Questions tagged [poetry]
Questions about poetry in general or about any specific poem. Please use this tag with the appropriate author tag, and, if applicable, a language tag (such as [french-literature].
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Catalectic trochaic tetrameter or acephaleous iambic tetrameter? Scanning "Kubla Khan"
I'm currently teaching myself to scan, and I'm practicing with Coleridge's "Kubla Khan" at the moment. You can read the entire poem online. I've arrived at line 32: "Floated midway on the waves;" and ...
user111
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Why did iambic pentameter become so 'standard' in classical English poetry?
Iambic pentameter is probably the most prevailing and widely used meter in classical English poetry, and it's the 'standard' form of verse in many forms of poetry such as sonnets. From Wikipedia (...
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Why does the poem "Naming of Parts" contrast war with nature?
Henry Reed's poem "Naming of Parts" (which you can read online) depicts a lesson used to teach soldiers the various parts of their rifles. (Hence the title "Naming of Parts"). Interspersed between the ...
user111
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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 ...
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Who introduced the sonnet to English literature? Wyatt or Shakespeare?
Who brought sonnet to English literature? Thomas Wyatt or William Shakespeare?
Their contributions to English literature: Shakespeare wrote a book that contains 154 sonnets, but I couldn't find ...
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What is the origin of this contradictory poem?
Does anyone know where this poem originates from:
One fine morning in the middle of the night,
Two dead men got up to fight,
Back to back they faced each other,
Drew their swords and shot one another....
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Whose were the "best minds" being destroyed in Ginsberg's "Howl"?
In Allen Ginsberg´s most famous poem "Howl", he claims he was witness to the destruction of the best minds of his generation:
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving ...
user59
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How many of the Songs of Innocence and of Experience come in pairs?
Some years ago I studied many of Blake's Songs of Innocence and of Experience. Many of them are very clearly paired up, an Innocence song and an Experience song deliberately written to compare and ...
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What are the "dark Satanic mills" in Blake's Jerusalem?
The short poem Jerusalem by William Blake - not to be confused with his much longer epic poem of the same title; I'm talking about the "did those feet in ancient times" one - contains the following ...
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Accuracy of the translation of Baudelaire's "Au Lecteur": how to forge an opinion?
This question is directly inspired from this one on French Language Stack Exchange.
To summarize it, the OP is wondering about the good translation for "chimiste" in Baudelaire's opening ...
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Why is the robin "sobbing"?
Blake's "The Blossom", part of his Songs of Innocence which you can read online, is a very short poem about a sparrow and a robin. The part about the robin reads as follows:
Pretty, pretty robin!
...
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2
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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 ...
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Doesn't Burns' use of parallelism reinforce "My Heart's in the Highlands" visual images?
Here is "My Heart's in the Highlands" by Robert Burns (https://www.bartleby.com/360/8/24.html).
My heart’s in the Highlands, my heart is not here;
My heart’s in
the Highlands a-chasing the deer;...
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What is the symbolism of the Western Wind (or Zephyr)?
I was reading some poetry and I stumbled upon the four-line 'Western Wind' by Anonymous, written in the 16th century:
Western wind when wilt thou blow
the small rain down can rain
Christ if my ...
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In what literature does Rumi say "You are the Soul of the Soul of the Universe. And your name is Love?"
In what literature does Rumi say, "You are the Soul of the Soul of the Universe. And your name is Love?"
Any slight modification of the verse, e.g. "The soul of the soul of the universe is love" can ...
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The second line of "God's Grandeur"
The second line of Gerard Manley Hopkins's sonnet God's Grandeur is:
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil.
What I found on the Internet regarding the analysis of this line was rather ...
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1
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Is Belarus actually hard to farm?
To Our Native Land by Janka Lučyna starts as follows:
Thou art spread widely with forests and marshes,
With sand-dune expanses that grant but poor living
It then goes on to talk about how bad the ...
