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بسم الله الرحمن الرحيم

Now does our World Descend
By
Edward Estlin Cummings

E. E. Cummings (1894 – 1962)

http://www.poetseers.org/the_great_p...__cummings/eec

Edward Estlin Cummings was a dedicated, full-time artist: a painter, a novelist, a playwright, a "nonlecturer"- but most of all a poet. He was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts. His father was a Harvard professor who later served as a Unitarian minister in Boston.
His body of work encompasses approximately 2,900 poems, two autobiographical novels, four plays and several essays, as well as numerous drawings and paintings. He began writing poems as early as 1904 and studied Latin and Greek at the Cambridge Latin High School. He received his B.A. in 1915 and his M.A. in 1916, both from Harvard. His studies there introduced him to avant garde writers, such as Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound.
Family environment

His father was a professor of sociology and political science at Harvard University and later a Unitarian minister.[3] Cummings described his father as a person who could accomplish anything that he wanted to. He and his son were close, and Edward was one of Estlin's most ardent supporters.
His mother never partook in stereotypically "feminine" things, and enjoyed reading poetry to her children. Raised in a well-educated family, Cummings was a precocious boy and his mother encouraged Estlin to write poetry every day. He wrote his first poem when he was only three: "Oh,the pretty birdie,O;/with his little toe,toe,toe!"[4]
His education:

Cummings enrolled at Harvard University in September 1911, from which he received a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1917 and a Master's degree for English and Classical Studies in 1916. While at Harvard, he befriended John Dos Passos
In his final year at Harvard, Cummings was influenced by writers such as Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound. He graduated in 1916, delivering a controversial commencement address entitled "The New Art". This speech gave him his first taste of notoriety, as he managed to give the false impression that the well-liked imagist poet, Amy Lowell, whom he himself admired, was "abnormal". For this, Cummings was chastised in the newspapers. In 1917, Cummings' first published poems appeared in a collection of poetry entitled Eight Harvard Poets.
Career:

In 1917, after taking his M. A. at Harvard, Cummings went to France to serve as a volunteer ambulance driver with the Red Cross in World War I. shortly after his arrival in France he was imprisoned for three months in a concentration camp, partly because of the stupidity of the French military authorities and partly because Cummings's own stubbornness ( he refused to say he hated the Germans; he would only admit that he loved the French). he and a friend, William Slater Brown, were arrested . The two openly expressed anti-war views; They were sent to a military detention camp. After influential friends secured his release, Cummings was encouraged to write about his experiences. The result was The Enormous Room (1922), a novel that was the first significant statement of his lifelong dedication to individual freedom and his opposition to the dehumanizing forces he saw in the modern world.

Cummings returned to the United States on New Year's Day 1918. Later in 1918 he was drafted into the army. He served in the 12th Division at Camp Devens, Massachusetts, until November 1918.[9][10]
After the war Cummings lived in Paris and took up painting as well as writing. The title of his first book of poems, Tulips and Chimneys (1923) This work was the public's first encounter with his characteristic eccentric use of grammar and punctuation.
He remained in Paris for two years before returning to New York. During the rest of the 1920s and 1930s he returned to Paris a number of times, and traveled throughout Europe, meeting, among others, Pablo Picasso. In 1931 Cummings traveled to the Soviet Union and recounted his experiences in Eimi, published two years later. During these years Cummings also traveled to Northern Africa and Mexico and worked as an essayist and portrait artist for Vanity Fair magazine (1924 to 1927).
His father's death:

His father's death had a profound impact on Cummings and his work, who entered a new period in his artistic life. Cummings began to focus on more important aspects of life in his poetry. He began this new period by paying homage to his father's memory in the poem "my father moved through dooms of love".[11]

His Death:

At the time of his death, September 3, 1962, he was the second most widely read poet in the United States, after Robert Frost. He is buried in Forest Hills Cemetery in Boston, Massachusetts.

During his lifetime, E. E. Cummings received numerous awards in recognition of his work, such as Fellowship of American Academy of Poets(1950) and Charles Eliot Norton Professorship at Harvard(1952-1953).

Influenced by:

Ezra:
Attending Harvard, Cummings studied Greek and other languages (p. 62). In college, Cummings was introduced to the writing and artistry of Ezra Pound, who was a large influence on E.E. and many other artists in his time (pp. 105-107).

Stein
His readings of Stein in the early part of the century probably served as a springboard to this aspect of his artistic development In some respects, Cummings' work is more stylistically continuous with Stein's than with any other poet or writer.

. Avant Garde

Cummings decided to become a poet when he was still a child. Between the ages of eight and twenty-two, he wrote a poem a day, exploring many traditional poetic forms. By the time he was in Harvard in 1916, modern poetry had caught his interest. He began to write avant-garde poems in which conventional punctuation and syntax were ignored in favor of a dynamic use of language. Cummings also experimented with poems as visual objects on the page. These early efforts were included in Eight Harvard Poets, a collection of poems by members of the Harvard Poetry Society.

Early age, Cummings studied the classical languages of Greek and Latin. At his final year at Harvard, he came under the influence of Avant Garde writers, such as Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound refers to people or works that are experimental or novel, or it is a new and very modern ideas , particularly with respect to art, culture, and politics.

His poetry:

Cummings's poetry was noted for its eccentric and playful style, its unusual typography, odd spellings, and deliberate grammatical tricks. But beneath the surface of trickery and apparent formlessness, his poetry is curiously conventional. He was a love poet in the romantic tradition; he celebrated families, parents, children, fun, and old-fashioned virtues. He admired youth, spring, that which is natural. He hated automatic patriotism and intellectualism, the rationality that , he believed, stifles man's ability to feel deeply. He fiercely condemned the inhumanity of science and technology, writing, "Never will mankind become human …….until it rises up and smashes its machines". He found modern conveniences contemptible; he shunned electricity in his home, hated radio and television.

His subjects:

Other critics focused on the subjects of Cummings' poetry. Though his poetic language was uniquely his own, Cummings' poems were unusual because they unabashedly focused on such traditional and somewhat passe poetic themes as love, childhood, and flowers. His exalted vision of life and love is served well by his linguistic agility. He was an unabashed lyricist, a modern cavalier love poet. But alongside his lyrical celebrations of nature, love, and the imagination are his satirical denouncements of tawdry, defiling, flat-footed, urban and political life—open terrain for invective and verbal inventiveness."

This satirical aspect to Cummings' work drew both praise and criticism. His attacks on the mass mind, conventional patterns of thought, and society's restrictions on free expression, were born of his strong commitment to the individual. In the "nonlectures" he delivered at Harvard University Cummings explained his position: "So far as I am concerned, poetry and every other art was, is, and forever will be strictly and distinctly a question of individuality." As Penberthy noted, Cummings' consistent attitude in all of his work was "condemning mankind while idealizing the individual." Much of his literary effort was directed against what he considered the principal enemies of this individuality—mass thought, group conformity, and commercialism." For this reason, Cummings satirized what he called "mostpeople," that is, the herd mentality found in modern society. Cummings is directly opposed to letting us rest in what we believe we know; and this is the key to the rhetorical function of his famous language." Cummings' nature poems emphasize both the physical, material reality as well as the emotional, intuitive levels of existence. In his poetry, Cummings celebrates the interlaminations of man and nature.

His style:

In his work, Cummings experimented radically with form, punctuation, spelling and syntax, abandoning traditional techniques and structures to create a new, highly idiosyncratic means of poetic expression
He is one of the most innovative of contemporary poets. In some ways, he is oddly traditional. Through he drops most punctuation and capitalization, and deliberately distorts syntax, he is fond of the sonnet and other regular forms; he likes rhymes and off-rhymes in a way that the innovators of half a century later would find almost reprehensible. Though Cummings alters parts of speech and makes verbs into nouns and nouns into verbs, he does so chiefly to express feelings whose simplicity belies all this complication. His acquiescence in that judgment of scope is signalized by his refused to capitalize the first person singular, as if to divorce himself from all that vanity and selfhood.
In the introduction he argued forcefully for poetry as a "process" rather than a "product."


he occasionally made use of the blues form and acrostics.. His poems are also often rife with satire.
While his poetic forms and themes share an affinity with the romantic tradition, Cummings' work universally shows a particular idiosyncrasy of syntax, or way of arranging individual words into larger phrases and sentences. Many of his most striking poems do not involve any typographical or punctuation innovations at all, but purely syntactic ones.

His literary forms

His poems were either lyrical or satirical, and were good in both modes. His love poems are the most winning, written with a childlike wonder and humor which Cummings has almost to himself in modern poetry. His satirical poems are witty as well as savage.
Punctuation and typography

He uses punctuation only for special effects, and many of his poems exploited odd typographical arrangements, allowing letters of words to trail over from one line to the next in total indifference to syllables.
Cummings, who was also a painter, understood the importance of presentation, and used typography to "paint a picture" with some of his poems.[17]
Poetry today is invariably read with the eye rather than heard with the ear. Therefore Mr. Cummings has attempted to help the reader by printing his verse in such a way as to accent its rhythms and its meanings. He uses capital letters if and when he pleases; he pays no attention to the rules of syllabication; he makes his lines slant or break as he sees fit.
Some of Cummings' most famous poems do not involve much, if any, odd typography or punctuation, but still carry his unmistakable style, particularly in unusual and impressionistic word order. For example, the aptly titled "anyone lived in a pretty how town" begins:
anyone lived in a pretty how town
(with up so floating many bells down)
spring summer autumn winter
he sang his didn't he danced his did

Grammatical structure
More and more Cummings has come to refine his technique by trying literally to rescue language from the discursive, analytic abstractness that threatens to deaden it. He has not so much tried to give life to words but to their grammatical-syntactical context: to give life not to the substance of a sentence but to its structure.
cubist movement

He shows us the movement of his thoughts through an unmatched use of the typewriter. This technique is widely seen as a part of the cubist movement, which means a style and movement in art, especially painting, in which objects are represented geometrically. Cummings is seen as a modernist himself, grouped with Pound and Eliot. He is the first poet who translate the cubist art into painted poetry.
Word choice

Discussing Cummings's technique, Randall Jarrell explained: "Cummings is a very great expert in all these, so to speak, illegal syntactical devices: his misuse of parts of speech, his use of negative prefixes, his word coining, his systematic relation of words that grammar and syntax don't permit us to relate—all this makes him a magical bootlegger or moonshiner of language, one who intoxicates us on a clear liquor no government has legalized with its stamp."

In addition, a number of Cummings' poems feature, in part or in whole, intentional misspellings, and several incorporate phonetic spellings intended to represent particular dialects. Cummings also made use of inventive formations of compound words, as in "in Just-", which features words such as "mud-luscious", "puddle-wonderful", and "eddieandbill."

Critic's sayings about the poet:

"Among the most innovative of twentieth-century poets," according to Jenny Penberthy in the Dictionary of Literary Biography, E. E. Cummings experimented with poetic form and language to create a distinct personal style. A Cummings poem is spare and precise, employing a few key words eccentrically placed on the page. Some of these words were invented by Cummings, often by combining two common words into a new synthesis. He also revised grammatical and linguistic rules to suit his own purposes, using such words as "if," "am," and "because" as nouns, for example, or assigning his own private meanings to words. Despite their nontraditional form, Cummings' poems came to be popular with many readers.
"Cummings," Richard P. Blackmur wrote in The Double Agent: Essays in Craft and Elucidation, "has a fine talent for using familiar, even almost dead words, in such a context as to make them suddenly impervious to every ordinary sense; they become unable to speak, but with a great air of being bursting with something very important and precise to say.
Norman Friedman explained in his E. E. Cummings: The Growth of a Writer that Cummings' innovations "are best understood as various ways of stripping the film of familiarity from language in order to strip the film of familiarity from the world. Transform the word, he seems to have felt, and you are on the way to transforming the world."

Cummings' work changed little from the 1920s to the 1950s. Others saw him as merely clever but with little lasting value beyond a few technical innovations. Still others questioned the ideas in his poetry, or seeming lack of them.
Southworth went on to say that "the reader must not mistake Mr. Cummings for an intellectual poet."
Dickey stated that It is better to say what must finally be said about Cummings: that he has helped to give life to the language."
Maurer believed that Cummings' best work exhibited "a new and delightful sense of linguistic invention, precise and vigorous." Penberthy concluded that "Cummings's achievement deserves acclaim. He established the poem as a visual object.


Introduction to the poem:

E.E. Cummings wrote this poem after joining the World War One as an ambulance driver. He was deeply affected by the drastic results of the war. Thw war did bring dramatic transformation in all aspects in the life .The world has become more and more fragmented and destroyed. In this poem, Cummings deals with one of these changes which is the contradiction between the individual (himself and people like him) and the masses (world), and he is always sided with the individual. The world is descending to decay and dreamers like him have no place on it. He also, throughout the poem, draws attention on the horrors of civilization , and to the devastating effects of the advancement of technology that they brought about many changes in national life. The most important change is the decay of morals where
all spiritual and ethical values have been undermined

The Poem

.
now does our world descend
now does our world descend
the path to nothingness
(cruel now cancels kind;
friends turn to enemies)
therefore lament,my dream
and don a doer's doom

create is now contrive;
imagined,merely know
(freedom:what makes a slave)
therefore,my life,lie down
and more by most endure
all that you never were

hide,poor dishonoured mind
who thought yourself so wise;
and much could understand
concerning no and yes:
if they've become the same
it's time you unbecame
where climbing was and bright
is darkness and to fall
(now wrong's the only right
since brave are cowards all)
therefore despair,my heart
and die into the dirt

but from this endless end
of briefer each our bliss--
where seeing eyes go blind
(where lips forget to kiss)
where everything's nothing
--arise,my soul;and sing

1st Stanza:

Throughout reading the title of the poem we come to know the whole poem. It is about the descending of the world. The first line in the poem is a refrain. The poet describes the situation of the world during the World War One where every thing is chaotic. He says that the world is in its way to complete decay of everything. Decay of morals, values, and everything. The “cruelty” is now “canceling” out “kind” which is the morals and values.
He then follows with an effective line “friends turn to enemies”. This line shows how cruel and unfair people are becoming, even close friends have become your enemies. As we know, E. E. Cummings believes that civilization and technology are the causes of all disasters that are happening , and he thinks that technology makes life nothing , people become like machines , having no emotion . He says that , in this descending world , only dreamers are capable of living and doing things, but even though those dreamers are bound to reach the “doom”.
It is clear that the poem is more about feelings rather than concentrating on a correct form of sentences, as there is no logical development.

2nd stanza:

In this atmosphere of decay, “creating” has become “contriving”, and “imagining” is just “knowing". Dreams can’t be fulfilled . The original things in life are being fake. The fist two lines in this stanza emphasize the shallowness of the world. Ironically, the poet said freedom is what makes a person a “slave” to his own needs, and one have no other choice but to “endure” his pain. Here, it is obvious that everything has changed. Creating has changed to contriving, imagining has changed to “merely knowing” , and “freedom” has changed to slavery .

3rd stanza:

In the third stanza, the poet tries to say that those who feel themselves "wise" and can understand everything are just poor and "dishonored". He criticizes them and their high expectations of themselves. It is as if they dream of something they will never reach .the poet said "dishonored" because those people think that they can do something they are not convinced of; they think that they are wise while they are not. So because of that they have to hide their selves. Then, the poet explains why we are not being ourselves saying "concerning no and yes if they have became the same". For those people cannot differentiate between right and wrong, yes and no, this leads them to confusion so, as a result of that they should merge with the masses and they follow their general opinions.
4th stanza:

The poet continues explaining the other reasons of the same question "why we are not what we think about ourselves". For example, he mentioned that climbing and reaching the top which is considered to be success becomes now like falling in this world. Also, in this world, when you think it is bright, it is the time of darkness and where doing the wrong things is the only right thing to do because the right things become hidden and unknown. In addition those who were known as brave are just cowards. This world is not honest so, at the end of the stanza, the poet calls his heart to despair.
5th stanza:

In the last stanza, the poet changes his tone and becomes more optimistic. There is still hope left in his last lines. From this endless end where our bliss is getting briefer day by day, our eyes are growing die, where lips forget to kiss which is their natural function signifying love and where "everything is nothing", we can still strive and get up. Despite all these, the speaker is going to challenge the darkness and change the world by singing because it is advocated.
Themes:

Cummings is, in his general outlook on life, an unabashed romantic. He affirms life wholeheartedly in all its multiplicity, but especially in whatever is simple, natural, loving, individual, unique. Above all, he emphasizes feeling and emotion rather than thought or analysis. He rejects those social forces in life that hinder the unique and individual expression of each person's essential being. He is particularly hostile to forces that promote conformity, group behavior, imitation, artificiality. He regards technology and the complexities of civilization as dehumanizing. Above all, he abominates war, which he looks upon as the ultimate negation of human values.
Although Cummings maintains the same general views throughout his life, he is more affirmatively exuberant in his early career and more lightheartedly iconoclastic. In his later career, he is more serene in his response to the basic good things of life and to the beauties of the natural world, but more harshly satiric in his denunciation of what he opposes.
Cummings believed that modern mass society was a threat to individuals. "Progress is a comfortable disease," Cummings once wrote. He was interersted in cubism, and jazz, which had not became mass entertainment In his poems Cummings often expressed his rebellious attitude towards religion, politics, and conformity But Cummings also celebrated the joy of life and the beauty of natural world, of which people have unluckily estranged themselves
Conformity, mass psychology, and snobbery were frequent targets of his humorous and sometimes scathing satires. In his subject matter, he deals with the relationship of the individual to the messes and to the world. His poems are also often rife with satire because he always expresses his ideas in witty ways, in unconventional formulations and in satiric undertones. His poetry is mostly built on contradictions and contrasts and this is reinforced the main theme which is the contradiction between an individual and the masses. In the poem "now does our world descend ", Cummings posits a contradiction between himself and (the people like him) and the world. The world is descending to decay and dreamers
Figure of Speech:

In this poem, E.E. Cummings uses a figurative language. He uses personification, contrast, paradox, and irony. All these figures he uses work together to intensify and highlight the emotion and feelings.


