AICE Literature Poems
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The Clod and the Pebble
Structure:
First and third stanza: alternating rhyme scheme
Second stanza: deviating rhyme scheme.
To represent that there are 2 different perspectives
3 quatrains
Background:
The author taught his wife how to read and write.
His brother died at 24 of tuberculosis.
Romance poet.
No high education
Plot:
Clod believes that love is selfless and that it can save you in anything.
Pebble believes that love is selfish and that it harms you
Clod and Pebble Lit Devices
Literary Devices:
Personification:
“Love seeketh not itself to please”
“So sung a little Clod of Clay”
Paradox:
“And builds a Heaven in Hell’s despair”
“And builds a Hell in Heaven’s despite”
Also a metaphor for binding.
Turn:
“But a Pebble of the brook”
Also an enjambment
Endstops
Allusion:
“Heaven in Hell’s despair”
This represents how the clod has a softer view of love + how it can be selfless.
“Hell in Heaven’s despite:
This means that the pebble has a negative perception of love
Publication Date for The Clod and The Pebble
1794
Publication Date for Winter Song
Published in 1714-27.
Winter Song (Elizabeth Tollet)
Structure:
1st person POV
1 stanza
24 lines
Alternative rhyme scheme.
Background:
Never married.
She’s very smart.
Wrote a poem about wanting civil rights.
Lived in the tower of London
Someone wrote and called her the “little crooked woman”, so she might’ve had a physical deformation.
Plot:
Poem is her proving how much she loves him
Lines 1-6: She would go to the arctic for him
Lines 8-12: She would fight alongside him.
Lines 13-17: She would go with him where he is getting shipped off.
Lines 18-20: She would live in a cave for him
She did not end up going with him.
Publication Date for She was a Phantom of Delight
Published in 1807.
Surplus Value (David C. Ward)
Structure:
Free verse
2 stanzas
No rhyme or meter
POV: 1st
Theme:
How economic exploitation negatively impacts the working class
Background:
Works at the Smithsonian Institution.
He’s not experiencing surplus value firsthand. It is his family (sister).
The speaker's brother-in-law is who does this job.
Detroit, Michigan is the heart of the American automobile industry.
2008: Big 3 American Car industries were crashing (going bankrupt)
General Motors.
Ford.
Chrysler.
What is surplus value?
When companies are producing an excess amount of product with cheap materials it is just giving profit to big companies and underpaying the workers.
Plot:
Makes machines:
“Tool and die guy”
Little guy but strong:
“Bantam”
Hard worker:
“built himself”
Takes pride in his work:
“For twenty years of work, good times, and happy with it”
Union collapsed:
“The union went south first”
Full of pollution:
“Now it’s frozen all year long:
Surplus value destroyed man and nature.
Publication Date for Surplus Value
Published in 2014.
Father Returning Home (Dilip Chitre)
Structure:
One stanza
Free verse
24 lines
POV: 1st
Background:
Mumbai, India
Theme:
Appreciate parents before it’s too late while they are around to spend time with.
Reminiscing about how they treated their parents and their regrets.
Plot:
Dad on the train at late hours
This means that he worked hard.
Tone:
Sad, bad day.
Shows kid’s POV:
“I see him drinking weak tea”
Sad, frail, old, grey, weak dad.
The child regrets not talking to their father more.
Publication Date for Father Returning Home
Published in 1990.
In the Park (Gwen Harwood)
Structure:
3 stanzas
14 lines
Petrarchan Sonnet: abba cddc efgefg rhyme scheme
Ironic because she’s not talking about love.
POV: 3rd person
Background:
Wrote about frustration + the cost of womanhood
Gender bias in Australia
1977: She got recognition for her poems and now they’re constantly displayed in Australia.
Theme:
A mother doesn’t always have to be happy about her kids.
Literary Devices:
Caesura:
“She sits in the park. Her clothes are out of date.”
2 endstops in stanza 1.
Sibilance:
“Someone she loved once passes by”
Visual Imagery
Dialogue:
Shows us the shallow conversation between her and the man
Metaphor:
“a small balloon”
Like a text bubble.
“They have eaten me alive”
Imagery:
“Flickering light”
“Sits staring at her feet”
Turn:
“Then, nursing the youngest child,”
Plot:
She’s in a park with her 4 kids.
She is exhausted.
“They have eaten me alive”
Publication Date for In the Park
Published in 1961.
