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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About Sappho's epigram for the little girl Aithopia: first line (manuscript tradition and experts' take), and authorship
Background and research:
As I am planning to post this poem on my blog relatively soon, I was doing some research on the first line. From what I had written previously, I seem to have found two ...
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What's the origin of the rhyme "My friend Billy had a ten foot willy"?
A simple rhyming song which I heard growing up and which still gets stuck in my head every so often:
My friend Billy had a ten foot willy.
He stuck it through the neighbour's door. OR He showed ...
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Understanding the plotline of “The Smile” by Ted Hughes
I'm reading Ted Hughes' "The Smile" (text version), and I'm trying to understand its plotline.
More specifically: what's the nature of the scenes wherein the poem's protagonist, the smile, ...
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What is the deeper meaning of Blake's "The Lily"?
The poem "The Lily" by William Blake must be one of the shortest of his Songs of Innocence and of Experience collection, only four lines long:
The modest Rose puts forth a thorn,
The humble sheep ...
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Difference between "conte" and "nouvelle" at the time of La Fontaine
One of the works of the French poet Jean de La Fontaine is a collection of stories that's usually known as Contes et nouvelles en vers. It seems to me that this title implies that there was a ...
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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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Who is the author of this contradictory poem starting "The night was dark and stormy"?
Does anyone know the name of or the author of the poem below? My grandfather used to say it all of the time and I would like to read it at his funeral. It's very silly and goes something like this:
...
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Why does Tahir Hamut Izgil speak "the names of ants" he's known?
Reading Tahir Hamut Izgil's "Somewhere Else"*, I was confused by why "ants" specifically were brought up here:
night after night
one after another
I spoke the names of ants I’ve ...
- 9,553
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Was Fontane's Tay Bridge poem compared to McGonagall's at the time?
The Tay Bridge Disaster is one of the most famous bridge collapses. It inspired a universally reviled (yet nevertheless wildly (in)famous) poem from William McGonagall, "The Tay Bridge Disaster&...
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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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Does Auden's poem 'The Model' refer to any particular painting?
I re-read 'The Model' by W H Auden earlier today, and I was struck by how good it is. I've venerated Auden since I was sixteen, but I hadn't appreciated this poem properly until now.
I find myself ...
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Who or what is 'our God' in Swinburne's 'Ave atque Vale'?
The following is a bonus question to "Who is the 'pale Titan-woman' in Swinburne's 'Ave atque Vale'?", which I was advised to separate into its own question.
The twelfth verse of 'Ave atque ...
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What did Yeats in his late period think of his early work?
The poetry of W.B. Yeats is commonly seen as belonging to three rough phases. The first is a Romantic and pre-Raphaelite style of flowery verse which commonly invokes figures of Irish mythology. The ...
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What's the first "reverse" poem?
I recently discovered an interesting type of poetry. When read one way, it says one thing and when read a different way, the opposite, all with the same words.
A sub-type of these is known as the ...
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Which original Persian poem of Rumi does this refer to?
Does anyone know which is the Persian text for the below poem by Rumi ?
I choose to love you in silence…
For in silence I find no rejection,
I choose to love you in loneliness…
For in loneliness no ...
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Is my controlling idea for my poem analysis accurate?
This is my current controlling idea of my essay on the poem "On Pleasure":
"The speaker challenges the idea of pleasure in the minds of the
audience, and argues that pleasure is an ...
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What does Tiriel's blindness symbolize?
In Tiriel, it's mentioned several times that Tiriel is blind, first in Chapter I, line 27:
Look at my eyes, blind as the orbless skull among the stones!
And later again in Chapter II, lines 61-65:
...
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Reference to Novalis in Ghérasim Luca's poem "La Poésie Pratique"
Ghérasim Luca's poem "La Poésie Pratique" / "Practical Poetry" contains the following lines:
En pratiquant le bouche à bouche de mot à mot
de « feu » le mort à « feu » vif
d' « ...
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Why are the non-fellow-students not referred to as guns in Clint Smith's "The Gun"?