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1
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How to scan Robert Frost's "For Once, Then, Something"
I just read a fascinating blog post titled "Frost, Hendecasyllabics & For Once, Then, Something". The blog post describes the challenges of scanning Robert Frost's poem "For Once, Then, Something" ...
user111
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2
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Does translation take away from the meaning of verse and poetry?
I am currently reading The Heart of Haiku by Jane Hirshfield. In it, many examples of haikus translated from Japanese are given. However, in their English form, they lack the rhythm and meter of Haiku....
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Did Lenore merely leave or is she dead?
Edgar Allen Poe's poem The Raven has the narrator mourning the loss of his love Lenore. But it's actually not entirely clear to me if Lenore merely left the narrator (for whatever relationship-related ...
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What is the pun in Kipling's poem "The Three-Decker"?
In the poem The Three-Decker, by Rudyard Kipling, there is one line where the meter is slightly different from all the other lines. I Googled that line, not expecting to find anything, and Google ...
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Why are haiku usually of 17 syllables?
One of the characteristics of Haiku is that the poems are usually of 17 syllables (5-7-5). Exceptions exist, of course, but 17 is the norm.
Why 17? How did the originators of Haiku come to settle on ...
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Bilbo’s song of Eärendil in “The Fellowship of the Ring”
In The Fellowship of the Ring, the character Bilbo Baggins recites a poem beginning with these lines:
Eärendil was a mariner
that tarried in Arvernien;
he built a boat of timber felled
in Nimbrethil ...
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Why are all the schoolchildren referred to as guns in Clint Smith's "The Gun"?
Clint Smith's poem "The Gun" describes a school shooting from the perspective of a child. However, the central character, as well as its fellow classmates, are all referred to as "guns&...
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When and why did "No man is an island" start being regarded as a poem?
John Donne's "Meditation XVII" from Devotions upon Emergent Occasions (1624) includes the following well-known passage:
No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the ...
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Significance of the Phoenician Sailor having pearls for eyes in The Waste Land
In T. S. Eliot's poem The Waste Land (which you can read online), the "Phoenician Sailor" (an image on a tarrot card) is described as having pearls for eyes in lie 48:
Is your card, the drowned ...
user111
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What rough beast slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
Turning and turning in the widening gyreThe falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and ...
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The name of a poem about a poet being happy that someone has forgotten the title of their poem
I read this poem in a collection and now I can't find it. It starts with the poet talking about how they were approached by someone who had loved one of their poems. But the reader could not remember ...
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What happened to the epic poem?
It's so strange to me that we all praised and adore things, but would never consider supporting them in a modern setting. There are many examples of this: poetry (very unpopular nowadays; not in the ...
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Why did the stars throw down their spears?
William Blake's poem “The Tyger” from Songs of Experience contains one couplet whose meaning has always puzzled me, lines 17–18, the first two lines of the fifth stanza:
When the stars threw ...
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Does "The Soul selects her own Society" by Emily Dickinson have a simile?
Here is the poem "The Soul selects her own Society" by Emily Dickinson.
The Soul selects her own Society —
Then — shuts the Door —
To her divine Majority —
Present no more —
Unmoved — ...
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What is the deeper meaning of "The Tyger"?
William Blake's poem "The Tyger" is part of his collection Songs of Innocence and of Experience, an extraordinary set of poems which explores ideas such as spirituality, love, poverty, repression, all ...
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What did "Moloch" represent in Allen Ginsberg´s poem "Howl"?
In Allen Ginsberg´s poem "Howl", what did "Moloch" represent?
What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination?
Moloch! Solitude!...
user59
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Who put forward this completion to Sappho 94, and what is it actually supposed to read?
In Sappho 94 (τεθνάκην δ' ἀδόλως θέλω), there is this tercet at ll. 25-27, which is very incomplete, which Edmonds doesn't even have, and which Bibliotheca Augustana and Campbell p. 69 both read:
...