1) Personification :
-Line 5: “lament, my dream”.
He compares “dream” to a person who laments something.

- Line 13: the image of “mind” is being compared to a “wise” person.
- Line 28: “lips forget to kiss”
Lips are compared to a person who kisses.
- Line 30: “my soul; and sing”
He compares the “soul” to a person who sings.


2) Paradox:
The whole poem is built on contrast and paradox which reflect the contradicted values and contradicted world.
-Line 4: “friends turn to enemies”.
-Line 9: “(freedom: what makes a slave)”.
-Line 21: “(now wrong's the only right”.
-Line 22: “since brave are cowards all)”.
-Line 29: “where everything's nothing”.




Style & structure:

Although he is more traditional than he often seems at first glance , he was never content to rest easily with inherited conventions . Here again , instead of favoring in more usual devices of the modernist – juxtaposition , self-mockery , reflexive meanings , complex symbols , learned allusions- Cummings went on to develop many of his own . he juxtaposes words and parts of words instead of image , or incidents , and his chief structural invention is typographical or perhaps linguistic rather than compositional. And this is very clear in his poem now does our world descend .
By reading this poem , we notice that it has eccentric structure, broken rules, and visual style. His knowledge of the visual arts experiment with punctuation such as parenthesis and colons in “(freedom:what makes a slave)”,and dislocated syntax such as “don a doer's doom”..He lived during the WW1 and he saw the destruction of the human values, and this is reflected in the fragmented structure of this poem . Discussing Cummings' technique, Randall explained "Cummings is a very great expert in all these, so to speak, illegal syntactical devices: his misuse of parts of speech [such as “create” and “cruel”], his use of negative prefixes, his word-coining, his systematic relation of words that grammar and syntax don't permit us to relate--all this makes him a magical bootlegger or moon shiner of language, one who intoxicates us on a clear liquor no government has legalized with its stamp."
One of his most important techniques is his eccentric punctuation and phrasing. For example, each stanza contains parentheses to sum up the main idea like, "(now wrong's the only right)". In addition, the most common poetic form used by Cummings is enjambment or the running- on of a sentence from one line to the next. He uses it so freely that one sentence might be the entire poem. For example, "now does our world descend"; this sentence runs on until the end of the poem. Cummings who was also a painter understands the importance of presentation and used typography to "paint a picture" with some poems. Therefore, his poems are mostly built on contradictions and contrasts. For example, in now does our world descend ,he uses some contrasts like "become" and "unbecome", “freedom” and “slave”, “no” and “yes”, “climbing”and “fall”, “friends” and “enemies” , “ wright”and “wrong”, “everything”and “nothing”, “seeing” and “blind”, "bright" and "darkness", and "brave" and "cowards".

Mood:

Cumming`s mood was alternately satirical and tough.

Tone:

sarcastic, melancholic, ironic and meditative

.

"Where the Rainbow Ends"
By Robert Lowell



Poetry of the twentieth is divided into two parts:

Modern poetry (1900-1940).
In the Modern period, the questioning of the self and exploration of technical innovation poetry are interconnected.
The dislocation of the authorial presence is achieved through the application of such techniques as visual poetry and the juxtaposition of unconnected materials. These techniques are used to rise up questions in minds regarding the nature of poetic experience.
The leading figures of the period are Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot.


Post Modern poetry (1940-1999).

Which started with the Second World War, poets were called post war poets, they reflected their fears but it still was not more important than their own psychological problems. Many writers tried to find answers to the question ‘who I am’ .There central themes are often loneliness and searching of the self.
Such a period were divided into Three phases:
From the 1950s until 1960s:

In the 1950s, a group of poets appeared calling themselves ‘ The Beats’ because they felt beaten by society. For them, fear of the future was part of illness of the modern society. The representative of the group is Allen Ginsberge , who used free form to reflect free life style.

Formalists :
the poets wrote in traditional forms and declared that this return to rhyme and more fixed meters. This group is also called the ‘The Movement’ in Britain.

Confessional poetry:

*It is one of the finest achievements of the period following the second world war, it gained prominence between 1950s and 1970s.

*The term is usually applied to certain poets of the United States from the late 1950s to the late 1960s.
What is confessional poetry? The term “confessional poetry” is taken from the word “confession” which means that the poet tries to confess his emotions and experience.
The confessional poem is a narrative and lyric verse, which deals with facts , mental and physical experiences of the poet’s own life.
The Characteristics of the Confessional poetry.

Confessional poems include Autobiographical moments to dramatize the feelings of pain and sorrow. Therefore, Robert Philips had called the age of confessional poetry "The Age of Autobiography".

*It presents private experience with feelings about death, trauma, depression and relationships that were addressed often in an Autobiographical manner.

*Autobiography can be often used to mask the lack of self-reflection that confessional poetry demands.
Confessional poetry is based on a personal experience, so it explores personal details about the author's life without modesty or
discretion.

*Some poets write in lyrical and metaphysical modes.

*The poet's confession is in a quite colloquial, unashamed tone.

*The confessional poetry's tone of mortified despair is not limited; it is sometimes called 'murderous art'.

*Confessional free verse poetry has become the dominant approach in contemporary poetry.

*They don't care about following the conventional form of poetry because of their strange experience that cannot be limited to a certain rhyme.

*They make use of associative logic advice which helps to supplant reason with emotion.


*In spite of its personal expression, it has a universal value and it uses the elements of the story in the service of larger subjects not limited to particularities of the poet's life.
*The use of the first person narration to widen the scope of the poem, as a tool to increase the reader's identification with the writer as an actor in the work.

*The "I" in their poems is meant as a direct representation of the poet.
Some of the themes of confessional poetry:

* Negative subjects about their pain and misery of their physical collapse because as Sexton said "pain engraves a deeper memory".
* Reflect their personal experiences, faults and private history.
* Material problems and breakdowns.
* The failure of relationships.
* The consequences of the past on modern society.
* Alcoholism.
* Family.
* Suicide.
Aims :

1-They aimed for a kind of authenticity or even truth .
2-The poem is meant to play directly on the heart strings of the reader .
3-To transform the personal experiences to the public.
Some of the poets of the confessional poetry:

Ann Sexton: She is the leader of this movement. She explored her abortion and mental illness in direct and open style. Her works are; To Bedlam and Park Way Back and All My Pretty Ones
John Berryman: He spoke about his troubled life. He wrote Dream Songs on alcoholism.
Sylvia Plath: she charted her suicide attempts. She was a friend of Ann Sexton. Their poetry influenced the development of feminist poetry.

Unfortunately, the movement lost many of its participations for committing suicide, such as:
John Berryman, Anne Sexton, and Sylvia Plath.
Robert Lowell.

http://famouspoetsandpoems.com/pictu...ert_lowell.jpg

His life:

Robert Lowell was born to parents of prominent Boston families.
Lowell's turbulent childhood, dominated by incessant tensions between his father, a naval officer, and mother, left deep and lasting emotional scars.
He attended preparatory school at St. Mark's School in Southborough, Massachusetts, where he was a student of poet Richard Eberhart, Lowell's first literary mentor.
At St. Mark's, Lowell also earned the nickname "Cal," a dual reference to Shakespeare's Caliban and the infamous Roman emperor Caligula.=

Lowell began studies at Harvard University in 1935, though left abruptly in 1937 to travel with English novelist Ford Madox Ford to the Tennessee home of poet Allen Tate and his wife, novelist Caroline Gordon.
After spending a summer with the Tate's, Lowell followed Tate to Kenyon College in Ohio, where he enrolled and studied under John Crowe Ransom. While at Kenyon, Lowell met lifelong friends poet Randall Jarrell and short story writer Peter Taylor.


Lowell graduated summa cum laude with a degree in classics in 1940 and, during the same year, converted to Roman Catholicism and married novelist Jean Stafford.

The next year, Lowell attended graduate courses at Louisiana State University, where he studied under Robert Penn Warren and Cleanth Brooks.

After brief employment with the Catholic publishing house Sheed and Ward in New York, Lowell took up residence with the Tate's in the Tennessee mountains, where he continued to write.

A conscientious objector to military service during the Second World War, Lowell was imprisoned for six months during 1943 and 1944.
Lowell descended from a long line of distinguished New Englanders, including literary relatives James Russell Lowell and Amy Lowell
He then published his first collection of poetry, The Land of Unlikeness (1944), followed two years later by Lord Weary's Castle, for which he was awarded a Pulitzer Prize.


He also received a National Institute of Arts and Letters Award and a Guggenheim fellowship in 1947.

In the period before the publication of his next volume, The Mills of the Kavanaughs (1951), Lowell divorced Stafford, abandoned the Catholic Church, and suffered a severe bout of manic depression, a psychological disorder that afflicted him for the rest of his life.

Lowell married writer Elizabeth Hardwick in 1949.

During the 1950s, he taught at several universities, maintained a friendship with William Carlos Williams, and traveled to California, where he encountered Allen Ginsberg and other Beat generation writers.
Lowell settled in New York in 1960 and, from 1963 to 1970, commuted to Boston to teach at Harvard.

He won a National Book Award in 1960 for Life Studies and a Bollingen Prize for Imitations (1961), a collection of verse translations, in 1962.

Lowell also emerged as an outspoken critic of U.S. military involvement in Vietnam; he publicly declined an invitation by President Lyndon Johnson to attend the White House Festival of the Arts in 1965 and participated in the historic Pentagon march in 1967.

Lowell moved to England in 1970 and taught at the University of Essex and Kent University.

After divorcing Hardwick and marrying his third wife, British author Caroline Blackwood, in 1972, Lowell produced three additional volumes of poetry in 1973—For Lizzie and Harriet, History, and The Dolphin, for which Lowell received a second Pulitzer Prize in 1974. His final collection, Day by Day (1977), winner of the National Book Critics Award in 1978, was published days before Lowell suffered a fatal heart attack in a New York taxi.

Major Works

Land of Unlikeness (poetry) 1944
Lord Weary's Castle (poetry) 1946
Poems, 1938–1949 (poetry) 1950
The Mills of the Kavanaughs (poetry) 1951
Life Studies (poetry) 1959
Imitations [editor and translator] (poetry) 1961
Day by Day (poetry) 1977
Collected Prose (prose) 1987
Collected Poems (poetry) 1997
Life Studies :

The subjects of his book, Life Study, becomes autobiographical. The book touches on his prison experience during World War II. But by and large it records his ambivalence toward the New England where he resettled after the war.
His own style seemed "distant ,symbolridden , and willfully difficult". His own new style was to be more controlled and severe than "Beat“ writing ,and wrote more openly than he had about his parents and grandparents, about the mental breakdowns, and about the difficulties of marriage.

The Poem

"Where the Rainbow Ends"
I saw the sky descending, black and white,
Not blue, on Boston where the winters wore
The skulls to jack-o'-lanterns on the slates,
And Hunger's skin-and-bone retrievers tore
The chickadee and shrike. The thorn tree waits
Its victim and tonight
The worms will eat the deadwood to the foot
Of Ararat: the scythers, Time and Death,
Helmed locusts, move upon the tree of breath;
The wild in grated olive and the root
Are withered, and a winter drifts to where
The Pepper pot, ironic rainbow, spans
Charles River and its scales of scorched-earth miles
I saw my city in the Scales, the pans
Of judgment rising and descending. Piles
Of dead leaves char the air –
And I am a red arrow on this graph
Of Revelations. Every dove is sold.
The Chapel's sharp-shinned eagle shifts its hold
On serpent-Time, the rainbow's epitaph.
In Boston serpents whistle at the cold.
The victim climbs the altar steps and sings:
"Hosannah to the lion, lamb, and beast
Who fans the furnace-face of IS with wings:
I breathe the ether of my marriage feast."
At the high altar, gold
And a fair cloth. I kneel and the wings beat
My cheek. What can the dove of Jesus give
You now but wisdom, exile? Stand and live,
The dove has brought an olive branch to eat.

Introduction:
“Where the Rainbow ends” is one of Lowell’s great poems that reflects his inner trauma and nostalgia to the place he used to live in “ Boston”. This poem is the last one in his masterpiece “Life Studies." The book concludes with "Where the Rainbow Ends," in which Lowell becomes a Hebrew Bible prophet, weighing his native Boston in the balance and finding it wanting: "I saw my city in the Scales, the pans / Of judgment rising and descending. Piles / Of dead leaves char the air — / And I am an arrow on this graph / Of Revelations."

First stanza:

I saw the sky descending, black and white,
Not blue, on Boston…
*In the first stanza, the persona of the poet appears in “ I saw the sky”. He starts his poem in a confessional tone through which the poet describes the bad changes that happen in Boston. As a confessional poet, Lowell wants transform his personal experiences to the public by saying that “I saw the sky descending, black and white\Not blue, on Boston..." When the sky descends it usually means a storm is coming.
* Boston appears to be a special setting to the poet. The black and white represent the clouds. The poet was shocked to see the sky not blue and clear like before.

…where the winters wore
The skulls to jack-o'-lanterns on the slates,
A rite of fall is Halloween These jack-o-lanterns (pumpkin.) seem to have been left out on the "slates" too long and are now husks embraced by the winter storm.

The poet starts his poem by a very pessimistic image of the cold and stormy weather, which indicates the death and gloomy mood in poetry. He begins by "I" as a dramatic persona. The poem could be considered as a subjective and universal at the same time.
And Hunger's skin-and-bone retrievers tore..

He begins by describing the gloomy cold weather of Boston where winter and the storm have united to destroy everything. As a result there is no more Halloweens but only starvation, cold weather and hunger. Even those pumpkins became like the “ skulls” that the “retrievers tore”.

The chickadee and shrike. The thorn tree waits
Its victim and tonight ..

The "Chickadee and shrike" birds and the "thorn tree" are all waiting for food but unfortunately there is nothing to feed on. The birds can immigrate but the tree is waiting for any victim.

The worms will eat the deadwood to the foot
Of Ararat: the scythers, Time and Death,
Helmed locusts, move upon the tree of breath;
The wild in grated olive and the root ..

Mount Ararat is purported to be the mountain on which Noah's ark came to rest. That ties in with the rainbow in the title.

To emphasize the image of starvation that is caused by the hard winter, he draws a picture that even the worms who used to feed on fresh plants are feeding on the dead wood of Noah's arc, that is to say that the religious aspects are being attacked. The "worms", "scythers", "Time and Death" are words that have a common idea which is killing, vanishing, and destructing.

Then he adds that even the "locusts" are searching for any living tree in order to feed on, which emphasize the fact that Boston is infertile land. Then he concludes this stanza by saying that the only present food is the olive and the roots, which means that it is only by returning to the traditions and faith “roots” , Modern man can reach to peace which referred to it in the poem by “Olive”.



Second Stanza

Are withered, and a winter drifts to where
The Pepper pot, ironic rainbow, spans
Charles River and its scales of scorched-earth miles…

This stanza is opened by a very pessimistic image of the cold and stormy weather, which indicates the death and gloomy mood . He says that everything is withered even the "ironic rainbow". Of course, we know that the “rainbow “ is celebrated with happiness and joy, but now it’s a “rainbow” that gives dead and gloomy feelings to the city. A "pepper pot" can be a small lighthouse, which seems to be casting a light across the barren Charles River and the spans that hold the two side bridge of Charles River and the earth around it. We are used that the two banks of the river are covered with beautiful followers and plants, but here the image is different.

I saw my city in the Scales ..
Of judgment rising and descending. Piles
Of dead leaves char the air
And I am a red arrow on this graph
Of Revelations. Every dove is sold

The scales of justice, weighing good and bad, against Boston. A “scale” always judges weather something is “descending or rising”. Here the poet shows that when Boston is judged, it won’t succeed, because it will descend.
The poet here jumps from describing the scene to mentioning religious images. He then says that now it is the judgment day, where he plays the role of God's observer holding the "Revelations". The “dead leaves” represent the humans, and the "Piles" represents the hell.
For him Boston represents the whole world, and when "Every dove is sold" there will be no more peace on this world, because peace is sold by sins and by getting away from religion. “Dove” is a bird that symbolizes peace and innocence.

The Chapel's sharp-shinned eagle shifts its hold
On serpent-Time, the rainbow's epitaph …... The last two lines represent the end of the world, as the "Chapel's sharp-shinned eagle", The “chapel” is a church in Boston. Dove is a peaceful bird. It is Compared to a powerful eagle. “Eagle” represents wars made for the benefit of the church {the word "shinned" emphasized the excessive wars} is now replaced with "Serpent-Time".

The Serpent was used before to deceive Eve and Adam and was the reason that lead Adam and Eve out of Heaven. This time the “serpent” it is used to deceive people and kill the life on earth.


The " Rainbow's epitaph" emphasizes the death and infertility of earth, as the rainbow always appears after the rain among the beautiful nature, but now the beauty of the rainbow is vanished because there is no more rain nor nature.


