Julia Alvarez "Woman's Work" Julia Alvarez's poem "Woman's Work" explores the nature of female gender roles and their impact on the mother-daughter relationship. The poet employs rich imagery, internal and end rhymes, and alliteration to convey the Continue Reading...
Line 12 - Again, he notes that the land and country will change, but it will still remain close to what it is today. Line 13 - This line talks about creation and the birth of Earth, just as the poem celebrates creation and the birth of a building. Continue Reading...
The conceit or metaphor in extended though an image of the world or globe. The tears become the entire world which encompasses the speaker's life and feelings. So doth each tear, Which thee doth wear, globe, yea world, by that impression grow, (Li Continue Reading...
Memory of Elena A Poem to Explain Grief Often a poem's meaning is apparent from only the title. This is not the case with "The Memory of Elena," a poem written by Carolyn Forche in 1981. At first, the title suggests a poetic recollection of Elena, Continue Reading...
Andre Lorde "Beams" Explication In Audres poem "Beams" she suggests that the process of aging and the loss of the vigor youth is something that cannot be halted. The poem expresses the sadness and loss of innocence that results from the perception o Continue Reading...
Worn Path by Eudora Welty "A Worn Path" is recognized as one of Welty's most illustrious and often studied works of what is considered to be short fiction. Illusorily simple in scope and tone and, the story is made to be very structured upon a journ Continue Reading...
Shakespeare Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer's Day The explication of Shakespeare's sonnet, "Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer's Day" has been done ad nauseum. A quick web search will pull up a million websites dedicated to Shakespearean sonnets, an Continue Reading...
A "setting sun" is a reference to the passing of the day into night (12). The word "passing" is repeated throughout Dickinson's poem. Repetition allows the poet to stress the meaning of the word, which in this case symbolizes the passing of all thin Continue Reading...
Fern Hill (Dylan Thomas) The "Poetry Explications" handout from UNC states that a poetry explication is a "relatively short analysis which describes the possible meanings and relationship of the words, images, and other small units that make up a po Continue Reading...
Ballad Birmingham An explication of poem "Ballad of Birmingham" by Dudley Randall An explication of poem "Ballad Birmingham" by Dudley Randall The current essay is an explication of the poem "Ballad of Birmingham" by Dudley Randall. Dudley wrote t Continue Reading...
" The stanza discusses how Bill's friends tried to "persuade" both themselves and him that they were not afraid and therefore showed this by comforting him with kisses. However, the following stanza shows how this statement is not entirely true. The Continue Reading...
In the end of the poem she has tied together her themes to show that her words do not divide her from her father. The very fact that she, the daughter and the author has in English expressed her emotion and care towards her father indicates that lan Continue Reading...
The second half of the poem is dedicated to the poet's desire to make physical contact with one of the ponies: would like to hold the slenderer one in my arms, For she has walked over to me And nuzzled my left hand. In many ways, the second hal Continue Reading...
One example is found in the lines, "Mr. Scott the retired plumber, and his plump midwestern wife, considered moving home back home where white and black got along and stayed where they belonged." The implications of this, though not surprising for t Continue Reading...
The speaker of Theodore Roethke’s poem “My Papa’s Waltz” reflects on his abusive father. Using an ABAB CDCD rhyme scheme and fixed meter, the poet underscores the main motifs of music and dance. The titular waltz is a structur Continue Reading...
After this troubling question, the poet throws up his hands, no wiser than before. At the end of this poem of pulsating, drum-beat of questions in a sing-song of nursery rhymes, the poem returns to the beginning. The poetic drum retains the short me Continue Reading...
The meter has a very similar effect, and could very easily make the poem feel like a nursery rhyme if careful attention isn't paid to it during a reading. Many of the poems lines are written in two groups of trochaic tetrameter -- two sets of four Continue Reading...
Daddy by Sylvia Plath: An Explication At first glance, Sylvia Plath's "Daddy" seems like the ranting of an adolescent breaking away from an oppressive parent. In fact, on one level, this poem is a poetic tirade directed at a father who is the sourc Continue Reading...
Papa's Waltz" The Play as Literature In an art form which imitates the lives of Marilyn Monroe and Arthur Miller, the star -- Kitty -- is a needy, insecure, and unstable actress. Putting the entire movie production at risk -- and her own reputatio Continue Reading...
This indicates that the friendship he refers to never truly existed in the first place. Indeed, in Stanza XIII, he has the audacity to make a claim for the "truth." This, as the reader has come to expect at this stage, is only very brief. The only Continue Reading...