The Lost Woman (Patricia Beer)
Structure:
An elegy to the poets’ mother
6 sestets.
POV: 1st person.
Theme:
Don’t take your parents for granted.
Background:
Her mother died when she was 14.
The ellipsis in the title implies that who is “The Lost Woman…” isn’t an obvious answer.
Literary devices:
Stanza 1:
Euphemism:
“My mother went with no more warning”
Endstopht/metaphor to heart attack:
“a bright voice and a bad pain.”
Visual, auditory, & color imagery
Stanza 2:
Repetition:
“She never returned and I never saw/Her buried.”
To show how affected she is.
Metaphor:
“The ivy-mother turned into a tree”
Ivy wraps around and its vines pass through things. This shows the mother’s involvement in her life.
“My tendrils are the ones that clutch”
She wants her mom back.
Imagery/simile:
“That still hops away like a rainbow down/The avenue”
Shows how her mom slipped away from her, but she’s still trying to hold onto the memories.
Stanza 3:
Metaphor:
“I made a life for her”
Alliteration + slang:
“She met her match at an extra-mural”
Anaphora:
“Who will not alter, who will not grow”
Shows how her mother’s image will never change from what it was when she was 14.
Stanza 4:
Hyperbole:
“And every poet has acquired”
Caesura/anaphora:
“Who will not alter, who will not grow:
Stanza 5:
Imagery:
“Hear how they hate/Themselves for losing her as they did”
Stanza 6:
Turn:
“But my lost woman evermore snaps”
Dialogue
Plot:
Stanza 1:
Background info showing her mom dying.
Stanza 2:
Ivy clings.
She can’t reach her mom
She never went to the funeral, she’s fantasizing.
She’s trying to clutch memories of her mother.
She’s fantasizing about what life could’ve been like if her mom was still around.
Stanza 3:
She’s imagining her mother’s life as if she was still there
Her mom would have left her dad and found her soulmate
Stanza 4:
Her mom is her muse
Her mom will always be around
Stanza 5:
Her mother was kind
Rabbit light: dawn and dusk.
Her mom is a positive soul and her community misses her
Stanza 6:
Her mother drives her
People think she’s lost without her mother
Her mom criticizes her
We realize that it is the daughter that is lost without the mother.
The daughter feels like she didn’t live up to her mother’s expectations.
Publication Date for The Lost Woman
Published in 1990.
Stabat Mater (Sam Hunt)
Structure:
Shakespearean Sonnet
POV: 1st
Theme:
The theme is about sacrificing
Background:
Father was 60 and mother was 30.
Poem is autobiographical.
He got kicked out of a Christian school because he was writing lude poetry
The poem is for his mother.
Literary Devices:
Alliteration:
“For the first few years”
“How hard it had been”
Imagery:
“I learned this from a book she had inscribed”
Sibilance:
“Made her seem so small”
Turn:
“Now in a different way,”
Shows shift of power from father to mother
“That once I stand up straight, I too must learn”
To disclose the message of the poem.
Simile:
“Still like a girl”
“Sometimes turns to me as if it were a game”
Hyperbole:
“She calls my father every other sort of name;”
Metaphor:
“Roams old age”
Consonance:
“She was embarrassed when I asked her why/But later on explained how hard it had been”.
Helps characterize the mother because she is still immature, even with the sudden shift in power.
Plot:
Title of Poem:
It shapes the meaning of the poem by alluding to the story of Mary, the mother of Jesus, and how she was always there for him. This is much like his mother holding power by taking care of her family
Not a love match + detachment.
Things change over time
His dad’s older than his grandpa.
Father had all the power.
Then the mom had the power because the father is old now.
Ending couplet: Shows the lesson
Don’t grow up too quickly because you can’t go back.
Publication Date for Stabat Mater
Published in 1973.
Australia 1970 (Judith Wright)
Structure:
6 quatrains
POV: 1st
Loose rhyme scheme
Theme:
We should take better care of the planet because harming it will harm us.
Background:
The first Earth Day in Australia occurred this year.
She’s an environmentalist.
The poem is about nature.
She speaks about the native flora and fauna.
Literary devices:
The ENTIRE poem is an APOSTROPHE b/c Australia isn’t responding.
Simile:
“Die, wild country, like the eaglehawk”
“Die like the tighersnake”
“Like suicided invading stain.”
