks of old
Archimago, the wanton loves of false Fidessa, the wretched couple turned into
trees, the House of Pride, the combat of the Red Cross Knight with Sansloy, the
luckless combat with Orgoglio. Una at least feels better, knowing that the Red
Cross knight may still be alive.
They see a knight coming toward them, his glittering armor from head to toe
shining far away, with a belt of precious stones (one stone blazing like
Hesperus among the other stars was shaped like a lady‟s head). His sword as
sheathed in ivory and had a hilt of burnished gold. His made of pure diamond,
kept covered because its blazing light turned men art ( good insurance for the
going on in The Fearie Queene!). The great enchanter Merlin had himself made
the shield and sword, the armor for Prince Arthur himself whom we now meet

405
for the first time. Tactfully he draws out from Una the secret of her troubles. He
assures her that she has cause to complain (Surely an understatement!). He
promises that he will not leave her until he has rescued the Red Cross Knight
from Orgoglio.
CANTO VIII :Arthur‟s squire, Timias, blows a tremendous horn before the
castle of Orgoglia, where the Red Cross Knight imprisoned. The castle seems
deserted, its gates shut. But, with the piercing note of the horn, everything
bursts open. The giant puts aside at once his “dalliance” (cf. the word “dilly-
dally”) with Duessa to find out what catastrophe is impending. She follows
Orgoglio on her impressive seven-headed monster.
A tremendous battle ensues between Orgoglio and the Red Cross Knight.
Orgoglio uses heavy equipment a dreadful club, “all arm‟d with ragged
snubbes and knottie graine, ” but he lacks marksmanship. With a clever thrust,
the knight smites off Orgoglio‟s left arm, which falls like a block to the ground,
the blood flowing like a river from a rock. Duessa at this point brings in her
dreadful beast as a reserve, but the squire heads him off. Duessa then sprinkles
upon Timias an enchanted poison that makes him useless as a fighter. Arthur
lops off one of the accessory heads of the monster, but things are not going
well, for he has to fight both the monster and Orgoglio! Finally he uncovers his
diamond shield. Apparently it would have been unsporting, though certainly
practical, for Arthur to have used this at first! But, since Duessa broke the laws
of chivalry s they pertained to single combat, Arthur is now justified in its use.
Duessa is temporarily blinded. Arthur brings the giant down to size by smiting
off his right leg at the knee, and follows up with a truly decisive gesture-by
beheading him! The squire makes the “scarlet whore” his prisoner.
They enter the castle. Ignaro (“ignorance”) answer their questions about the
whereabouts of the Red Cross Knight by constantly repeating “he could not
tell. ” The castle is richly decorated with gold and tapestry, but the floor is
covered with the blood of guiltless babes. They find the Red Cross Knight
feeble, with eyes dull in their hollow pits, arms rawbone.

406
 Duessa is stripped naked of her royal purple. She looks perfectly horrible-her
bald head being only a minor feature of her repulsive person. For such is the
falsehood. In the meantime the rescued and the rescuers rest at the castle.
CANTO IX: Spenser tells us of the background and ancestry of Arthur. At
birth he was given to the charge of a faery knight, old Timon, to be brought up
as a gentleman and as a knight. Timon, living under Mount Rauran by the river
Dee in Walees, was expert in all martial skills. Merlin visited Arthur and
supervised his development. Merlin kept the names of Arthur‟s parents secret
from him, though he did say Arthur was the son and heir of a king, and at the
right time he would learn who he was. But as we see him now, Arthur is
suffering from a grievous, internal wound, for he is in love! Timon has warned
him to keep such inclinations under of Faeries, in a dream. The Red Cross
Knight assures him that he lady, whom Arthur has not yet seen, is most
beautiful of virgins, “full of exchange of gifts, Arthur goes on his way to seek
his love; the Red Cross Knight resumes his journey to fight the dragon, Una‟s
foe.
The Red Cross Knight, accompanied by Una, is not yet fully recovered from
the effects of his imprisonment. He meets the armed Sir Trevisan, minus his
helmet, running in a hysterical state, pale, with his hair standing on end.
Around his neck is a hempen rope. Sir Terwin, who had been in love with a
woman contemptuous of his passion. Together they had met a man of hell
named Despair. Despair had persuaded Sir Terwin to kill himself.
The travelers, with the exception of Sir Trevisan who refuses to approach the
place, reach the darksome cave of Despair, where they see the body of Sir
Terwin wallowing in luck-warm blood. Despair, far from being dismayed,
argues with persuasive psychology that the Red Cross Lnight should also kill
himself!
Sleep after toyle, port after stormier seas,
Ease after warre, death after life, does greatly please.