This is sort of the reverse of my previous question on Clint Smith's poem "The Gun". While it's blatant about referring to all of the kids as "guns", I find it interesting that the ...
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What is an "intermezzo from the dusky elm's trunk"?
Phone Call by Tahir Hamut (full text on Words Without Borders) contains the following line:
An intermezzo from the dusky elm’s trunk
fans the spirit lamp into a bonfire
I'm somewhat confused by the ...
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What does the ellipsis in Machado's poem 'Pegasos, lindos pegasos' mean?
What does the ellipsis in Machado's poem 'Pegasos, lindos pegasos' mean? I don't know what all those dots represent. Maybe it is something specific I'm not aware of. Here is the poem.
Pegasos, lindos ...
user13380
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When and how was the phrase "these dark Satanic mills" in Blake's "Jerusalem" first altered to "those dark Satanic mills"?
William Blake's lines of verse "Jerusalem", which appear in the "Preface" to his poem "Milton", were written c.1804 and first printed c.1808.
They also appear, but with ...
user8097
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Are there different formats of haikus?
This is similar to this question but not exactly the same. I have seen haikus in the following formats:
The traditional / which is in five-seven-five / and is most common
But I have also read that ...
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Why does isolating "there" on its own line sound less emphatic in Korean than English?
I was reading Translator’s Note: Three Poems by Ko Un from the Poetry Foundation and came across this excerpt:
We translated “명사도 동사도 다” (“all nouns and verbs”) as “all words,” which sounds less ...
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Why does Petrarch's sequence of poems to Laura have three different titles?
Petrarch's celebrated sequence of 366 poems to Laura goes by three different titles. As far as I can tell, they're used interchangeably:
Il Canzoniere, The Songbook
Rerum Vulgarium Fragmenta, ...
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Who is the 'one who had lifted it' in Shelley's sonnet about 'the painted veil'?
In Shelley's famous sonnet, which begins 'Lift not the painted veil', the "turn" is placed - unusually - in the seventh line.
Lift not the painted veil which those who live
Call Life: ...
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'meter' vs. 'rhythm': How do their meanings in poetry differ from those in music?
'meter' and 'rhythm' are termed in poetry and music. So what are their parallels? Their differences?
Source: Listening to Music (2013 7 ed, but ∃ 8 ed) by Yale Prof. Craig Wright:
[p. 463] meter: ...
user175
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What metaphor(s) are represented by the mysterious figure in Charles Causley's "Innocent's Song"?
The other day, I came across this rather sinister poem by Charles Causley, set to music.
Innocent's Song
Who's that knocking on the window,
Who's that standing at the door,
What are ...
- 21k
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What is the “presence” in Wordsworth’s ‘Tintern Abbey’?
In Wordsworth’s ‘Lines written a few miles above Tintern Abbey’ he describes a “presence”:
And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated ...
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What view of suttee comes across in Naidu's poem?
Sarojini Naidu's poem "Suttee" is reproduced several places on the internet (Wikisource, Allpoetry, Poetry Archive), but I don't know the context in which this work was written and published....
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What's the role of "a, a" at the end of every stanza in Jaufré Rudel "No sap chantar qui so non di"?
At page 165 of the book Los trovadores. Historia literaria y textos by Martín de Riquer one finds the text of the cansó No sap chantar qui so non di (262, 3) by the troubadour Jaufré Rudel:
No sap ...
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Symbolism in the final lines of Yeats' Song of Wandering Aengus
Yeats' early poem The Song of Wandering Aengus is a poetic retelling of a famous Irish myth as I explored in this question. It's also a metaphor in which Aengus' quest for his fae lover is compared to ...
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How does one count syllables in medieval Galician-Portuguese poetry?
I'm trying to figure out how to count syllables in medieval Galician-Portuguese cantigas. I've tried to find it in the book A poesía lírica galego-portuguesa by Giuseppe Tavani, which I found in my ...
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Understanding comparisons in Crowcolour by Ted Hughes
In the poem "Crowcolour", the shortest of Ted Hughes' Crow poems, there's a series of comparisons of Crow's blackness with other black images.
