Poetic form

“Echo,” a poem by Christina Rossetti, reveals the universal longing for a loved one departed and the nature of one’s thoughts as they echo without a person on the other end to respond. The speaker in the poem, perhaps a woman, appears to have lost her lover to some kind of death. She wishes to be reunited with her lover, either in dreams, or in her own death. The speaker utilizes sestet stanza units, specific meter with metrical variations, and repetition to enact the experience of longing.…

I have no preconceptions.” This tells the reader something interesting because silver is something that we all picture the moon. The moon reflects the sun and the mirror reflects everything. The mirror also tells us that it has no before thoughts of what happens. In the second and third lines the mirror tells us “Whatever I see I swallow immediately just as it is, unmisted by love or dislike.” What this means is that the mirror will take what it gets immediately and show it back exactly how it…

To understand William Blake’s statement ‘Without Contraries is no progression’ one might look at the origin of it, which can be found on the third plate in ‘The Marriage of Heaven and Hell’ and continues with a list of examples: “Attraction and Repulsion, Reason and Energy, Love and Hate, are necessary to Human existence. From these contraries spring what religious call Good & Evil. Good is the passive that obeys Reason. Evil is the active springing from Energy. Good is Heaven, Evil is Hell”…

American based poet, Galway Kinnell was born in the year 1927 in Providence, Rhode Island. Growing up Kinnell was a very shy and introverted child who often turned to American literature and poetry to escape daily life (Poetry Foundation). Kinnell, who spent two years in the United States Navy then went on to receive a Bachelor’s degree from Princeton University and a Master’s degree from The University of Rochester. During the times of when he was most active writing poetry was during and…

In the poem “My Son, My Executioner” by Donald Hall, there are several literary devices at work to help the poet convey his message to the reader. This poem explains the realization that this young couple has about their newborn son in which they are no longer living life for themselves, but for their son instead. “My Son, My Executioner” explains how the birth of a child is a major turning point in life and can be viewed as either the continuation of a legacy, or the ending of one’s life at the…

The poem “Ballad of Birmingham” was written in 1969 by Dudley Randall. At the age of 13, Dudley Randall published his first poem which appeared in the Detroit Free Press. He is a poet, editor, publisher, and founder of Broadside Press in 1965. While Randall was earning his degree in English and library science, he was working at the post office as well. After earning his degrees, he became a librarian at the University of Detroit in which he retired from the job in 1974. Dudley Randall became an…

yet contrasting manner. Millay’s poem explores personal grief when passionate love wanes with age. Shakespeare’s poem, on the other hand, depicts platonic love for a friend who, to the narrator, is the epitome of perfection. The poems have similar form: both are Petrarchan sonnets and both possess iambic pentameter. However, differences in rhyme scheme, meter, and punctuation set the poems apart. Literary devices such as metaphors and imagery of seasons…

(4) It’s also a ‘form of metonymy as the shires themselves aren’t sad, but the people in them are.’(4) The soldiers are called to war using an instrument and the soldiers going to war is seen as heroic and is a cause of celebration as seen in the poem The send-off as the…

a dozen of her nearly eighteen hundred poems before her death in 1986 at the age of 56. She was born in Amherst, Massachusetts to a successful family of the decade. Dickinson’s work was usually altered remarkably to ‘fit in’ with the conventional poetic rules of the time period. I chose Emily Dickinson as she is a complex poet and all her poems are all very personal and she writes very much from her personal experiences and the things she had personally overcome. The poems Emily Dickinson…

Gaspar De Villagrá is considered to be the first published poet in the United States as he recounts his journey through epic poetry. The poem, Historia de la nveva Mexico, is divided into three separate parts and then into thirty-four various cantos. As Manuel M. Martín-Rodríguez comments in his passage describing the origins of Villagrá’s poetry and expedition, “Villagrá’s poem serves a utilitarian purpose: that of justifying actions and highlighting services in hopes of obtaining royal favor,”…