407
 Despair argues that necessity itself decides the date of men‟s death, and,
therefore, suicide itself is determined within the laws of necessity. He even
goes so far as to persuade the knight, who is in a weakened condition anyhow,
that he is already damned because of the failings of his past life. Despair
actually puts a dagger in the hands of the Red Cross Knight, and the latter‟s
hands tremble! Una, in cold fright, snatches it away from him, reminding him
of a more constructive assignment fighting the fire-mouthed dragon, horrible
and bright. She reminds the knight of the realities of mercy and justice.
Despair, failing to destroy the Red Cross Knight, hangs himself with a halter!
Yet he cannot die!
CANTO X: Spenser says that no man should ascribe victory over spiritual
foes to his own skill, but rather to divine grace. Aware that the Red Cross
Knight is still weak, Una brings him to recover his strength at the House of
Holiness, renowned throughout the world for “sacred lore and pure unspotted
life, ” under the direction of a grave matron, named Dame Caelia. Caelia has
two unmarried daughters, Fidelia and Speranza, and one married, Charissa.
The travelers are admitted by a porter named Humilita, and are greeted by
Zeal and Reverence. Caelia welcomes Una as “most virtuous virgin, born of
heavenly birth. ” She is pleasantly surprised that Una and her knight are visiting
the house:
So few there bee,
That chose the narrow path, or seeke the right.
Fidelia bears a cup of gold filled to the brim with wine and water, in which a
serpent lies enfolded, and a book signed and sealed with blood, wherein hidden
things, hard to understand, are written. Speranza, dressed in blue, the color of
modesty, bears a silver anchor on her arm. After introductions to Faith and
Hope (Fidelia, Speranza), the are led by Obedience to an appropriate lodging.
Fidelia teaches the Red Cross Knight celestial discipline out of her
mysterious books stressing, the meaning of God, grace, justice, and free. The
lessons take so well that the Red Cross Knight beings to “abhore” the wretched

408
world. At this point Speranza takes over his schooling, to bring him to a better
spiritual balance. He has to learn to take sure hold of her silver anchor, else
concentration on his past to take sure hold of her silver anchor, else
concentration on his past sins will cause him to lose the main of Fidelia‟s
teaching.
Others help him, too. Patience doctors him, prescribing sackcloth and ashes;
Penance provides him with an iron whip. But, above all, Charissa (“Charity” –
“the greatest of all these is Charity”), with turtle doves on an ivory chain as
symbols of happy married love, instructs in the Christian idea of love. She had
not previously met the Red Cross Knight because she had been giving birth to a
child. Charity leads him to Mercy, who guides him to a hospital where various
human and miseries are tended.
After the Red Cross Knight has performed various good works, he visits a
hermitage near by, where lives an aged holy man named Contemplation.
Contemplation‟s physical eyesight is poor for he is very old indeed; embodying
youthful spiritually, he has keen spiritual sight:
For God he often saw from heavens height …
The old man, at the request of Mercy, guides the Red Cross Knight to the
highest mount, like that of Moses or that on which Christ gave his famous
sermon. The Red Cross Knight views a great city built high of pearls and
precious stone, indescribable by an, where dwell eternal peace and happiness.
This is the New Jerusalem that God built for his chosen people, a city excelling
in beauty even Cleopoils, the seat of the Faerie Queen herself. The old man
predicts that the Red Cross Knight will be among those “eternized” in the
“immortal book of fame and that he shall be knows as “Saint George of Merry
England. ”
The Red Cross Knight does not want to return to the world. The old man,
however, reveals to him the secret of his parentage. The Red Cross knight
springs from an ancient race of Saxon kings. He had been a changeling, stolen
by a faerie from his human parents who were left a changeling, stolen by a