The keys and the house are not in her possession any longer but the "cities, rivers, and caves" do not belong to her as they once did. This kind of loss, too, does not represent what the poet would define a disaster. However, true loss is explored i Continue Reading...
Life is a rollercoaster which offers both ups and downs, and one must learn how to handle both. In this sense, the lines "If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster / and treat those two impostors just the same" (Kipling: lines 11-12) support the ide Continue Reading...
Nobody's Darling," Alice Walker dramatizes the conflict between the comfort of conformity and the courage it takes to be different. The speaker offers advice to the reader, in a didactic tone but one that confers wisdom. "Be nobody's darling, be an Continue Reading...
The fly is a gruesome image because flies gather around decaying corpses. However, while this image is startling, it is still shocking that the poet is not more in shock of dying, of being dead, or witnessing just a fly upon her death. The poem con Continue Reading...
" (Lines 5-7) the metaphor of the poet being like a battered and invaded town that is impinged upon by outsiders yet still strives to let in the saving forces suggests both a medieval castle and the poet's divided alliances between the world (evil) a Continue Reading...
The speaker also addresses himself. The conflict does not come from outside the speaker; it is all within him. This makes the conflict that much more difficult to bear and this motivates him to write the poem, if for nothing else than to ease his sp Continue Reading...
It also shows that she is not worth a holy visit; she is just another person who has died that day. This also shows that her expectations and assumptions were larger than life and did not really have anything to do with reality. It says that she had Continue Reading...
Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening In his poem "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening," Robert Frost uses deceptively simple language to communicate his ideas. There is only one three-syllable word in the entire poem -- "promises." The rest of the Continue Reading...
Elizabeth Bishop's poem "One Art" is clearly about loss. She tells the reader that in the first line: "The art of losing isn't hard to master...." She might have called the poem "One Lesson" instead of "One Art," because on the surface she pretends t Continue Reading...
For example, in the third stanza, he describes the dawn as " yellows bright as wood -columbine (8) The metaphor used in the following line also attests to the beauty and mystery of nature or was only a fuzzed moth in a flannel storm (9) Note as w Continue Reading...
This speaker is after something slightly more adult than cookies, of course, but this just makes the humor of the rhyme stand out more. His desire to "travel, sojourn, snatch, plot, have, forget" in line six details his desires of infidelity, and th Continue Reading...
Persimmons," a Light in the Darkness "Persimmons" is a free verse poem written by Li-Young Lee that explores how persimmons as a symbol, both figurative and as a word, have impacted an unnamed narrator in the poem. The poem is told from a first per Continue Reading...
T.S. Eliot, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, & Ezra Pound "Preludes" by T.S. Eliot adopts a slant rhyme pattern to convey the state of his thoughts as he writes the poem. The poem basically illustrates the Voice/Poet's thoughts about the seemingly busy, y Continue Reading...
The "blueblack cold" of a winter morning suggests the touch of cold and the sight of blue frost in the darkness. The "cracked hands" of the father who labors for his living appeals to a sense of cold, harsh touch. The son can "hear the cold splinter Continue Reading...
Henry Reed is a free-versed and metaphorical poem; because of the word "we," I can say that the speaker in the person uses the first person point-of-view. "Naming of Parts" talks about an issue termed as "the problem of war" by military historians Continue Reading...
Edna St. Vincent Millay's "Love is Not All" Scansion and Analysis Edna St. Vincent Millay utilizes a traditional sonnet form in "Love is Not All" that is reminiscent of a Shakespearean sonnet, with an ABAB, CDCD, EFEF, GG rhyme scheme. It also cont Continue Reading...
Whatever the significance of the phrase "He kindly stopped for me," the speaker does not dread Death, as personified by the kindly carriage driver. This poem also suggests that the speaker's perceptions of time and space are different in death; cent Continue Reading...
Homer -- Was the Blind Bard a Poetic Activist for War or Peace? Homer is a poet of war, namely the war between the Greeks and Trojans, and later in his "Odyssey," of the war between Odysseus and the gods whom would bar him from his trajectory homewa Continue Reading...
Bedside Story" by Mitsuye Yamada, a father relates an "old Japanese legend" to his young daughter (2). The legend involves an old woman who seeks shelter in "many small villages," looking for a place to stay for the night (6). In response to her pet Continue Reading...
By losing touch with the natural world, we live only within our own bodies, where the soul is stifled because it needs anima mundi to exist. There is a danger in not connecting to the environment around us. There is a danger in not allowing our hear Continue Reading...
