Questions tagged [poetry]
This tag should be used on questions about poetry in general or about any specific poem. Please use this tag with the appropriate author tag, and, if applicable, the language tag (such as [french-literature].
352
questions
2
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0answers
25 views
Outline the symbolism of “The astronaut in Isolation” by Rosalind Morris
“The astronaut in Isolation” by Rosalind Morris is a poem that was published on Daily Maverick on 30 April 2020.
It's a new poem and there is no interpretation of this anywhere on the web. I would ...
-2
votes
0answers
25 views
How do the novel American Psycho and the poem The Rape of the Lock compare?
How do Bret Easton Ellis's novel American Psycho (1991) and Alexander Pope's poem "The Rape of the Lock" (1712-1717) compare?
Since they both deal with themes of materiality and class, I was wondering,...
0
votes
0answers
14 views
Any famous poem or song describing RAIN SILENTLY kills or nourishes things [closed]
I'm an English learner and want to know some English poems and songs.
Any popular poem or song that portrays quiet rain is worthy of my studying.
Both real and fictional rain are OK, as long as the ...
2
votes
0answers
26 views
Is Williams's This Is Just to Say an imagist poem, an objectivist poem or neither?
The Wikipedia article about the short poem "This Is Just to Say" claims the text is an imagist poem without backing up that claim.
Williams contributed to the anthology Des Imagistes, published in ...
4
votes
3answers
122 views
Two Interpretations of Robert Herrick's “To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time”
In his "To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time", Robert Herrick concluded his carpe diem plea with:
For having lost but once your prime, You may forever tarry.
There seems to be two ways to ...
5
votes
2answers
82 views
Edgar Allan Poe's “Alone”
The short poem "Alone" by Edgar Allan Poe was written in 1829 or 1830, when he was a young man, but only published in 1875 long after his death. Its full text is as follows:
From childhood’s hour I ...
1
vote
1answer
76 views
What are the “animal heads of the flowers” in Allen Ginsberg's Transcription of Organ Music?
Here is the original text:
The rambler vine climbed up the cottage post,
the leaves in the night still where the day had placed
them, the animal heads of the flowers where they had
...
3
votes
1answer
107 views
Does “the” only serve to preserve metre in “The Tyger”?
William Blake's poem “The Tyger” from Songs of Experience utilizes "the" in an interesting manner in two separate couplets of the 4th stanza, lines 9 and 11:
What the hammer? what the chain,
In ...
2
votes
1answer
51 views
What does the last line of Daniel Borzutzky's “Managed Diversity” mean?
I wonder if anybody could help me to understand the last line of the poem “Managed Diversity”, written by Daniel Borzutzky:
The global economy brightens my room with the surveillance of my rotten ...
3
votes
1answer
30 views
“By the lives of all who’d come to console and assist the stricken” What does it mean?
I was reading the poem "The Miracle at Sea" by Shmuel HaNagid (translated from Hebrew by Peter Cole), and I came across a passage that really confused me. This is the second stanza of the poem:
By ...
7
votes
1answer
109 views
Why do I have a different version of “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”?
The first stanza of Robert Frost's "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" reads as follows in its original publication in New Hampshire (1923):
Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is ...
4
votes
2answers
138 views
Who is being referenced in the opening line of “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”?
The first stanza of Robert Frost's "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" goes like this:
Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping ...
4
votes
1answer
104 views
Origin of the title of “La Dragontea” by Lope de Vega?
Why Lope de Vega titled his poem La Dragontea, what were the prerequisites? I tried to search the etymology of this word but was not successful.
Yes, I know that Chinese Dragon Tea exists, but I ...
7
votes
0answers
132 views
Any significance to the “Dutch clock” and “Chinese plate” in Eugene Field's “The Duel”?
I just learned from an answer to an ID question about the poem "The Duel", or "The Gingham Dog and the Calico Cat", in which Eugene Field describes a vicious fight between two stuffed animals as told ...
2
votes
0answers
50 views
Trying to remember a poem that I only have a snippet of
I'm trying to find some lost poems that were favorites of mine in high school. This one, I only have one line that I remember clearly. Not much to go on, I know, but if anyone recognizes it, I would ...
1
vote
1answer
74 views
Author and title of poem: “Follow, follow me into the South, …”
Follow, follow me into the South,
And if you are brave and wise
I'll buy you laughter for your mouth,
Sorrow for your eyes.
I'll buy you laughter, wild and sweet,
...