409
faerie from his human parents who were left a faery child in his place. A
ploughman found the child and gave him the name George.
Returning to Una from the mountain, the Red Cross Knight finds that his
eyes have been dazed by the brightness of the vision.
CANTO XI: Now we come to the great battle between the Red Cross
knight and the old dragon. Una‟s parents have imprisoned themselves in a
tower of brass to escape the terror which the knight is now to meet. A horrible
roaring which shakes the ground is heard; then the dragon is seen stretched
along the sunny side of a great hill, himself a great hill! Making a terrific
shadow, the dragon, horrible and vast, approaches our courageous St. George.
Plated with scales, the monster has wings like two great sails with which he
can move with unexpected speed through the terrified sky. His tail has a
hundred folds with thick entangled knots, red and black, stretching little short
of tree furlongs. It is needless to mention his claws and devouring teeth. His
still bloody teeth are iron. In addition, he gives forth smoothing smoke and
sulphur.
The Red Cross Knight drives his pointed steel at him, as can be imagined,
with little effect. The dragon retaliates by picking up both man and horse and
driving them through the air. When the monster is forced to come down for a
moment and let go of his victims, the Red Cross Knight drives his spear, using
the strength of three men, into the dragon‟s body close under the left wing.
Black blood, the force of which could drive a watermill, gushes forth and
drowns the land. The dragon replies with fire, burning the knight‟s armor and
singeing his body underneath. The Red Cross Knight has the worst of it, what
with “heat, toil, wounds, arms, smart, inward fire. ”
The dragon knocks the knight into a well. Fortunately, this is the “well of
life” possessing medicinal properties, which can restore the dead to life. The
dragon claps his wings, feeling very pleased with himself. Una spends the first
night of the battle in prayer.

410
 But in the morning the Red Cross Knight comes out of the well, like an
eagle, fresh as the morning wave. This time the Red Cross Knight starts
operations by striking a yawning wound into the crested scalp of his enemy,
and the latter roars like a hundred rampaging lions. The dragon shoots his sting,
like a needy, though the knight‟s armor, where it breaks off and remains
painfully embedded. Enraged with pain, the Red Cross Knight cleaves the
dragon‟s tail down to the stump. Finally, the knight cuts off the dragon‟s feet
which has clutched his shield and which still cling remorselessly after they
have been cut off. The dragon then uses his smoke and flame-throwers, and the
Red Cross Knight goes down for the count.
Again the Red Cross Knight is fortunate. He falls beside a tree, loaded with
vermilion apples, called the Tree of Life. This tree gave a sovereign balm that
could cure mortal wounds. Night falls, and Una prays and waits.
The third phase of the battle is the last. The dragon tries to swallow the Red
Cross Knight whole, but the Knight, taking advantage of the open mouth,
thrusts his sword through it to the dragon‟s stomach, and down falls the
monster like a huge cliff.
CANTI XII: The watchman from the castle wall sees the dead monster.
The aged sire, lord of the land, opens the castle gate. The Red Cross Knight is
greeted by the King and Queen; dancing virgins throw laurel boughs before
him; Una is crowned with a green garland. The crowed approaches the dead
monster. Cautiously, afraid that somewhere near him may be a nest of small
dragons.
The floor of the castle is spread with the royal purple of welcome. The
Knight is proclaimed the King‟s heir and the future husband of his daughter,
Una:
So faire and fresh, as freshest flower in May,
For she had lady her mournefull stole aside,
And window-like sad wimple throwne away
Where with her heavenly beautie she did hide
Whiles on her wearie journey she did ride …
411
 All stand in amazement of Una‟s revealed beauty.
Then a stranger arrives with a message, apparently from Fidessa but in
reality from Duessa, stating that the Knight had already plighted his hand to
another love in another country. But the Knight identifies Fidessa as Duessa,
and Una fingers the messenger as Archimago. Archimago is arrested and
thrown into a dungeon. Una and the Red Cross Knight are finally married:
Great joy was made that day of young and old,
And sloemne feast proclaymd throught the land,
That their exceeding mirth may not be told …
But the Red Cross Knight shortly had to leave Una, and report back the
success of his exploit to the Faerie Queen.

