Iambic tetrameter

Curiosity and imagination are wonderful things, especially when combined and questions arise. I wonder what the dead do when they die? What does a person feel when they lose something that was hard earned? What do those questions look like when they’re answered in a poem? What do those poems look like when they are brought to life in animation? All good questions that Billy Collins and a couple of talented artists have attempted to answer. Their products are then put out for the world to see and…

declares, “How easily it goes unless you get Elizabethan.” Collins believes it is difficult to write in this form and uses the next two lines to explain why. Line six and seven say “and insist that iambic bongos must be played/and rhymes positioned at the ends of lines,” iambic in line six refers to iambic rhythm which starts with an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable. Bongos are drums that given rhythm and so the word is used to emphasize the strict rhythm in an Elizabethan…

Question: To what extent are there common threads in the poems you studied this year? Refer to a range of poems and poets in your answer. Famous poets William Blake, William Wordsworth, Wilfred Owen, Bruce Dawe and Gwen Harwood have all created a large array of poetic pieces. Each poem is an extension of each poet’s perspective of the world of which they use to portray specific messages to their intended audiences. The messages and tones conveyed throughout each author’s poems have similarities…

Thomas Hardy’s “The Darkling Thrush” is famous for being written on New Year’s Eve, which marked the turn of the century. The very work darkling is an old word which has been used since the 15th century, while the Thrush is a type of songbird which is known for its beautiful voice. The title as a whole could be literally interpreted as a songbird whose song which is slowly fading over time but will not be forgotten. A deeper interpretation could be the fact that Hardy is perhaps looking back on…

The reason or theories behind Shakespeare focusing on topics of love, friendship and marriage in his sonnets “Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind, And therefore is winged Cupid painted blind.” - William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s dream. (Goodreads). William Shakespeare’s works, especially his sonnets, namely sonnet 30, sonnet 55 and sonnet 116 included ideas of love, friendship and marriage. Topics of such, are important to Shakespeare because of what went on in…

My Papa’s Waltz The poem, My Papa’s Waltz is one of the best works by Theodore Roethke. When it is looked at first glance, it can be seen as a simple four-stanza body of work, but upon further analysis, we see it has a deeper meaning. Childhood experiences seem to play a significant role in the development of the plot. The dance that is described in the poem shows an interaction between a child and his father that has more nuances than it meets the eye. At first glance, there is a joyous and…

“[R]omanticism means, to most students a unitary shadowy phenomenon which can be extrapolated as forming a middle ground bounded by six poets: Blake, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Byron, Keats and Shelly” (Aers et al. 1). This paper deals with a work by the firstly named author: Blake. It is about the poem “The Chimney Sweeper: A little white thing among the snow” from 1794 from his collection of works named Songs of Experience. The poem is a companion poem to the formerly written “The Chimney Sweeper:…

In the villanelle structured poem, “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night,” written by Dylan Thomas is a transparent, yet raw expression of animosity and utter brawl towards annihilation of one’s life. Dylan Thomas embodied complex analogies, naturalistic imagery, and repetition to correspond to the elemental, impassioned theme of bereavement and fatality. While the poem advises one to be unyielding and relentless as death approaches until the last second, the author implies that death is…

A sonnet is a poem usually consisting of fourteen lines linked by a regular rhythm and one of two mayor rhyme schemes - that of either an Italian or Shakespearean sonnet (Prescott, 2010). Such forms will be analyzed in the works of two of the greatest poets of all time – John Donne and William Shakespeare. They are worthy canonical figures that are still acknowledged and studied today, were influenced by cultural and historical features of the era in which they wrote and included aesthetics…

In the Romantics Era there were many important qualities of Romanticism and one of those ideas was a story or explanation inside human awareness. Romantic writers such as Coleridge and Wordsworth believed that poetry is a way of grasping the insight of life. The Romantic writers, Coleridge and Wordsworth, both portray nature but in opposite ways than one another. Coleridge is the type of writer that underlines the grievous, supernatural and magnificent part of nature, while Wordsworth is the…