Heroic couplet

A woman puts on her armor before battle. An army of guardians defend their goddess. The enemy wounds the hero, starting a war and handicapping her for eternity. These heroic metaphors create just a dent in Alexander Pope’s satirical epic The Rape of the Lock. In reality, the woman’s armor is her makeup, the guardians are just a group of ineffectual sprites, and a lock of hair is stolen from the hero’s head, causing a trifling temper tantrum. The Rape of the Lock can be compared to Beowulf in that it follows the guidelines of a heroic epic. However, The Rape of the Lock transforms the ideas of heroism by heavily satirizing it. The reason for this mocking lies in Pope’s society at the time the poem was written: a society that had fallen far below the standards of classical heroism and nobility that ancient epics usually consist of. It seemed as if Pope believed that epic tradition was unsuited to the ways that people behaved in his time, and should be adjusted accordingly. In The Rape of the Lock, Pope transforms heroism to fit his society by using the form of a heroic couplet to juxtapose the serious with the trivial. Pope’s competitive emulation with his muse John Milton kick started his alteration of the heroic epic; comparing The Rape…

Helen Keller, then ten years old, a letter expressing her gratitude that Whittier’s poems had ‘made her joyful all the day long because her mind could see all the lovely things which she could not see with her eyes’” (Maskal 138). He inspired so many with his poems and one of which is “Don’t Quit”. This poem is narrated in Apostrophe format, has a couplet rhyme scheme, has a specific diction choice, impacts readers, and can reach all kinds of people. John Greenleaf Whittier has had experience…

Ironically, when Byron insults “the four first rhymes” and begs “take them not for mine” he is disparaging the rhymes of his own stanza as well. The Ottava Rima is consequently an expectation and a denial of the content contained within a signal form. This combination of two vastly different types of content, the lyrical beginning, and the punchy concluding rhyming couplet, demonstrates Byron’s use of different conventions and his combination of genres to his own egotistical, burlesque…

his perspective of himself and the world around him. Within the introductory heroic couplets of the poem, the stanza “And I must be, as he had been - alone” suggests the greater challenge of loneliness faced by the persona. The use of the caesura within this couplet emphasises the personas emotions within the introductory aspects of the poem, highlighting the key challenge portrayed within the text. As the poem progresses, the persona gains a renewed perspective of himself and the world around…

The poem is written as one continuous stream of consciousness, as though this is what depression feels like. The changing of ideas within the single stanza shows the reader how Thomas must have been feeling at the time of writing this. The poem also contains a rhyme scheme. The single stanza contains rhyming couplets throughout. However, Thomas, through the use of punctuation does not allow the reader to read the poem in the traditional way rhyming couplets allow the reader to be read. As…

The theme of "O Captain! My Captain!" is that sacrifices have to be made in order to be successful and gain greatness. Elegy: somber toned poem, lament for the dead This poem is an Elegy in honor of Abraham Lincoln. Walt Whitman wrote this poem a little after Lincoln's assassination. This poem is a big metaphor because it is about a captain -Abraham Lincoln- and his crew -Lincoln's followers- obtaining their sought out prize-winning the civil war- but after getting what they want the captain…

It has three lines for each stanza and the rhyming scheme is ABA, ABA. I was a little hungry here, so it influenced my writing. I wanted detail and visuals, but tongue in cheek. There are a lot of sensory details in this poem, which is the literary term I used for this. Vows Do you say “I do”? Yes, I do, I do, I do Bless you! This poem is a modern haiku with the syllables, 5 7 2. I came up with this one when I was falling asleep, and I think it’s pretty funny. True Identity I look like…

what their child could possibly do besides staring at the television screen, and angrily exclaims “THEY… USED… TO… READ!”(Dahl line 44). In the lines that follow this exclamation by Dahl, he alludes to some fairly famous children's book characters and stories, like “How The Camel Got His Hump” and “How The Monkey Lost His Rump”, providing examples of what children used to read, before the creation of TV. as well as giving parents the strength to ignore “the screams and yells the bites and…

rights. In the poem, Claude McKay utilizes a Shakespeare sonnet format along with various metaphors, rhymes and repetition to illustrate Stuart hall’s second argument of various transformations of cultural identity over time by presenting a terrific battle scene. In the poem, " if we must die" McKay borrowed Shakespeare sonnet format for his poem. As a sonnet, this poem has 14 lines and it is divided into four parts. The first three parts are each four lines long, and are known as…

Anne Bradstreet’s To My Dear and Loving Husband is a love poem that was published in 1678. Bradstreet explores the themes of time, faith, value, and identity through the speaker’s love for her husband. Through this poem, Bradstreet expresses Puritan values towards love and discusses the potential immortality of love. To My Dear and Loving Husband shares similarities to a sonnet, but alters with the rhyme scheme and use of twelve lines in comparison to the usual fourteen lines. Bradstreet crafts…