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Did Rudyard Kipling Write "The Wrath of the Awakened Saxon"?
I came across a poem on a forum, attributed to Rudyard Kipling called "THE WRATH OF THE AWAKENED SAXON" (the title seems to be often posted in caps).
A Google search indicates that where ...
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What does the "good night" symbolize in Dylan Thomas's "Do not go gentle into that good night"?
Do not go gentle into that good night by Dylan Thomas, he begins with "Do not go gentle into that good night". He also uses this as one of two alternating refrains. In this poem, what does the "good ...
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Who first claimed that Blake’s “dark Satanic Mills” referred to the Church of England, and what was their argument?
William Blake’s poem ‘And did those feet in ancient time’ (1808) contains the lines
And was Jerusalem builded here,
Among these dark Satanic Mills?
The meaning of the phrase “dark Satanic Mills” is ...
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Are the illustrations part of Shel Silverstein's poems?
Shel Silverstein's poems are illustrated by himself. The illustrations often provide the 'punchline' of the poem, as in the following examples (all taken from Falling Up.
Safe
I look to the left,
I ...
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Who is the 'pale Titan-woman' in Swinburne's 'Ave atque Vale'?
For those fond of intertextual references, 'Ave atque Vale' by Algernon Charles Swinburne, an English poet's lament for the French poet Charles Baudelaire, is something of a goldmine, being absolutely ...
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How much of The Song of Wandering Aengus by Yeats is based on Irish folklore?
Yeats was a keen student of Irish folklore and it is clear that the titular character in his poem The Song of Wandering Aengus is based on the pre-Christian Celtic god of love, youth and poetry.
...
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What are the "mind-forged manacles"?
From "London", a short poem in William Blake's Songs of Experience collection (free to read online):
In every cry of every man,
In every infant’s cry of fear,
In every voice, in every ban,
...
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Why rename Kipling's poem "The Beginnings" to “The Wrath of the Awakened Saxon”?
Several white nationalist and neo-Nazi websites have published a modified version of Kipling's poem "The Beginnings." In the new version of the poem, the title was renamed to "THE WRATH ...
user111
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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 ...
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Was Philip Larkin factually correct when he implied that in 1955 the streets in Ireland were "end-on to hills" more often than those in England?
In the 1955 Philip Larkin poem "The Importance of Elsewhere", it reads:
Their draughty streets, end-on to hills, the faint
Archaic smell of dockland, like a stable,
The herring-hawker's ...
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1
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Was "First They Came ..." a poem in German?
As I mentioned in another question, I have seen inconsistencies in the recounting of the poem, First They Came .... This led me to look it up and find out that the English poem comes from a collection ...
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Is the comparison in "The Clod and the Pebble" between different types of love?
The poem "The Clod and the Pebble" from William Blake's Songs of Innocence and Experience (which you can read online) is just three verses long and compares two different descriptions of love, ...
- 71.1k
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1
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Did Julian Huxley write a poem about an axolotl, and if so, what was it?
Julian Huxley was an avid science populariser, researched into the metamorphosis of axolotls, and wrote poetry. I'm pretty sure that these interests were combined in a poem I once came across, ...
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In which year was Frühlingsbotschaft by Heinrich Heine published?
I have been searching the entire internet (or mostly) and can't find when Frühlingsbotschaft by Heinrich Heine was first published.
I double-checked and it is not part of his collections
Gedichte, ...
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What were the poems other than those by Donne in the Melford Hall manuscript?
In November 2018, the Guardian reported that a 400 year old manuscript volume containing several poems by John Donne had been recently discovered at Melford Hall in Suffolk, England. In addition to ...
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What do these two segments mean in Milton's "On Shakespeare"?
I find two amphibolous segments in Milton's poem "On Shakespeare" when translating into Chinese, and thus need some help.
In first stanza
What needs my Shakespeare for his honored bones,
...
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