Poems

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"The Eagle"
Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809-92

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He clasps the crag with crooked hands;
Close to the sun in lonely lands,
Ringed with the azure world, he stands.

The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls;
He watches from his mountain walls,
And like a thunderbolt he falls.

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"Dulce et Decorum Est"
Wilfred Owen (1893-1918)

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Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of disappointed shells that dropped behind.

GAS! Gas! Quick, boys!-- An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And floundering like a man in fire or lime.--
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,--
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.

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Sonnet # 18
William Shakespeare (1564-1616)

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Shall I compare thee to a Summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And Summer's lease hath all too short a date:
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And oft' is his gold complexion dimm'd;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance or nature's changing course untrimm'd:
But thy eternal Summer shall not fade
Nor lose possession of that fair thou owest;
Nor shall Death brag thou wanderest in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou growest:

So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

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Speaker

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PERSONA (pur-SOH-nuh)
The speaker or voice of a literary work, i.e., who is doing the talking. Thus persona is the "I" of a narrative or the implied speaker of a lyric poem.

Sidelight: Sometimes the author of a poem identifies a created character as the speaker-- but in the absence of a specific attribution the term persona is applied in a neutral sense, since it should not be automatically assumed that a creative work directly reflects the personal experiences or views of the poet. The use of an identified persona precludes a potential ambiguity and enables poets to give expression to things they would prefer not to have attributed to their own person.

Sidelight: In Robert Browning's "My Last Duchess," the persona is the Duke of Ferrara. In John Keats' "Ode to a Nightingale," the persona is not identified, so it is up to the reader to infer whether it is the author himself or a speaker conceived by the poet for a particular effect.

Sidelight: The term, voice, while often used synonymously with speaker or persona, can also refer to a pervasive presence behind the fictitious voices that speak in a work, or to Aristotle's "ethos," the element in a work that creates a perception by the audience or reader of the moral qualities of the speaker or a character.

(Compare Content, Diction, Form, Motif, Style, Texture, Tone)

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stanza

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A division of a poem made by arranging the lines into units separated by a space, usually of a corresponding number of lines and a recurrent pattern of meter and rhyme. A poem with such divisions is described as having a stanzaic form, but not all verse is divided in stanzas.

Sidelight: A stanza having lines of the same length and meter, as is the case in most stanzaic poems, is said to be isometric. The exceptions, such as the stanzas in tail rhyme and Sapphic verse, in which the lines are not all of the same length and meter, are said to be anisometric or heterometric.

Sidelight: The regularity of stanza patterns conveys an impression of order and the expectation of closure.

Sidelight: A poem in which the lines follow each other without a formal pattern of stanzaic units is described as having a continuous form, in which there may be no line groupings at all or only irregular line groupings, dictated by meaning, as in paragraphs of prose.

(See also Fit, Stave, Strophe)
(Compare Canto, Couplet, Envoi)

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dramatic monologue

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A literary work which consists of a revealing one-way conversation by a character or persona, usually directed to a second person or to an imaginary audience. It typically involves a critical moment of a specific situation, with the speaker's words unintentionally providing a revelation of his character, as in Robert Browning's "My Last Duchess."

(See also Conversation Poem, Interior Monologue, Soliloquy)
(Compare Prosopopeia)

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didactic poetry

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Poetry which is clearly intended for the purpose of instruction -- to impart theoretical, moral, or practical knowledge, or to explain the principles of some art or science, as Virgil's Georgics, or Pope's An Essay on Criticism.

Sidelight: Didactic poetry can assume the manner and attributes of imaginative works by incorporating the knowledge in a variety of forms, such as dramatic poetry, satire, and parody, among others. Allegories, aphorisms, apologues, fables, gnomes, and proverbs are so closely related to didactic poetry that they can be considered specific types of that genre.

Sidelight: Although the instructional purpose is its primary aim, didactic poetry often contains vivid descriptive passages, digressions, and thoughtful reflections bearing on the subject matter.

(See also Georgic)
(Compare Catalog Verse, Epigram)

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pathetic fallacy

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The ascribing of human traits or feelings to inanimate nature for eloquent effect, especially feelings in sympathy with those expressed or experienced by the writer, as a "cruel wind," a "pitiless storm," or the lines from Shelley's Adonais:

Pale Ocean in unquiet slumber lay,
And the Wild Winds flew round, sobbing in their dismay.

Sidelight: The term was coined in 1856 by John Ruskin, an English painter, art critic and essayist. While his intent was derogatory, the term is now applied in a neutral sense as a less formal type of personification.

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figurative speech

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The use of words, phrases, symbols, and ideas in such as way as to evoke mental images and sense impressions. Figurative language is often characterized by the use of figures of speech, elaborate expressions, sound devices, and syntactic departures from the usual order of literal language.

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Metaphor

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A figure of speech in which a word or phrase literally denoting one object or idea is applied to another, thereby suggesting a likeness or analogy between them, as

The Leaves of Life keep falling one by one.
--- Edward Fitzgerald, The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám

I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!
--- Percy Bysshe Shelley, "Ode to the West Wind"

. . . The cherished fields
Put on their winter robe of purest white.
--- James Thomson, The Seasons

Sidelight: While most metaphors are nouns, verbs can be used as well:

Till the calm rivers, lakes, and seas,
Like strips of the sky fallen through me on high,
Are each paved with the moon and these.
--- Percy Bysshe Shelley, "The Cloud"

Sidelight: The poetic metaphor can be thought of as having two basic components: (1) what is meant, and (2) what is said. The thing meant is called the tenor, while the thing said, which embodies the analogy brought to the subject, is called the vehicle.

Sidelight: Both metaphors and similes are comparisons between things which are unlike, but a simile expresses the comparison directly, while a metaphor is an implied comparison that gains emphatic force by its connotative value.

Sidelight: A word or expression like "the leg of the table," which originally was a metaphor but which has now been assimilated into common usage, has lost its figurative value; thus, it is called a dead metaphor.

Sidelight: Frequently, the term metaphor, as opposed to a metaphor, is used to include all figures of speech, so the expression, "metaphorically speaking," refers to speaking figuratively rather than literally.

(See also Allegory, Conceit, Extended Metaphor, Mixed Metaphor,
Kenning, Personification, Synesthetic Metaphor)
(Compare Analogy, Metonymy, Symbol, Synecdoche)

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Personification

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A type of metaphor in which distinctive human characteristics, e.g., honesty, emotion, volition, etc., are attributed to an animal, object, or idea, as "the haughty lion surveyed his realm" or "my car was happy to be washed" or "'Fate frowned on his endeavors." Personification is commonly used in allegory.

Sidelight: "The Cloud" is personified in Shelley's magnificent poem.

(Compare Apostrophe, Pathetic Fallacy, Prosopopeia)

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Similie

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A figure of speech in which an explicit comparison is made between two essentially unlike things, usually using like, as or than, as in Burns' "O, my luve's like A Red, Red Rose" or Shelley's "as still as a brooding dove," in "The Cloud."

Sidelight: Similes in which the parallel is developed and extended beyond the initial comparison, often being sustained through several lines, are called epic or Homeric similes, since they occur frequently in epic poetry, both for ornamentation and to heighten the heroic aspect.

(Compare Analogy, Metaphor, Symbol, Synecdoche)

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occasional poem

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A poem written for a particular occasion, such as a dedication, birthday, or victory. The encomium, elegy, prothalamium, and epithalamium are examples of occasional poems.

Sidelight: Occasional poems are sometimes configured as pattern poetry.

(See Poet Laureate)