412
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1- Barashc, F. The Romantic Poets. Monarch Press. New York: 1991.
2- Bennett, J. Five Metaphysical Poets. Cambridge Press: Cambridge, 1964.
3- Boyle, Robert. Metaphor in Hopkins. Chapel Hill: N. C., 1961.
4- Brustein, R. The theater of Revolt: At Approach to the Modern Drama. Boston Little,
Brown, 1962.
5- Culler, A. Imaginative Reason: The Poetry of Mr. Arnold. 1966.
6- Freedom, Mori. Essays on the Modern Drama. Boston: Jeoth Co. 1964.
7- Fuller, John. A Reader‟s Guide to W. H. Auden 1970.
8- Gardener, Helen. The art of T. S. Elion. Clesset Press: 1968.
9- Henley, P. Spener in Freland. Cork, 1938.
10- Hough, G. The Romantic Poets. 1964.
11- Jonnes, P. Shakespeare, The Sonnets: A casebook. London: MacMillon, 1977.
12- Killham, J. Critical Essays on the Poetry of Tennyson. New York: 1960.
13- Lynen, John. The Pastoral Art of Robert Frost. New Haven: Yale Press, 1960.
14- Miller, J. Thomas Hardy, Distance and Desive. London: 1970.
15- Moynihan, W. The Craft and Art of Dylan Thomas. 1966.
16- Pishkar, Kian. Love & Death is Shakespeare‟s Major works. Tehran: 1997.
17- Purdom, C. B. A Guide to the Plays of G. B. Shaw. New York: Thomas, Y. 1958.
18- Ratner, L. Guide to English Literature, Mac Graw Hill, 1985.
19- Rezaei. A. An Introduction to literature in English. Tehran: Samt, Press, 1996.
20- Rezaei, A. Poetry in English. Tehran: Samt, Press, 1996.
21- Sokhanvar, J. The Practice of Literary Terminology. Tehran: Samt, Press, 1996.
22- Stallworthy, J. Wilfred Owen. London: Oxfoed Press, 1974.
23- Thompson. Lawrance. Fire and Ice: The Art and Thought of Robert Frost. New York
Holt, 1942.
24- Valgemea, M. Albee‟s Great God Alice. Modern Drama. New york: 1967.
25- Ward, A. C. A Major American Poet in American Literature. London: 1932.

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 26- Wasserman, E. Shelley. A Critical Reading. 1971.
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28- Winters, Yvor. Emily Dickinson and the Limits of Judgment. Norfolk: Conn, 1938.

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Index
ALESHIRE, JOHN
Slipping 240
AMMONS, A. R
Providence 241
ANONYMOUS
Edward 213
In the Garden 97
My Church 228
ARNOLD, MATHEW
Dover Beach 242
AUDEN, W. H.
Muse des Beaux Arts 245
That Night When Joy Began 124
The Unknown Citizen
BAKER, DONALD W.
Formal application 55
BASHO, . MATSOU / MORITAKE
Two Japanese Haiku 206
BERRY, D. C.
On Reading Poems to Senior 246
BISOP, ELIZABETH
One Art 247
BLAKE, WILLIAM
The Garden of Love 248
“Introduction” to Songs of Innocence 140
The Lamb 249
Soft snow 49
A poison Tree 223
The Tiger 249

BROOKE, RUPERT
The Dead 47
BROOKS, Gwendolyn
We Real Cool 126
BURFORD, WILLIAM
A Christmas Tree 215
BY VARIOUS HANDS
A Handful of Limericks 203
CAMPION, THOMAS
There is a Garden in her Face 40
CHAUCER, GEOFFRY
Canterbury Tales 182

415
CLIFTON, LUCILLE
Good Times 252
COLERIDGE, S. TAYLOR
Kubla Khan 253
COLLINS, MARTHA
The Story We Know 210
COWELY, MALCOM
The Long Voyage 229
CUMMINGS, E. E.
If Everything Happens that can‟t be Done 141
In Just-
The Greedy the People 176
DAVISE, W. H.
The Villain 109
DICKINSION, EMILY
Abraham to Kill Him 967
A Humming Bird 39
A narrow Fellow in the Grass 32
Apparently with no Surprise 109
As imperceptibly as Grief 126
Because I couldn‟t stop for Death 255
I heard a Fly buzz When I died 170
I like to see it lap the Miles 162
In Winter in My Room 310
I taste a liquor never brewed 257
My Life Closed Twice 50
One Dignity Delays For All 115
Some Keep the Sabbath Going to Church 228
„Twas warm at First Like Us 115
DONNE, JOHN
The Apparition 118
Death, be not proud 208
The Flea 118
Good-Morrow 258
Hero and Leander 7

