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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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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1
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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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Did Poe plagiarise someone else's work when writing "The Raven"?
I've read that Poe's been accused of lifting significant elements from many authors including Elizabeth Barrett, Charles Dickens, Leo Penzoni, and Thomas Holley Chivers (and "unknown," of course). ...
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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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25
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1
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Is the mariner immortal?
I pass, like night, from land to land;
I have strange power of speech;
That moment that his face I see,
I know the man that must hear me:
To him my tale I teach.
This is one of the last ...
user72
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7
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Does "The Charge of the Light Brigade" glorify war or criticize it?
The Charge of the Light Brigade is an 1854 narrative poem at the Battle of Balaclava during the Crimean War.
Does it glorify war or criticize it?
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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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6
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In Ozymandias, who is the "ye" in the line "Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!" meant to be addressing?
Percy Bysshe Shelley's Ozymandias is a well-known and oft-referenced English-language poem from the early 19th century, and purports to quote — presumably in translation from Egyptian hieroglyphs — a ...
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Looking for a poem about the (fictionalized) writing of The Canterbury Tales Prologue
A friend of mine used to quote a poem that told the fictionalized story of Chaucer writing the first lines of the Prologue of The Canterbury Tales:
"Whan that Aprill with his ... ".
When he ...
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2
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Did T.S. Eliot really plagiarize in "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"?
I've been trying to do research to confirm my English teacher's claim that T. S. Eliot plagiarized works by Jules Laforgue, Henri Bergson, and Andrew Marvell in his poem "The Love Song of J. ...
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2
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What circumstances is Bachchan referring to in this poem?
I came across a poem titled, Saathi, Sab Kuch Sahna Hoga (You have to tolerate this all, my friend) by Harivansh Rai Bachchan. I read this poem years ago and it is taken from an older book. Here is an ...
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What does it mean to laugh like the letter k?
In Abuelito Who by Sandra Cisneros, the symbolic meaning of one line is quite confusing. The narrator is referring to her grandfather (abuelo), and she says he:
who used to laugh like the letter k
I'...
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Why does the Lady of Shalott stay instead of stray?
In Tennyson's poem "The Lady of Shalott" there is the following verse:
There she weaves by night and day
A magic web with colours gay.
She has heard a whisper say,
A curse is on her if she ...
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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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What is the symbolism of the final rise of the Kraken?
I've been studying a lot of Tennyson, and I recently read The Kraken. The first 12 lines seem relatively straightforward, describing the giant beast that sleeps at the bottom of the sea, but the final ...
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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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1
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Meaning of "The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed" in "Ozymandias"
From "Ozymandias" by Percy Bysshe Shelley:
Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold ...
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1
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Which is the 'correct' version of "The Lady of Shalott" and why are there two?
It seems Tennyson wrote two versions of "The Lady of Shalott". They are quite similar but have some big differences, for example, the first stanza of the 1832 version is:
On either side the ...
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8
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Why does Robert Frost contradict himself in "The Road Not Taken"
In Robert Frost's poem "The Road Not Taken" (which you can read online), the narrator gives two contradictory reasons for taking a particular fork in the road.
At the beginning of the poem, the ...
user111
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Accented è in Blake's "The little ones leapèd, and shoutèd, and laugh'd / And all the hills echoèd."
Here is a poem by William Blake with some accented è's (Nurse's Song, 1789). How is this è pronounced? What is the background as to why the e bears an accent?
When the voices of children are heard on ...
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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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1
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Children’s poem about a boy stuck between the tracks on the underground
When I was young I used to love Michael Rosen. Don’t put mustard in the custard and lots of silly ones like that. I also remember that there was a darker poem in one of the poem compilation books set ...
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What does 'Gilead' mean in The Raven?
Poe's poem The Raven contains the following words in the fifteenth stanza:
[...] tell me truly, I implore—
Is there—is there balm in Gilead?—tell me—tell me, I implore!"
What does 'Gilead' mean ...
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5
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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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How did T.S. Eliot's literary criticism affect his poetry?