This time it is used to deceive people and kill life on earth. The extended conceit "the Rainbow's epitaph" emphasize the death and infertility of earth, as the rainbow always appears after the rain among the beautiful nature but now the rainbow is dead because there is no more rain nor nature.

Third Stanza

In Boston serpents whistle at the cold.
The victim climbs the altar steps and sings:.

He ends the stanza with the same idea that he opens the following stanza with. he opens the stanza with the image of "Boston Serpent" that whistle at the cold weather for the victims to climb the altar happily and singing. The "altar" is an elevated structure upon which sacrifices may be offered or before which other religious ceremonies may be enacted. Of course there is a connotation as the poet's real meaning, that the Serpent whistle is the deceptive war that calls the “victimize” innocent people by leading them into endless wars and haters. It’s not for religious reasons but for worldly matters
.
Hosannah to the lion, lamb, and beast
Who fans the furnace-face of IS with wings:

This is indicated in the verse "Hosannah to the lion, lamb and beast…", the "Hosanna" should be for God not mortal animals. What is strange in this verse is that the poet used an oxymoron in "lamb" which is an innocent animal representing Jesus with the "Lion" and "beast" which are wild animals. So they sacrifice human on the altar or can be used for ceremonial events such as the wedding ceremony.

I breathe the ether of my marriage feast."
At the high altar, gold
And a fair cloth. I kneel and the wings beat
My cheek…
The poet jumps to a religious and a subjective experience, which is his wedding day where he was standing at the “altar” with his fair cloth. When he was kneeling he felt that he was blessed by Jesus, as he was given wisdom that lead to his exile, because all people seem to be leaving him. However, he will still stand and live his life.
What can the dove of Jesus give
You now but wisdom, exile? Stand and live,
The dove has brought an olive branch to eat….

He ends his poem with a pessimistic image of the dove which brought the olive branch to eat, we are used that the image of the dove with the olive branch indicates peace, but by making the dove eats the olive branch emphasizes the idea that there is no hope of peace and security in the world.

Tone:

The tone is very pessimistic and gloomy. It appears through his dictions such as “ winter, death, hunger “.
Theme

Finally the poem is very similar to T.S Eliot's "The waste land" where he criticizes the modern man and the lack of religion on earth which brought curse to earth.
The theme that is handled is the loss of belonging ,destruction and lack of faith.
Figures of Speech:

Symbols:
Dove peace

Eagle war

Serpent evilness

Oxymoron :
the image of Innocent animal “lamb” and the image of wild animals “Lion , Beast “
Dove and eagle images
Dove and Serpent
Irony:
Although The rainbow which supposed to celebrated with happiness , here it represents frustration and death.

Form.
The poem is a lyric of three stanzas with ten lines in each. The poet uses free verse.
Although that he jumps from a descriptive tone to a religious tone, the poet skills are presented by handling the organic unity of the poem. For example: He ends the second stanza with the same idea that he opens the following on which is the image of “Boston serpent”.
Language :

He built his poem with traditional language and the usage of religious words such as “Hosanna , Ararat, Noah arc “
Mood :

From the beginning of the poem, readers can feel the gloominess of the atmosphere. It is also a religious one which appears through his use of some Christian images for example: church, judgment day.

.

Spring and All
By
William Carlos Williams

http://www.litkicks.com/Images/willi...oswilliams.jpg

Introduction
Williams' Life and Career
(1883 - 1963)
The Poet’s Biography

William Carlos Williams (1883-1963), also known as WCW, American poet, novelist, and physician.
As a poet, he was closely associated with modernism and Imagism.
Williams has always been known as an experimenter, an innovator, a revolutionary figure in American poetry.
Williams worked as a doctor in Paterson, New Jersey for more than forty years.
His own bright imagination created a distinctively American verse.
Early years William Carlos Williams was born in 1883 in a small New Jersey town.
His family provided him with a fertile background in art and literature.
He earned a worldwide reputation as a writer, publishing poems, novels, essays and plays.
He was acquainted with the nearby literary scene in New York City, befriending Ezra Pound and H. D., and became a key player in American Modernist poetry.
Pound became a great influence in Williams' writing.
His Movement

Modernism-Imagism

Following Pound, he was one of the principal poets of the Imagist movement, which was a reaction against the rigid and ordered poetry of the time.
However, as time went on, he began to increasingly disagree with the values put forth in the work of Pound and especially Eliot, who he felt were too attached to European culture and traditions.
Although his early poems are imagist, he later moved from Imagism to Objectivism. He termed his work “objectivist” to suggest the importance of concrete, visual objects.
Williams is more strongly associated with the American Modernist movement in literature.
Continuing to experiment with new techniques of meter and lineation, Williams sought to renew language through inventing an entirely fresh—and singularly American—poetic, whose subject matter was centered on the everyday circumstances of life and the lives of common people.
The leading American Poets
The leading American poets may be arranged in four groups.:

The first group is the group of older men like Robinson and Robert Frost.
The second group is The Imagists like Ezra Pound.
The third one is The Lyricists.
Finally, in the fourth group we put the younger men who have occupied themselves with experiments that often represent their generation's rebellion against order and tradition, its temper of dismay and hopelessness, its conviction of general and eternal chaos. In this group we find T.S. Eliot, E.E. Cummings and William Carlos Williams

His Relations with Other Poets:

John Keats and Walt Whitman:
Williams’ earliest poetry was deeply marked by the influence of the English romantic poet John Keats. Keats's traditionally rhymed and metered verse impressed him. In contrast, Whitman's free verse offered "an impulse toward freedom and release of the self“.
Like Whitman, he freed poetry from the restraints and regularity of traditional rhythms and meters, and used commonplace American scenes and speech to portray contemporary urban America. Williams was a poet of the everyday, the common, the contemporary. Yet, by his first year at Pennsylvania, Williams had found a considerably more vivid mentor than Whitman in a friend, Ezra Pound.
Ezra Pound and Eliot:•
The Pound- Eliot influence is very strong in the work of the doctor- poet William Carlos Williams.
William was a classmate of Ezra pound and Hilda Doolittle, and his early poetry reveals the influence of Imagism. Like Pound, Williams wanted to break away from poetic convention and make a new kind of poetry.
Like Eliot and Pound, Williams tried his hand at the epic form, but while their epics employ literary allusions directed to a small number of highly educated readers, Williams instead writes for a more audience.
He became involved in the Imagist movement but soon he began to develop opinions that differed from those of his poetic peers, Pound and Eliot. Williams was American in his aims as Pound was not.
The poetry of Eliot and Pound used the language and myths of Classical literature. But Williams was more interested in the language and scenes of everyday life. Williams’ poems have a warmer feeling for real people and real life than Pound’s.
Williams’ deep concern for people makes his poetry more interesting to the average reader. He is more optimistic than Pound or Eliot.
Robert Frost:
The appeal of his poetry resembles that of Robert frost. They were all accessible and entertaining; they possessed poetic personalities that have much charm; and they discovered poetry in the familiar circumstances of the contemporary life.
Robert Frost, however, rivals Williams in his use of the native idiom--his poems are true to the speech and the trapped psyches of the New England country-people he knew. On the other hand, Williams expresses the whole nation's character, and especially its urban instability.
In Williams’ hands, the poem was not to become the carefully recreated Wordsworthian incident as in Frost. Instead, the poem was to capture an instant of time like a snapshot- a concept he derived from photographers and artists he met at the galleries.
He can thus be seen as a bridge between the regional approach of Robert Frost and the European focus of Eliot.
His Poetry.

He tried to invent an entirely fresh form, an American form of poetry whose subject matter was centered on everyday circumstances of life and the lives of common people.
His sympathy for ordinary working people, children, and everyday events in modern urban settings made his poetry attractive and accessible. Williams cultivated a relaxed, natural poetry.
Themes: Many of his subjects are taken from nature.
Most of his images are visual ones. His images are close, fresh, concrete, and empathetic.
He didn’t use traditional meter in most of his poems. His revolutionary ideas led him to write poetry that was simple, and formless.
Method: He avoided conventional or traditional forms; tried to report a thing or event with the intensity of the moment of perception, aimed at reproducing the rhythms of American speech and the words of the common man.
The simplicity of his verse forms, the matter-of-factness of both his subject matter and his means of describing it, seemed to bring poetry into natural relation with everyday life. He is now judged to be among the best and most important poets writing between the wars.
His Influence.

His influence as a poet spread slowly during the twenties and thirties, overshadowed, he felt, by the immense popularity of Eliot's "The Waste Land"; however, his work received increasing attention in the 1950s and 1960s.
One of his most notable contributions to American literature was his willingness to be a mentor for younger poets, including Allen Ginsberg and the Beats, who were impressed by the accessibility of his language and his openness as a mentor.
He had an especially significant influence on many of the American literary movements of the 1950s: poets of the Beat Generation, the San Francisco Renaissance, the Black Mountain School, and the New York School.
According to Williams himself, his own special gift to the new poets was his "variable foot—the division of the line according to a new method that would be satisfactory to an American."
Williams had always protested against the English influence on American poetry. During his lifetime, he had not received as much recognition from Britain as he had from the United States.

His Works:

His major works include Kora in Hell (1920), Spring and All (1923), Pictures from Brueghel and Other Poems (1962), the five-volume epic Paterson (1963, 1992), and Imaginations (1970).
In 1950 Williams received the National Book Award for poetry, and in 1963 he was awarded a posthumous Pulitzer Prize for Pictures from Brueghel and Other Poems (1962).
His book Spring and All.

Eliot's The Waste Land was one of the "major influence[s] on Williams' book, Spring and All. The last in a decade of experimental poetry, Spring and All viewed the same American landscape as did Eliot but interpreted it differently. "The Wasteland," a poem that also begins with the late coming of spring, Williams' version is more idiomatic, more grounded in American colloquialisms and style.
Some of Williams‘ finest poetry appeared in the 1923 Spring and All.
It includes the famous poem "The Red Wheelbarrow." Much anthologized as the archetypal poem of Imagism, the weight of this brief poem rests entirely on the careful description of the thing itself, the actual wheelbarrow, which is not a symbol for anything, but simply exists as it is.
Spring and All created a new kind of American lyric, with attention toward natural, idiomatic language, sharply observed images, unusual syntax and enjambment, and abbreviated, carefully wrought lines.
The Poem
By the road to the contagious hospital
under the surge of the blue
mottled clouds driven from the
northeast—a cold wind. Beyond, the
waste of broad, muddy fields
brown with dried weeds, standing and fallen

patches of standing water
the scattering of tall trees

All along the road the reddish
purplish, forked, upstanding, twiggy
stuff of bushes and small trees
with dead, brown leaves under them
leafless vines—
• Lifeless in appearance, sluggish
dazed spring approaches—
• They enter the new world naked,
cold, uncertain of all
save that they enter. All about them
the cold, familiar wind—

Now the grass, tomorrow
the stiff curl of wildcarrot leaf

One by one objects are defined—
It quickens: clarity, outline of leaf

But now the stark dignity of
entrance—Still, the profound change
has come upon them: rooted they
grip down and begin to awaken
Introduction to the Poem.•

Spring and All is a poem of eight stanzas and twenty-seven lines which echoes some of the imagery as well as the concept s of Eliot's Waste Land.
This poem is Williams' rewriting of Eliot's Waste Land spring, yet he does not cross out Eliot's harshness. Like Eliot, he is working to find a new poetry; he means to explode it with the American local.
In a lot of ways, "Spring and All" is a classic Williams poem: short, beautiful, and filled with simple images. It focuses on making each moment as clear and sharp as possible. He’s discovering poetry in the world around him, in daily experience.
He’s inventing a style that doesn’t need fancy words or references to history in order to make its point or to amaze you with its beauty. This poem is easy to read, but there’s a lot behind it, and a lot going on under the surface.
The Importance of the Poem:

Basically, the "spring" that Williams talks about isn’t just happening in the poem. "By the road to the contagious hospital" was written at a big moment in history, a turning point for art, poetry, etc. WWI was just over, the world had changed, and people were looking for a way to talk, think, and write about the modern world. Williams was finding his own way to deal with these questions. He wrote simple, beautiful poems.
The Title

This poem was the first in the book "Spring and All," and the only title Williams gave it was "I" (as in the roman numeral one) People who needed a way to refer to this poem just called it by its first line: "By the road to the contagious hospital."
As the poem became more popular, it got pulled out of the book it was published in, and started to be printed as a stand-alone poem. In some cases, the book’s title was used for the poem.
The two words "and All" provide the little bit of mystery and extra complication that Williams loves. His poems focus on basic ideas and simple images, but they approach them in a way that forces you to think a little more about their meaning. Adding the "and All" gives your imagination some space to play, to think of new and different possibilities.
Summary of the Poem.

Someone has stopped by the side of a road that leads to a hospital, and he or she is looking at the landscape.
This person (the speaker of the poem) begins by describing the scene: the dead plants that cover everything at the end of winter.
Then, the poem shifts, and the speaker describes the coming of spring, imagining how new life will emerge from this landscape as it begins to wake up.

**************

Line 1: By the road to the contagious hospital
The opening line places the poem in a medical context.
The phrase "By the road" begins to set the scene.
The poem begins in a very straight forward set of words that cause the reader numerous impressions of the landscape being described. It starts with the words "contagious hospital" and it is obvious from the language the author uses that the hospital is not contagious because of the disease, but rather it itself is a sickness that is an ever-present state in this depressing landscape. The word "contagious" sets the mood for the poem.
It seems important to know that Williams earned his living as a doctor. We can’t know if this poem is about an experience he had, but he definitely would have been familiar with hospitals.
The first line which contains the word "hospital" is the poem's only mention of a human presence; it's the only line that suggests there is a human community in the world that is separate from nature. If Williams omitted this line, the poem would only focus on the natural world and the coming of spring. It would no longer have the implication of hope and redemption for mankind, who are sick in the "contagious hospital".
Lines 2-4under the surge of the blue
mottled clouds driven from the
northeast-a cold wind. Beyond, the
Immediately, the road and the hospital disappear, and the sentence continues with a description of the clouds.
These clouds don’t "drift" or "float" – they "surge." These clouds rush into the poem, filled with power, hurried along by the wind. Where some clouds might be a comforting, even white, these are "blue-mottled."
Finally, he ends the sentence with "a cold wind" which contributes to the bleak mood of this scene.
This poem makes you practically imagine every word, to feel how cold that wind is, to imagine that hospital looming in the distance.
Lines 5-8waste of broad, muddy fields
brown with dried weeds, standing and fallen
patches of standing water
the scattering of tall trees
We move down toward the land and outward toward the fields. For the first time, we see plants, brown and dry, as well as mud, dirty water, etc.
It’s a "waste," as the speaker puts it: an empty space, without any life that the eye can see. Yet, as we move on, we also start to look closer, to see how the elements of the landscape and the poem fit together.
Williams ties together the pieces of this poem by using repetition. In the sixth line, we see weeds that are "standing and fallen." Then, in the seventh, we see "patches of standing water."
We know that weeds and water don’t "stand", so this is a metaphor.
Lines 9-13All along the road the reddish
purplish, forked, upstanding, twiggy
stuff of bushes and small trees
with dead, brown leaves under them
leafless vines-
Around the edges, Williams does start to breathe some life into the scene. Some new colors do appear – reddish and purplish – but, for the most part, we’re still up close and personal with dry, “brown” and “dead” leaves and trees.
Lines 14-15 Lifeless in appearance, sluggish
dazed spring approaches-
The poem shifts, and we catch our first glimpse of spring. It doesn’t happen right away; in fact, it sort of creeps into the line, appearing in the distance. At first, we can’t even tell it’s there. The landscape still seems "lifeless," just like the vines in line 13 were "leafless." But, something has changed, and Williams wants us to look more closely. Spring is there, waiting for us to see it.
Even though there aren’t any real characters in this poem, spring is introduced as if it has a personality. Like some creature waking up, it is "sluggish" and "dazed." This is the first sign of life, and it’s also the first thing Williams treats like a living being.
Lines 16-19
They enter the new world naked,
cold, uncertain of all
save that they enter. All about them
the cold, familiar wind-
The next section tells us that other things are approaching, too. "They enter," Williams tells us, but who are they? He only tells us a few things: they’re naked and cold.
Williams just like a doctor examining a patient, is writing about the landscape being naked and fully exposed. He is trying to find out the symptoms of the possible disease, this time though, it's the spring that is coming, but the language leaves the referent of "they" unsure and undecided.
The image of these plants coming into the world might make us think of human babies being born. This is called personification, and he uses it through the poem. It’s one of a lot of ways that he twists together the human and the natural worlds, and suggests that they’re really just aspects of the same thing.
He again repeats the image of the cold wind from the fourth line
Lines 20-23
Now the grass, tomorrow
the stiff curl of wildcarrot leaf
One by one objects are defined-
It quickens: clarity, outline of leaf
Now, things start to pick up speed.
It looks like "they" are the new plants. The landscape is being renewed with the new life following the approach of "sluggish dazed spring," it evokes the shoots growing from the earth.
The mood of the poem changes and becomes exciting when it says "It quickens." you feel everything start moving along and rapidly becoming alive after the cold, dead winter. It also hints at the way the world speeds up in spring. Even the sound of the word is fast and lively, the opposite of the "sluggish" feeling.
Lines 24-27But now the stark dignity of
entrance-Still, the profound change
has come upon them: rooted, they
grip down and begin to awaken
However, spring is not quite there yet. It’s only beginning to happen. The word "entrance" is a key word here.
If Williams speeded things up in the last few lines, now he slows them down again by using the words "stark dignity" which have a serious-sounding.
The real changes are going on underground. Down at the roots, things are waking up. This is another use of metaphor.
Analysis of the Poem
Themes: (Little Words, Big Ideas)

Theme of Man and the Natural World
This could have been a poem just about nature, and for the most part, it is. But, someone is watching this nature, and someone is talking about it. Williams drives this point home hard by starting us out with the road and the hospital. Those two places are major symbols of the human world. They cut through the landscape and shut it out. In order for this poem to happen, the speaker and the reader have to step out of these human spaces and pay real attention to the natural environment.