Here's the full poem:
Crow was so much ...
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What does this mean about the interpretation of Lauretta's song at the end of Day 3?
At the end of Day 3 of the Decameron, Lauretta sings the following song after dinner, at the request of the new "king" Filostrato:
What dame disconsolate
May so lament as I,
That vainly ...
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Looking for an elegy poem about a flower the narrator cared for (at the cost of enjoying life), which died and left him devastated
I'm looking for an elegy-style poem in which the narrator recounts ignoring the beautiful flowers around them, instead attending to a single flower that had yet to bloom. They thought this one flower ...
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What inspired the “lava-lymph” in Elizabeth Browning’s “Aurora Leigh”?
In book V of Aurora Leigh (1856) by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, the narrator asks herself what she expects to achieve in her poetry:
Shall I hope
To speak my ...
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What is the relationship between Tagore's poems and his song lyrics?
Rabindranath Tagore composed and wrote the lyrics for approximately 2,200 songs, collectively known as Rabindra Sangeet, "Rabindra music". These songs remain immensely popular in India and ...
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Emily Jane Pfeiffer’s “To the Blind Architect of the City of Life”
Emily Jane Pfeiffer’s sonnet ‘To the Blind Architect of the City of Life, whose Humble Homes are the Creatures of Earth, Water, and Air, and whose “Meeting-House” is Man’ was first published in Littel’...
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What do the silks and tattoos represent in Sui-Yun's poem about Eve?
One of the Peruvian writer Sui-Yun's Four Short Poems (translated from Spanish by Jennifer Shyue) is written as addressed to "Eve, my eternal mother".
I hope I'm not being excessively dirty-...
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The motif of Tom O' Bedlam
The 17th-century motif of Tom O' Bedlam has always been one that I hold much affection and wonder for (as can be assumed by the choice of username on my part.)
The motif most famously makes an ...
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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 ...
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Is there a name for poems where each verse is a time period?
I'm having a hard time finding examples of this, but I found one by a man named Darryl Davis, called Almanac of a man, that goes like this:
When I was five,
I was supreme ruler
of a boundless ...
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Who wrote the poem that begins, "The Yeti, experts will attest . . ."
The Yeti, experts will attest, is physically unkempt at best.
And due to this may go for weeks, alone amidst the snowy steeps.
(Goes on to tell how he is looking for his "yet unmet counterpart".)
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How is the connection between the picture on page 59 and the last line of "Allison Beals and Her 25 Eels" shown in other publications of the poem?
"Allison Beals and Her 25 Eels" is a poem in Falling Up by Shel Silverstein. It describes how Allison uses 24 eels -- as shoelaces, earrings, ladle, etc. The 25th, however, is different. The poem ends ...
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Are there standard guidelines on apostrophising to denote swallowed syllables for scansion?
There are various words in English which can be pronounced in different ways with different numbers of syllables. Poetry often requires them to be read in a particular way for appropriate scansion, ...
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Who is the "lady weeping at the crossroads" in W. H. Auden's poem?
... and why does she need to go to the end of the world to plunge a penknife into her false heart?
W. H. Auden's poem
Lady Weeping at the Crossroads
starts with the stanza
“Lady, weeping at the ...
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2
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What is the "pride of a soul that has conquered fate"?
The second half of Sarojini Naidu's "The Bird of Time" ends like this:
O Bird of Time, say where did you learn
The changing measures you sing? . . .
[...]
In the sigh of pity, the sob of ...
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3
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The use of "thou" etc. in Romantic poetry
A lot of Romantic poetry (for e.g. Shelley's "Ode to the West Wind" and Keats' "Ode on a Grecian Urn") uses words like thou, thee and thy even though these had fallen out of use in ...
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What does “it” refer to in this line from “The Mental Hospital Garden”?
What is “it” in the following lines from the poem "The Mental Hospital Garden" by William Carlos Williams?
It is a bounty
from a last year’s bird’s nest.
I have two weak theories: The birds ...
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