T.S. Eliot wrote influential essays in New Criticism, a literary theory movement that if I understand correctly tried to revive formalism and focus on close reading and the text itself, as a response ...
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An imaginary young British poet who was invented as a literary hoax in the 1920s?
I think I read a brief piece about this a long time ago -- as in, over twenty years ago. (Possibly in some sort of literary reference book.) As near as I can recall, the following sequence of events ...
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Symbolism of "hot gammon" in T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land
I'm reading T. S. Eliot's poem The Waste Land (which you can read for free online) and one particular line stuck out at me:
Well, that Sunday Albert was home, they had a hot gammon,
And they ...
user111
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4
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Terminology and examples for what George Orwell calls "good bad poetry"?
Recently I bumped into an article where "The Poetry Foundation’s president, John Barr, takes a look at what separates “serious” poetry from the rest". Poetry being an art form, obviously no such ...
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Limerick involves a pregnant Scottish woman and anagrams
Somewhere in the 1993-2000 time period, I had a hardback book of various linguistic oddities, I think with a red slip cover with white lettering. One of the items included was a limerick along the ...
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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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What meter are "I lik the bred" poems in?
I'm trying to determine the meter of "i lik the bred" poems:
"i lik the bred" is a series of short poems about a domesticated cow written by British author Sam Garland, better ...
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Meaning of "all the boards did shrink" in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
From The Rime of the Ancient Mariner:
Water, water, every where,
And all the boards did shrink;
Water, water, every where,
Nor any drop to drink.
What is the meaning of this phrase in ...
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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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1
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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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How does the golden bough in "Sailing to Byzantium" relate to the story in the Aeneid, if at all?
According to Wikipedia of W.B. Yeats' "Sailing to Byzantium" is
a metaphor for a spiritual journey. Yeats explores his thoughts and musings on how immortality, art, and the human spirit may ...
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About l. 3 of the second stanza of Sappho's Ὠδὴ εἰς Ἀνακτωρίαν (Ode to Anactoria)
A long time ago, I translated all of Sappho's poems. In doing so, I had to reconstruct some parts of the texts, and do some amateur level criticism. One example of such work lies in the poem sometimes ...
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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 is the month of Aprill masculine?
In the first line of the General Prologue of The Canterbury Tales, the month of April is given a masculine pronoun:
Whan that Aprill, with his shoures soote
Why is this?
user111
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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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Who chained the albatross to the mariner's neck?
In the long poem by Samuel Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, the mariner talks about an albatross being chained to his neck:
Instead of the cross, the albatross
About my neck was hung.
...
user72
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1
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What happened on April 22, 1838?
The poem Kateryna by the Ukrainian poet Taras Shevchenko (also known as Kobzar) is dedicated to Vasilii Andreyevich Zhukovsky "in memory of April 22, 1838." What is this heading referring to?...
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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 does "The Edge of Doom" mean?
The following stanza is from Robert Frost's Into My Own:
One of my wishes is that those dark trees,
So old and firm they scarcely show the breeze,
Were not, as ’twere, the merest mask ...
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How does the old norse kenning 'nausta blakks hlé-mána gífrs drífu gim-slöngvir' break down into 'warrior'
The 11th century icelandic skald Þórðr Sjáreksson wrote this kenning, quoted from wikipedia:
nausta blakks hlé-mána gífrs drífu gim-slöngvir "fire-brandisher of blizzard of ogress of protection-...
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What does the raven symbolize (besides death)?
Whenever I ask a friend about the symbolism of the Raven from The Raven, they always seem to say death.
Is that the only thing the Raven is meant to symbolize?
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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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What literary work is being referred to in this limerick in which "The earth, like an orange, is blue"?
In the blog post Famous Poems Rewritten as Limericks on LanguageHat.com (2 April 2018), a certain Trond Engen posted the following limerick:
The earth, like an orange, is blue.
Your love and your ...
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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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Ogden Nash poem on hiccups
I have a vivid memory of reading a poem by Ogden Nash about hiccups that included the word "epiglottis" to help explain why they happen. I think it also had, as a poem, his quote about how &...
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