“Die like the soldier-ant”
Repetition:
The words ending in “ing” in the first stanza emphasizes the aggressivity of Australia.
Visual imagery
“I see your living soil ebb with the tree to naked poverty”
Being stripped of nutrients.
Shows the speaker's sadness for nature’s condition.
Personification:
“Suffer, wild country, like the ironwood”
Turn:
“For we are conquerors”
The speaker stops beginning every stanza with “Die”
Pathos:
To get the audience to empathize.
Paradox:
“We are conquerors and self-poisoners more than scorpion or snake and dying of the venoms that we make even while you die of us”
We are killing the earth and the earth is killing us.
“That we are ruined by the thing we kill”
Asyndeton:
“I praise the scoring drought, the flying dust”
Anaphora:
“That they oppose us still; that we are ruined by the thing we kill”
Caesuras:
To give the reader a moment to take in what the speaker is saying
Enjambments:
Represent continuous thought.
Plot:
The earth doesn’t deserve this.
We are killing the Earth and in return, the Earth is killing us
She praises nature for trying to balance itself
Publication Date for Australia 1970
Published in 1970.
Description of Spring (Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey)
Structure:
Petrarchian Sonnet
3 quatrains + couplet
Iambic pentameter
POV: 1st.
Pastoral poem because of bucolic imagery.
“The buck in brake.”
Theme:
Emotions can impact one’s perception of things.
Background:
His father was a duke and he was in line.
He was beheaded by King Henry the 8th because of treason.
He was imprisoned 1537-39 at Windsor Castle (very bougie) then again in 1546-47 in a worse prison.
Married at the age of 14 to the daughter of another Duke.
Had 5 children.
He missed his family when he was in prison.
He read works of Petrarch while in prison.
He is the real father of the English Sonnet because Shakespeare hadn’t even been born.
Shakespeare was inspired by him and Petrarch
One of the earliest English sonnets ever written.
Literary Devices:
Alliteration
“Heart hath hung”
Almost every line begins with “The”
Imagery
“The fishes flete with a new repaired scale”
Change in season.
“Winter is worn that was the flowers bale”
Shows how beautiful things can emerge from destruction.
Personification of animals
Turn:
“And yet my sorrow springs:
Plot:
Stanza 1: Spring
Stanza 2: Summer is coming
Stanza 3: Winter is gone
Couplet: He misses his family and although he is surrounded by so much beauty, he is still sorrowful.
Publication Date for Description of Spring
Published in 1557.
The Spring (Thomas Carew)
Structure:
24 lines
POV: 1st person
Iambic pentameter which separates it into couplets.
1 stanza
Theme:
Life is constantly changing, not everyone will reciprocate your feelings.
Background:
At one point he was the taste tester of the king
Never married but all of his poems are about a woman named Celia.
Literary Devices:
Personification:
“Earth hath lost her snow-white robes, and now no more the frost”
Hyperbole:
“Now all things smile, only my love doth lower,”
“All things keep/Time with the season.
Metaphor:
“Her heart congeal’d, and makes her pity cold”
She doesn’t feel the same way about him.
“June in her eyes, in her heart January”
She’s acting like she loves him, but she doesn’t.
Allusion:
“Amyntas now doth with his Chloris sleep”
The Romeo and Juliet of the generation.
He is sad because he sees everyone with a partner and his relationship status is stagnant.
The role of the couplets is to show the speaker's distress.
Shift #1: “But the warm sun thaws the benumbed earth,”
Shows the feeling he has when he’s with her
Shift #2: “Now do a choir of chirping minstrels bring”
Shows how she doesn’t reciprocate his feelings, and he feels alone.
Shift #3: “Now all things smile”
Shows how upset he is about how she feels
Publication Date for The Spring
Published in 1640.
Eel Tail (Alice Oswald)
Structure:
POV: 2nd person
Stanzas: 3
Lines: 44
Rhyme scheme: Free verse
Theme:
There’s beauty in nature, even when it’s repulsive.
