There are 10-line stanzas with iambic pentameter lines that rhyme. The first four lines begin with a steady pace. The voice is very modest and intellectual. In the next six lines, the pace starts to increase. “Of deities or mortals, or of both, In Tempe or the dales of Arcady? What men or gods are these? what maidens loth? What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape? What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?” There is this sense of excitement and the speed quickens. The same concept happens with the second stanza as well. The first four lines are authoritative but then its moves to talk about a man playing pipes and the speaker starts to get excited again. This can be seen because the speaker repeats the word never, “never, never.” In the third stanza, the reader is really excited. The repeated words (“happy, happy”) make the reader stop to breathe in the middle of the lines so by the end the reader is out of breath. In stanza four, the speaker is quiet and the pace is steady again. The words have longer first syllables, like “desolate.” The speaker reaches the pinnacle of his or her excitement in the final stanza with the use of exclamation points in the first 5 lines. In the second half of the stanza, the speaker returns to the steady tone. This reflects the calm authority of the urn who is a “friend to man.” The final two lines have caesuras (big pauses) in the middle. The sound of this poem shows how the speaker’s mood fluctuates.
Dickinson's poem contains a metaphor of a funeral to represent that the speaker is going insane and her feeling that part of herself is dying. Dickinson uses consonance with the repetition of 'treading' and 'beating' in the first two stanzas. She also uses cacophony and emphasizes harsh consonants by capitalizing several words throughout the poem, including Funeral, Brain, Mourners, Drum, Mind, Box, Lead, Space, Race, Plank, Reason, and Finished. Her reason for focusing on harsh consonants is to reflect the pain that she is suffering and be strong in her delivery. She uses onomatopoeia when the mourners 'creak across' in line 10. The point of using consonance, onomatopoeia, and cacophony is because it all relates back to the mental insanity. Especially when reading this in your head, these devices help create a sort of pounding sensation with words and their stresses. Dickinson's sound and repetition of 'And' specifically near the end of the poem help make the poem feel continuous and monotonous. Also, the dashes breaking up the repetitive words in the first two stanzas and again appearing in the following three stanzas are ironic because they momentarily pause the musicality of the poem. But, they also foreshadow what is to come and draw the reader further into the poem, and into madness. The rhythm and meter almost take control of the readers mind once he or she starts reading it.
This poem is comprised of 5 tercets. The poem has a has a relatively somber feel to it. The tone is very grave and serious. The words of the poem seem to trudge along, the way a person walking through snow would. Stevens' message appears to be that people who do not see the misery in the cold, dead winter are empty sad people themselves. The poem discusses the quiet, frozen winter, yet uses many active verbs. That provides a contrast between the active and the passive, or paralyzed. There is significant nature imagery, and Stevens seems to be using nature as a mirrior into the state of one's soul. Finally there is a sense, conveyed through the metaphor, and that language, of the hopeless, emptiness of life and existance. I like this poem, it's pretty. But I'm not sure exactly what I think the last stanza means.
Reading this poem reminded me of reading the very first example given in chapter 13- "Pease porridge hot, Pease poridge cold, Pease porridge in the pot, Nine days old." It is a lot of nonsense that seems to be written simply to please the eyes and ear. Consonance and asonance abound, such as with "Eskimos in Manitoba" and "oompahs on the tuba." There is also an abundance of cacaphony, which is what I think makes the poem so pleasant to read. There are many harsh c and k sounds like in "eskimo" and "cock" and many b sounds like with the line "nabob, bozo, toff, and hobo-." Since this poem relies so heavily on its musical aspects, it's quite fitting that it is about music- Roger Bobo and his recital on the tuba. It's like the harsh cacaphonous sounds and the noticeable cosonance and asononance mimick the sounds of Roger Bobo playing the tuba.
Atwood breaks the poem into four stanzas. The fairly short lines visually compliment the jagged imagery of the piece. The crab is directly addressed using "you" in the beginning: "as you testify,/ with your crust and jagged scissors" and by using "my" in the final lines: "my stunted child, my momentary/ face in the mirror,/ my tiny nightmare." This makes it seem as though the poem is an intimate dedication to a special life form. The landcrab represents an arduous birth of man. Atwood uses words like "jagged," "scissors," and "bone" to add to the rough imagery of the landcrab's environment and exterior. The lack of end rhymes also adds to the poem's coarse nature. The phrase "dry clatter" utilizes synesthesia by evoking two sense simultaneously. She uses assonance with word couplings like "sea's teeth," "lobes and bulbs," etc. There a contrast between hard and soft through cacophony and euphony. This contributes to the binaries of water and earth, and the crab's hard shell and soft underbelly. The poem has a broad beginning and narrows with description of the landcrab's physical attributes and actions, finally zeroing in on it through the glass of a flashlight before it scampers away.
