53
votes
In Ozymandias, who is the "ye" in the line "Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!" meant to be addressing?
"Look on my works ye mighty and despair."
First point: you are correct, the ye is equivalent to you.
Second point: the reason he uses ye instead of you is because it is supposedly an ...
- 2,221
36
votes
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Bilbo’s song of Eärendil in “The Fellowship of the Ring”
This answer grew too long for a single post, so I’ve split it in two, with history and analysis in this part, and detailed line notes in the other part.
Summary
Bilbo’s poem retells the myth of the ...
- 53.5k
36
votes
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Accented è in Blake's "The little ones leapèd, and shoutèd, and laugh'd / And all the hills echoèd."
The 'èd' verb ending in 19th-century and earlier poems indicates that you are supposed to pronounce the ending -ed as a separate syllable.
This is not the spelling Blake used when he originally wrote ...
- 11.6k
33
votes
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What is the pun in Kipling's poem "The Three-Decker"?
These are puns on the names of tourist agencies and operators.
Ways no gaze could follow has the double meaning:
routes that go beyond the horizon (or otherwise out of sight);
routes that are not ...
- 53.5k
33
votes
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Did T.S. Eliot really plagiarize in "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"?
Examples of allusions in the poem
In The Poems of T. S. Eliot Volume I edited by Christopher Ricks (Faber & Faber, 2015), Ricks has several notes for the lines "In the room the women come and ...
- 44k
32
votes
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What is the origin of this contradictory poem?
It's old. Like, really old. So old that it's impossible to tell where it originated.
The book The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren by Iona and Peter Opie, published in 1959, catalogues many ...
- 71.1k
32
votes
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Limerick involves a pregnant Scottish woman and anagrams
Sweet Molly MacDougal, in labour,
Warned her sister, "It hurts like a sabre.
Sin bears a high price,
So a girl should think twice
What she bares on the braes for a neighbour."
Found in ...
- 71.1k
28
votes
Bilbo’s song of Eärendil in “The Fellowship of the Ring”
This is the second part of my answer, containing detailed line notes for the poem. If I’ve omitted any difficulties, let me know in the comments.
I have preferred to use illustrative quotations from ...
- 53.5k
28
votes
Accepted
Children’s poem about a boy stuck between the tracks on the underground
This is Michael Rosen's poem "Nightmare", found in his book Mustard, custard, grumble belly and gravy, which is available to borrow on the Internet Archive:
I'm down
I'm underground
I'm ...
- 71.1k
28
votes
Accepted
Why are all the schoolchildren referred to as guns in Clint Smith's "The Gun"?
The use of "gun" as a noun to refer to all the children in the school serves three linked purposes.
Initially it purposefully confuses the reader as to what's happening in the poem, while ...
- 21k
27
votes
Accepted
Did Lenore merely leave or is she dead?
She's dead.
As Poe writes himself in his Philosophy of Composition, an essay about competent poetic writing based on his own analysis of The Raven (full text available here):
I had now gone so far as ...
- 71.1k
27
votes
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Did Poe plagiarise someone else's work when writing "The Raven"?
TL;DR:
There have been several major accusations that Poe plagiarized The Raven from a number of different works, many in other languages. However, those claims have little to no evidence to back them ...
- 5,864
25
votes
Accepted
Does "The Charge of the Light Brigade" glorify war or criticize it?
The Charge of the Light Brigade glorifies the warriors, not the war.
Throughout the poem, we see exaltation of the soldiers for their bravery. They are described as brave, bold, and having "fought so ...
- 1,377
23
votes
Why Pallas in "The Raven"?
Poe himself offers a brief answer to this in his 1846 essay The Philosophy of Composition. He states:
I made the bird alight on the bust of Pallas, also for the effect of contrast between the marble ...
- 21k
22
votes
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Meaning of "The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed" in "Ozymandias"
The passions survive the hand that mocked [the passions] and the heart that fed [the passions].
That means that the passions (by being impressed on the lifeless statue) outlived both the sculptor's ...
- 11.6k
22
votes
In Ozymandias, who is the "ye" in the line "Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!" meant to be addressing?
My impression is that "ye noun" was regularly used as a vocative (i.e., a direct address) in English in the 19th century. See Google Ngrams. (Although you shouldn't entirely trust this Ngram ...
- 11.6k
21
votes
How do these lines in Shakespeare's Sonnet 151 mean what they're supposed to?
Just glossing the last two lines.
No want of conscience hold it that I call
Her love, for whose dear love I rise and fall.
The main difficulty is with “No want of conscience hold it”. This is an ...
- 53.5k
21
votes
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Why did T.S. Eliot compare “waiting for death” with “a feather on the back of the hand"?
The couplet in question is:
My life is light, waiting for the death wind,
Like a feather on the back of my hand.
And the poem describes Simeon, a biblical character. He is an elderly Jew who was ...
- 21k
20
votes
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What does 'Gilead' mean in The Raven?
Commentators like William Giraldi, The Annotated Poe, point out that this refers to Jeremiah 8:22:
Is there no balm in Gilead; is there no physician there? why then is not the health of the ...
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20
votes
Why is the month of Aprill masculine?
There have been a couple of different explanations given for this, but the upshot seems to be that there's nothing particularly significant about the masculinity of April - it was more a product of ...
- 71.1k
19
votes
Accepted
What does "It is not meet" mean in "Idylls of the King"?
"It is not meet" basically means "it is not appropriate" or even "it is not right" (probably a better interpretation in this context). He's saying, more or less, that ...
- 306
19
votes
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Does Eli Mandel's poem about Auschwitz contain a rare word, or a typo?
The original 1973 publication of the poem is available at the Internet Archive and reads as follows:
while the whitehatted star spangled cowboys
shot the dark men and shot the dark men
...
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18
votes
Accepted
Why does Robert Frost contradict himself in "The Road Not Taken"
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
Quotes have a way of taking on a life of their own. These lines, the last three lines ...
- 1,364
18
votes
Why are all the schoolchildren referred to as guns in Clint Smith's "The Gun"?
The technique conveys that guns are all-pervasive in schools. By one measure, there were 303 gun-related incidents in American schools in 2022. That is more than one per school day. And so far this ...
- 22.1k
17
votes
Accepted
What is the meaning of "To Autumn"?
If "To Autumn" were merely a pretty description of the season, it wouldn't be considered a great poem. In fact, to read it as a straightforward celebration is to fall into the same trap as the bees in ...
- 22.1k
17
votes
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?
I don’t believe the poem is making any such claim.
Larkin lived in Belfast, specifically on Elmwood Avenue.
This street lies between Lisburn Road and Malone Road. All of the streets between these two ...
- 18.6k
16
votes
Did Lenore merely leave or is she dead?
LENORE IS DEAD.
The following confirms that Lenore is dead:
The narrator expresses grief for the "lost Lenore" Lost is defined as "something that cannot be recovered." Lenore cannot be recovered, ...
- 161
16
votes
Accepted
Did Rudyard Kipling Write "The Wrath of the Awakened Saxon"?
The poem has been altered from what Kipling actually wrote.
You can find the original here on Project Gutenberg — in A Diversity of Creatures, by Rudyard Kipling (1917).
The original title was The ...
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