Background:
Nature poet
Fascinated with life and death
Works for the BBC
Poem consists of hypermetric line: a line that will have one word, one syllable
Literary Devices:
Assonance:
“Roping and wagging”
List:
“Preliminary, pre-world creatures, cousins of the moon,”
Auditory imagery:
“Untranslatable hissed interruptions/unspeakable wide chapped lips”
Personification:
“It’s the wind again/cursing the water and when it clears”
“Smirk of ripples”
“And then as soon as you see her and then as soon as you say so gone”
Shows how quick the eel is
NO END STOPS
Sibilance:
“Sucking and sucking the marshes and sometimes its just a smirk of ripples”
S sound is reminiscent to snake like movement
Kinetic imagery:
“Just drill down into gravel and dwindle as quick as drips”
Simile:
“Dwindle as quick as drips”
Shows how quick the eel moves
Repetition:
“Untranslatable hissed interruptions unspeakable wide chapped lips it’s the wind again pushing on your ears and when it clears”
Also an example of internal rhyme”
Metaphor:
“Sometimes you see that whip-thin tail of a waning moon start”
Anaphora:
“And then as soon as you see her and then as soon as you say so gone”
Repetition to emphasize
Plot:
The eel is following the moon
The eel is quick
Sibilance is used to mimic snake movements.
Publication Date for Eel Tail
Published in 2008.
The Road (Nancy Fotheringham Cato)
Structure:
5 quatrains
POV: 1st
Rhyme: alternating rhyme
Meter: iambic tetrameter & iambic trimeter
Theme:
Driving with no end, leaving the darkness behind.
Background:
5th generation Australian environmentalist/conservationist
Literary devices:
Kinesthetic imagery:
“Behind the shouldering hill”
“The fence-posts whizzed along wires”
Both are used to create an image of speed and enthusiasm.
Simile:
“And like a long black carpet”. Referencing the road + leaving the darkness behind
“Like days that fly too fast”: time passing too quickly
Alliteration:
“The stars swarmed”
Also zoomorphism
Metaphor:
“The Road” is a metaphor for life because it is describing how we should leave the bad things in life behind and drive towards the brighter side.
“I drove towards the sun”
This shows how they are looking for the brighter side of life.
Plot:
Stanza 1: The speaker is driving until she loses track of time.
Stanza 2: It was nighttime; We determine what will happen in our lives.
Stanza 3: The headlights lit up the road in front of her, but behind was pure darkness.
Stanza 4: Examples of things that she drives by, symbolize leaving them in the past and moving into the future.
Stanza 5: Everything was aligned and perfect, giving the speaker tranquility and peace as they now were in control of where they were going.
Publication Date for The Road
Published in 1957.
Who in One Lifetime (Muriel Rukeyser)
Structure:
1 octet, 1 sestet
Sonnet
POV: 3rd person omniscient
No meter
Rhyme scheme:
1st stanza: none
2nd stanza: abc, abc
This symbolizes the transition from chaos→order.
Theme:
Hope: hopeful that future generations will do better when it comes to war/conflicts that our ancestors had to live through
Background:
American - graduated from Vassar College, all female school
Embodied feminism/early feminist
Lived through major world conflicts like WWII and the Vietnam War
got jailed for protesting Vietnam War
Literary Devices:
Repetition:
“Sickness” being repeated is an epizéuxis that emphasizes the tough times that were occurring.
Paradox:
“A childless goddess of fertility”: This is also an allusion to little girls all over and children waiting to be born that might change the world.
“Treaty before the war”
Hyperbole:
“though her whole world burn”
“Who in one lifetime sees all causes lost”
Allusion:
“Seeing the integrated never fighting well”: racism
“The camps of ambush to chambers of imagery”: the Holocaust
Plot:
This poem is showing the violence in the world
Wars that are occuring.
Women’s roles were different in the 80’s
Publication Date for Who in One Lifetime
Published in 1978.
an afternoon nap (Arthur Yap)
Structure:
4 quatrains, 1 quintain
This is a circular poem, so it begins and ends with the same structure.
POV: 3rd person
Free verse
No meter/rhyme scheme
Theme:
The emotional toll of tiger moms on children
Background:
The author was born in Singapore
He criticizes the toxicity of the education system
Begins in media res
Literary Devices:
Asyndeton:
“each monday, wednesday, friday, miss low & madam lim”
“leaving him an adagio, clause analysis, little pocket-money”
Informal Diction:
Informal diction is used to show the poet’s rebellious side, as he grew up learning to be formal in everything he did.
Plot:
His mother is mentally & physically abusive
His tutors are leaving him easy work because they feel bad for him
The parallel “The embittered boy across the road is at it again” shows how the agressee became the aggressor
Publication Date for an afternoon nap
Published in 1977.