Williams argues that man and nature are fundamentally separate, and that we can observe nature, but only from a distance. He suggests that, in our world of roads and hospitals, we have lost the ability to fully participate in the natural world.

Theme of Mortality
Death opens this poem in a big way. It’s hard to think about a contagious hospital without thinking about the possibility of death. If that wasn’t enough, the landscape turns out to be dead, too. Check out the "dried weeds, standing and fallen," and the "dead, brown leaves." Ultimately, the whole world we see in this poem is "lifeless in appearance." That last word is a key, though. While a disease might make you really dead, the land only "appears dead." The payoff in the poem, the heartwarming conclusion, is that this isn’t the scary kind of death, but the kind that leads to rebirth.

Williams’ poem is an allegory for spiritual rebirth. It argues that plants, animals, and humans, as parts of the natural world, go through a cycle of death and resurrection/reincarnation
Theme of Transformation
Transformations are a major way Williams approaches nature in this poem. What he describes is "just" the changing of the seasons, but he makes it into a really big event. The world is changing, transforming itself from brown to green, from dead to living, from cold and windy to calm and warm. As Williams puts it: "the profound change has come upon them." By the end of this poem, spring has changed everything, including the speaker
Theme of Time

Time is definitely a factor in that the changing of the seasons is all about the passage of time. The interesting thing about time here is that it’s hard to tell whether the coming of spring really happens in this poem at all.
Although the speaker of the poem imagines a big change about to take place, nothing actually happens in this poem.
Symbolism and Imagery
Spring:
From the title, Spring is a pretty important part of this poem. Eventually, it emerges as a kind of weird main character, taking on almost human characteristics as it changes the world of the poem.
Lines 14-15: Our first glimpse of spring. It is described as being "sluggish and dazed." These words usually apply to humans, and that’s called personification.
Line 25: " The "profound change" of spring’s arrival is a metaphor for the changes over the whole world in the early 20th Century. World War I is over; people are producing new and exciting art and philosophy. In a general sense, spring has always been a symbol of new beginnings.
Plants: The poem is full of plants, both the dead old ones that Winter has left behind, and the new ones that are emerging with spring.
Lines 9-13: This is a pretty long description of dead plants as an image of cold and lifeless winter. More generally, they are symbols of the death that must come before rebirth and new possibility.
Line 16-18: These new plants are compared to human babies, another use of personification.
The Hospital: The man-made objects that open the poem have a big influence on the way we look at the nature scenes that follow. The hospital becomes a kind of lens that changes the way we see the world
Line 1: The image of the contagious hospital puts us (just for a moment) in a completely human world. Everything that follows is natural, but here, for just a second, we’re stuck in a place of disease.
The road is an important symbol, especially in America. it stands for freedom and possibility. On the other hand, roads can also make us think of danger, loneliness, and the violation of nature.
Setting
The whole poem is basically describing the setting, that famous road to the hospital with the dead plants all around it and the mood created by the description.
When we read about this place, it makes us feel alone, surrounded by a sort of brownish-grey emptiness. There’s a kind of loneliness to everything that we lay eyes on. There are no other people. Plants rule this world.
It’s hard to deny that there’s something desolate about this setting, which is hard to forget about or ignore.
Of course, spring does eventually show up, and the idea is that it will drive away the bleakness of winter.
Speaker Point of View
The speaker is someone who stops by the side of a road, looking at the landscape in late winter and telling us about it. That’s about all the information we get about the speaker of this poem. We know where he or she is, and what he/she is looking at, but we don’t know much else.

However, we do get a lot of information about how this person sounds. The speaker of this poem writes a bit like a scientist. Personal emotion is held back. The words are precise and short, without any extra flourishes. They all serve a purpose. Objects in the poem are described as "cold," "stiff," and "stark." It’s almost like we’re watching someone perform an operation. Words and images can’t wander, or take their time. Above all, this speaker is in control of the situation, and wants us to know it.
Rhyme, Form & Meter
Free Verse
This poem doesn’t have a regular meter, and the lines don’t rhyme. It is called "free verse." Williams wasn’t interested in the traditions of poetry. He needed a poetic style that was modern, unpretentious, and direct, and that’s what he got in his poem. It doesn’t rhyme or have an even rhythm. However, the choice of words, the arrangement of the lines, and the use of images in this poem are all very precise, and designed to create specific effects.
Sounds of the Landscape
When Spring is in its full rush, and Williams tells us that "it quickens, clarity, outline of a leaf," (line 23) listen to the knife-like sound of those words. They make us feel the fast spreading of the leaf and the sharpness of its edge. We get the same feeling a few lines before, when he talks about the "stiff curl" of a new leaf. The texture of those words perfectly captures the strong, tightly packed curve of a leaf unfolding.

When the roots in the final line "grip down," we can feel not just how they grow, but how strong and determined and relentless they are. As spring builds up, the whole poem fills with the rustling sound of growing, moving plants.
The Style of the Poet
Sharp, Clear Images and Short, Direct Lines
in general Williams’ poems are clear and easy. you can usually tell a Williams piece by the way he uses images. Like in this poem, the individual lines are mostly clear and direct. These short lines are meant to create a mental picture immediately. Even if he mixes up the order of the pictures, each one stays in sharp focus. That’s Williams’ style, and you’ll find it all over his poems.
This poem is pretty direct and straightforward, and Williams wants it that way.
Conclusion
The whole poem could be seen as Williams’ response to the wasteland world of poverty and disease which he encountered a lot as a doctor.
However, Williams' interpretation of this wilderness of clouds, cold, mud, and dead plants gives it a stark beauty

The return
By
Ezra Pound

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His life

Pound was born in Hailey, Idaho Territory, to Homer Loomis and Isabel Weston Pound. His grandfather was the Lieutenant Governor of Wisconsin, Thaddeus C. Pound; his mother was said to be related to the poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.
When he was 18 months old, his family moved to the suburbs ofPhiladelphia. In 1901 at the age of 15, he entered the University of Pennsylvania, but after studying there for two years transferred to Hamilton College.
During his studies at Penn, he met and befriended William Carlos Williams and H.D. (Hilda Doolittle), to whom he became engaged for a short time.
He had been taken to Europe by relatives in 1898 and again to Europe and Morocco in 1902. In 1908 he moved to Europe, living first in Venice but eventually settling in London after spending a brief stint working as a tour guide in Gibraltar.
London
. After he moved to London, the influence of Ford Madox Ford andT. E. Hulme encouraged him to cast off overtly archaic poetic language and forms and begin to remake himself as a poet. Pound believed that William Butler Yeats was the greatest living poet, and befriended him in England.

During 1914 and 1915 Pound and Yeats lived together at Stone Cottage in Sussex,

On April 20, 1914, Pound married Dorothy Shakespear, an artist and daughter of the novelist Olivia Shakespear, a former lover of Yeats
.
Paris

In 1920, Pound moved to Paris, where he met a circle of artists, musicians, and writers who were revolutionizing the whole world of modern art.
He continued working on The Cantos, writing the bulk of the "Malatesta Sequence", which introduced one of the major personas of the poem.
. In 1922 he met and became involved with Olga Rudge, a violinist. Together with Dorothy Shakespear, they formed an uneasy ménage à trois which was to last until the end of the poet's life
Italy

On 10 October 1924, Pound left Paris permanently and moved to Rapallo, Italy. Near neighbours were Max Beerbohm and his wife Florence Kahn. He and Dorothy stayed there briefly.

At this time Pound also organized an annual series of concerts in Rapallo, where a wide range of classical and contemporary music was performed

In 1933, he had a personal audience with Italy's prime minister Benito Mussolini and presented him with a draft of Cantos.

Pound remained in Italy, residing primarily in Rapallo, after the outbreak of World War II, which began more than two years before his native United States formally entered the war in December 1941 after Pearl Harbor.


He made several radio broadcasts from Rome, for which he was paid a small sum, but he also continued to be involved in scholarly publishing. Pound wrote many newspaper pieces.
Back to home

After the war, Pound was brought back to the United States to face charges of treason , He entered in mental hospital for twelf years, writing his cantos , and receiving literary visitors .

Death
He subsequently returned to Italy in July, 1958, he remained in Italy until his death in 1972.

His Career as
A translator- A critic- A poet
Imagism.

The return


See, they return; ah, see the tentative
Movements, and the slow feet,
The trouble in the pace and the uncertain
Wavering!

See, they return, one, and by one,
With fear, as half-awakened;
As if the snow should hesitate
And murmur in the wind,
and half turn back;
These were the "Wing'd-with-Awe,"
Inviolable.

Gods of the wingèd shoe!
With them the silver hounds,
sniffing the trace of air!

Haie! Haie!
These were the swift to harry;
These the keen-scented;
These were the souls of blood.

Slow on the leash,
pallid the leash-men!

The poem consists of three stanzas. It is not regular in the number of lines. It is a free verse. The poet is not restricted to specific rhyme scheme. Pound uses everyday speech in his poem. He does not exaggerate in using verbs and adjectives.

The poem talks in general about the return of the defeated army.
1st stanza:

The speaker describes the movements of the army:
Tentative.
Slow.
Trouble in pace.
Uncertain.

2nd stanza:

The speaker describes the isolation of the army. They return one by one not in groups.
He describes the snowy, windy, and gloomy atmosphere.
There is an irony when he compares between the army and the king of Gods (Zeus).
3rd stanza:

“Gods of the wingèd shoe” = Hermes (The personal agent and herald of Zeus, the king of the gods).
The speaker continues in describing the power of the gods.
The gods will send very strong dogs.
Description of the leash-men, their faces were pallid.
Theme:
The isolation of the modern man.
Tone
The tone of the poem is melancholic.He uses some words to show his pessimism like “tentative, trouble, fear, pallid”.

Lady Lazarus
By
Sylvia Plath

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Childhood
Sylvia Plath was born in Boston in 1932, daughter of a German immigrant biology professor, and his Austrian-American wife.
At 8, Sylvia suffered her first great loss: her father died suddenly after surgery for complications of undiagnosed diabetes. The death of her father left her feel guilty, depressed and confused. It also left her family with financial problem. She did her first attempt to suicide at the age of ten by drowning, which she admitted later it wasn’t serious.
She grew up in Wellesley, in an extremely close relationship with her widowed mother Aurelia. She sent out many poems and stories which were rejected before she began to see them published in national periodicals in 1950.
Education

Plath was a star student. She received much praise for her works, but knowing that she was exceptional caused her to feel different from her peers at school. Her social life died as she secluded herself.
She attended Smith College on scholarship and won a guest editorship at Mademoiselle in New York City in the summer of 1953.
Later that summer, having learned that she had not been admitted to the Harvard summer writing program for which she’d applied, Sylvia attempted suicide and was treated for depression at McLean Hospital.
She returned to Smith the next spring, and graduated in 1955, with a Fulbright scholarship to study at Newnham College, Cambridge.
Marriage

She met Ted Hughes at a party given in Cambridge. They Married secretly on 1956 in June.

During the honeymoon, There was one alleged episode, Sylvia told a friend that one afternoon as they sat on a hill Ted was overcome by such rage that he started CHOKING her, and she resigned herself to die. Which led to increase her depression.
There is some mystery over her in September 1956 One likely story claims that having become pregnant, yet still believing she needed to keep the marriage secret, she had travelled to the States to have an abortion.
The couple lived briefly in the US after graduating from Cambridge, and Plath taught at Smith College. In 1959, the couple returned to England, where their first child, a daughter, was born. and also published her poetry collection, The Colossus. With the new responsibilities of caring for a new baby, she found little time for writing. With Ted spending most of his time at a nearby flat that he kept for seclusion as he wrote, she was pretty much left alone to carry the burden on her own. With her health being poor and the woes of depression, she miscarries their second child in 1961. It was in 1962 that their son Nicholas Farr was born. Her dreams of balancing family and her love for words fell apart when she found out her husband's affair. She filed for divorce. Feeling isolated, and struggling with the difficulties of trying to write and raise two small children.


Her Unstable personality
TWO features stand out in everything written by or about Sylvia that throws light on her personality.
FIRST, there was the emotional instability or her mood swings. Academic or professional success stimulated her to spiraling activity; even small failures plunged her into dejection. The same mercurial quality affected all her personal relationships.
Second, though as a rule over controlled and unspontaneous, at times she would impulsively expose herself to physical harm, gashing her legs ‘to see if I had the guts’, skiing recklessly and breaking a leg, driving her car off the road—actions unexplained by a hypo manic state or by use of alcohol or drugs.
Her Poetry
Plath's work is valuable for its stylistic accomplishments, its melding of comic and serious elements, its ribald fashioning of near and slant rhymes in a free-form structure, its terse voicing of themes that have too often been treated only with piety. It is also valuable for its ability to reach today's reader, because of its concern with the real problems of American culture. In this age of gender conflicts, broken families, and economic inequities, Plath's forthright language speaks loudly about the anger of being both betrayed and powerless .

Themes in Plath’s Poetry

Relationships: father, children, husband
Dreams
Confessions and Performance
Female Role in Society: the struggle to manage
womanhood, motherhood, marriage, and writing.
Loss and betrayal, dealing with depression.

Her style
The Form of her poetry is “autobiographic” Because she talks about her deepest feeling and she expresses herself without hiding behind a persona.
Her words are sharp, apt tools which brand her message on the brains and hearts of her readers. With each reading, she initiates them forever into the shrouded clan of her own mind.
Her Language is a mixture of slang and colloquial language, so it is easily understood.
Her tones are depressive, angry, and dark.• She uses shocking imagery to reflect her own suffering. She had ability to arrange reaction and manipulate images to create a deep experience within the reading of her work.
She is remarkable in using horrific events as metaphors for personal anguish.

AS Confessional poet :
She is considered a CONFESSIONAL poet, because of the intimate nature of her poetry and because of her relationships with confessional poets Anne SEXTON and Robert LOWELL.
Like them, Plath rejects the MODERNISM of Ezra POUND, T. S. ELIOT, and William Carlos WILLIAMS, which emphasizes the abstract and the universal. Instead Plath embraces the deeply personal. But she is not purely autobiographical either. In a 1960 BBC interview she said: “

I think my poems immediately come out of the sensuous and emotional experiences I have, but . . . I believe that one should be able to control and manipulate experiences, even the most terrifying”.
Plath’s poetry transcends the term confessional through her attention to the craft of poetry and by her filtering of experience through the lens of her own stylized mythology.

The “I” in her poems is a persona, or fictional mask, rather than the true voice of the poet. It is a shell to protect an intense, highly sensitive individual who needed to be heard, but not seen too deeply.
Sylvia as a Feminist Writer
Women at that time started the Feminist Movement because they were very oppressed by men, they were treated as if they had no mind, object. The prevailing domestic ideology of the 1950s told women that their place was in the home caring for the family, and that they should find complete fulfillment in that role. So, women were only for taking care of their children and for being good wives, but they wanted to be more important in society. They wanted to be self- sufficient and to have their own life. During all of history we can see very good women writers, but never recognized their talent. The Feminist movement was a good thing to demonstrate the possibilities of women, that they can be as good as men. And to change the society’s perceptions of women.
Poets such as Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton satirized the constrictive roles forced upon women, thereby laying the groundwork for later feminist work.
Sylvia Plath became a good example of feminism because she wrote about her life, her experiences and of her husband. Through her poetry we can see that she was against the acts of her husband, and that she suffered because of his betrayal. When she died her husband published her poems, and everybody could know all about Sylvia’s concerns. Some women started to criticize Ted Hughes, thus we can talk about a feminist movement started Sylvia Plath’s poems. Plath is a literary symbol of the women’s right movement.
Sylvia Plath said: “ Being born a woman is my awful tragedy ”
Such a feeling of Plath is certainly an outcome of her frustration and suffering in a hostile world that belongs to men. In a male dominated society, woman is treated as an object.
She talks in her poems about the physical exploitation of women in the world. Plath finds women reduced to the status of a body in a world ruled by men.
Other important issues to Sylvia and other feminists include equality, ending discrimination, and bringing to light the frequency of domestic violence against women.

Some of Her Works

I. Journals:

Plath began keeping a diary at age 11, and kept journals until her suicide:
In 1980, The Journals of Sylvia Plath was published.

In 2000, was the publication of The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath, after her death.
II. Poems:
The Colossus
It was her first book
Ariel
The impact of Ariel was dramatic, with its potentially autobiographical descriptions of mental illness in poems such as “Tulips", “Daddy" and “Lady Lazarus".

. III. Novels:

The Bell Jar
A semi-autobiographical novel. Details of her attempts at suicide are chronicled in this book.

IV. Children's books

The Bed Book (1976)
The It-Doesn't-Matter-Suit (1996)
Collected Children's Stories (2001)
Mrs. Cherry's Kitchen (2001)

Prizes

Glascock Prize, in 1955, with "Two Lovers And A Beachcomber by The Real Sea".
Pulitzer Prize, in 1982, for The Collected poems.