0
votes
0answers
31 views
How is inner conflict presented in the poem “Tissue”?
We haven't studied this poem in clas due to the COVID-19 outbreak and schools shutting down, but we have made annotations for the poem. However nothing about conflict came up.
Have you got anyideas ...
3
votes
0answers
59 views
Marianne Moore’s ‘Four Quartz Crystal Clocks’
Marianne Moore’s poem ‘Four Quartz Crystal Clocks’ (1940) was first published in The Kenyon Review 2:3, pp. 284–285, and collected in What Are Years (1941). Here's the first stanza (of seven):
...
3
votes
0answers
59 views
Understanding two lines from “The Wound-Dresser” by Walt Whitman
Among the hospital poems, "The Wound-Dresser" by Walt Whitman is one of the best and finest. I wonder if anybody here can help me to understand two lines of this piece.
But in silence, in dreams’ ...
2
votes
1answer
97 views
To whom is Anne Bronte's “A Reminiscence” addressed?
Anne Bronte's short poem "A Reminiscence", originally published under the name Acton Bell in the book Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell (1846) published jointly with her two sisters, is addressed ...
2
votes
1answer
122 views
What is the rhythm of the line 'I want a hero, an uncommon want'?
What is the rhythm of the following line from the start of Byron's Don Juan?
I want a hero: an uncommon want,
Is it iambic or trochaic? It's a tetrameter and not a pentameter that I am aware of. ...
1
vote
2answers
56 views
Can stream of consciousness have punctuation/structure?
Our English teacher showed us a poem about someone trying to organize thoughts/feelings that haunt them into a list, and revising the list as they go.
She claims that this style of writing is stream ...
1
vote
1answer
292 views
Ezra Pound's “In a Station of the Metro”
Ezra Pound wrote a very short poem entitled "In a Station of the Metro". It is, in full:
The apparition of these faces in the crowd:
Petals on a wet, black bough.
What kind of meaning and ...
4
votes
1answer
87 views
Does anyone recognise this poem - from my mum (90)?
Once upon a summer in the hills by the river
Was a deep green forest where the wild things grow.
There were paths as ...?....?
There were ...?...?...?
And a thousand little spaces where the ...
2
votes
1answer
60 views
What game are they playing in Elizabeth Moody’s ‘The Temptation’?
Here’s an extract from ‘The Temptation; or, Satan in the Country’ by Elizabeth Moody:
The verdant table Satan spy’d,
And took his seat by Lydia’s side;
Soon as he hovers o’er her hand,
Lydia ...
3
votes
1answer
139 views
Michael Field’s ‘To Christina Rossetti’
‘Michael Field’ was a joint pen-name used by Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper. Their elegy ‘To Christina Rossetti’ (1896) was written after Rossetti’s death in 1894.
Lady, we would behold thee ...
2
votes
1answer
81 views
Keats' views on beauty
In the poem Endymion: A poetic romance (1818), the first stanza of Book I (beginning, "A thing of beauty is a joy for ever") focuses a great deal on beauty where Keats presents some of his views on ...
2
votes
1answer
57 views
Are “simple sheep” a biblical reference in Keats' “Endymion”?
In the poem Endymion: A poetic romance (1818), the first stanza of Book I (beginning, "A thing of beauty is a joy for ever") contains the following passage:-
...
1
vote
1answer
84 views
Why “a creeper climbs” in Our Casuarina Tree by Toru Dutt?
In the poem "Our Casuarina Tree" by Toru Dutt, why has she written 'a creeper climbs...'?
Instead, she might have written 'a climber climbs'! Does it imply anything?
2
votes
1answer
66 views
Anne Bronte's “The Penitent”
Anne Bronte's poem "The Penitent", originally published under the name Acton Bell in the book Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell (1846) published jointly with her two sisters, reads as follows:
...
3
votes
2answers
706 views
What does Wordsworth mean by “A pagan suckled in a creed outworn”?
I have two questions regarding this sonnet by William Wordsworth, first published in 1807:
The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers:
Little we ...
1
vote
2answers
150 views
What's the meaning of this phrase in The Invitation
In Oriah Mountain Dreamer's poem The Invitation, the sixth paragraph is:
It doesn't interest me if the story you are telling me is true. I want to know if you can disappoint another to be true to ...
3
votes
1answer
275 views
Explain the third stanza of Donne's “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning”?
This is the third stanza of John Donne's "A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning":
Moving of th' earth brings harms and fears,
Men reckon what it did, and meant;
But trepidation of the spheres,
...