Song :Go and catch a falling star 259

The Triple Fool 18
DOUGLAS, KEITH
Vergissmeinnicht 261
DRAYTON, MICHAEL
Since there is no help 110
DUGAN, ALAN
Love Song: I and Thou 48
ELIOT, T. S.
Ash Wednesday‟ day 86
A Song for Simeon 94

416
 Hollow Man 78
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock 237
FERLINGHETTI, LAWERENCE
Constantly Risking 16
FIELD, EUGENE
Little Boy Blue 231
FORCHE, CCROLYN
The Colonel 261
FRANCIS, ROBERT
The Hound
Pitcher 218
FROST, ROBERT
Acquainted with the Night 263
After Apple-Picking
The Aim Was Song 144
Departmental 56
Desert Places
Dust of Snow 49
Home Burial 234
Mending Wall 267
Mowing 21
Nothing Gold Can Stay 138
The Silken Tent 41
The Span of Life 145
The Telephone
West Running Brook 265
GEORGE, GASCOIGNE
And If I Did What then? 23
Gilbert, Christopher
Pushing 275
Grander, Isabella
Gimboling 274
GRAVES, ROBERTS
The Naked And The Nude 25
Down, Wanton, Down 310
HARDY, THOMAS
Channel Firing 276
The Darkling Thrush 34
Hap
The Man He Killed
The Oxen 116

HAYDEN, ROBERT
Those Winter Sundays

HERBERT, GEORGE
Redemption 45

417
 The Quip 35
Virtue 139
HARINGTON, SIR JOHN
On Treason 54

HERRICK, ROBERT
To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time
Upon Julia‟s Voice 145
HOLMAN, M. CARL
Mr. Z
The Caged Skylark 98
The Lantern out of Doors 98
The Windhover 102
HOPKINS, GERARD MANLY
Heaven –Heaven 166
Pied Beauty 215
HOUSMAN, A. E.
Bredon Hill 278
Eight O‟clock 169
Oh Who is that young Sinner 143
With Rue My Heart is Laden 125
To An Athlete Dying Young 279
HUGHES, TED
Wind 165
JARRELL, RANDELl
The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner 281
JENISON, KEITH
Last Stand 78
JOYCE, JAMES
All Day I Hear 170
KEATS, JOHN
Bright Star
La Belle Dame sans Merci283
Ode on a Grecian Urn 285
Ode to a Nightingale 289
Ode On Indolence 298
Ode On Melancholy 296
Ode to Psyche 291
On First Looking into Chapman's Homer 177
To Sleep 42
KE, ELLEN
Pathedy of Manners 282
KINNELL, GALWAY
Blackberry Eating 299
KLISER, GRANFIELD
The Most Vital Thing in Life 223
Knight, Etheridge

418
The Warden Said to me 301
KUMINE, MAXINE
400-Meter Freestyle 214
LARKIN, PHILIP
Aubade 106
A Study of Reading Habits
MACBETH, GEORGE
Bedtime Story 301
MACLEISH, ARCHIBALD
Ars 108
You, Andrew Marvell 45
MADGETT, NAOMI LONG
Midway 303
MARVELL, ANDREW
A Dialogue Between Soul and Body 304
MATHIS, CLEOPTRA
Getting Out 306
MCNAUGHTON, J. H.
The Faded Coat of Blue 220
MIDDLETON, RICHARD
On a Dead Child 225
MILLAY, EDNA ST. VINCENT
Counting-Out Rhyme 135
MILTON, JOHN
Arcades 67
On Shakespeare 65
On the death of a Fair Infant Dying of a Cough 59
On the Morning of Christ‟s Nativity 61
Paradise Lost 385
Sonnets 70
Sonnet 7 73
Sonnets 8, 9, 10 73
Sonnet 16 74
Sonnet 23 75
The Passion 64
Three Lyrics 65
To The Nightingale 72
MOORE, MARIANNE
Nevertheless 307
NEMROVE, HOWARD
Grace to be Said at the Supermarket 308
NIMS, JOHN FREDERICK
Love Poem 53
NYE, NAOMI SHIHAB
Famous 309
OLDS, SHARON
The Connoisseurs of Slugs 310