The structure of this poem is really important to the meaning. The poem was written while Owen, the author, was at a war hospital after contracting Trench fever during world war I. The structure, a sonnet, with the rhyme scheme of an English sonnet, is very rigid and strict. This applies to the meaning as well. The structure of war is strict and young soldiers are continually sent off to be slaughtered, like cattle.
Another significant device is the appeal to sound. Owen creates the sounds of war to add to the overall message of the idea of unnecessarily lost lives. First of all, the first stanza has loud war sounds: "stuttering rifles' rapid rattle," "patter," "choirs," "shrill," "wailing shells," "bugles." Then, it transitions to the final sestet where rather than sound it focuses on the quiet of the home front. It shows more light/dark imagery like "candles," "shine," "glimmers," "pallor," and in the last line "dusk a drawing-down of blinds."
There is also parallelism with rhetorical questions in the first line of each stanza. There is also personification of guns in line 2, by giving them anger. There's alliteration with "stuttering rifles' rapid rattle", which adds to stuttering-like sound. On line 7, there's a lot of repetition of the "l" sound and on line 4 "patter" is onomatopoetic.
Lastly, there's alliteration on the last line with "d," which although it's not used in the poem, corresponds to "death" (and refers back to "doomed" in the title).
The poem starts by talking about its speed and sheer volume, as it "sends all else skittering to the curb". It mentions that the fire-truck is so fast that it might as well be a verb. The next stanza talks about the loud squeaking sound it makes when it goes around the bend, combining speed and sound. In addition, there still the bell and siren wailing past. It is all action; there is no thought involved in its pure vitality. The next stanza states that it is both "beautiful", and yet "loud" and "obnoxious". These are contradictory in typical cases, but here the words are used to describe the beauty of something big and boxy, just because it saves lives and is lively simultaneously. The narrator's mind, which was beforehand "brooding" over something, is now clear thanks to the blaring blur of red. And this blank state of mind carries on even after it is gone. The narrator then admires it as a whole.
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Ode to a Grecian Urn
There are 10-line stanzas with iambic pentameter lines that rhyme. The first four lines begin with a steady pace. The voice is very modest and intellectual. In the next six lines, the pace starts to increase.
“Of deities or mortals, or of both,
In Tempe or the dales of Arcady?
What men or gods are these? what maidens loth?
What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape?
What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?”
There is this sense of excitement and the speed quickens.
The same concept happens with the second stanza as well. The first four lines are authoritative but then its moves to talk about a man playing pipes and the speaker starts to get excited again. This can be seen because the speaker repeats the word never, “never, never.”
In the third stanza, the reader is really excited. The repeated words (“happy, happy”) make the reader stop to breathe in the middle of the lines so by the end the reader is out of breath.
In stanza four, the speaker is quiet and the pace is steady again. The words have longer first syllables, like “desolate.”
The speaker reaches the pinnacle of his or her excitement in the final stanza with the use of exclamation points in the first 5 lines. In the second half of the stanza, the speaker returns to the steady tone. This reflects the calm authority of the urn who is a “friend to man.” The final two lines have caesuras (big pauses) in the middle.
The sound of this poem shows how the speaker’s mood fluctuates.
I felt a Funeral, in my Brain
Dickinson's poem contains a metaphor of a funeral to represent that the speaker is going insane and her feeling that part of herself is dying. Dickinson uses consonance with the repetition of 'treading' and 'beating' in the first two stanzas. She also uses cacophony and emphasizes harsh consonants by capitalizing several words throughout the poem, including Funeral, Brain, Mourners, Drum, Mind, Box, Lead, Space, Race, Plank, Reason, and Finished. Her reason for focusing on harsh consonants is to reflect the pain that she is suffering and be strong in her delivery. She uses onomatopoeia when the mourners 'creak across' in line 10. The point of using consonance, onomatopoeia, and cacophony is because it all relates back to the mental insanity. Especially when reading this in your head, these devices help create a sort of pounding sensation with words and their stresses. Dickinson's sound and repetition of 'And' specifically near the end of the poem help make the poem feel continuous and monotonous. Also, the dashes breaking up the repetitive words in the first two stanzas and again appearing in the following three stanzas are ironic because they momentarily pause the musicality of the poem. But, they also foreshadow what is to come and draw the reader further into the poem, and into madness. The rhythm and meter almost take control of the readers mind once he or she starts reading it.