3
votes
1answer
43 views
What is the meaning of Brodsky’s saying in the context of Sagan & Schneider’s book “Into the Cool”?
I came across this paragraph while reading Into the Cool by Sagan and Schneider and I was intrigued by a reference to Joseph Brodsky’s poetry but I can’t seem to understand what it means exactly:
...
4
votes
1answer
68 views
A slightly different interpretation in the poem “Boat Stealing” by Wordsworth
I have recently annotated this poem and when looking online, I have found that my interpretation of the poem in some aspects is a bit different to most others. I just want to make sure that my ...
3
votes
1answer
86 views
Meaning of “tally” in Whitman's “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d”
From "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d" by Walt Whitman:
To the tally of my soul,
Loud and strong kept up the gray-brown bird,
With pure deliberate notes spreading filling the night.
...
5
votes
1answer
1k views
Meaning of “cloudless at dawn” and connection with Shakespeare's head?
I was reading one of the master-pieces by Stephen Spender, "An Elementary School Classroom in a Slum".
Following are the starting lines of the second of four octaves:
Our sour cream walls, ...
0
votes
1answer
75 views
What figure of speech does “alive enough to have strength to die” by Hardy contain?
The poem "Neutral Tones" by Thomas Hardy was written in 1867 and published in the 1898 collection Wessex Poems and Other Verses. It contains the stanza:
The smile on your mouth was the deadest ...
2
votes
1answer
403 views
Theme of William Wordsworth's poem “We Are Seven”?
"We Are Seven" is a poem by William Wordsworth and this poem depicts the innocent nature of a child who just does not want to understand that her siblings have passed away of natural causes and ...
1
vote
0answers
30 views
What does Walt Whitman mean by “going in for my chances”?
From "Song of Myself" by Walt Whitman:
What is commonest, cheapest, nearest, easiest, is Me,
Me going in for my chances, spending for vast returns,
Adorning myself to bestow myself on the first ...
4
votes
0answers
83 views
Is Hemingway's poem entitled MITRAILLIATRICE or MITRAIGLIATRICE?
I read -- a few months ago -- Hemingway's juvenilia poetry & short-story collection stoically entitled Three Stories & Ten Poems. It was published in the early 1920s -- I think 1923, but I've ...
2
votes
1answer
29 views
Converting poetry to prose
The poem describes a situation when three witches (Old Goody Jones, Goody Price, and Madge Gray) and a man (Robin) stole into the vicarage's cellar and indulged in revelry. These thieves laughed so ...
4
votes
1answer
129 views
“inlooped flags” in Whitman's poem
What is the meaning of "inlooped flags" in a poem of Whitman (When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd)? He is describing the Lincoln funeral:
Coffin that passes through lanes and streets,
...
1
vote
0answers
47 views
How can enjambment be used to enhance rhythm in a poem?
I was wondering how enjambment can be used to improve the rhythm in poetry. I have seen some innovative uses of it by e.e. cummings, such as by breaking a word and writing the ending on the next line....
0
votes
2answers
183 views
The meaning of the poem “Crucified” by Kahlil Gibran
I am a high school student, and my assignment was to find intertextuality of the crucifixion of Christ and write a reflection about it.
I was surfing on the web, and found a poem called "Crucified" ...
1
vote
1answer
603 views
In “Howl”, what does “Blake-light tragedy” mean?
In the passage from Ginsberg's Howl:
who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy among the scholars of war
How does the hyphen in Blake-...
1
vote
0answers
75 views
What does A. E. C. denote in the poem about Edward Anti-Teller?
"Perils of Modern Living" is a poem written by the physicist Harold P. Furth inspired by a speech on antimatter by Edward Teller. (Hat-tip to our comrades at Worldbuilding SE for making me aware of ...
3
votes
1answer
822 views
What does T. S. Eliot mean in the poem The Hollow Men when he ended it with “This is the way the world ends/Not with a bang but a whimper”?
I once read a poem "The Hollow Men" by T. S. Eliot. The poet ended the verse like this:
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a ...
5
votes
1answer
652 views
What does “ceremony of innocence” mean In “The Second Coming”?
The Second Coming by W.B. Yeats:
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,...
0
votes
0answers
47 views
What does “the cedars where our old ones sleep” mean here?
days pass easy over these ancient hills
i wander near a moccasin path overgrown with
rusted cans and weeds
i stand in the forest at sunset waiting for
a song from the rising wind
it ...
