ENG348H1 - Title and Author vs. Summary

W.B. Yeats, “No Second Troy”

complexities of love and societal conflict; uses a series of questions

• Troy

• Blame

• Similes

• Rhetorical questions

W.B. Yeats, “Leda and the Swan”

describes a girl; retells the classic Greek myth; transfer of power between Gods and mortals

• sex and violence

• sonnet

• fate and free will

• rhetorical questions

• lots of punctuation

W.B. Yeats, “Sailing to Byzantium”

• naturalistic

• eternal and transient

• em-dashes

• reflects on the difficulty of keeping one’s soul alive in a fragile, failing human body

W.B. Yeats, “The Cold Heaven”

• a vision that freezes thought into memory

• cold and hot images

• quick, back and forth

W.B. Yeats, “The Second Coming”

• revelations

• deeply mysterious and powerful alternative to the Christian

• Jesus's prophesied return to the Earth as a savior announcing the Kingdom of Heaven. The poem's first stanza describes a world of chaos, confusion, and pain.

Robert Frost, “Design”

• fairytale

• argument from design

• sonnet

• existence of God

• intricacy = intelligent creator

Robert Frost, “Fire and Ice”

• almost like an epigraph

• religious symbol of fire

• authoritative

• understatement

• ironic and momentous truth in lighthearted way

Edward Thomas, “In Memoriam (Easter, 1915)”

• death, absence, war

• war’s erosion of intimacy

• implications of men with sweethearts

• namelessness

• anticipatory grief

• flowers

Wallace Stevens, “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird”

• cantos

• ambivalence

• perspectivism

• ways of seeing

• all perspectivs are just perspectives

Wallace Stevens, “The Snow Man”

• made in our image

• we are the creator

• significance of division in the title

• nature, origins, and limits of knowledge

Wallace Stevens, “The Emperor of Ice Cream”

• commonplace and gaudy

• takes place at a wake

• coldness as metaphor

• take things easy, but seriously

Wallace Stevens, “Sunday Morning”

• complexity of tone

• exaggeration to introduce materality

• femininity

• articulates the human + non-religious view

• what happens when we die

• quiet urgency

William Carlos Williams, “Tract”

• death

• hearse

• rural

William Carlos Williams, “The Red Wheelbarrow”

• rural

• short

William Carlos Williams, “This Is Just to Say”

• forbidden fruit

• plums

• naughty playfulness

• intimacy between the narrator and to whom the poem is addressed

William Carlos Williams, “To a Poor Old Woman”

• plums

• lacks punctuation

• enjambment

• colloquial

• double meanings

• observation

D.H. Lawrence, “Snake”

• naturalistic

• long

• human’s destructive nature

• masculine insecurity

Ezra Pound, “The Garden”

• depicts the beginning of social change in London post WWI

• describes the emotional conflict caused by changes in the upper and lower classes of England during the ending months of WWI

Ezra Pound, “The River-Merchant’s Wife: A Letter”

• love deepens through absence and time

• young wife writes to husband

H.D., “Sea Rose”

• conventional views of what a rose is supposed to be like

• subtle, beautiful repetition followed by a harsh turn

• just another number

Marianne Moore, “The Steeple-Jack”

• each stanza looks the same + has the same syllables in each line

• form is important here because its abritrary

• prententiousness

• fairytale world

• the point: seeing

T.S. Eliot, “Marina”

• paternity

• existence and morality

• rediscovery of a lost daughter

• title suggests water, harbour, rest, repair

• objective correlative

• 4 dimensions of knowing

T.S. Eliot, “Portrait of a Lady”

• comments on upper class society

• thinks the subject is soulless but the speaker is callous

• 3 episodes of failed friendship

• isolation to explore the anxieties of the modern world

Wilfred Owen, “Anthem for Doomed Youth”

• evokes the brutality of modern war

• reverses the usual pathetic fallacy

• the guns are angry not the people

• pain is unique

e.e. cummings, “anyone lived in a pretty how town”

• plays with syntax

• theme is not so original

• asks us to pay attention to elements not syntax

• universal/abstract

• poem asks us to use our intuition, no need to paraphrase

Jean Toomer, “Reapers”

• loose iambic pentameter

• mimics the process of reaping

• mechanical routinized/dehumanizes

• rat as a symbol of nature

• every breathing thing is know by their utility

Langston Hughes, “The N*gro Speaks of Rivers”

• rivers all flow into the ocean

• everything is connected

• how we are both rooted and on the move

Langston Hughes, “Harlem”

• dream deferred

• reference to the American Dream

• first question is discursive, the rest are imagistic

• ripening process

Stevie Smith, “Mr. Over”

• connotations of over

• idea of transcendence

• childlike, playful tone

• simplicity makes it radical

• human, divine, devil

Stevie Smith, “No Categories!”

• implies categories/hierarchies

• categories: how we organize our knowledge of everything

Stevie Smith, “Not Waving but Drowning”

• death

• describes a drowning man whose frantic arm gestures are mistaken for waving by distant onlookers

• On a less literal level, the poem speaks to the isolation and pain of being misunderstood

W.H. Auden, “Lullaby (Lay your sleeping head, my love)”

• gay poet and poem

• more performative than intimate

• accepts the faultiness of humans…we are not so noble

W.H. Auden, “Musee des Beaux Arts”

• related to the myth of Icarus (flys to high in the sky and lands in the ocean)

• to be a human is to be a martyr and a dog

• prosaic lines are of the same value as poetic lines

Elizabeth Bishop, “Sestina”

• child, tears, grandmother, stove, house, almanac

• fantastical

• inanimate objective

• irrational versus rational

• child versus adult

Elizabeth Bishop, “The Fish”

• humanized through similes

• we cannot catch reality with out language

• wisdom in relinquishing its attempt

• poem that talks about its own failure and deconstructs itself

Dylan Thomas, “Fern Hill”

• time is fleeting

• childhood - enchanted but only for a time

• we have to alternate our understandings of life

• rural

• “I”

Dylan Thomas, “The Force that Through the Green Fuse Drives the Flower”

• “dumb”

• syntactic force

• premature obsession with death

• time is traumatizing

• loving deeply is like dying

Philip Larkin, “Church Going”

• title has at least 3 connotations

• the speaker admits that he's drawn to churches and speculates about what will become of them once religion itself has completely died out