A Long Journey (Musaemura Zimunya)
Structure:
Rhyme: free verse
32 lines
7 stanzas
POV: 1st person
Theme:
Societal change and feeling guilty for changing tradition
Background:
Zimbabwe is a country in South Africa
It is one of the poorest countries in the world
It used to be called Rhodesia b/c it was claimed by the British (Cecil Rhodes).
The poem is during a time period of transition because the colonial era was ending.
A lot of westernization and progress, but at what cost?
The poet was expelled from the University of Rhodesia for protesting.
Went to university in England, and then returned to Zimbabwe to teach at the University of Rhodesia
This poem talks about the long journey that Zimbabwe has undergone.
The journey is as a country/nation.
Literary devices:
Anaphora:
“O such a long long journey”: This sets the tone for the poem and it emphasizes that the people in Zimbabwe have been through a long journey.
“Through decades that ran like rivers”, “through pick and shovel sjambok and jail”
To show the struggles that people have been through.
The lack of any punctuation in the poem represents that the journey was continuous and without pause. It also symbolizes how Zimbabwe was stripped of tradition.
Synecdoche:
“I hear the cry from human blood and wicked bones rattling around me”
“We moved into the lights”: urbanization
Polysyndeton:
“Threatened by wind and rain and cold”: shows endless struggles.
Metaphor:
“A long journey from bush to concrete”
“an almighty hand reaches for our shirts”: the ancestors.
Plot
It was a time period of colonization & abuse
Modernization began.
There were more opportunities + people were dreaming of better things.
Colonization started: South African competition under Rhodes claimed land & people to utilize
Traditional values + ancestors “left behind”
The rivers are symbolic of years.
Publication Date for A Long Journey
Published in 1985.
I Hear an Army (James Joyce)
Structure:
3 quatrains
POV: 1st
Lines 12
Alternating rhyme scheme
Theme:
Losing people.
Background:
The poet is 22 years old and wants to find love
It is the last poem in his collection “chamber music”
Literary devices:
Onomatopeia:
“Clanging, clanging upon the heart as upon an anvil”: To show how the army is basically teasing the speaker.
Imagery:
“I hear an army charging upon the land”
“They come shaking in triumph their long, green hair”
Zoomorphism:
“with fluttering whips, the charioteers”
Apostrophe:
“My heart, have you no wisdom thus to despair?”
“My love, my love, my love, why have you left me alone”
Plot:
He is having a nightmare
The army coming from the depths of the water represents how they came out of nowhere
He’s struggling.
Publication Date for I Hear an Army
Published in 1907.
Growing Old (Matthew Arnold)
Structure:
POV: 1st person plural
7 cinquains
Blank verse, with alternating trimeter and pentameter
Theme:
The stages of life.
Background:
He is a Victorian poet with a pessimistic view of life
He is someone who educates and guides others on social issues.
He was influenced by Woodsworth
7 stages of man:
1) Infant 2) Child 3) Lover/student-teens 4) Soldier/20s 5) Justice/30s&40s making decisions 6) Old man/50s&60s more relaxed life 7) 2nd childhood/extreme old age with dementia, assisted living and Home Health Aid.
Literary devices:
Synecdoche:
“The lustre of the eye”: how taxing growing old can be.
“Deep in our hidden heart” Memories have become forgotten.
Hypophera:
“Is it for beauty to forego her wreath?”: Questioning what growing old is.
“It is to suffer this, And feel but half, and feebly, what we feel” Answering the question “Is it to feel each limb grow stiffer”
Caesura:
“Grow stiffer, every function less exact,” growing old can be a slow process.
“As from a height, with rapt prohetic eyes”
Metaphors:
“Not our bloom only, but our strength decay” comparing us to a flower
“In the hot prison of the present, month”
Euphemism:
“It is - last stage of all - ” Is a euphemism for nearing death.
Plot:
The poem is divided into the 7 stages of life.
Publication Date for Growing Old
Published in 1867.
from Fears in Solitude (Samuel Taylor Coleridge)
Structure:
POV: 1st
Rhyme: loose rhyme
Begins on the 3rd stanza out of 8 from the poem.
Iambic pentameter
Theme:
War is not always good
Background:
Youngest of 14 kids, his siblings were in the military.
Opium addict b/c of laudnam.
Was often depressed & bipolar
Was friends with Rudyard Kipling, and best friends with Woodsworth.