Sylvia Plath Among the Other Poets

Anne sexton:

Both writers were friends. The first meeting which established their friendship took place in Robert Lowell’s poetry class at Boston University. The brief but intense friendship, influenced the work of both poets.
Robert Lowell:

She attended an evening poetry class, which was given by Robert Lowell, whose confessional style influenced Sylvia’s poetry.
From Robert Lowell and Anne Sexton, Plath adopted the License of “private and taboo subjects”, such as their experiences of breakdowns and mental hospitals.


Lady Lazarus
I have done it again.
One year in every ten
I manage it----

A sort of walking miracle, my skin
Bright as a Nazi lampshade,
My right foot

A paperweight,
My face a featureless, fine
Jew linen.

Peel off the napkin
0 my enemy.
Do I terrify?----

The nose, the eye pits, the full set of teeth?
The sour breath
Will vanish in a day.

Soon, soon the flesh
The grave cave ate will be
At home on me

And I a smiling woman.
I am only thirty.
And like the cat I have nine times to die.

This is Number Three.
What a trash
To annihilate each decade.

What a million filaments.
The peanut-crunching crowd
Shoves in to see

Them unwrap me hand and foot
The big strip tease.
Gentlemen, ladies

These are my hands
My knees.
I may be skin and bone,

Nevertheless, I am the same, identical woman.
The first time it happened I was ten.
It was an accident.

The second time I meant
To last it out and not come back at all.
I rocked shut

As a seashell.
They had to call and call
And pick the worms off me like sticky pearls.

Dying
Is an art, like everything else,
I do it exceptionally well.

I do it so it feels like hell.
I do it so it feels real.
I guess you could say I've a call.

It's easy enough to do it in a cell.
It's easy enough to do it and stay put.
It's the theatrical

Comeback in broad day
To the same place, the same face, the same brute
Amused shout:

'A miracle!'
That knocks me out.
There is a charge

For the eyeing of my scars, there is a charge
For the hearing of my heart----
It really goes.

And there is a charge, a very large charge
For a word or a touch
Or a bit of blood

Or a piece of my hair or my clothes.
So, so, Herr Doktor.
So, Herr Enemy.

I am your opus,
I am your valuable,
The pure gold baby

That melts to a shriek.
I turn and burn.
Do not think I underestimate your great concern.

Ash, ash ---
You poke and stir.
Flesh, bone, there is nothing there----

A cake of soap,
A wedding ring,
A gold filling.

Herr God, Herr Lucifer
Beware
Beware.

Out of the ash
I rise with my red hair
And I eat men like air.
•
The poem in relation to Plath

"Lady Lazarus" conveys a message about her own life, obsessions, weaknesses, and feelings. In recording her previous suicide attempts, she makes comparisons that are not always obvious to decipher or to understand without the right background information. The poem serves as a metaphor that retains a morbid sensation through its description of the author’s psychological journey.
Title

The title “Lady Lazarus” has a Biblical illusion to the story of Lazarus. who was brought back to life by Jesus' miracle. In this poem,sylvia feminizes Lazarus, that it is shown as a lady, and this lady is an identification with the poet herself who felt "saved" too because all of her attempts to suicide failed. She is the main character of this poem, so in this story Lazarus is a lady, Lazarus is Sylvia Plath.
1
Sylvia starts saying that she has done it again, this means that she has attempted to suicide before, and this could be probably the second time . the poet here admits and confesses her personal experience of committing suicide by using the pronoun "I". Now she is 30, but she had an attempt each decade, the first time, at the age of ten, and the second one at her early twenties. " I manage it-----" in this line there is a sudden pause which indicates the poet is tentative. By using The word " manage", claims that she has a kind of power over her own fate, and that she is capable of controlling the whole situation.
2 - 3

She compares herself to a miracle that is walking because she wonders that she still alive although she was close to death many times. She identifies herself with Lazarus again. Then she set herself as a victim, comparing herself to the oppressed and imprisoned Jews by the Nazis, however her oppressors weren’t the Nazis, but the doctor who tried to save her and the people who were always taking care of her. She compares her skin to Nazi lampshade which is made by Jews' skin that Nazi burned Jews and used their skin to make things like lampshade.Then, she compares her burning foot to a paperweight to help the reader to imagine her heavy burning leg which makes walking difficult for her. After that, she describes her face as "featureless" and a piece of textile or cloth because it is burned and you can no longer recognize her.
4

She felt her life as the Holocaust, she was a victim of this torture of being saved again and again. She compared herself with a Jew oppressed and imprisoned by the Nazis, however her oppressors weren’t the Nazis, but the doctor "enemy" who tried to save her each time. Thus, she compares the doctors who are trying to save her life in hospital to the Nazi who tormented Jews in Holocaust. She asks her enemies (Nazis) to remove the cover that they used to put on those victims. " Do I terrify?-------", through the rhetorical question, she ironically wonders if she terrifies them because of her "featureless" face and burning body.
5

Sylvia suffers greatly, nearly as much as the Jews did in Holocaust. This is expressed through various representations of Nazis’ torment techniques and devices. One of which is starvation is causing the eye pits to show. In these lines, she describes some of the only recognizable features of one who has had their face badly burned. She said that all these features and even the foul breath " Will vanish in a day" to show us how easy it is for her to kill herself.
6
In this stanza Sylvia imagines herself dead, her flesh has been eaten by warms in her grave. Then she says " At home on me " that she will be back to life again, like what happened to Lazarus.
7

She says even after being back from death, she will come back to live and smile as she was before." I am only thirty." She is declaring he real age, which is an example of the confessional poem. She is mocking herself by saying that I am only thirty years old and I committed all these numbers of suicide. Then, she compares herself to a cat has nine times to die. Here is another shock-effect in the poem. People usually say that a cat has nine lives, nobody would say that a cat has " nine times to die". By insisting on death rather than on life, Sylvia further reinforces its thematic of death in the poem.
8
Sylvia is boasting about the fact that this is the 3rd time for her to attempt suicide.“Three” is capitalized because she has not done it yet. She wants to arouse people interest and wants them to enjoy the perfection of her third time. She thinks she is in a trash and doctors are her enemies. “To annihilate each decade”, it is suggested here that the act of committing suicide may now be no more than a ritual or game, periodically played, to tear oneself only to be reassembled, mended, and recalled to life once again by doctors, her enemies.
9
The suicide attempts of the speaker are followed by returns, through medical technology. That reestablishes contact with life as if a very fine, thin thread-like “filaments”, were trying her once again to life. That which ties the speaker, in a million ways, with the world." Filaments" is a Latin word used suddenly with the simple language. There is a circus imagery throughout the rest of the poem. The audience are spectators and shoves, they are interested in her story.
10
The circus imagery here continues. People crowded around her and want to know the cause of her death. They are interested in her naked psych rather than her naked body. “Gentleman , ladies”, is a phrase that used at circus, as if she going to present a magic show. She is using sarcasm and almost showing off as if she is going to present a magic show. She uses the “Gentleman” first to convey the supremacy of male over female and to show that men are the main cause of her suffering.
11 - 12

Plath acts as a guide at this particular point as she demonstrates her features: "These are my hands / My knees." She emphasizes the fact that she has been reduced to "skin and bone[s]," yet she reassures us that she is "the same, identical woman" in spite of her altered physical appearance; she has not changed. Then, as any good guide would do, she supplies a historical record of past events. She mentions the swimming incident that nearly cost her life when she was ten. This was the first time she skimmed death. It was purely accidental.
13 - 14
Then she moves to her second suicide attempt at twenty, which was intentional, when she tried to kill herself with sleeping pills. She had "rock shut // As a seashell" in the basement of her house. She was terribly well hidden. Her mother and brother found her only three days later, practically dead, with earthworms crawling over her.
In these two stanzas, Plath used vivid and graphic imagery.
First , she compares herself to a seashell that is hard on the outside and soft on the inside, and like a shell she is hard to open and to revive.
Then, she compares the worms that are struck on her body, to a pearl struck inside a sea shell.
15

This stanza is one of the famous lines of Sylvia's poetry, in which she gives general comment on the art of dying. The first line consists of one word "Dying" to place much emphasis on it.
Throughout these lines, Plath develops her "madwoman" persona. Extremely successful throughout her life, Sylvia believes that she can also die exceptionally well. She does not mean that she has literally died, but rather that she has already killed herself in a figurative sense. She considers death like an exploit of sorts, and she has sarcastic attitude toward it.
16
I do it so it feels like hell
Plath repeats the phrase "I do it" to convince the reader of the truthfulness of her experience. She clarifies that death is as painful as "hell“.
I do it so it feels real.
She wants to feel alive, "real" by killing herself, which is ironic since she sees her life only in her death.
I guess you could say I've a call.
Here, she identifies herself with Lazarus who has been called to life by Jesus. This allusion gives the poem since of holiness and universality.
17

In these following stanzas, Plath provides an insight on how easy she finds it is to commit suicide: "It’s easy enough to do it in a cell". In her case, you could nearly say it accomplishes itself on its own as Plath summons death upon herself so fervently. "cell" has a religious connotation because it is the place where priests imprison themselves to purify their souls. So death might be a way for Plath to purify her soul.
She imagined herself on a stage performing the act of dying in front of people.
18 - 19
Next, she describes the disappointment she feels when she realizes she is Like Lazarus comes back to life in a very strange broad day, To the same place. instead of welcoming her they were shocked, Shouting "miracle".
The crowd is in awe and entertained but completely indifferent to the fact that she is alive still. They're watching a magic trick being performed: 'A miracle!' They are amused by the fact that death nearly took her from them.
20
-She is mocking people who are happy and excited as if they are fool, even when they see her scars and realize what she has done.
-There is, also, a reference to the Nazi's violence mentioned before.
21
-People have to pay a lot of money to hear her "word", or "touch" her body, or even to see a drop of blood.
-There is, also, a reference to the Nazi's violence mentioned before.
22
-She addresses to the Doctor in German instead of in English, so it is clear the relation she does between Nazis and him.
-The Doctor has the same behaviour the Nazis had, he is a he is her enemy: he brought her back to life inorder to use her.
-Her use of Mr.(Herr) implicates the superiority of men, they are controlling women, just as what the Nazis treatment of the Jews is.
23

-The use of “I am” is more effective on the reader.
-She explains the reason of considering the doctors as enemies.
-She says" I am your gold baby", a metaphor to show how valuable she is to them, like gold.
-She wants to prove that she is treated as an object by men, as Jews are objects to the Nazis too.
24
-The piece of gold is melt to make use of it.
-An Allusion to the Holocaust where Jews are put in ovens and burned.
-This might be a hint for the way Sylvia chose to
commit suicide.
-Irony(the last line), there "concern" just for their own benefit.

25 -

She is warning those enemies by saying even if you burn me
you just find ash, you won't find any piece of me.
26
She compares these doctors to Nazi doctor who made" cake of soap" from the dead Jewish bodies. They also took their wedding rings and fillings after they burned them.
27
-She reminds us of the doctors who are acting as if they were gods, who resurrected Lady Lazarus, and also like the devil Lucifer, for committing an evil act.
-She does not want to be controlled by anyone whether it is man, god, or even Lucifer.
-She is against the supremacy of men in her society, therefore, she wants to take revenge on them, "beware"!.
28-She is insisting on taking revenge on men even after her death.
-During her life, she is unable to do anything concerning her wish because she is controlled by them.
-Thus, she wants to commit suicide and burn herself, from the remaining ashes of her body, a ghost will rise and carry out her wish.
-She alludes to an ancient myth by comparing herself to a Phoenix (a mythical bird that is a fire spirit with a colorful plumage and a tail of gold and scarlet ).
Language
First, the poem derives its dominant effects from the colloquial language and, the conversational opening ("I have done it again") to the clipped warnings of the ending ("Beware / Beware"), "Lady Lazarus" appears as the monologue of a woman speaking spontaneously out of her pain and psychic disintegration.
The Latinate terms ("annihilate," "filaments," "opus," "valuable") are introduced as sudden contrasts to the essentially simple language of the speaker.
The obsessive repetition of key words and phrases gives enormous power to the plain style used throughout.
Form

The poem's sentences are organized in a rigid structure that mimics the inflexible gender roles of her day. Just as a woman had to be passive and mindless to be a part of the social hierarchy, the poem's lines have to wrap around and twist themselves in order to fit the poem's structure. They are forced to conform with the three line per stanza form, to the point of being broken off mid-statement. These abrupt transitions give the poem a tense feel, as if the writer is stressed to the point of acquiring strict self-control, strict to the point of being self-destructive.
Pauses used-enjambment (‘soon the flesh/the grave cave at…’)
caesural pauses (‘Nevertheless, I am the same, identical woman’)
end-stopped lines (‘And like the cat I have nine times to die.)
Images:
The biblical figure Lazarus
The Holocaust
Phoenix
Themes:
1Death and suicide
Depression.
women’s oppression.
Tone

The speaker’s tone is revealed through many different poetic aspects:
First, diction or word choice used throughout this poem depicts apart the meaning and stresses the tone.
Next, the images used to describe the speaker’s experiences with death shows the emotions and thoughts that go through the speaker’s mind concerning death. These events the speaker experiences give a vivid description, which reveal her attitude.
Lastly, the repetition and sounds throughout the poem encourage the importance of the poem.
Through diction, images, repetition and sounds depicts apart the poem in showing the true meaning and most essentially, the part of this poem that reveals her attitude towards death

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American History:
Social background:
If we compare the situation of poets in America in 1890s with that in England, the most striking single fact is their isolation. Old Americans were isolated as the poets lived faraway from each other.


Economic background:
The Civil War coasts some eight billion dollar and claimed 600,000 lives. It seems also to have left the country morally exhausted. Nonetheless, the country prospered materially over the five following decades in part because the war has stimulated technological development and had served as an occasion to test new methods of organization and management that were required to move efficiently larg numbers of men and materials, and which were then adapted to industrial modernization on a massive scale.

Religious background:

In the 19th century, no other religious faith except Modernism was treated as so fundamentally incompatible with the conception of the American nation entertained by many Christians. Catholics had to create their own institutions, church, schools, hospitals, orphanage, relief services with little help or encouragement from their follow citizens.
Introduction to American poetry
American poetry differs from British poetry chiefly because America's culturally diverse traditions exerted pressure on the English language, altering its tones, dictions, forms, and rhythms until something identifiable as American English emerged. American poetry is verse written in this altered form of English.
The factors that helped raising the American poetry:

Poetry in America was motivated by a national awareness that begin since the end of the Civil War.
Initialization
The emergence of America as an economic, and political power.
World wars that shook the bases of the Europeans civilization.




Major American literary Movements:

Imagism: led by Ezra Pound and Amy Lowell, the imagist ports wrote short poems that used everyday language and free verse to create precise and concentrated word picture.
Symbolism: a literary movement that used symbols to suggest meaning
Realism
Naturalism

Modern American Poetry ( 20th century)
American Modernist poetry merged in the first half of the 20th century, as many writers sought to subdue nationalist impulses in their poetry and define themselves as part of an international advance in the arts.

Characteristics of Modern American Poetry:
It was direct and accessible and often agreeable or interesting in setting.
Poetry would present character, events, or objects and this would be realistically treated.
In American poetry, we have new topics, ways of thinking, new emotions in short a new reality.
It is innovative, intellectual, and experimental.


Themes:
Many of the American poets sought to portray American life, characters, attitudes, and feelings.
Instead of classical and medieval subject they turned to the contemporary scene. They often portrayed a particular region.

Language:
The new poetry strove for the concrete, exact, and usually colloquial phrasing.
Modern poetry was to adopt the new vocabulary, syntax, and rhythm of contemporary speech.
American poets brought large changes in poetic styles, changes that continue to influence poets to the present day.

Robert Frost (1874-1963

http://www.newhampshire.com/doclib/celebrity/frost.jpg

His childhood:
Robert Frost is one of the greatest American poets. He was born on 1874 in San Francisco.
His mother, Isabelle Moodie, a native of Scotland is a woman of deep poetic and religious feeling.
His father died of a disease at the age of thirty four when Frost was eleven.
Then, the family moved to New England where his mother supported them by teaching in school.
His Education:
He graduated from Lawrence High School in 1891 where he studied Latin and Greek.
He entered Darmouth College but he didn’t feel happy so he left it.
In 1895, he attended Harvard University for two years.

His personal life:
He married Elinor Miriam Whit, in 1895, who had been with him at the Lawrence High School.
Throughout his life, Frost endured personal tragedy, the insanity of his sister, the death of his daughter, and in 1938 the death of his wife, and the suicide of his son two years later.
His travel to England and his works:

In 1912, having been unable to interest American publishers in his poems, Frost moved his family to a farm in Buckinghamshire, England, where he wrote prolifically, attempting to perfect his distinct poetic voice.
During this time, he met such literary figures as Ezra Pound, an American expatriate poet and champion of innovative literary approaches, and Edward Thomas, a young English poet associated with the Georgian poetry movement then popular in Great Britain.
Frost soon published his first book of poetry, A Boy's Will (1913), which received appreciative reviews.
Frost continued to write prolifically over the years and received numerous literary awards as well as honors from the United States government and American universities. He died in Boston in 1963.
His style of writing:
He uses traditional verse forms- sonnet, rhyming couplets, and blank verse. Some of his poems have strict line rhyming pattern. Many of them are written in the blank verse. He rejects the modern free verse.
His language is clear and easy, the language of ordinary people, spoken everyday language.
His poetry always contains universal themes. He writes about loneliness, isolation and sadness.
His poetry has psychological complexity. It may appear
Simple but in reality it is profound.
His poetry reflects his deep thoughts with deeper meanings.
He used to write natural lyrics describing and commenting on a scene or an event.
His poetry reflects the rural life. His subjects are usually about characters, events or creatures of rural New England. Thus, he is called a pastoral poet. He expresses the beauty of the landscape in his poetry.





Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening

whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound's the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep.
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

Introduction to the poem
"Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening," one of Robert Frost's most well-known poems, was published in his collection called New Hampshire in 1923. This poem illustrates many of the qualities most characteristic of Frost, including the attention to natural detail, the relationship between humans and nature, and the strong theme suggested by individual lines. In this poem, the speaker appears as a character. It is a dark and quiet winter night, and the speaker stops his horse in order to gaze into the woods. The speaker projects his own thoughts onto the horse, who doesn't understand why they have stopped; there's no practical reason to stop. The woods are ominously tempting and acquire symbolic resonance in the last stanza, which concludes with one of Frost's often-quoted lines, "miles to go before I sleep." One interpretation of this stanza is that the speaker is tempted toward death which he considers "lovely, dark and deep," but that he has many responsibilities to fulfill before he can "sleep."

The Significance of the Title:
The title “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” suggests that there is a journey readers will come across through the poem. This is clear in “stopping by” which suggests that the speaker will stay in this place for a short while and he will leave. “woods” can be considered a resting-place.


Paraphrase
Line 1:
In this opening stanza, the setting is clarified as a winter evening in a rural environment. The speaker desires to watch snow fall quietly in some woods. While these woods belong to someone, that person is not present and so will not protest if the speaker trespasses.
Lines 5-8:
The speaker emphasizes that he has no practical reason to stop, that he is stopping for the beauty of the scene only. However, in line 8, an element of darkness appears, which can indicate that all is not well. Because the speaker also emphasizes the cold with "frozen lake," readers begin to understand that the poem may not be a simple light-hearted celebration of nature.
Lines 9-12:
Although this stanza begins with an auditory image, the shaking of the harness bells, the greater emphasis of the stanza is on silence. Although the speaker can hear the "easy wind," such a sound is gentle, nearly as silent as the falling of the snow. The slight alliteration in line 11 "sound's the sweep," mimics the sound of of this wind.
Lines 13-14:
In this stanza, the speaker emphasizes his attraction to the unknown and perhaps the dangerous. He is tempted to go farther into the woods which are "lovely" but are also "dark and deep." He can't, however, lose himself in these woods because he has obligations to fulfill. Here, his life in a social community conflicts somewhat with his desire for communion with nature.
Lines 15-16:
The repetition of this line as the conclusion to the poem indicates that the idea contained in it is highly significant. Although the speaker may literally have "miles to go," the line also functions as a metaphor. He has much life to live before he can "sleep" permanently in a "dark and deep" woods. These lines suggest that although death may at times be more attractive than life to the speaker, he is nevertheless determined to choose life. The tone of the lines, however, may also indicate that the speaker is resigned to life but not necessarily enthusiastic about it.






Analysis
Themes:
Return to Nature

With sadness, "Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening" examines just how difficult it has become in the modern world for man to stay in touch with nature. The poem is made up of contrasting images of the natural and the man-made: the woods and the village, the farmhouse and the lake, even the horse and the harness-bells. The speaker is enchanted with the things of nature, but is constantly reminded of human things, and, after a few minutes of giving in to the enchantment, decides with regret that this return to nature cannot last. In this poem humanity is represented not just by objects but by the concept of ownership. The first two words focus attention on an absent character about whom we only find out two things: that he lives in the village, away from nature, and that he owns the woods. It is the irony of this, that the owner does not appreciate what he has, that establishes the poem's mood. Man, it tells us, is wasteful.
One of the most striking things about this piece is that the human and the animal appear to exchange their values. The horse is the one who is in a hurry, who needs a place of business—a farmhouse—in order to make sense of their brief stop. It is the human who is able to temporarily put aside the idea of property ownership and destination and to appreciate the moment. The horse is impatient, the human tranquil. This shows us how completely the horse has been brought into the human world, indicating the completeness of nature's transformation to mankind's uses. Other works of literature, such as Thoreau's Walden, show us people casting aside their social lives in order to live with nature, but in the world presented here a brief unplanned visit with nature is all that is possible.
Duty and Responsibility
The speaker of this poem has "promises to keep," and regardless of what these promises are or who they were made to they have to be fulfilled. Obviously, the scene in the wood is important to this person, who is practically hypnotized by the falling snow. Another observer might feel that experiencing this unexpectedly beautiful scene is more important than anything, including promises, or that they are not responsible for doing what they promised because they did not know, at the time the promise was made, that this snowfall in the wood would be so attractive. Promises are broken every day by people who find some reason to forgive themselves. The speaker of this poem loves the snowfall's beauty enough to be distracted by it, but even more than that he or she values keeping a promise. The repetition of the final two lines gives us an indication of how this person feels about the responsibilities that lie ahead: they are not frightening or unpleasant, they are just tedious, involving travel, lack of sleep, and numbing repetition. Unenthusiastic about obligations but enthusiastic about the snowfall, this speaker nevertheless lives up to the promises that were made.


Style
"Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" is written in iambic tetrameter. "Iambic" means that each metrical foot contains two syllables, an unstressed one followed by a stressed one. "Tetrameter" means that each line contains four metrical feet. So a poem written in iambic tetrameter would contain a total of eight syllables in each line. This idea will become clearer if we scan a line, or diagram the meter:
Of easy wind and downy flake.
When the line is scanned, it will look like this:
Of eas / y wind / and down / y flake.
Such metrical patterns generally make poetry sound more musical. Occasionally, a line will vary from the established pattern, which often emphasizes the importance of that line.
"Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" also relies on rhyme to achieve some of its music. For the first three stanzas, the rhyme scheme is consistent. Its pattern is aaba bbcb cede. The fourth stanza, however, rhymes every line with d. This means that in the first stanza, lines one, two, and four rhyme with each other, with line three ("here") seeming odd. However, in stanza two, lines one, two, and four rhyme with "here," while the rhyme on line three, "lake," is picked up in stanza three. Such a pattern links the stanzas together and indicates that the ideas contained in the stanzas are strongly related.
Tone :
the tone of the speaker is dejected. Although the speaker is happy to stop briefly in the woods, he is unhappy because he has to leave and return to the village. The speaker’s depression stems mainly from his unwanted responsibility.
Form:
The poem is nature lyric. The poem is divided into four stanzas of four lines in each. The pensive, unhurried mood of the poem is reflected with a calm rich imagery that creates a vivid mental picture. The images in the poem are very vivid. The man telling the story is telling events as they happened in his own eyes. The persona of the poet appears in the poem.



Critics review:
Because it is so well known, "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" has received significant critical attention, generally positive. Writing in The Virginia Quarterly Review, James M. Cox states that this poem contains "haunting rhythms" which are formed partly by the "logic of the rhyme scheme." This rhyme scheme, he says, "is an expression of the growing control and determination" of the speaker. John T. Ogilvie, in his article in the South Atlantic Quarterly, suggests that the poem becomes richer with each reading. It has, he says, "a disconcerting way of deepening in dimension as one looks at it, of darkening in tone." A poem which might initially seem simply to describe a natural scene becomes more ominous as the reader becomes more attentive.
John C. Kemp, in his book, Robert Frost and New England: The Poet as Regionalist, also believes the poem is successful in part because of its structure. Here, "we find restraint, economy, and gracefully tuned cadences," he says. In this passage, Kemp is suggesting that Frost is able to use language skillfully, that he is able to draw several levels of meaning from each word and line, and that he is able to do so attractively

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As Kingfishers Catch Fire, Dragonflies Draw Flame”
By Gerard Manley Hopkins

Gerard Manley Hopkins

http://www.poetryconnection.net/imag...ey-Hopkins.jpg

Born at Stratford, Essex, England, on July 28, 1844, Gerard Manley Hopkins is regarded as one the Victorian era's greatest poets. He was raised in a prosperous and artistic family. He attended Balliol College, Oxford, in 1863, where he studied Classics.
In 1864, Hopkins first read John Henry Newman's Apologia pro via sua, which discussed the author's reasons for converting to Catholicism. Two years later, Newman himself received Hopkins into the Roman Catholic Church. Hopkins soon decided to become a priest himself, and in 1867 he entered a Jesuit novitiate near London. At that time, he vowed to "write no more...unless it were by the wish of my superiors." Hopkins burnt all of the poetry he had written to date and would not write poems again until 1875. He spent nine years in training at various Jesuit houses throughout England. He was ordained in 1877 and for the next seven years carried his duties teaching and preaching in London, Oxford, Liverpool, Glasgow, and Stonyhurst.
In 1875, Hopkins began to write again after a German ship, the Deutschland, was wrecked during a storm at the mouth of the Thames River. Many of the passengers, including five Franciscan nuns, died. Although conventional in theme, Hopkins poem "The Wreck of the Deutschland" introduced what Hopkins called "sprung rhythm." By not limiting the number of "slack" or unaccented syllables, Hopkins allowed for more flexibility in his lines and created new acoustic possibilities. In 1884, he became a professor of Greek at the Royal University College in Dublin. He died five years later from typhoid fever. Although his poems were never published during his lifetime, his friend poet Robert Bridges edited a volume of Hopkins' Poems that first appeared in 1918.
In addition to developing new rhythmic effects, Hopkins was also very interested in ways of rejuvenating poetic language. He regularly placed familiar words into new and surprising contexts. He also often employed compound and unusual word combinations. As he wrote to in a letter to Burns, "No doubt, my poetry errs on the side of oddness…" Twentieth century poets such as W.H. Auden, Dylan Thomas, and Charles Wright have enthusiastically turned to his work for its inventiveness and rich aural patterning.
The poem.

As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies dráw fláme;
As tumbled over rim in roundy well
Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell’s
Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;
Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:
Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;
Selves—goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,
Crying Whát I do is me: for that I came.
Í say móre: the just man justices;
Kéeps gráce: thát keeps all his goings graces;
Acts in God’s eye what in God’s eye he is—
Chríst—for Christ plays in ten thousand places,
Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his
To the Father through the features of men’s faces.

Summary
The kingfisher, one of the most colorful birds in England, “catches fire” as the light brings its plumage to a bright radiance. Similarly, the iridescent wings of the dragonfly glint with a flame-like beauty. These two optical images are followed by three aural ones: the tinkling sound of pebbles tossed down wells, the plucking of strings on a musical instrument, and the ringing of bells as the “bow” swings like a pendulum to strike the metal side. Each of these objects does exactly what its nature dictates, in a kind of (unwilled) self-assertion. More generally, every “mortal thing” might be thought to do the same: to express that essence that dwells inside (“indoors”) of it. “Selves” (assumedly from the infinitive “to self,” or “to selve,”) is Hopkins’s coined verb for that self-enacting, and he elaborates upon this process in the lines that follow: to “self” is to go oneself, to speak and spell “myself,” to cry, “What I do is me: for that I came.”
The next stanza extends this concept from object to man. “Justices” (from the made-up infinitive “to justice”) becomes the verb for that which the just man does or enacts. He harbors a grace (bestowed by God) that reveals itself in all his “goings” or everyday activities. And he acts before God as the being that God sees him as, which is Christ, who is both man and God. Christ dwells everywhere—in bodies and in the expressions of human eyes. It is the beauty lent by Christ’s presence that makes “the features of men’s faces” lovely in God’s sight.
Form

The poem is an Italian (or Petrarchan) sonnet: 14 lines divided into an octave and a sestet. Hopkins’s variations on straight iambic pentameter enhance the ideas the poem expresses, and the poem provides one of the best examples of his dexterous use of musical effects. For example, examine the third line: “As tumbled over rim in roundy wells.” While the line is neat iambic pentameter, the iambs fall in such a way that they split the words “tumbled,” “over,” and “roundy.” This splitting (which Hopkins called “counterpoint”) effects a regular, quick, and broken feel, and re-creates beautifully the reverberations of stones plunking down a well. The pattern by which the consonants and vowels are repeated and varied replicates the subtle but discernible change in pitch as pebbles of different shapes and sizes strike the water below. Contrastingly, the even accents in the phrase “each tucked string tells” issue forth in plucking regularity and sonorousness. In the poem as a whole, the disproportionately large number of accented words complements the conceptual emphasis on the “thisness,” or individuality, of each thing.
Commentary

This poem offers perhaps the most direct illustration of Hopkins’s theory of “inscape.” The term is hard to define precisely—even Hopkins struggled to articulate it—and critics have carped at length over its exact meaning. Coined on the model of the word “landscape,” the term refers to the unifying designs by which the unique interior essences of a thing are held together. The word does not merely refer to what is particular and individual about an object, but posits a kind of inner order or pattern by which these individual essences form a kind of harmonious composition. Moreover, inscapes imply a creator; by paying close enough attention to observe inscapes, one might hope to be lifted to a closer contemplation of God. Hopkins often took the idea of inscape as a standard for the kind of order and beauty that poetry might hope to achieve. The rich density and careful patterning of his poems reflect, therefore, a theological belief in a world whose character is one of subtle and magnificent design.
As with many of Hopkins’s sonnets, this poem turns from a physical first part to a spiritual, moral, or theological second part. More specifically, the poem shifts its focus from being (the mere passive possession of essential, defining characteristics) to the more active notion of self-expression, and then to action itself. Hopkins first draws on the physical being of kingfishers, dragonflies, and stones: each aspect he describes is a part of the unchanging nature of the object. However, the sound of the bell moves us more into the realm of deliberate self-expression. Hopkins uses the word “tongue” to link the involuntary ringing to the conscious power of speech. The bell’s ringing is equivalent to a “fling[ing] out of its broad name,” because the sound is so unique to the bell that it defines the object the way a name defines a thing. All of the world’s objects possess and assert uniqueness in the way the bell does, Hopkins declares. And though the objects he has mentioned so far are all insensate or unconscious, he prepares us for the next stanza by extending the characteristic to “each mortal thing.” The use of “selves” as a verb is one of the most remarkable things about this poem; by making the noun “self” into an action word, Hopkins enacts his thematic shift from the idea of substance or essence to a phase of activity and purpose.
Now in the sestet Hopkins makes the promised extension from inanimate object to human being; yet the self-asserting that seemed such an inevitable process for the objects described in the octave takes on a different character when applied to man. The process is complicated for human beings, because human beings possess a moral capacity. Thus the enacting of the self cannot happen unconsciously or automatically; rather, it means becoming one’s highest self, or acting to the highest of one’s capacity. A man is not just, Hopkins asserts, until he behaves justly, or “justices.” Furthermore, the implication is that he is not fully a man unless he does so—that being just is part of the essence of man, insofar as the striving for moral perfection is part of his basic existence. Hopkins then extends this concept to the theological idea of God’s immanence in the world, and the Christian belief that Christ dwells within the hearts of men. It is by the grace of God that humans are what they are; more specifically, it was through divine grace that Christ came to redeem men from sin. Hopkins therefore asks that men “keep grace.” This phrase describes the humble acceptance of God’s grace that is the first gesture of Christian life. This acceptance will lend grace to their everyday comings and goings, and will allow man to act “in God’s eye what in God’s eye he is”—that is, to become one with Christ and so fulfill the purpose of his being. Through Christ, this daily activity can become truth, and the loveliness of bodies and faces can correspond to a loveliness of soul in a perfect Christian inscape.
Analysis

Gerard Manley Hopkins is one of the greatest 19th-century poets of religion, of nature, and of inner anguish. In his view of nature, the world is like a book written by God. In this book God expresses himself completely, and it is by “reading” the world that humans can approach God and learn about Him. Hopkins therefore sees the environmental crisis of the Victorian period as vitally linked to that era’s spiritual crisis, and many of his poems bemoan man’s indifference to the destruction of sacred natural and religious order. The poet harbored an acute interest in the scientific and technological advances of his day; he saw new discoveries (such as the new explanations for phenomena in electricity or astronomy) as further evidence of God’s deliberate hand, rather than as refutations of God’s existence.
One of Hopkins’s most famous (and most debated) theories centers on the concept of “inscape.” He coined this word to refer to the essential individuality of a thing, but with a focus not on its particularity or uniqueness, but rather on the unifying design that gives a thing its distinctive characteristics and relates it to its context. Hopkins was interested in the exquisite interrelation of the individual thing and the recurring pattern. He saw the world as a kind of network integrated by divine law and design.
Hopkins wrote most frequently in the sonnet form. He generally preferred the Italian or Petrarchan sonnet, which consists of an octave followed by a sestet, with a turn in argument or change in tone occurring in the second part. Hopkins typically uses the octave to present some account of personal or sensory experience and then employs the sestet for philosophical reflection. While Hopkins enjoyed the structure the sonnet form imposes, with its fixed length and rhyme scheme, he nevertheless constantly stretched and tested its limitations. One of his major innovations was a new metrical form, called “sprung rhythm.” In sprung rhythm, the poet counts the number of accented syllables in the line, but places no limit on the total number of syllables. As opposed to syllabic meters (such as the iambic), which count both stresses and syllables, this form allows for greater freedom in the position and proportion of stresses. Whereas English verse has traditionally alternated stressed and unstressed syllables with occasional variation, Hopkins was free to place multiple stressed syllables one after another (as in the line “All felled, felled, are all felled” from “Binsey Poplars”), or to run a large number of unstressed syllables together (as in “Finger of a tender of, O of a feathery delicacy” from Wreck of the Deutschland). This gives Hopkins great control over the speed of his lines and their dramatic effects.
Another unusual poetic resource Hopkins favored is “consonant chiming,” a technique he learned from Welsh poetry. The technique involves elaborate use of alliteration and internal rhyme; in Hopkins’s hands this creates an unusual thickness and resonance. This close linking of words through sound and rhythm complements Hopkins’s themes of finding pattern and design everywhere. Hopkins’s form is also characterized by a stretching of the conventions of grammar and sentence structure, so that newcomers to his poetry must often strain to parse his sentences. Deciding which word in a given sentence is the verb, for example, can often involve significant interpretive work. In addition, Hopkins often invents words, and pulls his vocabulary freely from a number of different registers of diction. This leads to a surprising mix of neologisms and archaisms throughout his lines. Yet for all his innovation and disregard of convention, Hopkins’ goal was always to bring poetry closer to the character of natural, living speech.

