Poetry is generally used to tell a story whether it be about love or an epic adventure. Sonnets specifically tend to deal with complications that come with love. Billy Collins however decided to go a different route in his poem “Sonnet.” His poem is a lesson about the sonnet and how he believes the form needs to change. He does this by explaining the different forms of a sonnet, by adding in characters to support his claims, and by using figurative language to emphasize the changes he believes need to be made.…
A young girl that would be known as Phillis Wheatley happened to be one of the most influential black poets in the 18th century. As it came, Phillis Wheatley, being a black woman with an educational upbringing endure great triumphs for her writings. She sought out to emphasize her view of slavery to freedom and rescue when finding Christianity. In all of Wheatley’s writings, there is one particular poem called, “On being brought from Africa to America”, that views into her journey to salvation and her experience in slavery. This poem particularly emphasizes Wheatley’s background and highlights all of the key points in a sense to understand Phillis Wheatley.…
In this poem I use the strategy Internal Rhyme, each verse has 8 syllables and the whole poem has 8 lines. This poem symbolises about how some people just wander aimlessly through life not knowing what will happen next; will they be a saint, or will the lead a life of crime? I've used this formatting to show how formal some people may appear to be, which is the left side of the poem, which uses only one font. The right side represents the crumbling happiness of said person. These fonts were chosen to show the many moods they can go through, with a mind of a day to day basis.…
The Scars of War and The rehabilitation of Life In this essay I will be examining the Casey Thayer’s “The Hurt Sonnet” and determine how the speaker copes with the loss in their life. In the poem it would appear that the speaker in the speaker has not lost a loved one but the loved has lost apart of himself; this is due to war. He has loss body appendages and mental integrity.…
The question that I choose was to discuss the use and effect of sound and sound techniques in the poem, We Real Cool. This poem may be short, but it is full of real world youth problems in today's’ society. The poem seems to be about some young guys just playing pool at the local pool hall. But it is really an outside observer who wonders what these boys may be feeling.…
Furthermore, she felt overwhelmed by two poems during her time visiting rural areas. The first poem is about childhood, and the second poem is about addiction in a family. Smith published a book called “Wade in the Water” that has a collection of poems; she hopes that the poems help to make people feel less “alien” to each other. During her interview,…
There is no rhyme scheme present, but the poem is easy to read and has a nice rhythm. The tone of the poem is somber because she never does what she wants to do but always settles. The poem was pleasant, and it made the reader to think and analyze their choices,…
Phillis Wheatley recognized that white people justified their immoral actions by arguing that they’re saving their slaves by converting them to Christianity. Wheatley decided to take her observations and turn it into the poem, “On Being Brought from Africa to America”. In this poem, the speaker is an educated slave who uses diction to mock and accuse highly educated Americans by pretending that she agrees with her target audience’s viewpoints. Wheatley develops the themes of slave conversion and racism using an ironic and accusatory tone. Using an ironic tone, Wheatley develops the theme of slave conversion to Christianity.…
“The Sonnet-Ballad” was written in 1949, from the mind of Gwendolyn Brooks, a highly regarded poet with the honor of being the first black author to win the Pulitzer prize. Though the sonnet isn’t inspired by any events in Brooks’ life, it is part of an entire book by the name of “Annie Allen”, the second volume of the series. Therefore, the women in this poem is Annie Allen. This snippet from the book speaks of Annie’s grief and loss. Her lover had went off to the war and she mourns the possibility of him dying.…
This short poem is about a basketball who once was good at playing basketball. Flick Webb had great talent, but failed to use it. He was an inordinate basketball player in high school. After high school Flick made a poorly decision and did not use his talent. Instead, of going to college and using his skills, he let his life go to waste by working at a gas station.…
I went on to add “so” at the beginning of the second line in the third stanza to show that the second line is an effect of the first line in the stanza. This created a better flow, making the poem easier to read. The last small…
"The Prisoners of War,” a relatively short poem by Tom Disch, written in 1972, is riddled with imagery and deeper meaning. Even in the opening line, Disch cuts to the point. “Their language disappeared a year or so after the landscape: so what can they do now but point?” (line 1-3).…
The last couplet of this quatrain is self-explanatory as it is very simple to understand. So, the rhyme scheme for the third quatrain is as…
Poets of the twentieth century explored the implications of shifting uses of form that occurred over a period of one hundred years. Poems such as William Carlos Williams’ “The Red Wheelbarrow”, e.e. cummings’ “my sweet old etcetera”, Dereck Walcott’s “Parang”, bpNichol’s “Blues”, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti “Modern Poetry is Prose (But it is Saying Plenty)”, exemplify the multiple shifts that characterized the evolution of poetry throughout the 1900s. These authors use form as a means of embedding meaning within the text through the structural aspects, thus showing the changes that have developed modern comprehensions of the poetic genre across a rapidly shifting timeline. Through the use of formulaic elements to affect the reader’s comprehension…
Charlotte Smith’s Sonnet III, ‘To a Nightingale’ could be considered to be a mournfully romantic tale of a nightingale singing a song of such sadness that the poet begins to question the tragedy of the nightingale, and then to consider a cause for its song of such profound despondence. The narrator then admits to being envious of the nightingale for its freedom to sing the song. The meaning of this sonnet will be explored through key elements of prominent moods, language and figurative language devices, sound devices, poetic meter and rhyming patterns. Prominent moods portrayed in Smiths sonnet are sadness, curiosity, and envy.…