They wrote and lived together some times.
Written during the Revolutionary War
1790: Napoleon controls France and wants to take over England
Literary Devices:
Paradox:
“Peace long preserved by the fleets and perilous seas”: the navy brings peace
Polysyndeton:
“Famine or blue plague, Battle, or siege, or flight through wintry snows”: To show the endless effects of war and the repetition shows emphasis
Allusion:
“And adjurations of the God in Heaven”
“To ask a blessing from his Heavenly Father”: allusion to God
Chiasmus:
“However dim and vague, too vague and dim”
“The poor wretch, who has learnt his only prayers/From curses, and who knows scarcely words enough”
Hyperbole:
“We, this whole people, have been clamorous”
“Of thousands and ten thousand! Boys and Girls”
Irony:
“The best amusement for our morning meal”: Shows a change in routine, caused by war
Imagery:
“For war and bloodshed; animating sports”
“Pull off an insects wing, all read of war”
Plot:
In stanzas 1 & 2 he was saying that the English benefited from corruption.
He says there’s hypocrisy because England benefits from slavery in colonies.
He is addressing his concern that England wants a war.
Publication Date for from Fears in Solitude
Published in 1798.
Renouncement (Alice Meynell)
Structure:
Stanzas: 1
14 lines
Petrarchan sonnet
The first 8 lines are about the day, last 6 lines are about the night.
Theme:
Forbidden love/one’s dreams can provide a new reality
Background:
27 years old and she was not married, which wasn't good for the time
She was falling in love with the priest who was teaching her about Catholicism because she was converting from Anglican to Catholic
The poem is about forbidden love
In the poem, she has to “renounce” the man that she loves.
These poems are a prelude to her life
Her father was friends with Charles Dickens
She published along with her husband for the rest of her life, not the priest.
Literary devices:
Juxtaposition:
“Tired yet strong”: Shows how she wants their love to become a reality, but she is getting tired of dreaming.
Hyperbole:
“But it must never, never come in sight”: She knows that their love will never come to life.
“I must stop short of thee, all day long”: The speaker is unsatisfied in the daytime because she cannot be with him in the way she wants.
Caesura:
“This breast, the thought of thee waits hidden yet bright”
“Oh, just beyond the fiarest thoughts that throng”
The purpose of the caesuras is to show the speaker in despair since she must hid her feelings.
Synecdoche:
“This breast, the thought of thee waits hidden yet bright;”
“I run, I run, I am gathered to thy heart”
Also is epizeuxis
Plot:
She dreams of him and imagines them together
She can’t stop thinking of him
She cannot wait for the nighttime when she can finally dream of him.
Publication Date for Renouncement
Published in 1875.
Winter Song Lit Devices
Literary Devices:
Imagery
Sibilance
Hyperbole
Where all is wind and all is waste
Consonance + personification
If there the tim’rous stag
Symbolism:
The stag is a symbol of the king of England
Savage spoils: Things they’ve acquired.
Surplus value lit devices
Literary Devices:
Allusion to big 3 automakers
Metaphor:
“Bantam with thick fingers”
“Slashed and burn”
“Scars grew deeper now”
Jargan:
“Tool and die guy”
Personification:
“America to drive”
“Factories flushed”
Turn/Alliteration:
“But that road ran out”
Imagery:
“Twice a year. The Harley went and then the cabin; food stamps/Bought essentials, nothing more.”
Anaphora:
“Day to week to month to the years”
Hyperbole:
“Now it’s frozen all year long”
The only present tense in the whole poem.
“That it never iced, even/In the depths of winter”
Slang:
“But the road ran out”
Affects the tone of the poem by showing a turn from stability to instability.
“The union went south”
Illustrates the chaos that the economic crash caused in the worker’s lives.
Father Returning Home lit devices
Literary Devices:
Imagery:
“Commuters in the yellow light”
“Coming out the trembles at the sink/The cold water running over his brown hands,/A few droplets cling to the greying hairs to his wrists.”
Color imagery: Brown and grey
“Eating a stale chapati, reading a book./He goes into the toilet to contemplate.”