Themes, Motifs and Symbols
Themes
The Manifestation of God in Nature
Hopkins used poetry to express his religious devotion, drawing his images from the natural world. He found nature inspiring and developed his theories of inscape and instress to explore the manifestation of God in every living thing. According to these theories, the recognition of an object’s unique identity, which was bestowed upon that object by God, brings us closer to Christ. Similarly, the beauty of the natural world—and our appreciation of that beauty—helps us worship God. Many poems, including “Hurrahing in Harvest” and “The Windhover,” begin with the speaker praising an aspect of nature, which then leads the speaker into a consideration of an aspect of God or Christ. For instance, in “The Starlight Night,” the speaker urges readers to notice the marvels of the night sky and compares the sky to a structure, which houses Christ, his mother, and the saints. The stars’ link to Christianity makes them more beautiful.
The Regenerative Power of Nature
Hopkins’s early poetry praises nature, particularly nature’s unique ability to regenerate and rejuvenate. Throughout his travels in England and Ireland, Hopkins witnessed the detrimental effects of industrialization on the environment, including pollution, urbanization, and diminished rural landscapes. While he lamented these effects, he also believed in nature’s power of regeneration, which comes from God. In “God’s Grandeur,” the speaker notes the wellspring that runs through nature and through humans. While Hopkins never doubted the presence of God in nature, he became increasingly depressed by late nineteenth-century life and began to doubt nature’s ability to withstand human destruction. His later poems, the so-called terrible sonnets, focus on images of death, including the harvest and vultures picking at prey. Rather than depict the glory of nature’s rebirth, these poems depict the deaths that must occur in order for the cycle of nature to continue. “Thou Art Indeed Just, Lord” (1889) uses parched roots as a metaphor for despair: the speaker begs Christ to help him because Christ’s love will rejuvenate him, just as water helps rejuvenate dying foliage.
Motifs
Colors
According to Hopkins’s theory of inscape, all living things have a constantly shifting design or pattern that gives each object a unique identity. Hopkins frequently uses color to describe these inscapes. “Pied Beauty” praises God for giving every object a distinct visual pattern, from sunlight as multicolored as a cow to the beauty of birds’ wings and freshly plowed fields. Indeed, the word pied means “having splotches of two or more colors.” In “Hurrahing in Harvest,” the speaker describes “azourous hung hills” (9) that are “very-violet-sweet” (10). Elsewhere, the use of color to describe nature becomes more complicated, as in “Spring.” Rather than just call the birds’ eggs “blue,” the speaker describes them as resembling pieces of the sky and thus demonstrates the interlocking order of objects in the natural world. In “The Windhover,” the speaker yokes adjectives to convey the peculiar, precise beauty of the bird in flight—and to convey the idea that nature’s colors are so magnificent that they require new combinations of words in order to be imagined.
Ecstatic, Transcendent Moments
Many of Hopkins’s poems feature an ecstatic outcry, a moment at which the speaker expresses his transcendence of the real world into the spiritual world. The words ah, o, and oh usually signal the point at which the poem moves from a description of nature’s beauty to an overt expression of religious sentiment. “Binsey Poplars” (1879), a poem about the destruction of a forest, begins with a description of the downed trees but switches dramatically to a lamentation about the human role in the devastation; Hopkins signals the switch by not only beginning a new stanza but also by beginning the line with “O” (9). Hopkins also uses exclamation points and appositives to articulate ecstasy: in “Carrion Comfort,” the speaker concludes with two cries to Christ, one enclosed in parentheses and punctuated with an exclamation point and the other punctuated with a period. The words and the punctuation alert the reader to the instant at which the poem shifts from secular concerns to religious feeling.
Bold Musicality
To express inscape and instress, Hopkins experimented with rhythm and sound to create sprung rhythm, a distinct musicality that resembles the patterns of natural speech in English. The flexible meter allowed Hopkins to convey the fast, swooping falcon in “The Windhover” and the slow movement of heavy clouds in “Hurrahing in Harvest.” To indicate how his lines should be read aloud, Hopkins often marked words with acute accents, as in “As Kingfishers Catch Fire” and “Spring and Fall.” Alliteration, or the juxtaposition of similar sounds, links form with content, as in this line from “God’s Grandeur”: “And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil” (6). In the act of repeating “red,” our mouths make a long, low sound that resembles the languid movements of humans made tired from factory labor. Elsewhere, the alliterative lines become another way of worshiping the divine because the sounds roll and bump together in pleasure. “Spring” begins, “Nothing is so beautiful as Spring— / When weeds, in wheels, shoot long and lovely and lush” (1–2).
Symbols
Birds
Birds appear throughout Hopkins’s poetry, frequently as stand-ins for God and Christ. In “The Windhover,” a poem dedicated to Christ, the speaker watches a falcon flying through the sky and finds traces of Christ in its flight path. The beauty of the bird causes the speaker to reflect on the beauty of Christ because the speaker sees a divine imprint on all living things. Similarly, “As Kingfishers Catch Fire” meditates on the innate behaviors and patterns of beings in the universe: the inscape of birds manifests in their flights, much as the inscape of stone manifests in the sound of flowing water. Christ appears everywhere in these inscape manifestations. In Christian iconography, birds serve as reminders that there is life away from earth, in heaven—and the Holy Ghost is often represented as a dove. “God’s Grandeur” portrays the Holy Ghost literally, as a bird big enough to brood over the entire world, protecting all its inhabitants.
Fire

Hopkins uses images of fire to symbolize the passion behind religious feeling, as well as to symbolize God and Christ. In “God’s Grandeur,” Hopkins compares the glory of God and the beautiful bounty of his world to fire, a miraculous presence that warms and beguiles those nearby. He links fire and Christ in “The Windhover,” as the speaker sees a flame burst at the exact moment in which he realizes that the falcon contains Christ. Likewise, “As Kingfishers Catch Fire” uses the phrase “catch fire” as a metaphor for the birds’ manifestation of the divine imprint, or inscape, in their natural behavior. In that poem too, the dragonflies “draw flame” (1), or create light, to show their distinct identities as living things. Nature’s fire—lightning—appears in other poems as a way of demonstrating the innate signs of God and Christ in the natural world: God and Christ appear throughout nature, regardless of whether humans are there to witness their appearances.
Trees
Trees appear in Hopkins’s poems to dramatize the earthly effects of time and to show the detrimental effects of humans on nature. In “Spring and Fall,” the changing seasons become a metaphor for maturation, aging, and the life cycle, as the speaker explains death to a young girl: all mortal things die, just as all deciduous trees lose their leaves. In “Binsey Poplars,” the speaker mourns the loss of a forest from human destruction, then urges readers to be mindful of damaging the natural world. Cutting down a tree becomes a metaphor for the larger destruction being enacted by nineteenth-century urbanization and industrialization. Trees help make an area more beautiful, but they do not manifest God or Christ in the same way as animate objects, such as animals or humans

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Disabled
by
Wilfred Owen

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The poem

He sat in a wheeled chair, waiting for dark,
And shivered in his ghastly suit of grey,
Legless, sewn short at elbow. Through the park
Voices of boys rang saddening like a hymn,
Voices of play and pleasure after day,
Till gathering sleep had mothered them from him.
About this time Town used to swing so gay
When glow-lamps budded in the light blue trees,
And girls glanced lovelier as the air grew dim,-
In the old times, before he threw away his knees.
Now he will never feel again how slim
Girls' waists are, or how warm their subtle hands.
All of them touch him like some queer disease.
There was an artist silly for his face,
For it was younger than his youth, last year.
Now, he is old; his back will never brace;
He's lost his colour very far from here,
Poured it down shell-holes till the veins ran dry,
And half his lifetime lapsed in the hot race
And leap of purple spurted from his thigh.
One time he liked a blood-smear down his leg,
After the matches, carried shoulder-high.
It was after football, when he'd drunk a peg,
He thought he'd better join. - He wonders why.
Someone had said he'd look a god in kilts,
That's why; and maybe, too, to please his Meg,
Aye, that was it, to please the giddy jilts
He asked to join. He didn't have to beg;
Smiling they wrote his lie: aged nineteen years.
Germans he scarcely thought of; all their guilt,
And Austria's, did not move him. And no fears
Of Fear came yet. He drought of jeweled hills
For daggers in plaid socks; of smart salutes;
And care of arms; and leave; and pay arrears;
Esprit de corps; and hints for young recruits.
And soon, he was drafted out with drums and cheers.
Some cheered him home, but not as crowds cheer Goal.
Only a solemn man who brought him fruits
Thanked him; and then enquired about his soul.

Now, he will spend a few sick years in institutes,
And do what things the rules consider wise,
And take whatever pity they may dole.
Tonight he noticed how the women's eyes
Passed from him to the strong men that were whole.
How cold and late it is! Why don't they come
And put him into bed? Why don't they come ?

Introduction
Disabled is an elegiac sonnet that reflects the destroyed youth of soldiers who return from war. Owe uses a broken stanza structure and rhyme pattern to symbolize the physical and mental suffering of these young soldiers. The structure of the poem is not only visual but aural as well. It prevents the reader from feeling at ease when reading and seems to be very jumpy and uneven, again to symbolize the physical and mental condition of the soldiers.
Throughout ‘Disabled’ the sentence structure and rhyme scheme runs disorganized making it difficult to know what the next five stanzas would be like. The unpredictability of this causes the poem to be read at a different pace with a different amount of emotion. The length of each sentence in each stanza also decides the pace in which Owen wanted the reader to read the poem. It starts off with three small stanzas working towards one larger and then two smaller ones like a big buildup to the final climax, in which Owen’s message is conveyed.

The First Stanza
The first stanza introduces the main character. He is a young man who has been reduced to a torso by war and has seemingly no prospects in life. The character is never given a name, which adds to the feeling of worthlessness and meaninglessness of his life. “He sat in a wheeled chair . . . legless, sewn at elbow.” He also suffers mentally, he is “waiting for dark” this indicates the mental torment of the soldier and how his physical disability affects him mentally. For his “waiting for dark” signifies his fear of reality – his present condition. He has lost the meaning of his life. He is insensitive to the sound of youth, like of the boys playing in the park. The voices make him “sad”, for they make him remember his childhood. But it all seems a distant memory, for the war makes his disabled person mentally and physically, therefore, he alienates himself from the boys, “till gathering sleep has mothered them from him.” He doesn’t want to face the harsh reality.

The Second Stanza

In the second stanza, the narrator reminisces about how things used to be before he was injured. The contrast between the soldier’s past and present condition highlights the horrors of war. Before “he threw away his knees” and when “town used to swing so gay” girls were always around and would flirt with him. But now that he is physically disabled, the girls do not want to be with him. Therefore, “he will never feel again how slim girls’ waists are, or how warm their subtle hands.” It indicates that the soldier has been psychologically scarred further by being shunned by ladies. The speaker hates that all the formerly interested girls “touch him like some queer disease”. The word “queer” shows the alienation caused by the loss of the soldier’s legs.
The Third Stanza

The speaker continues to reminisce about how things used to be before he was injured in order to dramatize the horrors of war. There was a girl who was an artist, and she was smitten with him. “For it was younger than his youth” is just another way of saying that he had a baby face. He adds “last year” as a way of telling the reader that he does not look like that anymore. His face has changed a lot during the war. It has lost its boyhood charm, and it has been replaced by a face that is hard and worn by the ravages of war. “He lost his color” most likely means that he had lost a lot of blood. He was caught in enemy fire, which is how he lost his limbs. He bled and bled until there was no more blood left. His injuries caused him to grow up very quickly, the reality of warfare sunk in and it was no longer something that was considered to be honorable, glorious, nor fun. The war not only made him physically disabled but mentally disabled as well, as he was alienated from society.
Fourth & Fifth Stanzas

The narrator is reminiscing about why and when he originally enlisted. At one time, the sign of blood on one’s body was considered a good, honorable thing. It was after a football game and a drink of brandy with soda that he decided to join. When he says he wonders why he is trying to make sense of his decision; did he join because he genuinely wanted to, or was it because he was under the influence of alcohol, or was it just because of girls? “He asked to join. He didn’t have to beg; Smiling they wrote his lie: aged nineteen years.” He didn’t have to prove his worth to the officers; they just signed him up without question. He knew nothing about Germans and Austrians. He did not know anything about the horrors of the war, he only thought of how the uniform would make him look, and how people would treat him once he put it on. When men left for war they were sent off with many drums and cheers. It was like a big parade.
Sixth & Seventh Stanzas


This man is troubled by the world’s indifference toward him and the ungratefulness that is shown towards him after he returns home from the war. This is apparent when he describes how only some cheered him home, but not as many as would cheer a goal that he scores in a football game. “Only a solemn man who brought him fruits/Thanked him; and then enquired about his soul.” The ingratitude that the man feels by the people of the country that he helped to protect is one of the resounding themes of the poem. This feeling is conveyed in the last two lines of the poem, when the man thinks “Why don’t they come/And put him into bed? Why don’t they come?” As Owen continues the poem we come to find out that the disabled man has lost confidence in his personal strength and vitality, made evident by the observation that girls’ eyes pass “From him to the strong men that were whole.” He seems to be very depressed over the fact that he will never be a whole man again, and he will never get to experience the love of a lady. Owen has left us with a very personal portrayal of one man’s experience with World War I.

Technique
A clear technique used by Owen is the varied stanza length and the broken stanza structure that makes the poem look unorganized and symbolizes the physical and mental anguish of the soldier who has returned from the war. Using these techniques makes the reader feel uncomfortable and unsure as the poem could change at any time.

Images.
The visual images of a wheeled chair symbolize the man’s permanent loss of physical ability. “Dark” is a symbolic representation of impending doom and death. His use of the color “grey” and the description “dark” reveals the soldier’s isolation from self and society. The “light, blue trees” and “Girls glanced lovelier” represent a carefree, joyful past. While “his ghostly suit of grey” illustrates a joyless present. Evening time blossomed with enjoyment “when glow lamps budded”, but evening now means “waiting for dark”, shivering, resentful of “how cold and late it is.”

Symbols.

“Lost his color very far from here” symbolizes the loss of youth. The color “purple” symbolizes his past youth before war. The blood-smear down his leg at football is thought life-enhancing and strengthening. While the loss of color and blood “poured down shell-hole till vein ran dry” is life draining and the ultimate loss of entire life.

Language & Choice of Words.
Owen’s choice to alter this one word from “youth” to “veins” shows that the man not only lost his youth during the war, but ultimately lost his entire life. A man whose veins have run dry is a man who has no life in his body, eventually lifeless.
The repetitions of “how”, “last year”, “one time” and “old times” illustrates his mental torment and suffering. Finally, Owen uses repetition in the last stanza on the line “Why don’t they come?” This adds a high amount of tension and feels as if the poem is finishing on a cliff hanger.

The Darkling Thruch
By Thomas Hardy

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The poem

I leant upon a coppice gate
When Frost was spectre-gray,
And Winter's dregs made desolate
The weakening eye of day.
The tangled bine-stems scored the sky
Like strings of broken lyres,
And all mankind that haunted nigh
Had sought their household fires.

The land's sharp features seemed to be
The Century's corpse outleant,
His crypt the cloudy canopy,
The wind his death-lament.
The ancient pulse of germ and birth
Was shrunken hard and dry,
And every spirit upon earth
Seemed fervourless as I.

At once a voice arose among
The bleak twigs overhead
In a full-hearted evensong
Of joy illimited;
An aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small,
In blast-beruffled plume,
Had chosen thus to fling his soul
Upon the growing gloom.

So little cause for carolings
Of such ecstatic sound
Was written on terrestrial things
Afar or nigh around,
That I could think there trembled through
His happy good-night air
Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew
And I was unaware

.

The works of the English novelist, poet, and dramatist Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) unite the Victorian and modern eras. They reveal him to be a kind and gentle man, terribly aware of the pain human beings suffer in their struggle for life.
Hardy illustrates and underscores his own status as a poet with one foot in Victorian England and the other in the modern world. He presented the spectacle of England from Napoleonic times to World War I and after. He revealed the changes that overwhelmed Victorian England and made it modern: the decline of Christianity, the from an agricultural to a modern economy, and above all the growing sense of the disparity between the enormous universe and tiny man.
A writer who expressed himself prolifically and successfully in both prose and verse, Thomas Hardy hoped to be remembered for his poetry. His unique reputation as both a major poet and a major novelist, already established at the time of his death, has only strengthened and developed in the course of this century.
Critics have long called Hardy a transitional figure between the Victorian era and the modern world. Though it is easy to see the Victorian influences in his poetry, especially in his traditional verse forms and his nostalgia for older, simpler ways of living, it is often more difficult to see what makes him a modernist.
In almost all his poems Hardy uses Victorian diction, regular meters, and neat stanzas. These cause him to be called a Victorian poet. But he also uses everyday words. These, with his bleak view of the human condition and his fusion of humor and pity, rank him with the moderns.