419
 OWEN, WILFRED
Anthem for Doomed Youth 166
PAGE, P. K.
The Landlady 313
PASTAN, LINDA
Ethics 314
PATMORE, COVENTRY
The Toys 231
PHAIR, GEORGE E.
The Old-fashioned Pitcher 218
POMERY, RALPH
Row 134
POPE, ALEXABDER
Engraved on the Collar of a Dog Which 123
On a Certain Lady at Court 53
Sound and Sense146
The Rape of the Lock 149
POUND, EZRA
Portrait D‟une Femme 28
RANDALL, DUDLEY
Ballad of Birmingham 315
RANSOM, JOHN CROWE
Bells for John Whiteside‟s Daughter 225
Parting, Without a Sequel 132
REED, HENRY
Naming of Parts
REID, ALASTAIR
Curiosity
RICH, ADRIENNE
Living in Sin 34
RICHARDSON, DOROTYH LEE
At Cape Bojeador 44
RIOS, ALBERTO
Nani 316
ROBINSON, EDWIN. ARLINGTON
The Dark Hills 37
The Mill 24
Miniver Cheevy
Mr. Flood‟s Party 317
Richard Cory 27
ROETHKE, THEODORE
I knew a woman 319
The Waking 321
ROSSETI, CHRISTINA
Uphill 49
SANDBURG, CARL
Splinter 145

420
 The Harbor 131
SASSOON, SIEGFRIED
Base Details 30
SCOTT, SIR WALTER
Breathes there the Man 229
SEXTON, ANNE
Her Kind
SHAKESPEARE, WILLIAM
Fear no more 322
Let me no to the marriage of true minds (Sonnet 119) 323
My mistress‟ eyes (Sonnet 130) 326

From Romeo and Juliet 207

Song: Hark, Hark 144
That time of year 199
SOTO, GARY
Small Town with One Road 328
SPESER, EDMUND
The Faerie Queene 400
Stafford, William
Traveling Through the Dark 136
STEVENS, WALLACE
A High-Toned Old Christian Woman 331
Anecdote of the Jar 339
Disillusionment of Ten O‟clock 335
Peter Quince at Clavier 333
Sunday Morning 337
The Death of a Soldier 329
The Emperor of Ice Cream 335
The Snow Man 330

Thirteen Ways of looking at a Blackbird 341

STOW, RANDOLPH
As he Lay Dying 211
SWENSON, MAY
Question 343
SWIFT, JONOTHAN
A Description of the Morning 344
TENNYSON, ALFRED, LORD
Crossing the Bar 116
The Eagle
Ulysses
THOMAS, DYLAN
Do not Go Gentle into That Good Night 346
Fern Hill 347
Poem in October 204
TOOMER, JEAN

421
 Reapers 348
UPDIKE, JOHN
Ex-Basketball Player 349
WAGNORE, DAVID
Return to the Swamp 351
WAKMAN, JOHN
Love in Brooklyn 113
WALCOTT, DEREK
The Virgins 352
WANIEK, MARILYN NELSON
Old Bibles 353
WARREN, ROBERT PENN
Boy Wandering in Simm‟s Valley 354
WHITMAN, WALT
A Noiseless Patient Spider 356
Come Up from the Fields Father 220
Had I the Choice 144
There was a Child Went Forth 357
When I Heard the Learned Astronomer 359
WILBUR, RICHARD
A Late Aubade 31
The Mill 360
WILLARD, NANCY
A Wreath to the Fish 361
WILLIAMS, MILLER
A Poem For Emily 362
WILLIAMS, WILLIAM CARLOS
The Dance 175
WORDSWORTH, WILLIAM
Composed upon Westminster Bridge September 3, 1802
I wandered lonely as a cloud 375
Resolution and Independence 364
Strange Fits of Passion Have I Known 372
The Solitary Reaper 373
YEATS, WILLIAM BUTLER
Sailing to Byzantium 379
The Coming of Wisdom with Time 110
The Second Coming 380
The Wild Swan at Coole 382

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