The Snow Man
This poem is comprised of 5 tercets. The poem has a has a relatively somber feel to it. The tone is very grave and serious. The words of the poem seem to trudge along, the way a person walking through snow would. Stevens' message appears to be that people who do not see the misery in the cold, dead winter are empty sad people themselves. The poem discusses the quiet, frozen winter, yet uses many active verbs. That provides a contrast between the active and the passive, or paralyzed. There is significant nature imagery, and Stevens seems to be using nature as a mirrior into the state of one's soul. Finally there is a sense, conveyed through the metaphor, and that language, of the hopeless, emptiness of life and existance. I like this poem, it's pretty. But I'm not sure exactly what I think the last stanza means.
Recital by John Updike
Reading this poem reminded me of reading the very first example given in chapter 13- "Pease porridge hot, Pease poridge cold, Pease porridge in the pot, Nine days old." It is a lot of nonsense that seems to be written simply to please the eyes and ear. Consonance and asonance abound, such as with "Eskimos in Manitoba" and "oompahs on the tuba." There is also an abundance of cacaphony, which is what I think makes the poem so pleasant to read. There are many harsh c and k sounds like in "eskimo" and "cock" and many b sounds like with the line "nabob, bozo, toff, and hobo-." Since this poem relies so heavily on its musical aspects, it's quite fitting that it is about music- Roger Bobo and his recital on the tuba. It's like the harsh cacaphonous sounds and the noticeable cosonance and asononance mimick the sounds of Roger Bobo playing the tuba.
Landcrab
Atwood breaks the poem into four stanzas. The fairly short lines visually compliment the jagged imagery of the piece.
The crab is directly addressed using "you" in the beginning: "as you testify,/ with your crust and jagged scissors" and by using "my" in the final lines: "my stunted child, my momentary/ face in the mirror,/ my tiny nightmare." This makes it seem as though the poem is an intimate dedication to a special life form. The landcrab represents an arduous birth of man.
Atwood uses words like "jagged," "scissors," and "bone" to add to the rough imagery of the landcrab's environment and exterior. The lack of end rhymes also adds to the poem's coarse nature. The phrase "dry clatter" utilizes synesthesia by evoking two sense simultaneously. She uses assonance with word couplings like "sea's teeth," "lobes and bulbs," etc. There a contrast between hard and soft through cacophony and euphony. This contributes to the binaries of water and earth, and the crab's hard shell and soft underbelly. The poem has a broad beginning and narrows with description of the landcrab's physical attributes and actions, finally zeroing in on it through the glass of a flashlight before it scampers away.
Anthem For Doomed Youth
The structure of this poem is really important to the meaning. The poem was written while Owen, the author, was at a war hospital after contracting Trench fever during world war I. The structure, a sonnet, with the rhyme scheme of an English sonnet, is very rigid and strict. This applies to the meaning as well. The structure of war is strict and young soldiers are continually sent off to be slaughtered, like cattle.
Another significant device is the appeal to sound. Owen creates the sounds of war to add to the overall message of the idea of unnecessarily lost lives. First of all, the first stanza has loud war sounds: "stuttering rifles' rapid rattle," "patter," "choirs," "shrill," "wailing shells," "bugles."
Then, it transitions to the final sestet where rather than sound it focuses on the quiet of the home front. It shows more light/dark imagery like "candles," "shine," "glimmers," "pallor," and in the last line "dusk a drawing-down of blinds."
There is also parallelism with rhetorical questions in the first line of each stanza. There is also personification of guns in line 2, by giving them anger. There's alliteration with "stuttering rifles' rapid rattle", which adds to stuttering-like sound. On line 7, there's a lot of repetition of the "l" sound and on line 4 "patter" is onomatopoetic.
Lastly, there's alliteration on the last line with "d," which although it's not used in the poem, corresponds to "death" (and refers back to "doomed" in the title).
A Fire-Truck
The poem starts by talking about its speed and sheer volume, as it "sends all else skittering to the curb". It mentions that the fire-truck is so fast that it might as well be a verb. The next stanza talks about the loud squeaking sound it makes when it goes around the bend, combining speed and sound. In addition, there still the bell and siren wailing past. It is all action; there is no thought involved in its pure vitality.
The next stanza states that it is both "beautiful", and yet "loud" and "obnoxious". These are contradictory in typical cases, but here the words are used to describe the beauty of something big and boxy, just because it saves lives and is lively simultaneously. The narrator's mind, which was beforehand "brooding" over something, is now clear thanks to the blaring blur of red. And this blank state of mind carries on even after it is gone. The narrator then admires it as a whole.
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