Thomas Hardy’s gloomy poem about the turn of the twentieth century, “The Darkling Thrush,” remains one of his most popular and anthologized lyrics. Written on the eve of the new century and first published in Graphic with the subtitle “By the Century’s Deathbed

”.

Thomas Hardy's The Darkling Thruch

,

is a poem full of mucli sorrow. It is dark and bleak, just as it's title is. Although it is so unhappy, it is also very deep. This poem is one of the many example's of Hardy's talent.

The thirty-two line poem uses a bleak and wintry landscape as a metaphor for the close of the nineteenth century and the joyful song of a solitary thrush as a symbolic image of the dawning century. Like much of Hardy’s writing, “The Darkling Thrush” embodies the writer’s despair and pessimism.

Themes

Hardy's poem draws many beautiful themes which reflect his thoughts and feelings

.

Search for Meaning

The speaker's despair echoes Hardy's own world-weariness and loss of hope for humanity's future. Isolated from those who have "sought their household fires," the speaker sees a death-haunted landscape and a "growing gloom. The speaker's connection to the past has been severed, and he cannot find meaning in the present, and the dawning century, symbolized by the thrush's song, offers little in the way of meaning. The bird is "frail, gaunt, and small," and his "carolings," though joyful and "fullhearted," are an evensong and about to end

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Nature

In Hardy's poem, nature is not a pretty place where flowers bloom and fuzzy animals frolic in the sun waiting to be petted. It is governed by the cycle of life and death and is largely indifferent to human needs or desires. "The Darkling Thrush" deromanticizes nature by taking even the capacity for renewal away: "The ancient pulse of germ and birth, / Was shrunken hard and dry. Hardy's speaker, however, finds no inspiration in the processes of the natural world. Though he has meditated on the nature of life, he has found no life in nature.


Through the use of personification, diction and style , he produces images in the readers mind, when all he really does is just speak from his inner state of mind, as modernists are soon to do.

Style

Form

Composed in four octet, or eight-line, stanzas, with an ABABCDCD rhyme scheme, "The Darkling Thrush" is written in iambic tetrameter, with lines one, three, five, and seven carrying four stressed syllables, and lines two, four, six, and eight carrying three stressed syllables. In poetry, a foot refers to a group of syllables, one of which is accented. An iambic foot, the most popular in English verse, consists of an unaccented syllable followed by an accented syllable, which creating a tension that gives the poem energy and emotional depth

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Diction:

The choice of words in this poem has been carefully

selected, leaving little to coincidence. If you look carefully, you notice him using lots of negatively loaded words such as grey, desolate, broken, haunted etc. He himself is all alone out in the cold with all his negatively loaded words. But this changes further on in the poem. In stanza number 3 you will notice a change in the poets use of diction. In stead of keeping mainly to negatively loaded words, he suddenly makes use of positively loaded words too. Words like frail, aged, gaunt and small still remains, but you also get words like evensong, full-hearted and joy illimited. This change in diction shows the reader that something new has occurred in the poem. A song-bird has entered, spreading warmth and hope into an earlier desolate and dead landscape.

Personification

To personify something is to give human qualities to inanimate things. Hardy does this throughout the poem, describing twilight as the "weakening eye of day" and the landscape as "The Century's corpse

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Techniques used by the poet in this poem

:

Poetry written with a Dark theme such as the poem The Darkling Thrush by Thomas Hardy is piece of literature written by the poet in meter or verse expressing various emotions which are expressed by the use of variety of techniques including metaphors, similes and onomatopoeia. The emphasis on the aesthetics of language and the use of techniques such as repetition, meter and rhyme are what are commonly used to distinguish Dark poetry from Dark prose. Poems often make heavy use of imagery and word association to quickly convey emotions. A famous example of Dark poetry is the poem The Darkling Thrush by Thomas Hardy


In fact, this poem means different things to people, but all can agree that it is unhappy. Almost all of Hardy's poems were the same way, and that is what made them masterpieces. In his short time as a poetry writer, he wrote many dark poems that seemed hopeless and miserable

Dover Beach
By Matthew Arnold

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The Poem

The sea is calm tonight,
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits; on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
Come to the window, sweet is the night air!
Only, from the long line of spray
Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land,
Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.
Sophocles long ago
Heard it on the Agean, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery; we
Find also in the sound a thought,
Hearing it by this distant northern sea.
The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.
Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

In "Dover Beach", Matthew Arnold laments the shaken faith of people in God and religion.
Write a brief essay of this element with illustration.

Matthew Arnold’s religious views were unusual for his time. Scholars of Arnold's work disagree on the nature of Arnold's personal religious beliefs. Under the influence of Baruch Spinoza and his father, Dr. Thomas Arnold, he rejected the superstitious elements in religion, even while retaining a fascination for church rituals. He seems to belong to a pragmatic middle ground that is more concerned with the poetry of religion and its virtues and values for society than with the existence of God. He defined religion as “morality touched with emotion”.

In his poem “Dover Beach”, Arnold challenges the validity of longstanding theological and moral precepts that have shaken the faith of people in God and religion. In Arnold's world of the mid-1800's, the pillar of faith supporting society was perceived as crumbling under the weight of scientific postulates such as the evolutionary theory of English physician Erasmus Darwin and French naturalist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck. Consequently, the existence of God and the whole Christian scheme of things were cast in doubt. Arnold lamented the dying of the light of faith, as symbolized by the light he sees in this poem on the coast of France, which gleams one moment and is gone the next. He remained a believer in God and religion, although he was open to an overhaul of traditional religious thinking. In God and the Bible, he wrote: “At the present moment two things about the Christian religion must surely be clear to anybody with eyes in his head. One is that men cannot do without it; the other, that they cannot do with it as it is”.
In the third stanza of Dover Beach, the sea is turned into the "Sea of Faith", capitalized, which is a metaphor for a time when religion could still be experienced without the doubt that the modern (Victorian) age brought about through Darwinism, the Industrial revolution, Imperialism, a crisis in religion, etc. Arnold illustrates this by using an image of clothes ('Kleidervergleich'). When religion was still intact, the world was dressed ("like the folds of a bright girdle furled"). Now that this faith is gone, the world lies there stripped naked and bleak. ("the vast edges drear/ And naked shingles of the world".
"Dover Beach" did not become among the most well-known poems in English by accident. Arnold makes explicit the formula by which everyone finds meaningfulness in an experience. We see a landscape by seashore, moonlight and sunset off the French coast, and then, "Listen! you hear the grating roar." Here it is something from Sophocles. Then, inexplicably, our experience-memory mixture utters a new thought, that the ebbing tide is to nature what the loss of faith is to humanity, inescapably natural and sad. Thus our revelation, finally, ends in a resolution. The faithful love of friends can replace that between man and God

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In Memoriam
By Alfred lord Tennyson

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The poem

Strong Son of God, immortal Love,
Whom we, that have not seen thy face,
By faith, and faith alone, embrace,
Believing where we cannot prove;

Thine are these orbs of light and shade;
Thou madest Life in man and brute;
Thou madest Death; and lo, thy foot
Is on the skull which thou hast made.

Thou wilt not leave us in the dust:
Thou madest man, he knows not why,
He thinks he was not made to die;
And thou hast made him: thou art just.

Thou seemest human and divine,
The highest, holiest manhood, thou.
Our wills are ours, we know not how;
Our wills are ours, to make them thine.

Our little systems have their day;
They have their day and cease to be:
They are but broken lights of thee,
And thou, O Lord, art more than they.

We have but faith: we cannot know;
For knowledge is of things we see
And yet we trust it comes from thee,
A beam in darkness: let it grow.

Let knowledge grow from more to more,
But more of reverence in us dwell;
That mind and soul, according well,
May make one music as before,

But vaster. We are fools and slight;
We mock thee when we do not fear:
But help thy foolish ones to bear;
Help thy vain worlds to bear thy light.

Forgive what seem’d my sin in me;
What seem’d my worth since I began;
For merit lives from man to man,
And not from man, O Lord, to thee.

Forgive my grief for one removed,
Thy creature, whom I found so fair.
I trust he lives in thee, and there
I find him worthier to be loved.

Forgive these wild and wandering cries,
Confusions of a wasted youth;
Forgive them where they fail in truth,
And in thy wisdom make me wise.
XXVII
Thou comest, much wept for: such a breeze
Compell’d thy canvas, and my prayer
Was as the whisper of an air
To breathe thee over lonely seas.

For I in spirit saw thee move
Thro’ circles of the bounding sky,
Week after week: the days go by:
Come quick, thou bringest all I love.

Henceforth, wherever thou may’st roam,
My blessing, like a line of light,
Is on the waters day and night,
And like a beacon guards thee home.

So may whatever tempest mars
Mid-ocean, spare thee, sacred bark;
And balmy drops in summer dark
Slide from the bosom of the stars.

So kind an office hath been done,
Such precious relics brought by thee;
The dust of him I shall not see
Till all my widow’d race be run.
LVI
‘So careful of the type?’ but no.
From scarped cliff and quarried stone
She cries, `A thousand types are gone:
I care for nothing, all shall go.

‘Thou makest thine appeal to me:
I bring to life, I bring to death:
The spirit does but mean the breath:
I know no more.’ And he, shall he,

Man, her last work, who seem’d so fair,
Such splendid purpose in his eyes,
Who roll’d the psalm to wintry skies,
Who built him fanes of fruitless prayer,

Who trusted God was love indeed
And love Creation’s final law-
Tho’ Nature, red in tooth and claw
With ravine, shriek’d against his creed-

Who loved, who suffer’d countless ills,
Who battled for the True, the Just,
Be blown about the desert dust,
Or seal’d within the iron hills?

No more? A monster then, a dream,
A discord. Dragons of the prime,
That tare each other in their slime,
Were mellow music match’d with him.

O life as futile, then, as frail!
O for thy voice to soothe and bless!
What hope of answer, or redress?
Behind the veil, behind the veil.

Summary

Prologue:
The poem begins as a tribute to and invocation of the “Strong Son of God.” Since man, never having seen God’s face, has no proof of His existence, he can only reach God through faith. The poet attributes the sun and moon (“these orbs or light and shade”) to God, and acknowledges Him as the creator of life and death in both man and animals. Man cannot understand why he was created, but he must believe that he was not made simply to die.
The Son of God seems both human and divine. Man has control of his own will, but this is only so that he might exert himself to do God’s will. All of man’s constructed systems of religion and philosophy seem solid but are merely temporal, in comparison to the eternal God; and yet while man can have knowledge of these systems, he cannot have knowledge of God. The speaker expresses the hope that “knowledge [will] grow from more to more,” but this should also be accompanied by a reverence for that which we cannot know.
The speaker asks that God help foolish people to see His light. He repeatedly asks for God to forgive his grief for “thy [God’s] creature, whom I found so fair.” The speaker has faith that this departed fair friend lives on in God, and asks God to make his friend wise.
XXVII:

Here the speaker states that he feels no jealousy for the man who is captured and does not know what it means to feel true rage, or for the bird that is born with in a cage and has never spent time outside in the “summer woods.” Likewise, he feels no envy for beasts that have no sense of the passage of time and no conscience to check their behavior. He also does not envy those who have never felt pain (“the heart that never plighted troth”) or those who complacently enjoy a leisure that they do not rightfully deserve. Even when he is in the greatest pain, he still realizes that “ ‘Tis better to have loved and lost / Than never to have loved at all.”
LVI:
After having asserted in Section LV that Nature cares only for the survival of species (“so careful of the type”) and not for the survival of individual lives, the speaker now questions whether Nature even cares for the species. He quotes a personified, feminine Nature asserting that she does not attend to the survival of the species, but arbitrarily bestows life or death on all creatures. For Nature, the notion of the “spirit” does not refer to any divine, unearthly element, but rather to the simple act of breathing.
The poet questions whether Man, who prays and trusts in God’s love in spite of the evidence of Nature’s brutality (“Nature, red in tooth and claw”), will eventually be reduced to dust or end up preserved like fossils in rock: “And he, shall he, Man...Be blown about the desert dust, Or sealed within the iron hills?” The thought of this evokes a notion of the human condition as monstrous, and more terrifying to contemplate than the fate of prehistoric “dragons of the prime.” The speaker declares that life is futile and longs for his departed friend’s voice to soothe him and mitigate the effect of Nature’s callousness.
Form
“In Memoriam” consists of 131 smaller poems of varying length. Each short poem is comprised of isometric stanzas. The stanzas are iambic tetrameter quatrains with the rhyme scheme ABBA, a form that has since become known as the “In Memoriam Stanza.” (Of course, Tennyson did not invent the form—it appears in earlier works such as Shakespeare’s “The Phoenix and the Turtle”—but he did produce an enduring and memorable example of it.) With the ABBA rhyme scheme, the poem resolves itself in each quatrain; it cannot propel itself forward: each stanza seems complete, closed. Thus to move from one stanza to the next is a motion that does not come automatically to us by virtue of the rhyme scheme; rather, we must will it ourselves; this force of will symbolizes the poet’s difficulty in moving on after the loss of his beloved friend Arthur Henry Hallam.
Commentary
Tennyson wrote “In Memoriam” after he learned that his beloved friend Arthur Henry Hallam had died suddenly and unexpectedly of a fever at the age of 22. Hallam was not only the poet’s closest friend and confidante, but also the fiance of his sister. After learning of Hallam’s death, Tennyson was overwhelmed with doubts about the meaning of life and the significance of man’s existence. He composed the short poems that comprise “In Memoriam” over the course of seventeen years (1833-1849) with no intention of weaving them together, though he ultimately published them as a single lengthy poem in 1850.
T.S. Eliot called this poem “the most unapproachable of all his [Tennyson’s] poems,” and indeed, the sheer length of this work encumbers one’s ability to read and study it. Moreover, the poem contains no single unifying theme, and its ideas do not unfold in any particular order. It is loosely organized around three Christmas sections (28, 78, and 104), each of which marks another year that the poet must endure after the loss of Hallam. The climax of the poem is generally considered to be Section 95, which is based on a mystical trance Tennyson had in which he communed with the dead spirit of Hallam late at night on the lawn at his home at Somersby.
“In Memoriam” was intended as an elegy, or a poem in memory and praise of one who has died. As such, it contains all of the elements of a traditional pastoral elegy such as Milton’s “Lycidas,” including ceremonial mourning for the dead, praise of his virtues, and consolation for his loss. Moreover, all statements by the speaker can be understood as personal statements by the poet himself. Like most elegies, the “In Memoriam” poem begins with expressions of sorrow and grief, followed by the poet’s recollection of a happy past spent with the individual he is now mourning. These fond recollections lead the poet to question the powers in the universe that could allow a good person to die, which gives way to more general reflections on the meaning of life. Eventually, the poet’s attitude shifts from grief to resignation. Finally, in the climax, he realizes that his friend is not lost forever but survives in another, higher form. The poem closes with a celebration of this transcendent survival.
“In Memoriam” ends with a an epithalamion, or wedding poem, celebrating the marriage of Tennyson’s sister Cecilia to Edmund Lushington in 1842. The poet suggests that their marriage will lead to the birth of a child who will serve as a closer link between Tennyson’s generation and the “crowning race.” This birth also represents new life after the death of Hallam, and hints at a greater, cosmic purpose, which Tennyson vaguely describes as “One far-off divine event / To which the whole creation moves.”
Not just an elegy and an epithalamion, the poem is also a deeply philosophical reflection on religion, science, and the promise of immortality. Tennyson was deeply troubled by the proliferation of scientific knowledge about the origins of life and human progress: while he was writing this poem, Sir Charles Lyell published his Principles of Geology, which undermined the biblical creation story, and Robert Chambers published his early evolutionary tract, Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation. In “In Memoriam,” Tennyson insisted that we hold fast to our faith in a higher power in spite of our inability to prove God’s existence: “Believing where we cannot prove.” He reflects early evolutionary theories in his faith that man, through a process lasting millions of years, is developing into something greater. In the end, Tennyson replaces the doctrine of the immortality of the soul with the immortality of mankind through evolution, thereby achieving a synthesis between his profound religious faith and the new scientific ideas of his day.

هذا ماستطعت جمعه من القصائد والشروحات التي درستها..
متمنيه الفائده للجميع..^_^

:lost lady:


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Special thanks to you

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السلام عليكم ورحمة الله وبركاته

:lost lady:

masha' Allah
Great effort dear
May Allah the Almighty grant you all your wishes

/

اللهم لا تجعل لها ذنبا إلا غفرته ، ولا هما إلا فرجته ،
ولا حاجة من حوائج الدنيا هي لك رضا ولها فيها صلاح إلا قضيتها,
اللهم ولا تجعل لها حاجة عند أحد غيرك
اللهم و أقر عينها بما تتمناه لها في الدنيا
اللهم إجعل أوقاتها بذكرك معمورة
اللهم أسعدها بتقواك
اللهم آمين آمين آمين
كل الشكـــــــــــــــــــــ ــــــــــــــر

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شكراً لك على هذه الكلمات الرائعة

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great job , thank you
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