Chinese poetry

A Swinger of Birches Hardened by the daily toils and responsibilities, the soft innocence of youth is easily forgotten with age. Walking through the woods in solitude, a man lets his busy mind wander for a moment. With the sight of trees swaying in the wind, his mind understands that the heavy ice and snow is what bends the thin trees. But his heart wonders if it was a boy’s doing – climbing to the top of the trees just to bend them enough so he can let go and fall safely to the ground – that…

My initial reaction is to say that there is no way to think “like a poet” because poets do not think alike. To be a poet, one must have something to say that is worth saying. Therefore, if all poets thought alike, then their poetry would not be that good…right? However, poetry is not completely avant-garde and formless. There are specific modes of thinking that allow one to stand out as a poet. Jane Hirshfield says “a good poem draws on the originality hidden at language-making’s core and also…

Throughout William Shakespeare’s sonnets, there are many highs and lows in his love life. Shakespeare encounters jealousy, heartbreak, utter bliss, and everything in between. All of the first 126 sonnets are addressed to a man. This man is Shakespeare’s rival poet, but also his younger, extremely handsome lover. However, this lover is not faithful and gives Shakespeare as much grief as he does pleasure. The poem I chose to analyze is Sonnet 71. The organization of the sonnet and the meaning…

Li- Young Lee poem This Hour and What is Dead seems to be filled with heartache and memorization from the death of his brother and father. Due to the format the poem is written it can be inferred that Lee use the Lord and other phrases as his connection to help humanize what can be looked at as a dream of the person he has talked about in each stanza. Li- Young does a tremendous job at using specific words to help allow the audience of this poem to visualize each scenario he is stating…

Frank O 'Hara 's "The Day Lady Died" is an elegy centering around the day of O 'Hara, leading up to his discovery of the death of singer Billie Holiday. This poem is unlike most in that it lacks figurative language throughout. O’Hara’s poem uses what seems almost like a bulletin, with every one of his actions being listed. He includes every detail of his day from the time he completed an action up to the people he interacted with along the way. On the surface, all of these things seem to be…

The thought-provoking essay “Poetry as a Way of Saying” by Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren provides an educational direction for a reader’s comprehension and understanding of the “naturalness” of poetry. They claim in this critical text that “mere immersion does little good unless the reader is making, however unconsciously, some discriminations, comparisons, and judgements” (16). As illustrated in “Do Not Go Gently Into That Good Night,” by Dylan Thomas, the raw power and emotion that…

“A Boat Beneath a Sunny Sky” In the poem “A Boat Beneath a Sunny Sky,” Lewis Carroll talked about the boat ride that he went on with his friend, Alice, and her sisters (Popova). On this boat ride, he told the children about the story of Wonderland, which later inspired his book called Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (Popova). This poem reflected the loss of Carroll 's loved one. As Alice grew up, she is not naïve and optimistic like she used to be when was a little girl. As a result, Carroll…

William Stafford, a famous writer whose work was often described as deceptively simple, wrote poems that often took place on a mountainside, a riverbank, or a roadside—"near an exit". In his poem “Traveling through the Dark,” the speaker travels upon a dead deer on the edge of a narrow road. This poem dramatizes the conflict between life and death, particularly as this conflict relates to the speaker’s assertion that death is inevitable, however, life can continue after death. Although the…

Waltz, Rhythm, and Rhyme A waltz is a rhythmed dance of partners that twirl around a dance floor. If said partners are words that rhyme and rhythm, and the dance floor made of paper; literary works of a poet are created. Theodore Roethke was a poet that mastered this skill and created “My Papa’s Waltz.” The choice of words and meter of lines send your imagination on a journey envisioning what is unfolding from the words set forth before you. The speaker in the poem, the structure of the…

“The Raven” is an example of Poe’s poetry, this poem in particular was based around the dark side of the human mind.The speaker of this poem is a man who is very unstable, to the point where he is talking to a raven.”Our speaker is definitely the melodramatic type. He starts out on an emotional…