“Black raincoat”
“Humid monsoon night”
Paradox:
“Unseeing eyes”
Personification:
“His eyes dimmed by age:”
Asyndeton:
“Home again”
Polysyndeton:
“His shirt and pants are soggy and his black raincoat stained with mud and his bag stuffed with books.:
Endstops
Turn:
“He will now go to sleep”
Simile:
“Like a word dropped from a long sentence”
phantom of delight lit devices
Literary Devices:
Metaphor:
“She was a Phantom”
“A lovely Apparition”
“a moment’s ornament;”
“Sweet records”
“The very pulse of the machine”
This poem was written during the midst of the Industrial Revolution.
Anaphora:
“For human nature’s daily food; For transient sorrows”
“A Being Breathing thoughtful breath, A Traveller betwixt life and death”
Alliteration:
“A Being breathing thoughtful breath”
List:
“Endurance, foresight, strength and skill;”
“To warn, to comfort, and command”
Hyperbole:
“ A perfect Woman”
“With something of an angel light”
Allusion to God:
“Nobly planned,”
In The Park Lit devices
Literary Devices:
Caesura:
“She sits in the park. Her clothes are out of date.”
2 endstops in stanza 1.
Sibilance:
“Someone she loved once passes by”
Visual Imagery
Dialogue:
Shows us the shallow conversation between her and the man
Metaphor:
“a small balloon”
Like a text bubble.
“They have eaten me alive”
Imagery:
“Flickering light”
“Sits staring at her feet”
Turn:
“Then, nursing the youngest child,”
lost woman lit devices
Literary devices:
Stanza 1:
Euphemism:
“My mother went with no more warning”
Endstopht/metaphor to heart attack:
“a bright voice and a bad pain.”
Visual, auditory, & color imagery
Stanza 2:
Repetition:
“She never returned and I never saw/Her buried.”
To show how affected she is.
Metaphor:
“The ivy-mother turned into a tree”
Ivy wraps around and its vines pass through things. This shows the mother’s involvement in her life.
“My tendrils are the ones that clutch”
She wants her mom back.
Imagery/simile:
“That still hops away like a rainbow down/The avenue”
Shows how her mom slipped away from her, but she’s still trying to hold onto the memories.
Stanza 3:
Metaphor:
“I made a life for her”
Alliteration + slang:
“She met her match at an extra-mural”
Anaphora:
“Who will not alter, who will not grow”
Shows how her mother’s image will never change from what it was when she was 14.
Stanza 4:
Hyperbole:
“And every poet has acquired”
Caesura/anaphora:
“Who will not alter, who will not grow:
Stanza 5:
Imagery:
“Hear how they hate/Themselves for losing her as they did”
Stanza 6:
Turn:
“But my lost woman evermore snaps”
Dialogue
stabat mater lit devices
Literary Devices:
Alliteration:
“For the first few years”
“How hard it had been”
Imagery:
“I learned this from a book she had inscribed”
Sibilance:
“Made her seem so small”
Turn:
“Now in a different way,”
Shows shift of power from father to mother
“That once I stand up straight, I too must learn”
To disclose the message of the poem.
Simile:
“Still like a girl”
“Sometimes turns to me as if it were a game”
Hyperbole:
“She calls my father every other sort of name;”
Metaphor:
“Roams old age”
Consonance:
“She was embarrassed when I asked her why/But later on explained how hard it had been”.
Helps characterize the mother because she is still immature, even with the sudden shift in power.
australia 1970 lit devices
Literary devices:
The ENTIRE poem is an APOSTROPHE b/c Australia isn’t responding.
Simile:
“Die, wild country, like the eaglehawk”
“Die like the tighersnake”
“Like suicided invading stain.”
“Die like the soldier-ant”
Repetition:
The words ending in “ing” in the first stanza emphasizes the aggressivity of Australia.
Visual imagery
“I see your living soil ebb with the tree to naked poverty”
Being stripped of nutrients.
Shows the speaker's sadness for nature’s condition.
Personification:
“Suffer, wild country, like the ironwood”
Turn:
“For we are conquerors”
The speaker stops beginning every stanza with “Die”
Pathos:
To get the audience to empathize.
Paradox:
“We are conquerors and self-poisoners more than scorpion or snake and dying of the venoms that we make even while you die of us”
We are killing the earth and the earth is killing us.
“That we are ruined by the thing we kill”
Asyndeton:
“I praise the scoring drought, the flying dust”
Anaphora:
“That they oppose us still; that we are ruined by the thing we kill”
Caesuras:
To give the reader a moment to take in what the speaker is saying
Enjambments:
Represent continuous thought.